In which Piero San Giorgio and Andrei Martyanov discuss the prospects for peace in Europe and NATO’s total lack of preparation for an escalated conflict with Russia:
Piero: So it was a few days ago that it was Victory Parade, and as you know, for me it is an event that is very dear because it is on May 9th, 1945 that my grandfather was liberated from a prisoner camp in Germany by the Red Army. So we always had this 9th of May as a family important day. And in fact, I will drink to it. I brought this from Moscow – I think it’s a 20mm shell anyway. And I wanted to start asking you the question: what does it mean for you and what does it mean for Russians in general, and what should it mean for everyone else, especially on this 80th anniversary of May 9th Victory Day?
Andrei: Well, it’s part of the family. Every family – literally every – there’s not a single family in Russia which hasn’t been touched by those events. And I understand, especially for you being a European, essentially it wasn’t the fight of Soviet Union, which was historic Russia, Russian Empire, new edition of Russian Empire. It was the fight against the combined forces of… It wasn’t just Germans. People who say that it’s “oh Germany” – yes Germany, but what about Romanian, Italian, Hungarian armies? Finnish half a million force of SS who participated in blockade of Leningrad, the siege of Leningrad. And you look at the SS divisions from France – Charlemagne – you know, Blue Division from Spain.
So when you go and look at this, yes, this was a unified European front against the Soviet Union. And as the result, we had a cataclysmic event of the kind which humanity never experienced. In four years, up to 70 million people on different fronts have been killed. Some of them have been killed in the most brutal way which haven’t been experienced before – be that concentration camps, let alone death camps, the industrial scale annihilation of the civilians like it was in Russia. And 27 million Soviet people died – actually majority of them civilians.
So whenever the so-called revisionists in the West begin… So-called revisionists – they don’t revise things, they just rewrite history. Most of them are not professional historians and they don’t know the first thing about warfare. But when they begin to rewrite history, they forget to say that majority of those were civilians. And the atrocities which have been committed against Soviet Union, and especially the utter destruction of European part of Soviet Union – primarily Russia and Belarus and Ukraine what is today – is unprecedented. And only Poles suffered equally, and obviously Chinese, but they had a much larger population already then.
So that’s the result. Scott Ritter stated a very interesting thing and I liked it very much, and I quote him: he said Russians cannot do anything about it because they have those people looking down at them. This is like… it was such a profundity. One of very few Americans who really grasped what it was.
So my family – no granddads, all killed at the front. My maternal grandfather was killed in 1941 around Donetsk. Then of course when my grandma remarried in 1945 – four years after, you know – she married again a veteran and he fought starting from the Soviet-Finnish War. So it’s in every family. My wife – she doesn’t have grandfathers. Pretty much 80-85% of the 23-year-olds generation in Soviet Union have been killed on the front. Yeah, disaster.
Piero: And it’s even more pitiful to consider the situation of today, that first of all it wasn’t the first time that Europeans tried to invade Russia – the Swedes, the Poles of course, but also Napoleon’s international armies. It was not just French. Crimean War, World War I was also… okay, we can argue on who really started it, but certainly there was a major front on the east in Russia. And all of this for me is very sad because you mentioned Europeans in World War II, the Charlemagne division and all that, and these young men were idealistic for the wrong reasons. And it’s always sad when you see young men dying for stupid reasons against other young men which could have had a bright future on all sides. And it’s such a disaster for me, for Europe and European civilization.
And so Victory Parade, the 80th anniversary last week – what do you… I obviously watched it, of course you watched it as well. What do you feel when you watch it?
Andrei: Well, it’s a sacred event really, and for any Russian. And especially most important thing actually is not even the parade – it’s the tradition, it’s a relatively new tradition of the Immortal Regiment. In St. Petersburg alone, which became Leningrad for a day sort of, 1.1 million people went out with their portraits of their grandfathers and grandmothers who fought and worked in rear to supply the front and all that. So it’s… I don’t even know how to explain it. I mean, many people they do not comprehend what is happening in terms of spiritual importance of all that. And it’s extremely important, extremely important. This is the part of you – you cannot change it, you just cannot change it. It’s there, you know.
So it’s… how can I forget my grandfathers? How? I mean, you know, they defended their motherland. Yes, they didn’t invade somebody, you know. Like people want to say, “Oh yeah, you split Poland between Germany.” Well, you wanted it, you refused to… So people don’t know the history, most people don’t. And in the West it is completely rewritten by the falsifiers and lowlifes, especially British succeeded, and Germans by the way. So when you look at that, what can I say? I mean Europe made up its mind. It’s Europe’s choice and nothing could be done about it. It cannot be changed.
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