MOSCOW, March 19. /TASS/. The leaders of Western countries are by no means interested in the struggle against Nazism, Russian experts have said in view of the obvious indifference of European and US officials about marches by Waffen SS veterans in Latvia and the refusal of some of them to come to Moscow for celebrations on the occasion of V-Day’s 70th anniversary. Some analysts suspect there is a well-considered policy behind such ostensible indifference.
On March 16 the Latvian capital Riga saw a customary march by veteran members of the Waffen SS and parliament members from the nationalist association All for Latvia. Several dozen former SS legionnaires and about a thousand of their young supporters took part.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, democracy and the rule of law, Konstantin Dolgov, said the march was "cynical desecration of the memory of millions of World War II victims."
"We hope that these disgraceful actions aimed at heroization of Nazism, held regularly in the Latvian capital, will at last draw adequate comments from the international and European organizations, including the United Nations, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe and that the proper signals will be dispatched to the Latvian authorities," he said.
Russian TV host Vladimir Pozner, who also has the citizenship of France and the United States, has posted an angry comment to slam the Western stance.
"Monseigneur Hollande, the president of France, a country whose citizenship I have, has said he is not coming to Moscow to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazism," Pozner said. "But will he then say something about the march by former SS members? Or about what is happening these days in Latvia, a member country of the EU and NATO?
"Or take Mr. Obama, the president of a country whose citizenship I have as well. He, too, shows little intention to go to Moscow to celebrate the victory anniversary. But why doesn’t he then say something about the march by those decent-looking old men, each of whom put to death thousands of human beings?
"Won’t any of the leaders say anything about all that? And won’t they address curses to those who march and to whose who applaud and encourage with their actions?"
The struggle against manifestations of Nazism and fascism has never been a sacred matter for the European countries, in contrast to Russia or Israel, the director of the Centre for Comprehensive and European Studies at the Higher School of Economics, Timofei Bordachev, has told TASS. "It has been just one of World War II-related problems for them all the way, and nothing else. These days they just don’t care. For them the rallies gather mostly members of a generation that is about to go extinct, so they feel certain this phenomenon is of no risk to political stability."
"The Western leaders are now mostly concerned about how to reform of the UN Security Council in order to weaken the positions of Russia and China," the leading research fellow at the Academy of Sciences’ International Security Problems Institute, Aleksei Fenenko, told TASS.
"The results of World War II are a hindrance to their attempts to establish a new world order," he believes.
The director of the Center for Political Studies, Sergey Markov, agrees that the western leaders see no threat in Nazism. "They are not just indifferent. They are keenly interested in pushing the principles of struggle against Nazism to the sidelines," Markov told TASS. "The victory over Nazism and the system of anti-fascist values forms the backbone of the post-World War II order, while the Western countries are in fact revising it and drifting away from the principle of equality towards the principle: he who is closer to the United States has more rights."
Markov also recalled another basic feature of the post-war world order: "European security will be impossible to guarantee if Russia’s interests are ignored."
"The United States and its allies would like to discard that principle," he believes.
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