On 'Victory Day,' remember who started World War II
In Russia, today is Victory Day, a national holiday that marks the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II. It is Russia's most patriotic holiday — "something like if the United States rolled Veterans Day and Memorial Day into one gigantic military-patriotic celebration," as Tom Nichols remarked in The Atlantic. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking in Red Square against the backdrop of a military parade, used the occasion to extol Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
"You are fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of World War II," Putin said. As usual he slandered Ukraine as a modern successor to Nazi Germany, and depicted Russia's murderous invasion as an extension of the struggle 80 years ago to defeat Nazism in Europe. Moscow has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and grew up speaking Russian, is actually run by Nazis. As troops recently returned from Ukraine rolled through Red Square in armored personnel carriers, Putin justified his assault on Russia's neighbor as a response to mounting violence by US- and NATO-backed fascists.
"The danger was growing day by day, so Russia gave a pre-emptive response to the aggression," he declared. "It was a forced, timely, and the only correct decision."
The notion that the Western democracies are eager to strengthen a "Nazi" regime is nonsensical, both historically or strategically. But then, Putin's Victory Day speeches over the years have always had less to do with history, explains The Washington Post, than with legitimizing his increasingly authoritarian rule and "exploiting the myth of Russia as a nation that never invaded anyone, fights only in self-defense, and single-handedly saved the world from Nazis in World War II, at a staggering cost of 27 million Russian war dead."
 Armored vehicles rolled through Red Square in Moscow during a rehearsal for today's Victory Day military parade. |
Just as Putin's Ukraine narrative is a confection of nonsense — from his repeated insistence that NATO has been engaged in a hostile attempt to "encircle" Russia to his absurd contention that Ukraine is not a real nation and has no right to sovereignty — so too is the legend that Russia was an innocent victim of Adolf Hitler, and that the launch of World War II was a monstrous crime committed by Germany alone.
There is no denying that a vast number of Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II. Without the Russian people's appalling suffering and sacrifice, the Allies might not have triumphed in the end.
But there is also no denying that Moscow was Nazi Germany's partner in unleashing the war, the deadliest in human history, in the first place. Victory Day is a good opportunity to review the record of Russian culpability in plunging the world into war — a record the Kremlin's propagandists have been trying to obscure for decades.
World War II is commonly said to have started on Sept. 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland. But it would perhaps be more accurate to date the start of the war nine days earlier. On Aug. 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a treaty of non-aggression, whereby their governments agreed to conquer and divide Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. It was under the terms of this pact that the Nazi Wehrmacht moved into western Poland on Sept. 1 and Josef Stalin's Red Army invaded Poland from the east 16 days later.
"Soviet and German forces set up brutal occupation regimes in their respective spheres and forcibly transferred hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to forced-labor sites," recounts Mark Kramer, the director of the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
On 22 September the Soviet and German forces celebrated the conquest of Poland with a joint military parade at Brest-Litovsk (Brześć-Litewski), a small city on the demarcation line established under point 2 of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Sporadic fighting continued for the next two weeks, but by early October 1939 the Polish state had ceased to exist.
Devouring half of Poland didn't slake Moscow's appetite. In the months that followed the Nazi-Soviet takeover of Poland, as Hitler's troops conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France and bombed much of London into rubble, Stalin's forces continued their illegal war of aggression and conquest. Writes Kramer:
Even as the Red Army was imposing Soviet rule on eastern Poland, Soviet troops also began moving into the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), which had enjoyed some two decades of independence after the First World War. In subsequent months, as Soviet military and state security forces continued to pour into the Baltic countries, they compelled the local governments to comply with Moscow's demands. Eventually, in mid-1940, Soviet occupying forces replaced the indigenous governments with puppet regimes that voted for "voluntary" incorporation into the USSR. The same pattern was evident in the formerly Romanian territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which the Soviet Union occupied and annexed in late June 1940.
The only major impediment to the expansion of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe came in Finland, where the entry of Soviet troops at the end of November 1939 sparked a brief but intense war.
In short, for the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies. They secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction. Later, of course, Hitler double-crossed Stalin and ordered the Wehrmacht to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. But before that turning point, the two totalitarian powers cooperated closely. The Soviet military, for example, was supplied with enormous quantities of German military technology. In the fall of 1939, the Germans agreed to supply Soviet submarines fighting against Finland. At the height of their cooperation, notes Ian Johnson, a professor of military history at Ohio State University, Stalin even authorized the German navy to operate a naval base near Murmansk to attack British shipping and support the invasion of Norway.
In 2014, Putin made it a crime for Russians to "spread intentionally false information" — i.e., to tell the truth — about the atrocities committed by Soviet forces during World War II. As a result, writes Kramer, "the brutality of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, including massacres and widespread rapes, is a taboo subject in Russia nowadays." In much the same way, Putin has made it illegal for Russian journalists today to report on Moscow's massive violations of human-rights crimes in Ukraine.
In his Victory Day remarks, Russia's dictator linked the record of the Red Army in the 1940s with that of the Russian troops now fighting in Ukraine. There are indeed parallels between the two, though decidedly not the ones Putin wants the world to focus on.
From 1939 through mid-1941, Soviet Russia collaborated with the Nazis in wreaking slaughter and savagery on the nations of Europe. The regime that rules in Moscow today is of course not responsible for Stalin's evil alliance with Hitler. But no one should be fooled as Putin seeks to cloak himself and his calamitous Ukraine war in the "heroic" history of World War II-era Russia. Moscow and Berlin together started that horrific war, and used it to impose a reign of tyranny across Europe. Germany no longer terrorizes its neighbors. Russia still does.
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'They Lied!' is a lie
Virtually from the moment a draft opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito overruling Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey was leaked last week, the Democratic left and its media allies have been incandescent with rage. The progressive meltdown has been unhinged. There have been protests that turned violent, pro-life offices firebombed, predictions of a coast-to-coast ban on abortion, and warnings by journalists that the right to birth control and interracial marriage were now at risk. Abortion activists announced plans for a week of mass public protests, including demonstrations outside churches and "nationwide die-ins."
 Abortion-rights protestors chanted outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in Chevy Chase, Md., on Saturday night. |
Naturally much of the furor has been targeted at the high court's six conservative justices. One group — calling on supporters to "rise up to force accountability using a diversity of tactics" — posted their addresses. Over the weekend, chanting crowds showed up outside the homes of Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, denouncing the "stolen, illegitimate, and far-right Supreme Court majority," renewed the call for court-packing legislation, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement blasting the court's conservative majority with having "ripped up the Constitution."
Of all the accusations hurled at Alito and the other justices expected to join in overruling Roe (and Casey), one that generate particular wrath is that they lied during their Senate confirmation hearings when they testified that the right to abortion was "settled" constitutional law and immune to being overturned.
In a TV interview, Representative Pramiya Jayapal, the Washington Democrat who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, slammed the jurtists for having "frankly lied under oath when they were testifying to Congress on this question." Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor, asserted that "these conservative justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the US Senate." On Twitter, the hashtag #LyingGOP trended. A video supercut prepared by MeidasTouch, a leftist political action committee, was posted on multiple social media platforms. It purported to prove that the justices had falsely promised not to do what the leaked Alito memo suggests they are prepared to do: overturn the Supreme Court's most important abortion precedents.
If my email is any indication, plenty of rank-and-file Democrats are indignant over the justices' supposed deception. One reader, in a message that was typical, advised me to "rewatch Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch lie to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding their belief that Roe v. Wade [was] 'settled law'."
The confirmation videos certainly do make clear what Alito and the other judges said about Roe. None of them said it could not or should not be overruled.
The subject came up, for example, during Neil Gorsuch's confirmation hearings in 2017. The nominee called Roe a "precedent of the US Supreme Court, worthy of treatment as precedent like any other." Having been "reaffirmed many times," Roe carried "considerable" weight, Gorsuch explained. All the same, he added, "there are instances when a court may appropriately overrule precedent after considering a lot of factors." Like all Supreme Court nominees, Gorsuch stuck to truisms. But he made no promises about how he was likely to rule in any controversial case. In response to a question from Senator Lindsey Graham, Gorsuch said that President Trump had not asked him to overturn Roe.
Graham pressed him: "What would you have done if he had asked?"
"Senator," Gorsuch replied, "I would have walked out the door."
A year later, during Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, he said more or less the same thing. When Senator Dianne Feinstein leaned on him to clarify his views on "whether Roe is settled precedent or could be overturned," he answered, in essence: both.
On the one hand, he acknowledged, Roe "is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis." But he also said that he could not guarantee in advance to uphold any precedent. "I listen to all arguments," he said. "You have an open mind. You get the briefs and arguments. And some arguments are better than others. Precedent is critically important. It is the foundation of our system. But you listen to all arguments."
When Amy Coney Barrett appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020, she too refused to make any commitment to uphold Roe or any other disputed judicial precedent.
Barrett had discussed the concept of a Supreme Court "superprecedent," which she defined as "precedent that is so well established that it would be unthinkable that it would ever be overruled." Senator Amy Klobuchar asked whether Roe fell into that category. Replied Barrett: "I'm answering a lot of questions about Roe, which I think indicates that Roe doesn't fall in that category. . . . [I]t doesn't fall in the small handful of cases like Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board that no one questions anymore."
Supporters of an unfettered right to abortion have every right to be upset at the prospect of Roe's fall. But the claim that Trump's nominees lied to the Senate about how they would rule if a case challenging Roe came before the court is itself a lie.
In a lengthy post on Thursday, Snopes, the well-known (and by no means conservative) fact-check website, examined the MeidasTouch video and its claim that the conservative justices "dishonestly suggested, in Senate confirmation hearings, that they thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning." Snopes's verdict: False.
First, [the creators of the video] engaged in highly selective editing of much longer and more nuanced archival clips of future justices during their US Senate confirmation hearings, in order to grossly misrepresent the substance of what they said.
Second, they appeared to misunderstand or misrepresent the meaning of a Supreme Court precedent. In brief, describing a ruling as an important precedent is not tantamount to giving a commitment not to overturn that ruling, or indicating you believe that ruling cannot be overruled. Therefore, the sweeping allegations of premeditated dishonesty on the part of GOP-appointed justices were as poorly supported by evidence as they were wrongheaded.
So, no, the conservative justices didn't lie and it is slanderous to claim they did. That said, I am sympathetic to the argument that Supreme Court nominees dodge entirely too many questions during their confirmation hearings.
For years I have maintained that senators should refuse to confirm nominees who won't give clear answers to reasonable inquiries about their judicial philosophy and how they would approach various legal controversies. When John Roberts appeared before the Judiciary Committee in 2005, he — like all Supreme Court nominees in the modern era — bobbed and weaved and filibustered and daintily insisted that he could not answer any questions about subjects he might face if he were confirmed.
"Look, it's kind of interesting, this Kabuki dance we have in these hearings here," fumed then-Senator Joe Biden, "as if the public doesn't have a right to know what you think about fundamental issues facing them. There's no . . . possibility that any one of us here would be elected to the United States Senate without expressing broadly and sometimes specifically to our public what it is we believe."
Biden was right to be frustrated, as I wrote at the time:
As chief justice, Roberts is likely to have more of an impact on American law and life than any of the senators voting on his nomination. From the power of presidents to hold terror suspects indefinitely to the power of Congress to override state law, from the execution of murderers to the recognition of same-sex marriage, from affirmative action to abortion, Roberts and his fellow justices will shape national policy for years to come. Their decisions will be binding not only on the litigants before them, but also, by longstanding tradition, on the other branches of government. There is no appeal from a Supreme Court ruling. When the court strikes down federal and state laws, federal and state lawmakers must accept its decisions.
There is little in the Constitution to check and balance such immense authority. All that can keep the court answerable in some way to the electorate is the fact that the political branches give them their jobs -- the president appoints federal judges; the Senate confirms them. While delinquent judges can be impeached and removed, there hasn't been a Supreme Court impeachment in 200 years.
So the modest leverage of the nomination process is all we've got to remind the justices that they are public servants who must answer, however indirectly, to the people, not philosopher-kings to whom the people must bow. But if nominees are permitted to keep their views to themselves, how can the people decide whether they want them on the bench? For all the recent talk about the importance of judicial "modesty," Supreme Court justices have been anything but modest in imposing their views on society. Shouldn't we know what those views are before investing them with such power?
My view on this is nonpartisan: I maintained that Roberts should be made to properly answer senators' questions and I reiterated the argument when Elena Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh were nominated. To date, however, no senators have been willing to condition their vote to confirm on getting clear answers during the hearings.
Well, so be it. Every Supreme Court nominee for the last 30 years has primly refused to express their views on subjects everyone knows they have strong opinions on, the constitutional integrity of Roe v. Wade being a classic example. Trump's nominees were asked about Roe and they answered with noncommittal boilerplate. Such answers are neither satisfying nor illuminating. But they certainly aren't promises and you can't call them lies.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "The tyranny of the IRS," May 13, 1997:
Dear Ann Landers:
You certainly went easy on the Internal Revenue Service in your recent reply to "Los Angeles Taxpayer." Maybe you were just being prudent. Because frankly, Ann, if your gentle words about the IRS were sincere, you need a reality check on just how incompetent and abusive Uncle Sam's tax agency really is.
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The Last Line
"As his eyesight failed, K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. 'Like a dog!' he said; it seemed as though the shame of it was to outlive him." — Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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