History repeats itself: how united Europe treated Belarus 80 years and how it treats it today
Rick Rozoff

On the 80th anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union by three million soldiers from Germany and its European allies, an official of that part of the invaded nation which suffered the worst casualties and the worst devastation, Belarus, stated the West is attempting to evade responsibility for the genocide that ensued. One that, by Belarusian calculations, cost the lives of a third of the population of the then-Soviet republic.

Oleg Dyachenko, a member of the upper house of his country’s parliament and vice-rector for academic affairs at Kuleshov Mogilev State University, used language rarely heard in relation to contemporary developments. He said that the collective West – by which he could only mean the U.S., NATO and European Union (the last announced yesterday, as though intentionally timed for the occasion of the anniversary, crushing sanctions against Belarus) – was trying to disavow responsibility for the genocide of the Belarusian people. The latter is his exact expression.

The senator added in detail which is worth sharing with a world that knows nothing (and doesn’t appear to much care) about it the national tragedy that began 80 years ago today:

“22 June 1941 is a mournful date in the history of Belarusian people. The treacherous attack of Nazi Germany and its allies led to the total destruction of the country’s economy. Civilians faced terror that was unprecedented in its scale. All in all, 9,200 Belarusian villages located in the occupied territories were burned by Nazi hit squads; of them over 5,000 villages were burned together with women, old people and children. In fact, every district of our country has its own Khatyn and its own Borki – sacred places of sorrow and pain for the Belarusian people. The entire country is covered with memorials, single and mass graves. This tragedy took a heavy toll on the demographic situation, and we are still dealing with its consequences many decades after.”

The mass-scale butchery and attempt at extermination of the Belarusian people, of all ages, occupations and religious backgrounds, is a story hidden from the people of the West by its politicians, statesmen and historians. But they are very much alive in Belarus; not just in the individual memories and the collective memory of the people, but the brutal, unconscionable crimes of 80 years ago are quite literally being unearthed even today.

The Belarusian parliamentarian also said: “New evidence of Nazi crimes against civilians is being found and documented all the time: places of executions and burial of Belarusian Holocaust victims are established. This spring we found five previously-unknown single burial sites of local peasants shot by German executioners in one of the villages of the Mogilev District in July 1942. And there are hundreds of such places; but unfortunately, not all war criminals received the punishment they deserved for their atrocities. Many of them fled to the near and far West, where the so-called mature democracies took them under their protection using various far-fetched pretexts and resorting to legal casuistry.”

Operation Barbarossa and the torrents of blood, the eternally echoing screams, the unmarked grave sites and the remains they contain still to be discovered and identified, the traumatized children of an entire generation will not disappear. The recollection of them will not be allowed to dissolve into oblivion. The very West that visited those horrors upon the small European nation and its people is once again – on the 80th anniversary of Barbarossa – surrounding Belarus with air bases, missile batteries, NATO battlegroups, tanks, artillery and troops in four of the five countries that surround the nation: Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military bloc that dwarfs in number of members – 30 – Germany’s Fortress Europe alliance of 1941, dedicated a section of its recent summit document to criticizing Belarus on virtually all fronts.

Nations that provided troops (including so-called volunteers) for the invasion of 80 years ago are now NATO members or Enhanced Opportunities Partners, including Germany, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. Don’t expect any of those countries to express remorse today; they’re too occupied in sanctioning, condemning and plotting “regime change” in Belarus.

The above-quoted official also issued this reminder and leveled a correlative accusation:

“[We] remember very well that 80 years ago it was the ‘united Europe’ of that time led by Nazi Germany that unleashed a terrible war against our people. History repeats itself. Western politicians do not like to remember this today…and, at the suggestion of new collaborators, are trying to change the agenda unleashing another hybrid war against the people of Belarus, imposing economic sanctions, blocking flights and spreading disinformation about our country. There is an obvious attempt by the collective West to evade responsibility for unleashing the genocide of the Belarusian people during the Great Patriotic War and to avoid serious compensations to the families of the victims of the Belarusian Holocaust.”

The disturbing parallel he drew doesn’t need to be made in his country, except among much of its youth; it should not have been necessary to draw it for the rest of the world, particularly for the people of the nations that inflicted the fiendish death and destruction he described; nor for the West as a whole. But it has proven necessary to do so if for no other reason than to strip those who are bent on wreaking new aggression against Belarus (and not only that nation) of the claim that they knew not what they did after the fact – and to pull the fraudulent halo of sanctity off their collective forehead beforehand.