Your correspondent, like the rest of the world has been hearing a lot about all those Nazis in Ukraine from the mouth of Putin! The accusation is a pure fabrication, that Putin seeks to justify his attack on Ukraine.
There may be a few hundred right wing extremists posing as threats in Ukraine, but they are in no way a risk to the security of Russia and certainly no justification for this brutal invasion.
Your correspondent wanted to check out history of the Nazis and the Nazis in Germany, and he visited the excellent museum in Munich called the “NS-Dokumentationszentrum”for short and “Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism (Nazi)”.
It is a great museum, not big, but full of interesting photographs and excellent short explanations in 2 languages – German and English. It starts with the period 1919 to 1923, when the Russian revolution started to impress some young people about the importance of socialism.
One of them was a young Adolf Hitler, who became a viral speaker on the topic. Around 1920 Hitler had joined the newly formed Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known colloquially as the “Nazi Party”). He was the one who designed the party’s banner of a swastika in a white circle on a red background, and by 1922 Hitler’s control over the party was unchallenged.
Hitler and others in the Party wanted to use Italian Fascism as a model for their appearance and policies. In 1923, they emulated Benito Mussolini’s “March on Rome” by staging their own coup in Bavaria, to be followed by a challenge to the government in Berlin.
However, it failed, and he and others ended up in jail. After about one year he was pardoned by the Bavarian Supreme Court, and was released from jail on 20 December 1924, against the state prosecutor’s objections.
After that nothing could stop this man from advancing within the political system. While in jail he had written “Mein Kampf” and ended up selling over 1 million copies. The book laid out Hitler’s plans for transforming German society into one based on race. Throughout the book, Jews are equated with “germs” and presented as the “international poisoners” of society. According to Hitler’s ideology, the only solution was their extermination.
Putin is using the same arguments that fictitious “Ukrainian Nazis” are a threat to Russia and that they should be terminated even though the people of Ukraine are no threat to Russia. Likewise, Jews and other people labelled as outcasts by Hitler were no threat to other Germans…
Labelling people as outcasts if they are from another country, worship another religion, or wear different clothes, speak another language are all wrong. Once you start this process like Hitler or Putin has done only leads to bad things happening – bigotry invariably leads to torture, violence, and later war crimes.
Bigotry has its seeds in resentment and has always understood to be wrong because history is full of examples of its murderous results!
If politicians start to preach bigotry in social media or in speeches, they should be stopped. Bigotry, no matter how mild, only leads to one terrible conclusion.
We have seen that the seeds of bigotry have been sown in many European countries because populist politicians see it as an easy way to garner votes. Bigoted remarks in social media accounts of several Finnish ministers from the True Finns have recently come to light. Although freshly discovered, their negative attitudes to immigrants and refugees have been well-known for years. Now is the time for other parties to break away from cooperating with such parties.
Immigrants who are prepared to work are needed to strengthen our economy because we have an aging population. That does not mean that these new people are a threat to us when arriving on our shore, quite the opposite! We need them.
Refugees who arrive in Europe to escape terror and death need help, and we must do our bit to help them. The refugee question is a challenging and complex matter, but we have a duty to give them support so that they can rebuild their lives. They are not to be treated as outcasts, as a threat to us, but they should be given the opportunity to have a normal life in our community.
Readers should recall that huge numbers of Finns migrated to the USA, to Europe and especially to Sweden in search of work for several decades after World War Two. Many children were sent as refugees to Sweden in that wartime to avoid being killed by Russian bombs and bullets. I hear no complaints from our bigots about this then human migration, but they certainly complain when foreigners come here now!
Here are the figures from a 2003 study by Jouni Korkiasaari & Ismo Söderling entitled “Finnish Emigration and Immigration after World War II”. It is or our enlightened interested readers and bigoted politicians to understand that Finland has seen huge population movement waves:
”During the last one hundred years, more than one million Finns have moved abroad, nearly 500,000 of them before and about 730,000 after World War II. Before the war, the majority of the emigrants moved to North America and, after the war, about 75 per cent went to Sweden. Approximately half of them have returned. Emigration has generally followed economic development in target countries to the extent that during booms it has increased, and during recessions it has correspondingly decreased…”
The table below is from the same study – our population in 1945 was some 4 million and now stands at 5.6 million, so you can understand that this was a big sliced of the population on the move:
