Thursday, September 15, 2016 Manchester, England
"It seems we haven't learned very much."
Manchester Metropolitan University Senior Lecturer Catherine Banks said that to a crowd of 50 yesterday, in Manchester Central Library:
http://www.mmu.ac.uk/news/news-items/4612/
Banks was explaining why she chose some items and not others for a library display marking the 75th anniversary of the September 8, 1941 start of the Leningrad Blockade.
"I was looking at a photograph of a bombed hospital in Leningrad," she said. "That day I saw on the news a bombed hospital in Syria. It seems we haven't learned very much."
Fascist Nazi Germany besieged Leningrad from 1941-44. Other fascists besiege Syria now. The Soviet Union freed Leningrad. Russia supports Syria today.
World War Two, which the Soviet Union called The Great Patriotic War, killed more Soviets than it killed in all major allied nations combined: England, France, Canada, the United States, Australia.
Late Harvard English Professor Paul Fussell was among United States soldiers who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, to open a second front long demanded by the Soviets, who had faced the brunt of the Nazi attack for almost three years.
The film Saving Private Ryan is not historically accurate, Fussell said when asked about his experience on Omaha Beach, the US landing spot in Normandy. The only part he called accurate was the first 20 minutes, when soldiers storming the beach faced fierce Nazi resistance.
"They should cut that film to 20 minutes and change its title to Omaha Beach: Aren't You Glad You Weren't There," Fussell concluded.
The Soviets' allies did not win the war, Fussell said. "The Soviets won World War Two, with some help from their allies."
Oh, how the people of Leningrad suffered, after the September 4, 1941 attack by Germany and its ally Finland. German leader Hitler vowed to erase the city, as he vowed to erase Belgrade, near the other end of what English leader Churchill would, shortly after the war, call "The Iron Curtain." The cigar-chomping racist who instigated the Bengal Famine during the war, killing millions, quickly forgot that the Soviets helped save his country from famine or worse during the war. True, England and its former colonies fought Hitler from 1939-45, while Russia fought from 1941-45, after Germany broke a 1939 non-aggression pact between the countries; but without Soviet help, England would have fallen into Nazi German hands. England came closer to defeat than it admitted at the time, archives released decades later show.
Leningrad came close to extinction. Professor Banks said that Hitler ordered the city of about three million demolished and wanted no prisoners taken.
The city evacuated thousands of children north, across Lake Lagoda, in the fall of 1941; but as the above photo shows, many died, and fewer and fewer were born as the siege continued. Germany and Finland had cut rail and road access in other directions. An ice road, The Road of Life, across the lake became the only supply line during the hungry winter of 1941-42.
Below, we see remaining children, and women, pressed into non-traditional work. Children made bombs, put out fires from Nazi bombs, and risked being bombed themselves while they weeded the many gardens the city planted, on every piece of available land.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people died from starvation or diseases related to starvation and related to a destroyed water and sewer system. The destruction which Canada helped bring to Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Haiti in more recent years differs in degree but not in kind from the destruction that Nazi Germany brought to Leningrad.
Culture continued despite the fascist onslaught, as the two photos below show. People moved more than 500 000 artworks from the Hermitage Museum to safer places, as Parisians had moved artworks from the Louvre Museum before German occupation. Leningrad, unlike Paris, was never occupied.
The composer Dmitry Shostakovich was in Leningrad when the siege started. He got out before the worst of the siege, and composed The Leningrad Symphony. Orchestras in Moscow, England, and the United States performed it. Bloodied but unbowed, Leningrad gathered enough musicians, half starved, almost too weak to play, and performed the symphony there on August 9, 1942.
That was my mother's fourteenth birthday. When I was growing up, she told me of wartime rationing of sugar, gasoline, and other items. Dad, nine year older, was in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war, in North Atlantic convoys bringing supplies to Europe. He told me that in Glasgow he met seamen from ships that would bring the supplies north to Murmansk. I suspect these northbound ships faced at least as much danger of attack at sea as Dad faced.
Before the symphony performance, heavy bombardment by Soviet guns that surrounded the city quieted the German lines, for the duration of the performance. The Soviets used large speakers to broadcast the music toward the Germans. Imagine if those Germans, from the country that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, had listened, put down their weapons, and gone home.
Soldiers in 1917 left World War One, called an by the Soviets an imperialist war, returned to Russia, and overthrew Tsarist tyranny. After the unauthorized Christmas, 1915 ceasefire agreed between the Germans and French in World War One trenches, commanders from each side punished the organizers, and moved the troops up or down the line, so they could resume shooting, this time at strangers. People's natural urge is more to create than to destroy.
Sports also helped morale, as the photo to the left below shows. The besieged Leningrad people organized a soccer match between Dynamo, a league team, and a team made of factory workers. The halves were 30 minutes, not the regulation 45, because the players were weak from starvation and/or disease. Still, like the saving of the Hermitage artworks, like the Leningrad Symphony performance, this event told the besieging fascist armies that this city's people would do cultured, beautiful, fun things despite the siege.
Below, right, are wartime Soviet cartoons, one showing the allies surrounding fascism. How many words is a picture worth?
In the years after the war, western-organized coups overthrew socialist governments in Greece twice, subverted socialism in Italy at least as many times, and in France, and in Iran, and in many Arab countries. The United States and its stooges have been on the wrong side of liberation struggles, Arab and other, ever since. One might think they resume Hitler's work, as they encircle Russia, and enlist Japan to help encircle China. Italian partisans had already rid Northern Italy of German soldiers and organized a socialist government before the United States and Canadian troops got there, coming from Southern Italy. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency, began during wartime, partly to subvert socialism in Europe.
Now, Europe is farther from socialism than it was even 20 years ago, let alone at the end of the war. I have seen many people begging and/or sleeping on the street in Germany and England since I came in early August from Canada for a European vacation. Still, there is hope. In 1962, a frosty year that the Cold War almost became hot enough to kill us all during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Manchester and Leningrad became sister cities, which they remain.
The Soviets under Stalin were little better than the United States and their war poodle England, as millions of subjugated people in Russia and elsewhere knew. In Yugoslavia, partisans had already swept German soldiers out of their country when the Soviets showed up, and agreed not to run over the victorious partisans, as they had run over Polish partisans. The Yugoslavs were stronger than the Poles, and Stalin didn't want to risk war with them, lest he endanger his own grip on power, his main concern. Postwar oppression in East Germany and other Soviet vassal states harmed people and hampered socialism.
United States General Patton, upon meeting his Soviet counterpart in Berlin in 1945, apparently asked his political superiors if he should continue east, that is, attack the Soviets. He, like Napoleon and Hitler, would have gotten into Russia, but not conquered it. Perhaps a war then would have prevented the decades of cold war militarism that followed, on both sides of Churchill's Iron Curtain.
The United States might have used nuclear weapons against the Soviets, as the U.S. used them against Japan that same year, 1945. Leningrad musicians performed their namesake symphony on my mom's fourteenth birthday. A United States plane dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Mom's seventeenth birthday. She grew up in wartime and survived, or I would not exist to tell you this tale.
How many people, each of them special, each loved by someone, died in heroic Leningrad resisting occupation? More than a million. How many died in wars and occupations past and present? How many die daily in the poverty and violence our system breeds? The Leningrad Blockade is long over, and we who heed history can learn from it: war never again, between nations, between individuals.
We can learn much. Professor Banks hopes so.
No comments:
Post a Comment