No.078-08-06-2015

PRESS-RELEASE

3 June 2015

Russian Center of Culture and Science

Jakarta

Lessons learned from WWII and Modern World

On May 9^th Russia and the entire world celebrated solemnly the 70^th Anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War and the end of the Second World War in Europe.

The Second World War became the most destructive and bloodiest war in the history of the mankind that had been suffering an unprecedented on its scale tragedy in 1939-1945.

The results of the WWII (including territorial ones) were fixed in the appropriate agreements between the USSR and other nations – participants of the anti-Hitler coalition (the USA, Great Britain, France, and China), and compose a fundamental basis of the modern world order. The establishment of the Organization of the United Nations as a result of the war was of the utmost importance. Its goal was not to repeat the mistakes of the past but to arrange a collective work to prevent a new world conflict, to ensure the stable international peace and security for decades and even centuries ahead.

However today we have quite enough reasons to doubt about how serious the international community is taking into consideration the lessons learned from the global catastrophe which happened more than 70 years ago.

One of the main lessons of the war is that any insane adventurous ideas of anybody's race superiority and exceptionality and the based on them criminal policy must be met with an immediate collective response by the civilized nations.

Did it happen in the 1930s in Europe after the Hitler Nazis had come to power with the aim to exterminate entire peoples and nations? Unfortunately it did not. The Russian President Vladimir Putin in his address on the occasion of the 70^th Anniversary of the Victory said: "then in the 1930s the enlightened Europe failed to see in the Nazi ideology a deadly threat".  Today we can say that the absence of the timely collective response to the crimes of Nazis led finally to the tragedy of the World War II. The Western powers (Great Britain, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia) didn't reply to the repeated Soviet proposals to establish a collective security system to oppose a man-hating policy of Hitler. Instead of that the Western nations preferred to make concessions to Nazi Germany in order to counterbalance this country to the USSR and turn its aggression to the East against the Soviet Union. The Munich Agreement of September 1938 between Germany, Italy, Britain and France was a culmination of that policy. The deal formalized the partition of Czechoslovakia and showed to Hitler that the Western powers will not oppose his further advancement to the East. But even despite that fact in the beginning of 1939 the Soviet Union undertook the last attempt to create a collective security system with Britain and France. However, the partners tried to delay the negotiations to every possible way. Moreover Poland, which by the way undertook its own actions to annex a part of the Czech territory after the Munich Agreement was signed, refused decisively to guarantee the passing of the Soviet troops through its territory to repel a planned Nazi aggression.

The USSR was not prepared enough for an inevitable war against Germany. In order to ensure its security the Soviet Union had nothing but a hard choice to agree for a Non-aggression Treaty with the Hitler government. This move allowed delaying the war that the Nazis finally unleashed in 1941.

It also makes evident another lesson of the Second World War, namely a counterproductivity of attempts to isolate Russia on the world arena, to deny cooperation with Moscow in solving vital problems of peace and security. Unfortunately the Western powers behaved exactly like that in the 1930s on the eve of the Second World War.

And on the contrary, the joining of efforts of the USSR, the USA, Britain and France and founding of an anti-Hitler Coalition after the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War accelerated a common victory over Nazism in Europe and Japanese militarism in Asia.

All this is worth mentioning today when Russia is again a subject to isolation attempts with the goal to press it out of the global politics. Those attempts are surely doomed to fail. But all that is happening in the recent environment with multiplying severest challenges to global peace and security, which could be countered only by joint efforts of all nations including Russia. There is about combatting global terrorism, WMD nonproliferation, dealing with climate change, ensuring a sustainable growth of the global economy and other vital problems.

The next important lesson of the Second World War is to suppress decisively and uncompromisingly any attempts to revive the virus of Nazism, to glorify Nazi criminals, to preach any kind of exceptionality or any ethnic or other superiority, to claim the global governance. It is absolutely unacceptable and extremely dangerous when today in some European countries we witness open propaganda of Nazi ideas and values, we see the Nazis and their henchmen are officially glorified, and radical nationalists are raising their heads. The latters and their today's supporters are openly organizing their processions with the connivance of official authorities. Here I mean Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine, countries claiming to be almost an example of democracy and a rule-of-law state. It is also worth mentioning that the Nazi ideology, Nazi organizations, Nazis themselves as well as their henchmen have been strongly condemned and outlawed by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

I have to note with regret and alarm that the use of the Nazi symbols is also present here in Indonesia today. For instance there is a so-called "Soldatencafe" in Bandung which is literally stuffed with Nazi symbols and attributes. I would like to appeal to my Indonesian friends to think, whether is it really acceptable?! Please note that the Nazi hordes under those symbols killed millions of innocent people, burned them alive in incinerators of concentration camps, ruined dozens of countries and thousands of towns and cities, humiliated millions of people of occupied nations! Thus any use of Nazi symbols means jeering at the memory of victims of the Second World War which in its turn means the loss of shame.

One more lesson of the past war worth mentioning today is an inadmissibility of re-writing history for the sake of short-term political benefits. We see how in a number of European countries liberated from the Nazi enslavement – note, by the Soviet Army – nowadays there are attempts to describe the Soviet Union as almost a culprit of unleashing the Second World War, to put an equality sign between the USSR and Nazi Germany, to call the USSR not a liberator of Europe and a victor over Nazism but an "occupier" of European nations. In all this we see an intention to slander my country due to the fact that the authors of such fabrications do not really like our honest and independent foreign policy aimed against regular attempts of the West to intervene rudely into internal affairs of sovereign states and to set up a change of political regimes also with the use of force.

But the history of the Second World War remains as it is. On the eve of the war unleashed by Nazi Germany many countries made their own tragic mistakes I mentioned above. But no matter how to estimate political and diplomatic upheavals of the 1930s-1940s, the following course of history drew a clear distinction between good and evil. Between the anti-Hitler Coalition and the countries of the so called "Axis", Germany, Japan and Italy. This distinction was fixed in the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal. And those who try today to glorify and justify the Nazi henchmen are unable to erode this indisputable verdict of history. It is also doubtless that it was the Soviet Union that liberated the peoples of many European countries occupied by Hitler and thus paved the way for the European continent towards creative development and partnership that we see today. And as to the attempts to "compare" Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union so they are absolutely false, deceitful and insulting towards Russia and other states of the former USSR. Our country has never – I underline it – never been a proponent of ideas of racial superiority and extermination of other countries and peoples according to ethnic, ideological or any other principle. That is why Russia was the most active fighter against Nazism.

Finally, I would like to stress that compared to the 30s of the last century today the international community possesses a unique tool to prevent wars and conflicts and maintain peace – the Organization of the United Nations. This system is not an ideal one but it has managed for decades to keep the mankind from a global catastrophe and also to promote solutions for many large-scale and complicated international problems. Therefore the need for effective use of the UN potential for keeping peace and security globally and regionally in the modern world is also a lesson we should learn from the time of that war when such a body was missing. As we experience nowadays the most sensitive and complicated problems might be solved if negotiated under the UN and its Security Council aegis in accordance with the UN Charter. The most obvious evidence for that is a recent chemical disarmament of Syria implemented under the central role of this global Organization and with the constructive participation of the Syrian government. And vice versa, in the areas where someone acts bypassing the UN and its Charter we witness destabilization, growth of conflicts, destructions, mass human victims, threats of the statehood's breakups, and as a result raging of extremism and terror. Unfortunately there are many instances: Iraq, Libya, and Syria again, ex-Yugoslavia etc. Therefore today it is quite timely to follow the example of the anti-Hitler Coalition's participants of the 40s of the 20^th century. They managed to overcome their ambitions and disagreements, to unite their efforts in order to destroy the common enemy, the criminal man-hating ideology. This kind of the joint work is also in a great demand today if we want to withstand effectively the numerous modern challenges.  The destiny of the world cannot be determined by a single state or a group of states. The real security can be equal and indivisible and be insured by collective efforts only as it fixed in the UN Charter.

Thank you for your attention.