Ben Wallace, Tory defence secretary, in a speech yesterday accused Russian president Vladimir Putin of ‘hijacking history’. Wallace spoke while Russia celebrated Victory Day marking the defeat of Nazi Germany when Soviet Forces took Berlin in 1945.
Wallace denounced Russia saying: ‘Through their invasion of the Ukraine, Putin, his inner circle and generals are now mirroring the fascism and tyranny of 70 years ago’, re-writing history to portray Putin as an ‘evil’ dictator on a par with Hitler.
In contrast to Wallace’s historical lies, Putin, at the Victory Day parade in Moscow, clearly set out the reality that Russia was forced to undertake a military operation in Ukraine as a pre-emptive move against an aggressor.
Putin said: ‘We saw the military infrastructure unfolding (in Ukraine); hundreds of foreign advisors starting their work; there were regular deliveries of the most modern weapons from NATO countries. The danger grew every day.’
He continued: ‘Russia gave a pre-emptive rebuff to aggression – this was a forced, timely and the only right decision by a sovereign, strong and independent country.’
He reminded the world of fruitless attempts by Russia to engage with the US late last year to secure security guarantees for the country from NATO saying: ‘NATO countries didn’t want to hear us, which means that, in fact, they harboured completely different plans – and we saw it.’
In fact, far from Russia ‘mirroring’ the fascism of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 it is the NATO states that have mirrored Hitler.
The run up to the Nazi invasion was the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact of 1939 which Stalin believed would guarantee peace between Germany and the Soviet Union despite all the clear indications that Hitler was preparing to invade.
Stalin left the Soviet Union and the Red Army completely disarmed in the face of Hitler’s stated aim to destroy forever the gains of the Bolshevik revolution.
30 years ago, when the Stalinist bureaucracy announced it was dissolving the Soviet Union, the imperialist nations were quick to give guarantees that they would not move an inch militarily to attack Russia. These promises were as worthless as Hitler’s non-aggression pact.
Putin belatedly recognised the criminal folly of trusting a word from the US and its NATO allies.
He was forced to learn from the lessons of history – a history that Wallace and the ruling class are so desperate to falsify in order to justify their war drive to reconquer Russia, overthrow the property relations established by the Bolshevik Revolution and restore capitalism.
Re-writing history is behind all the propaganda about ‘evil’ Russia and the ‘heroic’ Ukrainian regime that is being pumped out 24 hours a day by the BBC and designed to whip the country into a war frenzy.
NATO’s encirclement of Russia and the fact that the Ukrainian regime owes its existence to a fascist supported coup financed by the US are ignored.
The Ukrainian army is celebrated as heroes while the fascist Azov brigade, responsible for leading the attacks on workers in the Donbass region killing 14,000, has its crimes swept under the carpet.
The barrage of propaganda and historical falsification is essential to the ruling class in its efforts to convince the working class that it must make sacrifices to pay for this imperialist war. The Tories handed a further £1.3 billion to the Ukrainian military last weekend in addition to the £1.5 billion already donated.
Millions of working class families are going without food to feed their kids while energy prices, driven into the stratosphere by this war against Russia, mean that for low paid workers even boiling a kettle is becoming a luxury they can’t afford.
Russia has the absolute right to defend itself from imperialism and its war plans while the working class will never accept destitution and starvation as the price capitalism demands for its war to re-order the world.
The working class internationally will not be fooled by all the lying propaganda and are in open revolt against having their lives destroyed by a capitalist system that in its death agony can only survive through war.
The time has come to put capitalism out of its misery and put an end to imperialist war through the victory of the world socialist revolution.