Russophobia and the West’s “Final Solution”
Was Putin’s Foreign Minister right to compare Russians today with the Jews of WWII?
When Sergei Lavrov gave his yearly press conference recently, he caused quite a ruckus when he said the following:
Like Napoleon, who mobilised nearly all of Europe against the Russian Empire, and Hitler, who occupied the majority of European countries and hurled them at the Soviet Union, the United States has created a coalition of nearly all European member states of NATO and the EU and is using Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia with the old aim of finally solving the “Russian question”, like Hitler, who sought a final solution to the “Jewish question.”
The reaction was swift and full of righteous indignation. How dare Lavrov compare today’s Russians with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust?
Israel condemned the remarks. “Any comparison or relating current events with Hitler’s final solution plan for the extermination of the Jewish People distorts the historical truth, desecrates the memory of those who perished and the survivors and should be strongly rejected,” said the Foreign Ministry. Germany and France also criticised Lavrov’s comments.
Still — this was not the first time Lavrov got into hot water talking about Jews, however. In May 2022, while explaining Russia’s goal of “de-Nazification” in Ukraine despite the fact that President Zelensky is Jewish, Lavrov asserted that “Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean anything”.
That remark REALLY caused an uproar — so much so that Vladimir Putin felt he had to apologise to the Israeli PM.
But this time, Putin and Lavrov seem to be on the same page.
“Today they are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country,” Putin said in March 2022 during a televised meeting with Russian winners of culture-related prizes.
“I am talking about the progressive discrimination against everything connected with Russia, about this trend that is unfolding in a number of Western states, with the full connivance and sometimes with the encouragement of Western elites,” Putin added.
Putin did not apologise for the recent remarks by his Foreign Minister — most likely because of the fact that LAVROV HAS A POINT.
In fact, the West has fallen victim to an odious religion of blind Russophobia, fuelled — and led — by the Nazi-led nationalist forces in Ukraine, the West’s proxy in their war against Russia, and the standard bearer in the Western “crusade” to wipe out all things Russian and to even destroy the Russian state itself.
In their headlong rush to condemn Russia and “stand with Ukraine”, the West has allowed itself to become radicalised and racist, demanding that all things Russian be erased from global culture.
Why is Russophobia an “irrational fear”?
Russophobia, as it exists in the West, is a completely irrational sense of fear and hatred regarding Russia.
This is because Russophobia rests on two fundamental but opposing precepts:
Russia is a socioeconomically retarded backwater, a third world country with no industrial or technological capacity, a country running out of everything, with incompetent leadership and cowardly soldiers who run away at the first sign of a fight; that Russia is nothing but “a gas station masquerading as a country”, as John McCain said, and Putin is a petty thug, a weak leader who can only make life difficult for his neighbors, ans Barack Obama said.
Russia is a globe-straddling superpower that is poised to roll across Europe like the Mongol hordes, sweeping all armies and peoples before it, and Putin is a modern day Genghis Khan that is somehow also bent on becoming a modern day Peter the Great and reconstituting the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union.
Is Russophobia like Anti-Semitism? No.
Let’s be clear: Lavrov is not equating Russophobia with anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has existed for thousands of years — for as long as there have been Jews, there has been anti-Semitism.
Rather, Lavrov is saying specifically that the West is doing what the Nazis did in WWII. Namely, they are seeking to eradicate Russian culture, Russian history, Russian influence and even Russia itself from the world.
To understand the validity of Lavrov’s point, we need to explore the increasingly virulent phenomenon of Russophobia and how it compares to the Nazi efforts to “erase” Jews from the world.
Is Russophobia like Nazism? Yes.
First, we must acknowledge that the Nazis were not just out to exterminate the Jews. A major part of Hitler’s Nazi philosophy was a fundamental conviction that, like Jews, the Russians and other Slavs were also Untermenschen (sub-humans) deserving of eradication.
That anti-Russian Nazi element is today alive and well and living in the hearts of many Ukrainians. Indeed, Nazism — the original, Hitler-worshiping flavour — forms one of the keystones of Ukrainian Nationalism, which preaches that Ukrainians can only realise their own destiny when they have “eliminated” their enemies, including Jewish and Russian Untermenschen.
Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, was made a national hero in Ukraine in 2018. Bandera, who led the OUN during and after WWII, was famous for his hatred of Russians.
“The total and supreme victory of Ukrainian nationalism will take place when the Russian empire ceases to exist” — Stepan Bandera
Andriy Biletsky, founder of the “ultranationalist” Azov Battalion who went on to become a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, is a modern day standard bearer for the Bandera movement. In 2010 he gave a speech in which he said that the mission of Ukraine was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen”.
That crusade began in the Donbas in 2014, with the systematic slaughter of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
A UN investigation found that the Azov Regiment operating in the Donbas participated in the looting of civilian homes and targeted civilian areas between September 2014 and February 2015.
Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and torture perpetrated by the Azovs on ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas.
To say that what we now call Russophobia is similar to Nazism is, in fact incorrect: Russophobia was and is an intrinsic part of Nazism — and vice versa. Especially in Ukraine.
Making Russians “the Other”
A big part of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda was to portray Jews as being different from germans and other Europeans, and above all not belonging in European society. In Nazi Germany, jews were cast as being not just non-European, but as being something “other” than human.
This process, often called “otherization”, has also been used against many groups, such as indigenous people, LGBTQ, people of colour, even people of different religious sects (Catholics and Protestants in Ireland).
Otherization leads to alienation and fear of the unknown. Casting a group of people as “The Other” makes it all the more easy to hate them.
“Kill a Commie for Christ”
Modern Russophobia has its roots in the “Red Scare” days of the Cold War.
The US, for example, went to great lengths to emphasise its “moral superiority” over the “heathen atheist” Soviets by adding God everywhere. For example, in 1954 the US Congress voted to add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance that is recited by US schoolchildren every day.
In 1956, two years after having injected God into the pledge, Eisenhower signed a law that made “In God We Trust” the official motto of the United States. The US started printing and minting money with the phrase “In God We Trust” the following year.
And yet, even as Americans lived in fear of Soviet nukes; even as the USSR invaded Afghanistan; even as Reagan decried the USSR as the “Evil Empire”, the Bolshoi Ballet was still the hottest ticket in town when it toured the USA, and American children still enjoyed the fairy-tale beauty of The Nutcracker. Yes — Tchaikovsky was still played; Tolstoy was still taught; Prokofiev’s iconic “Peter and the Wolf” provided screen music for countless American films.
It took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a hubristic American hegemon to make possible the current campaign to completely eradicate all things Russian from our lives.
Russians as violent criminals
When the atheistic, communist USSR fell in the 1990's, the West had to find another way to demonise Russians.
Enter the Russian Mob.
Playing on the well-established “godless” meme of Russian culture, the West and Hollywood cultivated a non-stop parade of grotesque caricatures, depicting Russians as soulless, mindlessly violent criminals. The “Russian Mafia” became a wellspring of Hollywood memes for decades.
In western films, Russian mob bosses are often depicted as “Ex-KGB” —this trope literally provides a continuity of demonisation, showing the evolution of Russians from evil KGB killers to evil mafia killers.
A popular TV show, “Stranger Things” takes place during the Cold War and features evil Russian soldiers.
The hit TV show The Americans portrayed Russian sleeper agents pretending to be a “normal” American family — just with a lot of spying, assassination and deadly violence.
During the Cold War, the Soviets were portrayed as ruthless, but at least sometimes they were professional and often patriotic. Indeed, it was usually the Soviet system that was portrayed as the enemy. That godless, evil, corrupt, degenerate communist system that had “enslaved the unfortunate Russian people” and sent so many to the Gulags.
After the fall of the USSR, Russia could no longer be criticised for its evil economic system and degenerate lack of religion. So the decision was made to attack the Russians themselves.
Yes, Russians were now capitalist (like us), yes, they had a strong religious element in their society (like us), so it is no longer the Russian system that is at fault — it has to be the Russian people who are evil, corrupt, degenerate and violent.
The West convinced their people that the Russians were innately treacherous and deadly. They could NEVER be trusted, and they only wanted to kill and destroy.
In short, the Russians did not “share our values”.
Removing the Russians from Europe
The idea behind the current sanctions regime was not just to destroy Russia financially and economically, but to isolate Russians from the rest of the world, and make them The Other.
The past decades of bombardment with cultural tropes portraying Russians as mindless, soulless, violent criminals certainly helped this effort.
By September 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s rhetoric towards Russia was openly “otherizing” — if not outright racist. In her State of the Union address, she declared: “We will also propose additional bans on providing European services to Russia, and a prohibition for EU nationals to sit on governing bodies of Russian state-owned enterprises”.
“Russia should not benefit from European knowledge and expertise”, she snarled.
Clearly, to borrow the framing of European Commission VP Josep Borrell, Russia was not part of the European “Garden”, but rather part of the non-European “Jungle”.
It’s Germany 1933 all over again
The Nazis sought to remove everything Jewish from European and Western culture. They carried out targeted programs of boycotts, property seizures and other methods to systematically destroy and impoverish Jews:
The Sturmabteilung (SA) ran boycott and picketing campaigns targeting Jewish businesses that reduced their customers, sales and revenue. The Nazis exerted pressure on suppliers or wholesalers that left many Jewish businesses without stock. From 1936, the allocation of raw materials was regulated by the Nazi regime, which naturally denied them to Jewish companies. Nazis and Nazi sympathisers in local government often raised rates and rentals on Jewish stores and offices.
Also on March 7, two weeks before Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian frontier, the Washington Post published an extensive exposé on “Anti-Russian hate in Europe”:
“Across Europe, people who have no involvement with the war are being targeted and removed from positions,” said Aleksandra Lewicki, a sociologist at the University of Sussex. “There’s a sense of a clear enemy, it’s Russians, from all walks of life, who are being targeted by racist hate crimes and derogatory comments”.
The article goes on to describe a situation similar to what existed for German Jews in the 1930's:
A receptionist at another Russian restaurant in London, who asked not to be named for fear of further abuse, said his place is receiving 30 to 40 hate messages a day, mostly from Britons and Americans.
And this was BEFORE the Russians crossed into Ukraine.
CNN published a video report on how Russian businesses across the USA were being vandalised.
“We’ve had people call and say they would bomb us,” the owner of a Russian restaurant in California said
The “Most-Sanctioned Country Ever”
On March 7, 2022, two weeks before Putin launched his Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Bloomberg News declared that “Russia Is Now the World’s Most-Sanctioned Nation”.
The purpose of the Western sanctions was always clear — to punish Russia as a whole, to make life miserable for Russians. As a result of the “unprecedented” Western sanctions, US President Joe Biden crowed, “the Ruble will be rubble”.
European Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen proudly declared: “We will freeze Russian assets in the EU and stop access of Russian banks to our financial market”.
But the West’s Russophobic campaign did not end with sanctions. It went far beyond.The Great Boycott begins
After the launch of the SMO, Russia needed to be cancelled, and the West responded enthusiastically. Fuelled by 80 years of anti-Russian propaganda, outraged by persistent reports of “Russian hacking” and “election meddling”, and frustrated by incidents of “alleged” poisoning and assassination — none of which could ever be traced conclusively back to Putin, the collective West was ready to rip Russia to bits.
Here is a compilation of Russia-baiting madness by a MSM anchorman:
Of course, westerners were already predisposed to think of Russians as criminals and assassins — thanks to that long and documented history of the Russians being caricatured negatively in western popular culture.
In short: the Nazis portrayed Jews as the masters of money and finance; the West portrays Russians as the masters of crime and violence.
And so, shocked at the sight of blond-haired, blue-eyed war refugees and enraged at reports of Russian war crimes and atrocities, the West embraced an economic and cultural boycott campaign the scale and scope of which had not been seen since Kristallnacht.
Seizing the property of Russians
Like the Nazis did to the Jews in the 1930’s, the West has decided that all private as well as public Russian property is ripe for the taking.
More than $8 billion of Jewish property was stolen by the Nazis between 1933–45. But that number pales next to the enormous sums being stolen from Russians by the western powers.
It started, of course, with the national wealth and monetary reserves of the Russian Federation. These assets were frozen by the EU and the US days after the launch of the Russian SMO. Now there are proposals both in the United States and the European Union to use the $300 billion in seized Russian state wealth and use it to “rebuild Ukraine”.
Needless to say, this move is unprecedented.
But it is not just Russian state assets that are being stolen. Private Russian citizens are also seeing their property and money taken. Italy alone seized over $780 million in private Russian property.
The western nations teamed up to create a special entity called REPO, Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force. The nations forming REPO include Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, the UK, and US, along with the European Commission.
The REPO mission statement says the countries will assist one another as well as other nations to “find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s premeditated, unjust, and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the continuing aggression of the Russian regime”.
One may well ask how non-state “individuals and entities” can be sanctioned and have their property seized as a response to state actions. The answer is simple: declare all those individuals to be criminals who acquired their wealth illegally.
Seizing Russian wealth was easily justified because in the West, “everyone knows” that all wealthy Russians are criminals.
Thus it was that the US Treasury Department issued sanctions against, as they said, “Kremlin Elites, Leaders, Oligarchs, and Family”.
Note the “and Family” part. This means that if your uncle sat on a Russian bank board, guess what? Your US bank account was seized.
What “Standing with Ukraine” REALLY means
Stealing the property of Russians was just the beginning. In their hysterical determination to “Stand with Ukraine”, the West became the puppet and Kiev became the puppet master. Anything the Ukrainians implemented on their own was almost always adopted in the collective West.
People forgot — or simply ignored — the campaign of ethnic cleansing that had been raging in Ukraine since 2014. Ukrainian Nazis and ultranationalists were not just banning the official Russian language; under their campaign of “derussification” they were cancelling all Russian music, banning Russian books from libraries — and even burning them.
After Putin launched his SMO, Ukraine demanded that the West follow suit . In December 2022, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ukraine’s Cultural Minister, called upon all Westerners to boycott Russian culture.
Stating that his country is engaged in what he described as “a civilisational battle over culture and history”, Tkachenko called on the West to “cancel” everything from The Nutcracker to The 1812 Overture. Russian ballet, symphonies, literature, etc. were all to be banned, and where possible, replaced with Ukrainian works.
Then, Ukraine started demanding that Russia be banned from all international sporting events.
The West complied.
For example:
At the request of Kiev, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned Russian athletes from competing in the Olympics.
Formula One cancelled the Russian Gran Prix 2024.
Russians were banned from international film and arts festivals such as Cannes.
FIFA and UEFA banned Russia from competing in all events.
But banning Russia from international football competition was not enough. Russians had to be “erased” from football VIDEO GAMES as well.
EA Sports that it would remove the Russian national team and Russian clubs from its popular FIFA video game series. “EA Sports stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and like so many voices across the world of football, calls for peace and an end to the invasion of Ukraine,” the gaming company said.
Such measures are direct analogs of the Nazi campaign to eradicate “Jewishness” from European life.
The West ignores the plight of the Russian “Subhumans”
During the 1930s, as Hitler’s shock troops and street thugs were terrorising and murdering Germany’s Jews, the West turned a mostly blind eye to the atrocities.
The same ignorance was studiously practised by the West with regard to the killing, torture and ethnic cleansing perpetrated on the Ukrainian Russians by Kiev’s Nazi battalions.
A Ukrainian Russian living in the Donbas wrote a blog post using the pseudonym “Juan”. He described the events of 2014 from a victim’s point of view: the murders, the burnings, the bombings, the mayhem, and wrote:
To this day not a single western government that I am aware of has expressed the slightest sympathy or expressed condolences for the murdered men and women and children in Donbas nor has a single western government asked Kiev to cease the bombardments. After all, the dead citizens are Untermenschen. WE are Untermenschen.
The wilful ignorance of the West towards the suffering of the Russians in the Donbas is another similarity between them and the Jews of the Holocaust.
Destroying Russia as a nation
In Lavrov’s press comments, the Russian Foreign Minister accused the West of pursuing “the old aim of finally solving the “Russian question”.
What exactly is this aim, and why is it “old”?
Well — let us not forget that during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the West’s intervention on behalf of the White Russians (fighting against the Communist government) involved hundreds of thousands of troops. America’s commitment was 11,000, Britain’s 7,500, France’s 15,0001.
That was 100 years ago.
Operation Unthinkable is no longer unthinkable
Then, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Western Allies hatched a plan called Operation Unthinkable, designed to conquer and occupy the war-torn and weakened Soviet Union, with the following stated objective:
“The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire” — Operation Unthinkable (1945)
The operation was planned by the Joint Planning Staff and presented to Winston Churchill in May, 1945. The proposed launch date of the operation was July 1, 1945.
Operation Unthinkable’s potential success, according to the planners, depended on enlisting the Russian-hating Poles as well as “the re-equipment and re-organisation of German manpower” (i.e., NAZIS):
“Great Britain and the United States [will] have full assistance from the Polish armed forces and can count upon the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity”.
The planning brief concludes that in order to achieve the objective, “the defeat of Russia in a total war will be necessary”.
In short, this was Churchill’s plan for World War Three, and it ended with the complete defeat and “Occupation of Vital Areas of Russia”.
So — the plan revolved around recycling the recently decommissioned Nazis to fight against Russia — again. I wonder what Stalin and his staff thought when they learned about this (and you know they did).
Needless to say, Operation Unthinkable was never implemented. But the great western dream of conquering Russia has always remained — and still informs and shapes western policy towards Russia.
The Final Step in the “Final Solution”: carving up Russia
On February 14, 2023, policymakers, government officials and geopolitical “experts” gathered at the Hudson Institute, just down the street from the White House, for a half day conference to discuss the future of Eurasia.
As these policy potentates took their seats in the hall of one of the US’s greatest Washington think tanks, the air must have crackled with electricity. They were there, after all, on a momentous mission: to plan for the dissolution of the Russian Federation.
The introductory brief set the tone of the conference:
Because of the Kremlin’s decision to attack Ukraine, Moscow’s once extensive influence across Eurasia has dwindled, and the war has devastated Russia’s economy, military, and social stability.
US and allied policymakers need to understand this possibility and prepare for the new Eurasian geopolitical reality that a fall of the Russian Federation might bring.
Official US policy: “Decolonizing Russia”
It is not just the private think tanks that are preparing to break up Russia — “decolonizing” Russia is also official US policy. The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, is an independent commission of the U.S. Federal Government.
In June, 2022, the CSCE held its own conference, called simply “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative”.
Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative
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These people believe that the socialist USSR was not a force for “liberation” but rather one for “colonisation”.
Their plans assume that Putin is a deranged megalomaniac trying to “reconstitute the Russian Empire” (or the USSR), and whose days are now numbered.
It’s not just the Western Leaders
Westerners in general are now hell bent on destroying Russia — not just western leaders, but random people on social media platforms like Quora. Here is a sadly typical view:
Why Lavrov is Right
When the Nazis came to power in the 1930’s Germany was not a particularly anti-Semitic state. It took the Nazis years to turn ordinary Germans into dogmatic Jew-haters. But after those years of propaganda and brainwashing, the average German on the street knew that the Jew was his enemy, that Jews were The Other; that Jewish art and culture was decadent and corrupt; that Jews were criminal; that Jews had to be removed, eradicated, wiped out; that Jews were Evil.
That same process has been used in the West to create an all-encompassing anti-Russian culture that teaches us that Russians are not like us; that Russian art and literature is corrupt and decadent; that we cannot allow anything or anyone Russian to exist in our society; that Russia itself as it currently exists needs to be dismantled; that the Russians are, as that Quora poster said, “pure evil”.
In other words:
We are told that the Russians are a “problem”, one for which we need a “Final Solution”
— just as Lavrov said.