Really?! I thought I was a fool. I’m still looking forward to whether you’ll vote for:
- Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Deng Hsiao Ping’s cat?
- The Wessi Mercedes or the Ossi Trabi?
- The Soviet era communal apt in Riga or my post-Soviet renovated apt?
- An apt in Seoul or in Pyongyang? Bogota or Caracas? Riga or Moscow?
The Latvian Legion: When I taught history at Riga Business School my students debated "who was the worst occupier for the Baltic States and the rest of eastern Europe, the Germans or the Soviets?", using their elderly relatives as subjects for their oral history projects. One student's grandma was deported twice, once in 1940 at 8, and gain in 1949 at 17. This story yielded a devil in the details story that tells us the fundamental difference between the Stalin and Nazi regimes. After Stalin died grandma was given a furlough from the Gulag to visit relatives in Riga for a month. Her parents remained in the camp to guarantee her return. This would have, of course, been utterly inconceivable in the Nazi camp system.
The class had ethnic Latvians, Russians and bolshoi kisch-misch, including one who was part Russian/Latvian/Jewish/Tatar/Belarussian/Ukrainian. On March 16 we would go to the Legionnaires' march and video interview spectators showing them a printout of the Germans' Generalplan Ost with the map and plans to exterminate 70-90% of the native peoples of eastern Europe, asking if they knew about it. Many did, some didn't, some denied its existence. There were Latvians protesting against the Legionnaires along with visiting Germans and others who supported their Faustian bargain myth that they were fighting for Latvian independence. The grandfather of my Canadian-Latvian friend who was drafted into the Legion never had a choice. Neither did the Latvians who were drafted into the Red Army.
Students came into the course with parallel narratives and mythologized history, about the Great Patriotic War myth or the Legionnaires fought for Latvian independence myth. They reached a general consensus that in this bad vs worse dilemma the Baltics faced starting June 22, 1941, defeating Nazism before Communism was the better outcome, despite the Soviet deportations of 20-25% of their populations.
When we discussed May 9 victory celebrations, the Latvians who had a visceral resistance to celebrating a Soviet victory accepted my idea of celebrating May 8 instead as a practical alternative to rubbing their noses in Soviet occupation with May 9.
Generalplan Ost's map had the impact I thought it would. We know the outcome we got. Generalplan Ost forced students to examine how much worse the counterfactuals were. Thanks the American pilots at Midway and their sinking 4 Japanese carriers in 12 minutes for keeping FDR's Europe-first strategy and Lendlease in place. Otherwise you get D-Day in 1945 or 1946, if at all.
In L.A. I met the Polish-Jewish uncle of my Argentine girlfriend who was fluent in Uzbek. His life was saved by being deported by the Soviets to Uzbekistan.
The best book of Baltic history and Riga at the dark heart of the 20th century's twin totalitarian monsters (the Bolsheviks' Latvian Riflemen and the Freikorps vanguard of Nazism) is Modris Eksteins' Walking Since Daybreak: https://www.supersummary.com/walking-since-daybreak/summary/
He was a 1 year old boy in his mother's arms on the Jelgava river in October 1944 when the Soviets and the Germans were on opposite sides, grew up in a DP camp outside Flensburg until 1949, emigrated
to Canada, got scholarships to a fancy private school and a Rhodes to study at Oxford, later writing Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.
Apartheid: the Arab record of the Dar al Dhimmi theocratic Jim Crow from the 7th to the 20th centuries surpasses any "apartheid" Zionism has even attempted. No surprise that Golda Meir rejected the soon to be assassinated King Abdullah's offer of "you can live under my protection". The Jews of Baghdad in 1941 and the Jews of Palestine in 1929 and 1936 had learned what such protection meant. 800000+ Jews from Rabat to Baghdad fled the Arabs' Dhimmitude "protection" from 1947 to 1956, losing all their property, in a pogrom that to this day dwells in silence.
My grandfather survived the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev as an 8 year old. So I know exactly how close I came to never existing. Service in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in the Middle East in WWI taught him that Jews' only protection against more than 3000 years of gentile enslavement, ghettos and genocide is the same kind of sovereignty in a Jewish state that the Brits, the French, the Italians, the Germans, the Dutch, the Norwegians, etc have in theirs. The same goes for Ukrainians, no matter what the genocidal Holodomor-exporting empire-building Muscovites may think.
Had you told my grandparents from Vinnitsya, Rivne and Chmelnik that in the 21st century an independent Ukraine with a Jewish president and a Crimean Tatar Muslim defense minister was in an anti-colonial war with a post-Soviet Russian kleptocracy whose only hope for victory was to get a right wing Republican Russian asset and reality TV star back in the White House, they would have said, "what are ya, meshuggeneh?".
Had you told me the same in my anarchism-loving college years, I would have asked, "what are you smoking and can I have some?".
The beauty and nightmare of history is that it conjures up plots no novelist could ever invent.