In one of the most scandalous op-eds of the year, KP’s Ulyana Skoybeda takes the liberal Leonid Gozman to task for equating SMERSH with the SS. The original byline was later toned down, and the author offered a partial – and some insist, halfhearted – apology.
The Politician Leonid Gozman Says: “A Nice Uniform is the Sole Difference between the SS and SMERSH.”
At times, one regrets that the Nazis didn’t make lampshades out of the ancestors of today’s liberals – there’d be fewer problems. Liberals are revising history so as to knock the rug out from under our country’s feet.
“The federal channels are releasing a new serial about the war. On the roles of the SS. Our heroes aren’t the butchers of Auschwitz; they are not sadists or rapists… In the terrible meat-grinder of war, they honestly fight the enemy, performing deeds of great bravery, and self-sacrifice on behalf of their comrades. Many of them die, but they die with honor…
I made all this up, of course. Sorry. A film like that will never be shown on our screens. Likewise in Germany – even those Germans born many years after that nightmare are still ashamed of the SS uniform.
But in the past few days of Victory celebration, our screens have played host to a serial about SMERSH. They did not have handsome uniforms, but that is their only significant distinction from the SS.”
This post was published yesterday by the prominent liberal Leonid Gozman at his blog on the radio station Echo of Moscow’s website. He surely chose the appropriate time to compare a combat unit of Soviet military counterintelligence with the armed guardians of fascist concentration camps. Not just to compare them, in fact, but to equate them.
He must have waited for the moment, in all likelihood. So as to make it sting all the more.
You can just about imagine what started going down in the Internet.
Heated arguments and fights at Echo of Moscow and dozens of other sites. Blood, dirt, the gnashing of teeth.
I will advance one of the most representative discussions.
“SMERSH’s task was to catch saboteurs,” say a few outraged commentators. “The SS, on the other hand, was the chief organizer of terror and the destruction of peoples on racial criteria. How could you possible compare them?”
Then a liberal – not Gozman, but close enough – entered the discussion, and started bloviating. That during the war years, military tribunals convicted more than 994,000 Soviet soldiers, out of whom 157,500 were shot – that’s twenty times higher than the Nazi figure. That SMERSH operatives put soldiers up against the wall just for picking German propaganda leaflets off the ground, praising Germany weaponry, or phrases of the following sort, “No, we can never seize this hill, we’ll get destroyed by machine gun fire,” which were equated to spreading panic. That SMERSH and the NKVD were, for all intents and purposes, also killing squads just like the SS.
At which point the other commentators exclaimed, “Don’t compare them! The SS was an occult, anti-human organization. We personally know people, who exhumed corpses with skulls that had been drilled into; the SS had been searching for a “third eye” there, or something…”
The liberal: “Calm down, the NKVD also carried out medical experiments on people, and was also an anti-human organization, if not an occult one. Besides, it’s not like ordinary Waffen-SS soldiers did occultism or drilled into skulls, did they? Were they not, like, defending the Vaterland?”
The other users groaned, “Sure, they defended the Vaterland – at Smolensk?!” and proceeded to state the obvious: That the SS were enemy troops who had attacked us, and we were defending ourselves. And that is the essence of the difference!
The liberal: “You consider a soldier to be a criminal just because he’s participating in an unjust war of conquest? If so, then Soviet soldiers were criminals too. If not, then German soldiers weren’t criminals either. Russians were defenders in 1941, but aggressors in 1939 – not to mention interventionists in 1968, and once again aggressors in 1979.”
And moreover, it’s not like we can have any pretensions to military honor; everybody knows that we began the war allied with Hitler. And didn’t we steal the Brest Fortress, which we defended so heroically in June 1941, from the Poles?
“Ah…” rebutted the commentators, laying out their last, and ostensibly rock-solid, argument, “Wasn’t the SS recognized as a criminal organization in the Nuremberg Trials? And the NKVD – wasn’t!”
“The NKVD is a criminal, terrorist organization,” the liberal ambushed them. “The Nuremberg Trials were illegitimate, because it was a case of the victors judging the defeated…”
Well, how do you like that, hum? Beautiful, no? The liberal, crushingly victorious…
So here’s the liberal ditty, from the emigre Mikhail Berg to Leonid Gozman: Stalin is equal to Hitler, maybe even worse (he killed more people); Communism is equal to fascism, SMERSH – to the Waffen-SS. There is nothing to celebrate, and nothing to be proud of. The Nuremberg Trials were illegitimate. It would have been better if the Germans had won (the last claim, by the way, was proudly made by Berg, an ethnic Jew).
But I have an answer for the liberals. The Soviet Union was not equivalent to Hitler’s Germany by simple right of conquest. However the war started, and however it was fought, the fact remains that we won – and that will establish our own rules. We established them in 1945, to be precise. They do not require any revisions.
The main question concerns something else. Why do the liberals require historical revisions? Why do they insist on knocking the rug out from under our country’s feet? Why do they reevaluate and spit on everything tied to the war – that is, the most sacred thing remaining to people who lived past the collapse of the Soviet Union? Why do the Gozmans wish to lead us away from Victory into loserhood, worthlessness, and inferiority?
This question was best answered by the publicist Olga Tukhanina. “You know how the psychologist Levi put it? Nobody ever just walks up to you in an alley and suddenly starts beating you. The victim should first be put into the role of a victim. Hence, questions of the type, “Hey, can I borrow a fag? What’s the time?” And now we’re getting asked the same question: “Hey, what are we celebrating? How many died?”
Russia is being put into the role of a victim.
And you know, that means the activities of these liberals are nothing short of… subversion. Sabotage.
What are our intelligence services waiting for? They don’t want to recall SMERSH’s experience?
Reader comments
Правдоруб: The beginning is good… promising. I’m talking of the lampshades and “problems” – I haven’t bothered reading any further yet. But, knowing Skoybeda, I feel she won’t disappoint. Skoybeda, you are a nasty bitch, if you wrote this… It’s a pity that the Red Commissars, butchering the denizens of Ukrainian villagers, didn’t also butcher your ancestors. Maybe today’s journalism then would be a bit less repulsive than it actually is.
Константин Калинин: The liberals are losing and they are beginning to show their rotten, wolfish nature. Every liberal is a potential traitor to the Motherland, because they place individual interests above that of social interests. For them, their understanding of the Motherland is abstract; they are cosmopolitans by nature. As far as they are concerned, their Motherland is where they can more easily get fed, where they have access to more sorts of sausage. For them the interests of sexual minorities is higher than family values. As for Russia’s victory in 1941-45 this makes them totally mad and they are prepared to do all they can to smear this victory.
You can’t say it any better than Dostoevsky already did: “Russian liberalism is not an attack upon the existing order of things, but an attack upon the very essence of things themselves – indeed, on the things themselves; not an attack on the Russian order of things, but on Russia itself… Every misfortune and mishap of the country fills him with mirth, and even with ecstasy. He hates national customs, Russian history, everything… This hatred for Russia has been mistaken by some of our ‘Russian liberals’ for sincere love of their country, and they boast that they see better than their neighbors what real love of one’s country should consist in. But of late they have grown, more candid and are ashamed of the expression ‘love of country,’ and have annihilated the very spirit of the words as something injurious and petty and undignified.”
As far as I’m concerned, a liberal is worse and more dangerous than an SS man, because it’s clear that the latter is an enemy, and how to fight him. But the liberals act slyly. But as a result of their activities, Russia in the past 25 years has suffered twice as many losses as in the Great Patriotic War – both economic, and demographic, losses.
Alexey Peshemorehodov (replying to above): All this is banal, unoriginal. Along the lines of, “Today he listens to jazz, and tomorrow he will sell his country!” We’ve been through all this before…
Вадим Гасенко: I support Ulyana! Gozman, why don’t you go get lost somewhere?
