In a recent speech in Volgograd (formerly known as Stalingrad), Russian President
Vladimir Putin
evoked the horrors of World War II to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
"Time and time again we had to repel aggression from the West," he said unfazed (omitting that the United Kingdom and the United States were allies of the Soviet Union in that war).
Then, as now, he added, Russia faced the threat of German tanks, and is forced to defend itself against "the ideology of Nazism in its modern version."
This is, of course, a malicious distortion of history, cynically launched at the site where more than a million Soviet and German soldiers died during the deadliest battle of World War II.
Russia is not fighting back, it invaded a sovereign country whose president,
Volodimir Zelensky
, just happens to be a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust.
To suggest that it is Nazi ideology that drives Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians to defend the country against Russian aggression is ludicrous, even by Putin's standards.
As for the alleged threat that German weaponry poses to Russia, the reason German Chancellor
Olaf Scholz
hesitated so long before sending 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine was that he did not want his country to be perceived as a military leader.
Scholz was only convinced after US President
Joe Biden
reluctantly agreed to provide M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, after refusing to do so for months.
Like Putin, German leaders often mention World War II, sometimes ad nauseam, but the conclusions they draw from that war run counter to Putin's chauvinistic militarism.
A week before Putin's speech in Volgograd, Scholz used the annual Holocaust commemoration in the German parliament to emphasize Germany's historical responsibility for the murder of millions of Jews.
Recognizing this, he said, has been essential to guarantee that a crime of this type never happens again.
At the opening of the session, Bärbel Bas, president of the German parliament (Bundestag), highlighted the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Germany and considered that those who try to minimize the Holocaust are "a disgrace for the country."
Although some commentators criticized Scholz for his reluctance to take a more active role in supporting Ukraine - claiming that he had learned the wrong lessons from history - his aversion to military aggression reflects the postwar pacifism that shaped his leadership. generation.
Similarly, Germany's decision decades ago to rely solely on Russian gas could be seen as part of its effort to use trade and mutual dependence as a prophylactic against war.
But since Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany has been under pressure from its allies to rethink its pacifist foreign policy, take a leading military role and help defend Ukraine, a country it has brutalized in the past.
Often the memory of historical errors fuels violence, and the Holocaust is no exception.
For example, right-wing Israeli politicians, led by Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
, continually invoke the real trauma of the Holocaust to justify the oppression - and often violent repression - of Palestinians in the occupied territories and within the borders. of the country prior to 1967.
Does that mean that we are doomed to have Holocaust memories and other historical wounds exploited and manipulated by political opportunists, their true significance and meaning forever clouded by bad faith analogies?
Was George Santayana right when he coined the famous maxim that "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it"?
Yes and no.
While spotting historical similarities between different periods and contexts can offer valuable lessons and a sense of perspective, it can also encourage us to see similarities where they don't belong, or don't exist at all, and lead us to the wrong conclusions.
Some grotesque examples of this are that of the US legislator Michele Bachmann -who compared tax increases to the holocaust- and that of the Republican incumbent Marjorie Taylor Greene -who compared public health measures against Covid with the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
Although it is tempting to attribute these offensive visions to cynicism and malice, the cause is often simply ignorance.
Some supposed historical parallels, even if they are not cynical or malicious, still do not help.
For example, in a recent statement the International Auschwitz Committee compared the suffering of Holocaust survivors living in Ukraine today to the atrocities they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
But while Russian criminal behavior in Ukraine is undeniable, drawing parallels between Putin's atrocities and the Holocaust risks trivializing both.
Putin is bad enough, no need to compare him to Hitler.
We can learn more from history than just looking for parallels.
Studying history is understanding who we are, why certain things happened and how they can still affect us... but we must also be aware that things never repeat themselves in the same way.
As the British novelist LP Hartley once wrote, the past is "a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Oh!
This doesn't mean we necessarily do better now, but to understand that lesson we have to follow Santayana's advice and study history very carefully.
writer and editor
Copyright Project Syndicate, 2023.
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