Eric Zuesse

Ukrainians are increasingly waging war over whom their enemy was in World War II: Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin. On November 21st, the communist Soviet Union’s Georgian leader, Stalin, was twice cited by Ukrainian officials on two separate occasions as representing the Russia that today’s Ukraine fears, and must wage war (with help from the West) to defeat.

At the United Nations in NYC, Ukraine voted no on a resolution against resurgent nazism. As the UN’s press release about the vote recounted, “the representative of Ukraine said Stalinism had killed many people in the Gulag, condemning Hitler and Stalin alike as international criminals. Calling on the Russian Federation to stop glorifying and feeding Stalinism, he said he could not support the draft text.”

Samantha Power, the U.S. Representative at the U.N., gave as her reason for voting against the resolution, its unacceptability to the Government of Ukraine. “Her delegation was concerned about the overt political motives that had driven the main sponsor of the current resolution. That Government had employed those phrases in the current crisis in Ukraine. That was offensive and disrespectful to those who had suffered at the hands of Nazi regimes. Therefore, the United States would vote against the resolution.”

The only other government to vote no on the resolution was Canada, whose conservative Premier, Stephen Harper, is an unwavering supporter of both the U.S. and this new Ukrainian Government. The final vote-tally was 115 in favor, 3 against, and 55 abstentions. All of Europe abstained, as did Japan. Australia and New Zealand also abstained.

On the same day, but in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, the country’s President, Petro Poroshenko, laid a wreath at the grave of one of Stalin’s Ukrainian victims, and he said, “The spiritual descendants of Stalin haven’t dissolved into the sea of history. They are celebrating their bloody ball in the temporarily occupied territories.” Poroshenko was referring there to the areas of Ukraine, now contested as Donbass, Novorossiya, or other names, where the residents are ethnic Russians and which have declared independence from the new Ukrainian Government, the Government that was imposed upon them at a coup in Kiev back in February.

Just as the pro-Russian rebels’ talking-points ever since that coup have been against Hitler and nazism as being allegedly resurgent from the new Government, the Ukrainian Government’s talking-points are now increasingly against an alleged resurgent Stalinism from Russia. Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, is thus being increasingly portrayed by Ukraine as a new Stalin. The United States and Canada seem to agree with Ukraine, not with Ukraine’s pro-Russian separatists.

In World War II, both the U.S. and Canada were allied with Stalin against Hitler. So, too, were all of this U.N. vote’s abstainers, except Japan, which was allied with Hitler.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .