How often do you think of the Waffen SS?

An article by Ioannis Andris

Two very different Rooms

"People will show you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be." —Don Draper, Mad Men

There is a great scene in the superb TV show Mad Men, a show about corporate America of the 1960s, where the protagonist’s big secret, his stolen identity, is confidently and sensationally revealed by his main office rival to the company’s president, but contrary to the expectations of said rival, and the dramatic culmination of a season long plotline, the president’s answer is surprisingly a supremely nonchalant “Who cares?” The protagonist, going by the name of Don Draper, is a very complex but equally very competent man, being an indispensable part of the firm, and in stark comparison to his mediocre and spiteful rival, consistently delivers-he is superlatively effective. Thus, his real past, the story of his stolen identity, does not really matter as is evident by the full answer given: “Who cares? There are far worst stories than that. A man is whatever room he is in, and right now Donald Draper is in this room.”

A few days ago, in another room, not a fictional, and a much more spacious one at that, the room of the general assembly of the Canadian parliament, when the clown-turned president of the Ukraine and cocaine addict, Zelensky, was visiting as part of yet another beggar-thy-ally-to-stay-afloat tour, a standing ovation took place where the entirety of the assembly, Justin “Blackface” Trudeau et al present, praised and honored a 98 year old, very well standing and seemingly sweet grandpa of the Ukrainian diaspora. As was quickly revealed though, presumably unbeknownst to many of those present who delivered his praises, this grandpa was a former volunteer of the “1st Ukrainian Division”, better known to those with a sliver of knowledge of World War II history, as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, or 1st Galician Division, you know, the Nazis, the “baddies” in no uncertain terms.

But context matters, nothing is permanently set in stone and of those things set in stone, as in our case the history of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their overzealous Ukrainian accomplices in the first half of the 20th century, for them to matter in our present day and age, for them to regain their horrific gravitas in our historical “room”, one often finds in desperation that he has to grab the stone and slam It at the head of the current actors to get the message across-and even that might not be enough.

Why not? Well, because dear reader there has long been a whisper lurking at the depths of “civilized” Western societies, a whisper heard no longer at the fringes of the gathered crowd uttered by shadowy, malevolent cloaked figures, but more and more by its respectable members, the bonne société, the gatekeepers of the Overton window, a whisper ready to turn into a clear voice, one that when these forlorn terrors are brought to the fore and their perpetrators, their progeny and imitators are revealed and exposed will equally nonchalantly, will say “Who cares?”

The OG Nazis, the real Wehrmacht, not the Ukrainian Army cosplayers but the Waffen SS, Luftwaffe etc. were a lot of things - mass murderers on an industrial scale being the most prominent, but they were arguably very effective at waging war, and their passage through, and brief conquest of a large part of Russia left scars that can only be compared with the ones left by the Golden Horde centuries ago.

While the Nazis were eventually defeated, largely due to the immense sacrifices, the epic resilience and the martial prowess of the Russian people, there is no doubt that they were good at killing Russians as well-and in the modern “civilized” West, in the grotesque and often grotesquely surreal historical room and timeline we are inhabiting, for many otherwise respectable average Joes and “normies,” that is the measure of someone’s worth-skill at killing Russians.

“A man is whatever room he is in” and if said room is a war raging in Ukraine, then the Azov (Aidar, regular Ukrainian army, Ukrainian farmer or urbanite drafted and sent to the trenches and what have you) Totenkopf patch-wearing, Erika and Rechts Rock-listening Ukrainian LARPer, who has no qualms at “blindly” sending a 155mm cluster munition shell flying strait at the center of Donetsk indiscriminately slaughtering women and children (mind you, all these happened prior to 2022 and the launching of the “Special Operation” dear reader..), this very person is our man of the hour, his actions fine and dandy because right now “he is in this room”.

This reality, which saddens and offends the historical memory, living experience, and very existence of a lot of Europeans and Americans, while equally offending and profoundly puzzling a lot of Russians, did not come by accident, but partly by design, partly-and mostly- as a historical inevitability, factors that must be scrutinized and analyzed, not, as some naïve still believe, in order to reverse or cure it via “educating the masses” for that would be the equivalent of the TV series rival revealing the secret-there is no secret!-but in order to understand the nature of the enemy and steel ourselves for the battles being fought and the more difficult ones yet to come, for no one will be able to sit at the sidelines. This brief article seeks to outline the contours of such an analysis, shedding light to what I consider its most important elements.

Saruman’s Sin

“Whoever battles monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually.” - George Patton, referring to the Russians (Soviets) as “bastards” after the Battle of Berlin

Tolkien’s Saruman was likely not aware of the Nietzschean quote and warning, or he might have been but could not resist the urge and gazed into the Palantir nonetheless. To those unfamiliar with the Tolkien mythos, Saruman the White is a mighty wizard fighting initially at the side of good, but owing to his pride and arrogance, allows himself to be corrupted by the forces of evil. The said organ via which his corruption ensues is the Palantir, a powerful magical artifact, a gazing stone of sorts that grants its wielder secret knowledge of far-off or lost-in-the-past events, but similarly might hide or obscure related knowledge, thus requiring great wisdom and strength of character lest one succumbs to its influence, one that indirectly tends to reinforce the user’s worst tendencies (kinda like the internet one might add).

What does this (crucial) episode of the Tolkien mythos have to do with the normalization of Nazis today you might ask? Plenty, dear reader. You see, Saruman was a strategist, a military leader, at the head of the decision-making centers of this fantasy world if you like. His real-life contemporaries today might similarly reside in Washington DC and the Pentagon, the NATO headquarters and various defense ministries across the West, or inhabiting posts in academia and Beltway think-tanks. Amongst this crowd, and perhaps in inverse proportion to the strength of character of its members, a certain unhealthy semi-autistic fascination with military vigor and accomplishment is prevalent, alongside a professionally natural and essential drive towards the study of history. This fascination often coincides with an admiration for Nazi Germany’s doubtless military prowess, a “gazing into the abyss” that with the help of the nullifying effect of time’s passage, the distancing of the horrific events only the “good” memories remain, the practical knowledge that is of professional interest, at the expense of any bothersome and indifferent from a military analyst’s point of view, political-ideological details.

There is no denying that Nazi Germany was a fearsome military machine, with superior tactics and strategy, particularly during the first couple of years of the war, and an ever-present influence on virtually every aspect of military technology to this day, introducing novelties from doctrinal rapid breakthrough tank warfare, to building the first “real” submarine, to the first application of low observable (stealth) technologies, to mass producing the first assault rifle and many others. It should pose no great enigma (the name of the first cipher machine btw, again employed by the Germans, though in the late 1920s, prior to Hitler’s rise) that military professionals studying constantly such matters, can psychologically shift gradually (or rapidly) from a professional acknowledgment of the great capabilities of the Nazi German war machine to a tacit “understanding” of the political complexities of the time that led to the war, to outright praise to the German soldier (the Nazi identity being casually erased) who fought courageously and with outstanding élan against the Russians, the enemy du jour.

This is of prime importance in order to understand the psychology and motivation of the people designing and influencing policy at the low and mid-levels of western government bureaucracies, and the vast American military-industrial complex, in this case the policies of arming Ukraine’s quasi-Nazi army today with more and more sophisticated weapons, essentially a realization of Patton’s aborted dream of waging war against communist Russia once Germany was defeated. It is no coincidence that, as this informative article from The Grayzone presents, the NAFOid internet mob’s most prominent members or sympathizers are directly linked to the Western intelligence and military apparatus, while the whole NAFO rubble is generally well received amongst the Beltway professional crowd. As a historical note, it is worth mentioning the fate of many German WW2 era scientists who worked for Hitler’s war machine getting integrated to the US military industry and-in contrast to the smaller number of those that were seized by the Soviets, often rising to prominence within it.

This creates a self-replicating, self-sustained phenomenon in Western institutions, whereby people with similar beliefs favor the rise to key positions of their ideological partners, creating “safe spaces” for the initially restrained but gradually gaining in momentum, normalization of Nazism on its Ukrainian manifestation and likely in the near future to its original form as well, defining both the relative institutions’ ideological identity and expanding the gamut of acceptable ideas to an increasingly receptive to the voice of authority society.

Ukro-Baltic Cultural Enrichment hits the West

“We have always been at War with East Asia” - George Orwell, 1984

The end of the Second World War led to a significant outflux of Eastern and Central Europeans to the United States and Canada, many of them coming from the Baltic Limitrophe statelets and Ukraine, on top of those existing in already established communities. Such was the case of the SS veteran-turned-to-hero grandpa of the Canadian Parliament, but such was also the case of Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather. Chrystia Freeland is the acting Canadian deputy prime minister and minister of finance, and once a favorite for becoming the new NATO chief, whose grandfather was an editor of a pro-Nazi newspaper during the Second World War. While of course she cannot be held responsible for his actions, her portraying him as an innocent victim of evil Russians’ prosecution that fled to Canada seeking refuge, is both ridiculous and very typical of the rehabilitation process Nazis and Nazi collaborationists of Ukraine, the Baltics, and other European states have undergone in North America and Europe itself.

These people were unrepentant criminals, they aided or directly participated in war crimes and various atrocities against their fellow countrymen, but when Russia was proclaimed as the main enemy, all these past sins were forgotten. As they became assimilated and progressed through the social strata of their new adoptive states, it is only natural that they and their descendants devised and taught a different kind of history, one of heroic deeds against the “evil Russian occupiers”, a history that the bureaucracy of states like US and Canada had no reason to dispute, and plenty of reasons to encourage, as another ideological weapon in the Cold War. Of course, certain appearances still had (and have as the aftermath of the Canadian Parliament episode reveals) to be kept, since after all, many thousands of US and Canadian servicemen had lost their lives battling the original Nazis, many more had fought them and returned home, and they largely did not share the brewing anti-Russian hatred that began to permeate the upper echelons of power.

But year by year, decade by decade, that heroic western generation that fought, and that stood, and laughed and danced together with the Russian soldiers when Berlin fell, grew older, its memories withered and became lost for the collective unconsciousness, as new struggles of both historic and banal nature-for life must go on, and life, along with human societies, has a tendency to discard large heroic narratives as dangerous-grew in importance. Year by year, seemingly random and not connected, outwardly innocuous things, happened. Say, a little “innocent” change in the way school history books and curricula portray and treat a certain event, a public celebration taking a more varied color by inviting members of a previously marginalized group to share their experience, a public road changing name to commemorate a historical figure that was formerly viewed as controversial but newer research has presented on a different light-and a film, of course a film!, the new favorite of the masses-would arrive on the theaters were the war itself was, courtesy of artistic expression this time, be shown slightly different than what history taught, but “it’s ok, it’s just a film!”

Gradually, by design, the lines between hero, former allies and villain will become blurred for the masses, (after all there is a certain fascination with the villain, the bad guys) and people will, at the end of this process, readily agree that “we were always at war with East Asia”, “we were always at war with Russia”, and those that fought against it in the past, those sweet grandpas who in their glorious youth would rape women and children, murder with wanton and erase entire villages from the earth, were at the end of the day “on the right side of history”.

In this respect, the powerful and influential lobbies of the Ukrainian and Baltic diaspora played their hand very effectively, in cahoots with other state actors affiliated with the military industrial complexes and of the kind portrayed above and are now reaping the rewards of their Russophobia, and deeply rooted hatred for anything Russian, turning mainstream.

Rising Tribalism and edgy Nazis

“Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed

“Creating gods unto themselves, they forwith began appealing to each other: "Abandon your deities, come and bow down to ours, or death to ye and your idols!" And so will they do till the end of this world; they will do so even then, when all the gods themselves have disappeared, for then men will prostrate themselves before and worship some idea.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

For Aristotle, man is by nature either a political animal or an outcast. Perhaps it is better to view him as primarily a tribal animal, with politics being an extension and expression of that tribal social nature. What is undisputed though, is that on contemporary socially fractured western (and not only) societies, being or feeling an outcast is a norm for millions. There is a deep yearning for meaning and identity, particularly amongst the young atomized urban nomads of the Western metropolises, one that cheap escapism found on pc games and other forms of infotainment cannot sate; but tribalism can and those leaders that harness its power will rise triumphant in the years to come.

Enter the convenient and timely rehabilitation of Nazism. When a group creates an idol, which is a subconscious process, an artistic/metaphysical one, an idol with which to wage war against other groups and their idols-the essence of tribalism-then power, its projection and symbolism is the most important aspect. No one will follow a weak God to combat. German Nazis were very effective fighters, embodying many aspects, albeit it in a perverted and twisted fashion, of the warrior ideal, the primal drive Dostoyevsky describes to “conquer and drive out of the world all other gods”, and they were the last amongst the European nation states to do so. This creates a mythos around them which when successfully disassociated from its criminal and horrifying features, becomes enticing for increasingly more of the disaffected youth outcasts of the modern world.

If it is suddenly ok or edgy to LARP as Waffen SS then more will openly do so, and amongst them, some will actually seek their fortunes bearing arms in a real war. Hell, even Prince Harry famously wore that Nazi outfit at a party, for the same reasons of funny edginess, and he did pursue the warrior ideal, and he did go to war as a helicopter gunship pilot, no small feat no matter what one thinks of the man’s character. The ease by which Nazi symbolism today finds its way in the ranks of Ukrainian troops and mercenaries fighting at the side of Kiev in this war is a testament to the appeal of the false idol created by the Germans a century ago.

The fact that it is mainly the weak of character and conviction that seek to coalesce around a powerful idol in order to fill their internal void and find meaning, is not an argument against the potency of their gathering and its potential to create political results-in these cases results often of an outright criminal nature. From the average crypto-Nazi loving NAFO dog that engages in trolling and the occasional drone fundraiser, to the Georgian Legion mercenary war criminals that habitually execute POWs, there is a line not that hard to cross when enough tribal conviction is accrued to create momentum and peer pressure. Besides, the western Banderite/Waffen SS LARPer can produce domestic political results even if he doesn’t end up dead with his guts spilled at a Zaporozhye ditch.

How often do you think of the Roman Empire?

There is trend/meme hitting the internet these days, where men, mostly if not solely western men, are asked by seemingly curious spouses/girlfriends or other male friends how often do they think of the Roman Empire. Surprisingly perhaps, many confess that they do so quite often, with the long-gone empire viewed on a positive light as the apogee of a well-run, effective state that held military virtù and civic responsibility as defining qualities of a man’s worth, in great contrast to the decadent liberal Fukuyamian dystopias of the US and the EU garden.

Admittedly, comparing the still standing and elegant Roman aqueducts with the often collapsing or utterly neglected US and EU public infrastructure comprising mainly of brutalist and modernist monstrosities, can make someone eagerly seek to join Legio IX Hispana, but it must also be worryingly noted, that besides the attributes mentioned above, the Roman Empire can’t boast of many achievements in the sciences, philosophy and literature or the arts compared to its direct Grecian predecessors. (It’s called Greco-Roman world for a reason after all…) In short, what the modern man seems to admire when nostalgically pondering the days of the Roman Imperium is a proto-fascism, sans the capitalist element defying its modern forms. And again, symbolism and words matter.

So, in parallel with the edgy, still at the fringes but rapidly shifting to more mainstream niches, rehabilitation of Nazism, we have the much more socially acceptable normalization of another lite-totalitarian state ideology. That Mussolini envisioned his project as a revival of the Roman Empire and he just happened to ally with Hitler is a testament to certain historical parallels and ideological affinities one might notice.

To be fair, people in the West, disaffected by elites living in their parallel universe and indifferent to their mounting ills, seek with increasing desperation alternatives in order to rejuvenate (make America great again) their societies and unsurprisingly look in the past for them. Unfortunately, this healthy drive can easily by coopted by the powers that be to fuel their nascent techno-fascist dystopia that will have nothing to do with the lofty ideals those that often think about the Roman Empire might have. Both Fascism and Nazism rose as answers to the problems plaguing deeply ailing societies, be they of economic, social, or national roots.

The triumphant post-Cold War era of relative prosperity, security and progress for the West has long ended, supplanted by darker times where enemies, real or fictional, surround it, and the social fabric is being torn apart by plummeting birth rates and rampant wokeness. It is only natural-as in part of the human nature-that people feeling weak and abandoned will yet again coalesce around the “Strong Gods” that promise to restore the equilibrium. The fact that these strong gods are in fact false gods, tribal idols like Nazism, and not metaphysical categories like “real” Gods, makes little difference if you are desperate, and this desperation can and will be exploited, with, ironically, Ukrainian nationalists being the first to discover how they have been played and used as cannon fodder.

A clarification is in order. While Nazism-Fascism are being rehabilitated and gain ground amongst the low and mid-level operatives and clerks of the western states, their elites remain firmly anchored and with a zealous fervor, to the liberal globalization project. They have no qualms or ideological inhibitions though to instrumentalize the ones they in theory identify as their ideological antipodes to serve a greater goal (defeat Russia) in a typically “the end justifies the means” manner. They have been doing it for decades with Islamic radicals from Afghanistan to Syria and Iran, so why should Nazis be any different?

Perhaps, if instead of asking Westerners how often do they think of the Roman Empire, an honest experiment was made where they would be asked “how often do you think about the Waffen SS?”, and with a target audience younger and more internet savvy, the responses would be sociologically much more revealing.

View from the Kremlin

For the current generation of Russian leaders, and the people that are manning Russia’s foreign policy bureaucracy, there seems to have been prevalent (and in denial of reality there still persists) a genuine belief that Europe had truly foregone its dark Nazi past and all the residues left over in the Baltics and Central-Eastern European States that idiotically the Soviets did not wipe out, would be marginalized and politically inconsequential despite their inclusion to NATO. Similarly, Russians viewed the remnants of Banderism, Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers as marginal elements, with the ties of kinship between Moscow and Kiev unassailable despite certain political-economic differences. Oh, how wrong they were, and what fools they made and sadly even now still make for themselves with their naivete(?)...

The ongoing rehabilitation of the Nazi fighters as efficient killers of Russians, the bête noire, the Untermenschen or “Orcs” per the Ukrainian parlance, of the hour (or century), for whom an open season has been declared across the West, at the expense of ignoring the other parts of the Nazi history as mere “accidents” brought perhaps by an overzealous nature, must readily be said that it was completely missed by the boomer almost-gerontocracy running the show in the Kremlin (Putin is 70, Lavrov is 73 and Shoigu and Gerasimov 68). This fatal omission, a result of the outdated, anachronistic and overcentralized (to the point of a paralyzing l'état, c'est moi attitude) Russian system of governance, was certainly beyond the means of the Russian state to stop or reverse, as it is a decades long internal western process, but had it been earlier properly understood, and its ramifications communicated to Russia’s populace and allies, instead of the self-castrating nonsense of “western partners” or “Ukrainian brothers”, it might have better prepared Russia for the Special Milit… War in Ukraine. But though it is too late for that now as more and more of the “western partners” will say “Who cares?” who we arm in the Ukraine as long as they kill Russians, it is gladly not too late to strike back decisively at the enemy, after acknowledging him for what he is, not what we were hoping he would be, or expecting him to become.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

https://books.google.gr/books/about/Cannon_Fodder.html?id=32DxAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Type-XXI-U-boat-Anatomy-Ship/dp/0851775705

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229

https://sites.utm.utoronto.ca/historyinternships/blog/03182019-0228/birth-world%E2%80%99s-first-assault-rifle-sturmgewehr-44

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/28/spooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt%C3%B9

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/eus-borrell-under-fire-europe-garden-rest-world-jungle-remarks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legio_IX_Hispana

https://www.jstor.org/stable/260776