The crocodiles are hungry: Fascism back in Eastern Europe, appeased by the West

John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal.

Published time: 28 Mar, 2019 10:32Edited time: 28 Mar, 2019 16:40

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Activists and supporters of Ukrainian nationalist parties hold a rally in central Kiev, Ukraine March 2, 2019. ©  REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

The appeasement of fascism in the 1930s is justly considered the nadir of Western liberal democracy. Its appeasement today is thus inexcusable.

Someone much cleverer than I once argued that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. The fact that we are currently living through a recrudescence of fascism in Eastern Europe, in states allied to the West, is more than a tragedy and certainly no farce.

In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Poland the celebration and embrace of fascist ideas, iconography, history and ideology is back with a sinister vengeance. It’s almost as if the most devastating and barbarous period in Europe’s long and tortured history, the 1930s and 40s, never took place. It’s as if the vast killing fields of WWII in which millions perished – its mass graves, executions, and the Nazi death camps in which the systematic genocide of the Jews was attempted on an industrial scale – were a figment.

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For there is no other possible explanation for the insouciance with which the West has ignored the monster of fascism that’s been hatched in Eastern Europe of late, instead consumed with anti-Russia animus to such a degree that fascism is either deemed of no small importance or a price worth paying.

When you understand that this very dynamic allowed for the rise and growth of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, involving Western ruling classes actively courting fascism as a counterweight to the rising tide of communism and communist ideas among their own workers in the context of a global economic depression, and that in the eyes of Western ruling classes today Russia and the Soviet Union are one and the same, clarity is achieved.