It is time to take the side of humanity

“We’ve screened this film in about 30 countries. We think it’s important that people… know what happened on October 7,” said Hen Feder, spokesman for the Israeli embassy in France. The attack by the terror group on Israel on that day  killed 1,400 people, 1,000 of them civilians. The images are horrifying and one would think that they cannot be attributed to human beings. Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas to ISIS and the Nazis adding that “We are not fighting just our war, we’re fighting the war of all civilized countries and all civilized peoples.”

However, similar crimes occurred in the not so distant past when entire families from babies to the elderly were butchered together, in some cases burned alive in their homes. women raped, and innumerable victims tortured in acts of monstrous brutality commited by Nazi Germany during World War II. Humans were used for medical experiments on prisoners by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps mainly between 1942 and 1945. There were 15,754 documented victims, of various nationalities and age groups, although the true number is believed to be more extensive.

Now, what about Nazi collaborators in Ukraine?  These days it is not a very popular subject in the western political landscape and the media but surprisingly it was the Polish government which is one of the most unapologetically Russia’s critics if not haters and most outspoken supporters of Ukraine, both in words and deeds, that broke the rule.

Ukraine “cannot dream of joining the European Union” without resolving the issue of the exhumation of Volyn massacre victims’ remains on Ukrainian territory, the Polish Foreign Ministry’s Undersecretary of State Pawel Jablonski said on Nov. 7 and continued: “Therefore, we will absolutely emphasize that without a solution to this issue, there will be no long-term reconciliation with Ukraine.”

In the spring and summer of 1943, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), massacred thousands of Poles in Nazi-occupied Volyn, a region that used to be part of Poland and is now part of Ukraine. Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, estimates that the number of Polish victims of the massacre varies from 60,000 to 90,000. Warsaw claims that the number is over 100,000.

Poland’s head of state, Andrzej Duda, said earlier that obtaining permission for the exhumations plays a crucial role in Polish-Ukrainian relations while its Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki urged Ukraine to allow the exhumation of all victims of WW2 massacres. “Poland and Ukraine will never be fully reconciled until all Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists during World War Two have been found and laid to rest”, the Polish prime minister said as he marked the anniversary of the Volyn tragedy.

Ukraine has not accepted that assertion and often refers to the Volhynia events as part of a conflict that affected both nations but besides Poles Ukrainian Nazi collaborators committed similar heinous crimes as HAMAS to Jews and Russians.

Professor of History at the University of Michigan Jeffrey Veidlingeris did a major study on this subject and discovered that Ukrainians tortured people even without a German presence.

“As the Germans moved further east into Ukraine, they intensified their massacres. In hundreds of locales with the assistance of local Ukrainian collaborators, they gathered Jewish men, women and children, marched them to the outskirts of town, stripped them naked, and shot them in ravines or trenches. Locals were then permitted to scavenge the clothing of the dead. The organization Yahad in Unum, which has been mapping Holocaust-era mass graves, has identified nearly 1,000 such sites in Ukraine.”

In Zelensky’s Ukraine Nazi collaborators are treated as war heroes, cities and streets are renamed in their honor but one does not hear too much criticism from the West and even from the major Jewish organizations for their glorifications.

The recent event in the Canadian parliament when Zelensky together with his wife, Prime Minister Trudeau and other members of the Canadian political elite welcomed a Nazi criminal with a standing ovation was also downplayed and quickly forgotten.

Another outrageous event took place in the Ivy-League Stanford University where members of the Azov battalion which was previously denounced in the US Congress as a terrorist organization got a warm welcome in the presence of the former US Ambassador in Moscow McFall and Harvard “End of History” Professor Fukuyama.

In the meantime the horrors of wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue, the death toll and destruction keep rising but it looks like the US which has enough leverage to stop both wars is not interested in doing it. Actually, when it comes to Ukraine, Washington prevented a peaceful solution at least twice, first by torpedoing 2015 Minsk Accords and then doing the same in March 2022 with the peace agreement reached between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey.  Now it is blocking the UN ceasefire resolutions in Gaza.

As I was thinking of the conclusion lines, a helpful hand came from the former Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). This is what he said: “We must demand, now, that our government takes a new direction, and soon, not only for a cease fire, but a ceasing of war, the end of arms sales to fuel war, the end of 800 military bases around the world; the end of the theft of our tax dollars for killing; the end of policies that pit people against each other.”

America is deeply divided on many issues, including these ongoing wars but as Kucinich says: “If we are called to take sides, let us take the side of peace. Let us take the side of reconciliation. Let us take the side of restoration, Let us take the side of humanity.”

I couldn’t find better words to conclude.