Stay Behind?

Ukraine is heading inexorably towards the settlement that was offered two weeks before the invasion. 

Crimea has gone back to Russia permanently, having never historically been part of the Ukraine. Scarcely an ethnic Ukrainian has ever lived there, and there are far more of them in many other corners of the former Soviet Union, including several parts of Russia. Why would anyone who wanted a state for ethnic Ukrainians even want Crimea?

The Donbas was put into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in order to make independence impossible, and that has proved effective, in that an independent Ukraine with the Donbas in it has indeed turned out to have been unsustainable. The Donbas may not be incorporated into Russia by name, but in every other way it will be. Why would anyone who wanted a state for ethnic Ukrainians even want the Donbas?

And Ukraine will be constitutionally neutral, which is why NATO is eyeing up Finland and Sweden instead. Those countries have grown prosperous, and in many ways exemplary, outside NATO. But it exists to expand against Russia, and it is running out of options to justify its pension scheme.

All of this will require regime change in Ukraine, since the present regime would never wear it, and that will indeed entail denazification. A month ago, we were expected to believe that there were no Nazis in Ukraine. Now, they are just a little bit Nazi. The British and American publics are being confronted with the fact that the Nazis never went away. No one else had ever imagined that they had.

Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot subdue even Ukraine, much less anywhere else.

Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician).

Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Attlee's Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich.

In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War.

Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. 

And here we are. We have been allied to the Nazis for more than 12 times as long as we were ever at war with them.