Will the victim blaming never stop?

            On the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov/ Ribbentrop pact, or the Hitler/Stalin pact, or the Nazi/Soviet Nonaggression pact, the formal alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, pledging to jointly invade and divvy up Eastern Europe between them, I was told on social media (where else?) I could “thank Winston Churchill” for it.

   

         As I recall, Winston Churchill wasn’t a signatory to the pact. He did not participate in the partitioning of Poland or the annexation of the Baltic countries into the USSR. He was not Prime Minister at the time – he was not even a minister of anything at the time (though he did have a seat in Parliament).

            The thinking goes that Chuchill was to blame for scuppering an attempted anti-nazi alliance with the USSR, driving Stalin, as it were, into the arms of Hitler. It’s hard to see how this was Churchill’s fault: again, he was not part of Chamberlain’s government at the time, and it was Lord Halifax who led the negotiations. Stalin, having failed to join a coalition against he nazis, joined the nazis. Was this the most consequential case of “can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” in history?

            It has been argued the pact gave the USSR desperately needed time to prepare, and held off the nazi invasion just long enough. Indeed, acting completely off guard, losing hundreds of thousands of your soldiers, and letting your enemy advance thousands of miles into your territory, is usually the last thing he would expect your to do. To say nothing that under the terms of the pact, the USSR handed over thousands of tons of raw materials and military equipment right up until the eve of Barbarossa.

Pals: Hanz Guderian and
Seymon Krivoshein

            It seems a funny kind of master strategy, but very typical of authoritarian sympathizers, who tend to insist that whatever happened to the dictator is exactly what the dictator intended. The Party is infallible after all.

    More importantly, it abrogates any sort of moral responsibility on the part of the perpetrators. Did Britain invade Poland, and machine gun twenty-one thousand people at Katyn? Deport a hundred-and-thirty-thousand people from the Baltic states? Attack Finland? Did Churchill pull the trigger on any of these occasions?

            It’s the K-2 height of absurdity, but it’s what Soviet sympathizers have to do when confronted with the intolerable reality that their heroes aided, abetted, fought beside and entered into an official alliance with the nazis. It can only be tolerated if it can be retconned into a master strategy, blamed on the West, or both. It’s perverse really: condemn the side that went to war with Hitler to protect Poland while praising the side that joined Hitler to attack Poland. It can only make sense when one believes that the Party can do no wrong.

            It still happens: many still blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on NATO expansion. In these narratives, Russia has no control over its actions: it’s a mindless drooling zombie only doing what the West tricks it into doing. It’s not a very flattering picture, but it’s necessary to indulge if one wants to keep believing that only the West commits atrocities.