‘Copper and rubber were being rushed to Germany by express trains from the East and the Far East to keep Hitler happy in an effort of ‘appeasement’ that was as frantic as it was futile,” (Alexander Werth, Russia at War, p. 125).
Moscow had ample reconnaissance of Germany’s troop movement in the spring of 1941 as Hitler’s grand attack approached and also warnings from foreigners such as Tokyo-based German journalist Richard Sorge and British ambassador to Moscow Stafford Cripps.
Even so, Stalin refused to accept Germany’s enmity, clinging instead to the spirit of collaboration inspired by his multiple deals with Hitler following their joint dismemberment of Poland in the autumn of ’39.
Now that same pattern is repeated by Vladimir Putin as he waltzes with jihadism the way Stalin tangoed with Nazism.
Putin’s axiom is simple: the West is the enemy and the West’s enemies are friends.
And as axioms go, when the facts deny them the facts must be denied. That is what Stalin did when he was shown aerial photos of the German offensive formation, and that is what Putin did after the whole world last Saturday saw Islamist gunmen slay 140 concert-goers in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk.
Refusing to admit that his citizens were massacred by his Islamist bedmates, Putin tried to blame their attack on Ukraine.
We Israelis now know all about the psychology of such denialism. Our denial before the October 7 massacre was different – we understood the enemy’s enmity but misjudged its abilities, whereas Putin understands the enemy’s abilities but misjudges the enmity. The self-deceit, however, is the same.
That is why we are now in a position to tell Putin that he is repeating Stalin’s mistake, in both its parts: The war he has picked is with an enemy that is not an enemy, and the war he is escaping is with an enemy that is indeed an enemy – as last week’s massacre so close to the Kremlin has made plain.
Russians argue that the Red Army led Nazism’s defeat. This column has actually backed this claim (“Who defeated the Nazis?” 15 May 2020). However, Russians must also ask what would have happened if their leaders had realized from the outset that Germany was their enemy and Poland was not.
The answer to this “What if?” is as simple as it scathing: Hitler would have been defeated early on, and the lives of the millions he killed – most of them Soviet citizens – would have been spared.
Had Stalin faced his situation rationally, he would have allied with Poland against Germany, not the other way round. Having failed to do so, he ended up begging his capitalist archenemies in London and Washington to save him from Nazism’s fury.
The same goes for Putin’s alliance with Islamism and confrontation with the West.
PUTIN’S UTTER disregard for what jihadism represents was laid bare last November when Moscow officially hosted a Hamas delegation headed by Mousa Abu Marzuk. Aside from the provocation toward the Jews – this happened while the October 7 massacre was fresh and its fatalities had yet to be fully identified – Putin’s gesture displayed a thorough misunderstanding of what jihadism is about.
Hamas’s openly stated goal is that “The entire planet will come under an Islamic system,” as one of its leaders, Mahmoud a-Zahar, said in a video, translated and broadcast by MEMRI, in December 2022. That means every land is to be conquered, and also every faith – particularly Putin’s “treacherous Christianity” as a-Zahar sees it.
It’s natural for the targets of this triumphal manifesto to dismiss it as empty rhetoric and wishful thinking. “They can’t even take over one country, how will they conquer the world?” say the jihadist threat’s deniers. “Let them attack someone we don’t care about until they get tired, and in the meantime, we’ll do business with them,” goes that thinking.
That was Stalin’s attitude between the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht and as the Warsaw Ghetto was being walled up.
This is the rationale that now works in Moscow, as it strikes strategic deals with Iran’s ayatollahs, the spiritual fountainhead of all Islamist belligerency.
LIKE SOVIET foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, when he faced his Nazi counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop, Putin and his circle tell themselves that what their interlocutors say very plainly is not what they actually mean.
Stalin lied to himself that Hitler’s mission statement, in Mein Kampf, that Germany must expand East, to Russia, was not an actual plan, and that the Nazi belief that the Slavs should be the Aryans’ slaves was no reason for Russia not to trade horses with that faith’s prophets and henchmen. Russia’s partners are now different, but the rest is all the same.
Having first invaded Georgia as unjustly as Stalin invaded Poland, and having subsequently attacked Ukraine as clumsily as Stalin attacked Finland, Putin then bedded Iran’s ayatollahs as unabashedly as Stalin ingratiated Nazi Germany.
Yes, Nazism and Islamism are entirely different threats. The Nazi attack was centralized, industrialized, and secular, the Islamist attack is diffuse, religious, and disjointed, split between Sunnis and Shiites – as well as an array of often antagonistic groups, from Islamic State to Hamas.
Even so, all jihadists share the hope of imposing their faith on the rest of mankind. Do they deploy thousands of fighter planes, tanks, and canons as Hitler did? No, their weapons are simpler and their units smaller, but they have already struck on six continents, killed tens of thousands, and, unlike the Nazi assault theirs has been raging for nearly half a century since the Khomeini Revolution of 1979.
That’s why this is a world war; a world war in which Russia’s place, like its place in the previous world war, is clear to everyone except Russia itself.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.