When C.G.Jung visited Nazi Germany in 1933, he talked with "people of unquestionable idealism" who thought a "great revolution" was taking place there, even though there were some "unavoidable abuses". (from Volume 10 of Jung's Collected Works)
In February this year, the huge demonstrations of Euromaidan movement in Kiev, capital of Ukraine, brought about a régime change which some see as an idealistic revolution, others as a fascist coup.
It is undeniable that an elected leader was deposed, that rightwing paramilitaries played a part in the change, that people who fought on the fascist side in WWII have been glorified, that memorials to anti-fascist soldiers have been destroyed...
What sort of European identity is being expressed in this movement? Is it a return of collective shadow?
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"Mussolini was a communist"?? No, he was at one time a member of the Italian Socialist Party, from which he was expelled in 1914 for supporting a war which the party opposed. You seem to think there was no good reason for the anti-fascist alliance which defeated Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo in the Second World War? I'd agree that every country and every political movement has its shadow, as does every individual. But I would not go so far as to say that they are all the same, or that voting is waste of time.
As to the defeated 'axis of evil', to my mind the greatest evil is the present non existence of the space frontier. Too me democracy represents president Bush's failure too commit a measly $500 billion to putting man on the moon and mars, while $2 trillion dollars was blown in Iraq. Millions of men have nothing to do and nowhere to go. Ok so now we have to wait for the privatized space exploration sector to push this supreme human agenda. To little, too slow. It seems to me if Hitler had come out on top, humankind would have a space frontier. This would be better than the current situation.
Voting is an absolute joke. Politicians do what they want or what they are told. Parties distribute their brief policy pamphlets that are not binding and all of these pamphlets are very bland and similar . Journalists/media are incompetent. They all lie, communist, fascist, democratic. History has been written by journalists. There is no way to know what is really going on or what really happened. As far as I can tell the anti-fascist alliance had the same racial laws as the fascists.
The way of nature is high population means poverty and war. Low population means prosperity and peace. The rest of the details are irrelevant.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts and the Croatian soldiers song. I agree that nations and borders are artificial constructs. They matter only to the extent people think they matter. And if the inhabitants of a particular region want to break away from a particular nation state, then a negotiated separation is a more humane and more reasonable solution than a war...
"They are nothing without us." Yes, I agree. Political leaders are what they are because of the constituencies they represent.
Negotiations between leaders don't always lead to lasting peace. Weren't there plenty of top-level talks before the outbreak of the Second World War?
Regarding the word "fascist", it's important to remember that there used to be a bunch of people who called themselves that...
The (un)official hymn of Croatian soldiers during 1990s: http://www.tekstovipjesamalyrics.com/tekst-pjesme/5649-marko-perkov... - “Za dom spremni” is equivalent to the Nazi salute. There were also accompanying crimes and the World War 2 (political assassinations as some kind of tradition among Serbs probably didn’t help) and its latter reprise. The situation in Ukraine is similar to what happened in Croatia and Bosnia (it was tense, but there was a tiny space for someone not named Milosevic to avoid the war) with a twist: without elections and with direct involvement of arch enemies - Germans and CIA (Stalin was a Georgian and a communist).
For instance, I wouldn't have a problem (it would make sense to somehow deal with it) if Kosovo was recognized as independent (an average Albanian family has many children) even though there is a huge mythical content contained in that territory if Albanians weren’t the most violent and corrupted of us all. They are like a group of people that misbehaves and is encouraged by NATO to misbehave, rather than a “nation” that anyone should hate. Nations and borders are artificial constructs.
We (and those after us) are so in trouble if we are collectively incapable to deal with this and similar issues.
That photo is just adorable: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/10/ukraine-parliamentary... While democracy and one citizen-one vote sounds like a nice idea, there is a catch: even if in theory laws should apply to everyone, elected politicians are in a way immune to prosecution. A war is atrocity, probably even more so if we call it "just". Putin is far from innocent (he used to say that Ukrainians aren't a real nation, Russia is a haven for all kinds of individuals (also from Serbia...), in the latest situation I am "pro-Russian" or rather for less violence and blame game when the situation is already so messed up (as I understand, imprisoned Yulia Timoshenko was far from a free-thinking dissident and Poroshenko didn't really suffer the economic crisis while he was earning his billions).
If only they taught us in schools how to deal with our dark side and feel less need to belong to a herd.
Anti-fascism is called "Communist coup d'etat" these days. We the herd will receive just what we deserve, the full package. And hopefully giggle in the process.
http://io9.com/5813447/bulgarian-street-artists-turn-soviet-war-mem...
Thank you for drawing attention to the way an io9 blogger turned a victorious Soviet campaign in the Second World War into a "coup d'etat"! The io9 people are into "futurism", which may partly explain why they don't make the effort to describe the past accurately... However, it has been a characteristic of western political culture, during and since the Cold War, that the Soviet contribution to defeat of fascism has been mythologised away.
Soviet contribution to the defeat of fascism? Most of Europe was abandoned to soviet fascism for several decades.
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