Celebrating Ronald Reagan’s liberation of Auschwitz

It was exactly 80 years ago this week—HAHA, not really. But Reagan told the tale of his presence in the liberated camps so often that he probably convinced himself of it as lifelong mythmakers often do. When you bamboozle people for a living, it must get easier over the years.

But while the Americans were there to indulge their versions of history, the Russians again weren’t invited to the Auschwitz memorial even though Red Army troops liberated the place (not George C. Scott).

But that’s because Russia launched what we must always call its “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine 3 years ago out of unjustified squeamishness over NATO creeping eastward. No one understands why they’re so nervous about NATO even as the new head of EU foreign policy, Kaja Kallas from Lilliput, er Estonia, calls for Russia to be broken up into smaller pieces.

Nor should they worry about Chrysta Freeland close to taking over as PM of Canada. She’s the ex-foreign secretary whose grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. We recall that Canada is the country where the entire parliament stood up to cheer a veteran of a Ukrainian Nazi brigade. 

Of course, we can’t criticize much since our entire Congress roared with approval not at a former fascist but an active-duty one just last year.

Speaking of that guy, Poland offered to suspend fulfillment of the ICJ arrest warrant on Benjamin Netanyahu so that today’s genocidaire extraordinaire could show up to the Auschwitz memorial to mock the dead. Turns out in our upside-down world it’s possible to express horror at a past slaughter while carrying out one of your own.

We don’t pay a lot of attention to how the other side views us. We should. It may come as a surprise to know that the Russians think World War 2 hasn’t yet ended and that they’re now fighting clean-up battles against the Azov brigade and other 40s-nostalgic ideologues in Ukraine. The sight of German tanks heading toward Russia from the plains of Ukraine didn’t help.

Nor did the spectacle of German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock praising her active-duty Nazi soldier-grandpa at the Auschwitz memorial. 

In his usual sensitive way, Trump reinforced the insult by claiming that the USSR “helped us” win the war against the Nazis. Russians mostly think it was the other way around given the 11 million deaths of Red Army soldiers (plus 16 million Soviet civilians).

But the spirit of Ronald Reagan hovers above. Some of Trump’s incoming team remain trapped in Reaganite-Disney version of the battlefield in which just a few more armaments and a couple more forays will set things up for a Korean-style armistice and another 8 decades of hostilities on Russia’s western border. I guess Fantasyland has all the best rides, but those tickets cost a lot. 

Helping Ukraine get a foothold in pre-2014 Russian territory via the Kursk incursion hasn’t worked out so well given the estimated 55,000 Ukrainian dead on that front alone (almost exactly the total U.S. deaths in Vietnam over a decade). The attempt to carry the war to Russian lands is ending in defeat, but Trump’s people think the next attempt will succeed at last. Then we can all go on Space Mountain!

Trump also threatened more sanctions to wreck the Russian economy even though the first 12 rounds didn’t. Maybe he’ll include an import ban on the enriched uranium Russia supplies to U.S. nuclear power plants—that should hurt somebody. The Russians are unlikely to weep over the remaining $3 billion of annual commerce with the U.S. (down from $35 billion in 2021). 

Soviet Marshall Zhukov made a famous wisecrack after leading the Red Army's destruction of the Nazi regime: "We liberated Europe from fascism, and they will never forgive us." Given the record of the last 80 years, he wasn't far off. 

Will Russia be worried at the prospect of more U.S./NATO weapons supplies to sustain the Ukrainian army now that it’s lowering the draft age to 18? In any case, those kids will have plenty of training time since the shipments won’t be ready until somebody figures out how to produces it. Since the U.S. industrial base was shipped off to China and other cheap-labor countries since the 1980s, Ukraine will have to hold off Russian advances until someone scrambles it back together.

Yeah, sorry, the war is lost. No wonder Trump & Co. are starting to downplay it and subtly moving the whole business off the front pages. Maybe they'll pretend it never existed.

Years ago, Karl Rove said Republicans would reframe reality, and they did. We have the greatest fighting force in history, we defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, Ukraine will overthrow Putin, and nobody needed that Arctic ice sheet anyway. What’s important is that Americans feel good about themselves and stop apologizing. 

Reagan’s smiling belief in his own weird, private world is still the dominant political-informational mode we live under. You assert a thing, repeat it relentlessly, denounce nay-sayers, and little by little everyone gives in. Trump is the direct descendant of RR as the proud modern practitioner of the Make Shit Up style of governance. It works until it doesn't.

And now, back to Auschwitz to see how Private Reagan dismantled the gas chambers.