Willing What?

Such are Volodymyr Zelensky’s pharmaceutical habits that it is only fitting that he should be accompanied to the White House by the Seven Dwarfs. Which of Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey are each of Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Alexander Stubb, Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Rutte, and why? Watch out for the eight of them in panto, or as ideal contestants on Strictly Come Dancing.

Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them, wear the Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

“The coalition of the willing”? Heaven help us all. Merz and von der Leyen come from the party of those key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany, of NATO and of the EU who had very recently been Nazi officers. 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.

Macron appointed Michel Barnier, who was arguably better-known in Britain and certainly in Brussels, as Prime Minister because that was who Marine Le Pen wanted, or could at least work with, to keep out the New Popular Front that had come first at the only relatively recent legislative elections. We all know about Meloni. Now in coalition with the Finns Party, Stubb’s party was part of the coalition governments that fought with and for Germany during the Second World War, such that Finland did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020. Under Rutte, NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

And Starmer? He is the heir of Clement Attlee, who imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece, and who took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start. 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 conquer 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, as recently explored even here, 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 Joseph 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.

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 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.