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Vladimir Putin justified Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland; South Africa must denounce him

Branko Brkic
By Branko Brkic
15 Feb 2024
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The world is reeling from brutal wars, seething conflicts that could soon explode, and the prospect of deadly weapons (not all of them physical) that are already creeping towards us. Fear of what tomorrow will bring is everywhere. During chaos and swirl, South Africa has always been strongest when it takes a high moral ground. Denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his justification of Hitler’s invasion of Poland is a necessary place to start.

The right-wing US media personality Tucker Carlson is a lucky man who managed to snag an “interview” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin last week. Putin’s record of not giving interviews to Western journalists is still unblemished though. Carlson is no journalist (even his old employer, Fox News, admitted that) and he was, of course, lying when he claimed that no Western news outlet had ever bothered to interview Putin since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, now almost two years ago. 

If you have more than two hours to spare/waste, the “interview” is here and Carlson will surely be grateful that you improved his viewing metrics — entertainment shows depend on them.

The “interview” followed a predictable pattern: Clueless or alt-right “questions” and then Putin’s lengthy lecture from his alt-history repertoire, influenced by some of the most radical, reactionary ideologues the world has ever seen. 

What got me seriously worried was Putin’s appreciation of Hitler, something he has echoed in the past. The New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen had the same moment of fear — that is what happens to all of us born in the early post-World War 2 era when the wounds were still too fresh and the memory of lost loved ones still too vivid.

Here’s what Gessen said in her story about this section of the “interview”:

… I can’t get one passage out of my mind. In the history-lecture portion of the interview, when Putin got to 1939, he said, “Poland cooperated with Germany, but then it refused to comply with Hitler’s demands… By not ceding the Danzig Corridor to Hitler, Poles forced him, they overplayed their hand and they forced Hitler to start the Second World War by attacking Poland.” 


(This is my translation - MG.) 


The idea that the victim of the attack serves as its instigator by forcing the hand of the aggressor is central to all of Putin’s explanations for Russia’s war in Ukraine. To my knowledge, though, this was the first time he described Hitler’s aggression in the same terms.


Putin has reproduced Hitler’s rhetoric before. Ten years ago, announcing the annexation of Crimea, he seemed to borrow from Hitler’s speech on the annexation of Sudetenland. At the time, I assumed that the language had come from a speechwriter who knew what they were doing while Putin may not have. But the way Putin described the beginning of the Second World War in his interview with Carlson suggests that, although he keeps accusing Ukraine of fostering Nazism, in his mind he might see himself as Hitler, but perhaps a wilier one, one who can make inroads into the United States and create an alliance with its presumed future President.


It’s telling, too, that Putin took the time to accuse Poland of both allying with Nazi Germany and inciting Hitler’s aggression. As he has done with Ukraine in the past, he is positioning Poland as an heir to Nazism. He mentioned Poland more than thirty times in his conversation with Tucker. If I were Poland, I’d be scared. 


Gessen is a great journalist, with a particularly thorough understanding of the Soviet Union and today’s Russia, especially Putin. But during the Putin “interview”, and as I read her words, I could not help but be especially worried for South Africa.

A prisoner of the Cold War


Our government’s great friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is no ordinary politician. 

He is a product — and seemingly still a prisoner — of the Cold War. In his Soviet years, history was something to reimagine and rewrite according to the current needs and ideologies. 

So when he referred to the events of September 1939, with Carlson sporting his trademark clueless face, he did not talk about the inconvenience of the Soviet Union invading the very same “stubborn” Poland from the east, just 16 days after Hitler’s forces did. 

He did not say anything about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which aligned Stalin’s Soviet Union with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and was signed on 23 August 1939; it led to the occupation of Poland by both Germany and USSR. (The latter also occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the summer of 1940.) 

He did not talk about the 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war murdered in the Katyn forest by the Soviet army.

(Eventually, some 20-27 million Soviet people died in the war — including Putin’s elder brother — after Hitler attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941. Together with 6 million Poles and an estimated 6 million Jews across different countries, between 70 and 85 million people perished in those six years of madness.)

Today, Putin is happy to rewrite history, incomprehensibly accuse Ukraine and Poland of being heirs to Nazism, and invest billions into his state propaganda machinery to make his fiction permanent. 

Two years after he attacked Ukraine, he can still count on South Africa as a steady and loyal ally. We’ve helped the Russians in every way possible, including causing possibly lasting damage to our international reputation within the circle of the world’s democracies. 

Our government has been a friend where many a more circumspect country would have given up.

A moral duty


But sometimes, the moments of sheer and utter disbelief happen when things can never be the same again — and we must express our disagreement and disgust. Many around the world expressed similar outrage after Donald Trump too started quoting Hitler with some regularity. 

Don’t we feel a moral duty to call out Putin for justifying Hitler? If nothing else, we felt that same kind of moral duty when we pressed charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice. What is stopping South Africa now after Putin has crossed that line?

How can our government NOT react?

In these crazy times, up is down and down is up. We choose our path and decide who our friends are, and we pick only the worst, it appears. 

On Monday, a not-so-surprising tweet from the ANC secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, announced:

On the 15-17 February 2024, I will lead an ANC delegation to the Forum Of Supporters Of The Struggles Against Modern Practices Of Neocolonialism - For The Freedom Of Nations, in Moscow, Russia.  #ANCAtWork


While it’s sometimes difficult not to laugh at Mbalula’s tweets (he can be rather entertaining in his goofy way), this one was deadly serious. Our participation in such a sham event points to an alarming new level of alignment with Russia.

For what the United Russia party is... let’s just say it is Putin’s political vehicle and supports some of the nastiest people on the planet.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ‘The world is topsy-turvy’ — Ramaphosa denies SA’s foreign policy on human rights is unbalanced

(The conference Mbalula is so excited to attend will be chaired by Dmitry Medvedev, former president and premier of Russia, Putin’s long-time number two. If you want to learn more about him, just type Medvedev-nuclear threats in your browser.)

As these events march in their speedy cadence past us, why are we still happy to mortgage our democracy, our hard-fought freedom and respect, and our future? 

Are we content to throw away everything we have achieved — trade relations with the world’s democracies, our freedoms, the standing and the glow of the Mandela age — to follow aggressors, human rights violators and corrupt leaders into their nightmares? 

If you, dear reader, think that South Africa’s foreign relations pivot does not affect you, think again. It will affect you at every level of our society. And it will not be pretty. We still have a voice that will be heard if we finally, as a country, stand for what’s right and not for what’s wrong, and in every possible way.

The right thing is to, right now, denounce Putin’s Hitler remarks in the strongest terms possible. The world needs to know that South Africa does not endorse such a rewrite of history and does not stand behind the man who embraced the dark side. The price of not doing anything will one day be too costly.

And if we keep our silence, the ending of the book that begins with us not standing up to the reawakening of evil will be just too hard to bear. DM

With thanks to Gordon Lightfoot.

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