******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
(Following the lead of RT.com, Ben Norton wrote an article demonizing the Baltic states as bastions of support for Nazism in the same mold of much of the attacks on Ukraine. This is something I answered at https://louisproyect.org/2017/07/26/the-forest-brothers-and-the-holocaust/. That being said, there was support for the Nazis in the Baltic countries and in Ukraine motivated to some degree by the Soviet domination during the Stalinist era. Below, you can read about the tangled relationship between sympathy for the German invasion and the long-simmering anger toward the USSR in an obituary for Jonas Mekas, the 96-year old experimental filmmaker who founded Anthology of Film Archives, a downtown theater that could not be further from the alt-right. If Stalin had simply respected and even strengthened the sovereignty of places like Latvia and Ukraine, Hitler might have never reached Stalingrad and Leningrad. The best protection for a socialist country has always been a progressive foreign policy, after all.)
He was 16 when World War II started, and Lithuania was soon occupied — first by the Russians, who engaged in mass deportations of Lithuanians to Siberia, and then by the Germans, who wiped out almost all of the country’s Jewish population, often helped by Lithuanians who saw Jews as Communist traitors.
Inclined to subversiveness from an early age, Mr. Mekas worked for an underground newspaper published in Birzai, a northern Lithuanian city.
He later said that the newspaper, The New Birzai News, had needled both regimes. But in an article in The New York Review of Books in 2018, Michael Casper wrote that the paper, founded by an ultranationalist underground group, the Lithuanian Activist Front, was more favorably inclined toward the Germans and rife with anti-Semitic polemics. “Rather than resist the Germans,” Mr. Casper wrote, “Mekas’s circle of anti-Soviet activists, like LAF-aligned activists across the country, greeted them as a liberating force.”
But he added: “Unlike other members of his activist circle, Mekas was not an anti-Semitic polemicist. His own writings for the NBZ were book reviews, literary essays, and poems that espoused a romantic nationalism. None of his writings is anti-Semitic.”
Ms. Mekas wrote that he had resisted and tried to flee the Nazis and that, along with his brother, he was sent by the Germans to a labor camp. Interviewed by the critic and director Peter Bogdanovich in 2015 for Interview magazine, he said: “When the Germans came in, I joined other young people in the resistance. My function was to do the typing for the underground newspaper. It was against the Germans and the Soviets.”
full: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/jonas-mekas-dead.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
