On May 29, the All-Russian Parents’ Resistance organization held the conference “Nazism and Children.” During the conference, the experts discussed the ways to counter the Nazification of children, which is carried out not only directly, as in Banderite Ukraine, but throughout the world – sometimes in ways that are far from direct political propaganda. We present a translation of the speech of psychologist Zhanna Tachmamedova, an expert of the All-Russian Parents’ Resistance organization, made during the conference.
Zhanna Tachmamedova: Good afternoon! What we have just seen in these videos… [In the opening speech of Mariya Mamikonyan, the videos were shown. In these videos, the parents showed their small children chanting Russophobic and Banderite slogans.] It may seem that these are some marginal people at home raising children in their own way and that it really has nothing to do with Ukrainian state policy. Such marginal groups exist in any country, don’t they?
But the thing is that the Nazi ideology has actually become the state ideology, and Bandera has been proclaimed the national hero of Ukraine.
Members of the Azov battalion (organization banned in Russia), who openly profess Nazism and are not ashamed to place Nazi symbols everywhere, are also considered national heroes in Ukraine, although these heroes lost a bit of their popularity.
What kind of children is growing up in such a cultural and informational space and with such new national heroes? It is important to understand that the rehabilitation and glorification of Nazism, which has become a state ideology, has penetrated all areas of life in Ukrainian society.
It has infiltrated schools and even kindergartens. In 2015, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko signed a decree on the Strategy for National Patriotic Education of Youth. The decree stipulates that children should be educated on the ideals professed in the units of the Carpathian Sech and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) (organization banned in Russia).
If we take a closer look at the main characteristics of the education of youth in Ukraine, we see that they are very similar to the main principles of youth upbringing in Nazi Germany. What similarities are we talking about?
1. The Idea of National Supremacy
The cultivation of ideas of superiority of Ukrainian citizens over Russians.
In other words, we talk about Nazism. Recall the Maidan-era chants: “The one who does not jump is a Muscovite.” At that time there was no special operation. But a certain superiority, contempt, and hostility toward a group of people based on their nationality were already being formed. And children in schools were chanting these slogans. All of us had the opportunity to observe how widespread this phenomenon was.
Similar attitudes were formed in German society toward the Jews and then the Slavs in Nazi Germany. They were simultaneously portrayed as a dangerous force threatening the Germans with annihilation, with unpleasant, repulsive features.
Children were taught that it was right to humiliate those who were not of the Aryan “norm.” Here is a book [slide is shown. It is reproduced below] where German children cheerfully mock the Jews and chase the Jewish teacher and Jewish children out of school. The title of the book can be translated as Trust no fox on green pastures and no Jew by his oath (German: Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid), published in Germany in 1936. Illustrations by Elvira Bauer.
This is how children from an early age were inculcated with hatred of Jews.
An important element of propaganda is not only the inculcation of hatred. Jews are shown here as ugly, repulsive people. They are portrayed as inferior people, the very same Untermenschen. They were dehumanized.
The same was done in the information space by Ukrainian propagandists. Recall how they called a woman who died in the DPR “a female Colorado beetle with its legs torn off”.
A good illustration of the attitude towards the people of Russia being formed in Ukrainian children is the Insurgent ABC – a book for elementary school children, distributed in Ukrainian schools. [slide is shown. It is reproduced below] It was written by Oleg Vitvitsky. It tells in verse form the story of a young Banderite, a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (organization banned in Russia). Russia is presented as a khanate of fear, of slaughter.
Why do the Nazi propagandists need dehumanization? The German Nazis openly said that Untermenschen – inferior people – are out of the system of moral rights, ensuring the unity of the human race. One cannot kill a human being – one might feel sorry for him, in society it is considered a grave crime. But one can exterminate a rat.
The burning in the ovens of the Jews and Slavs in Germany did not begin immediately. At first, German society was prepared for this for a long time. The level of violence increased gradually. But it has come to the processes that all of us know about.
Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that “soldiers and officers thought of Russians and Jews as ‘animals’ … that had to perish.”
It is a question of aggression not restrained by any social framework. Cruelty, a sense of superiority becomes the norm. Moral norms are destroyed in children or simply not allowed to form. Children do not understand the boundaries of what is allowed, since these boundaries are formed in the process of upbringing. They have a certain sense of omnipotence, they do not fully understand the concept of death. All this makes them particularly cruel killers and oppressors. And they were brought up in this way in Hitler’s Germany.
“A youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active, dominating, intrepid youth, that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no tenderness or weakness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey... ,” demanded Hitler.
Education of children in this vein led to the fact that the children of the Hitler Youth formed the Einsatzgruppen and the Sonderkommando SS, which committed atrocities in the occupied territories.
In ideological terms, the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” was one of the most fanatical units in the SS forces and the most brutal.
And this kind of education began with specific children’s books.
2. The Cult of Death
There is a second important feature present in the upbringing of children in the spirit of Nazism in then Germany and contemporary Ukraine. The militarized Nazi culture of the “adolescent Reich” was very much based on the glorifying of death and the dead, on German mythology, where the central deity was Odin, the god of war and death, surrounded by an army of the dead, with whom he went on a bloody “wild hunt.”
Hitler became this Odin for German children. A cult of Hitler was created among young people. It “was an initiation into a cult of death: with missionary zeal Schirach preached to a whole generation of young Germans the catechism of a National Socialist religion, which declared that to die for the Führer was the way to the eternal life of his youth movement,” historical researcher Guido Knopp writes.
The Nazi songs of those times are filled with plots about the host of the living people accompanied by a “host of the dead.” The motif of death often appears in the lines of the songs and in their titles.
Song stanzas and titles became slogans: “Germany must live, even if we have to die!” (Heinrich Lersch), “Germany, you will stand shining, may we also perish” and “The banner is far greater yet than death!” (Baldur von Schirach), etc. Heinrich Anacker’s text “Many will have to fall” (Heinrich Anacker, Fallen müssen viele) is telling.
In Ukraine
It is known that the Azov (organization banned in Russia) battalion played an active role in the education of young people in Ukraine. [A video about Ukrainian Summer Camo organized by the Ukrainian nationalists is being shown.]
There is a whole network of children’s camps in Ukraine with so-called patriotic education, which is also conducted by members of Azov (organization banned in Russia).
The video [entitled Ukraine Summer Camp: Learning To Fight], shot by New York Times journalists, shows children in such a camp reciting the Azov (organization banned in Russia) prayer, “Ukraine, sacred mother of heroes, come upon my heart with a storm of Caucasian winds, the noise of Carpathian streams, the battles of the glorious conqueror Father Chmel, the triumph and noise of the guns of the revolution, the joyful ringing of Sophia’s bells. Let my soul be reborn in you, let your glory illuminate me, for you are my whole life, for you are my whole happiness.
Ring me with the clang of manacles, with the creak of gallows in the dreary morning, bring me the cries of the tortured in cellars and prisons and exile, that my faith may be granite, that my fervor and power may grow, that I may boldly go into battle as heroes have gone for you, for your glory, for your holy ideas; to avenge the shame of captivity, the trampled honor, the torture of your executioners, the innocent blood of your tortured children, the majestic deaths of the heroes of the Ukrainian nation and thousands of others unknown to us, whose bones are scattered or secretly buried.
Burn with life-giving fire all the weakness in my heart. May I know no fear, may I know no hesitation. Strengthen my spirit, harden my will, and dwell in my heart! Let me be raised up to deeds of light. In these deeds may I find death, a sweet death in agony for thee. And I will dissolve in you, and I will live in you forever, native Ukraine, holy, mighty, and united!”.
Note the chanting of “sweet death” and the desire to dissolve. All of this is very reminiscent of the features of the almost religious cult of death for the Führer that reigned in the Hitler Youth. It would also be worth considering an appeal in prayer to a certain Mother of Heroes.
Bandera’s teacher Dmitry Dontsov, the generally recognized leading theorist of Ukrainian nationalism, openly wrote that the cult of the Virgin Mary (in his understanding) corresponded to Cybele, “the mother of the gods.” The mysteries of Cybele are among the most ancient and inhuman. It is an orgiastic matriarchal secret cult. It is inseparable from human sacrifice. So the religiosity of the Azov (organization banned in Russia) is apparently connected with the darkest matriarchal cults. They also accustom Ukrainian children to them.
Pyotr Danilov © Rossa Primavera News Agency
Collectivism, the image of the future
Many Hitler Youth members, who later sincerely repented and condemned the activities of the Third Reich, nevertheless claimed that those years spent in the then-largest youth organization in the world were the happiest of their lives.
They had this feeling when they recalled the atmosphere of brotherhood. The children in the Hitler Youth lived in tent camps, they were taken camping, they sang songs around the campfire. They had military training.
And another important aspect: the children were constantly told that they had a mission, a purpose and the meaning of life – to save Germany, to raise their nation. And any person lives a full life, the effectiveness of his activities increases many times if he has a high goal that lies outside his personal interests.
In Nazi Germany, this goal was dark and sinister. Children were turned into a tool, a killing machine. But it was not because they went camping and sang campfire songs. It wasn’t even because they were taught how to use weapons. It was because they were allowed to use weapons to persecute those who were weaker and destroy anyone who was not like them.
But, weapons can also be used to protect those who are weaker than you. Strong and courageous people can be raised to love their neighbors. Strength and kindness – this is not the opposite concept, as many like to present it now. The ideas of equality and brotherhood can be extended to the entire human race, not to a select few. These are the ideas professed in Christianity and communism. It is exactly the kind of children who were raised in the USSR. They, too, went camping, had military training and learned to sacrifice for a greater cause. But they were brought up in a spirit of equality and internationalism, not Nazism. And they were able to raise young people who were able to rebuff Nazism, before which the rest of the world fell to its knees.
And now a logical question arises: will our present generation be able to fight against Nazism? In what spirit are they being brought up?
The current generation of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine has not yet had time to be poisoned by digitalization and to taste the full effect of educational reforms with their gamification. That is why, for the moment, there are enough people in Russia who are not infected with game addiction, who have not fallen into the total captivity of the social networking web. Digitalization has not destroyed their health, has not distorted the process of brain development, has not led to infantilization and other mental disorders.
However, contemporary schoolchildren are fully exposed to these destructive processes. What will happen in a few years when they encounter their peers from Ukraine who have been raised in a militaristic and Nazi way?
We often talk about the fact that the current youth and educational policy in Russia, which turns children into “sludge,” is carried out according to Western methodologies. It is obvious that the West, which is now turning against us, does not want to see the growth and development of strong, courageous, strong-willed, and developed citizens in Russia who are capable of repulsing the fascism that is coming over us. But judging by the stubborn unwillingness of our officials to hear us, we can conclude that our elite does not want such citizens to exist in Russia either. It is natural for those in power to want the citizens in their subordination. Perhaps they see their own secure existence in keeping the people in a state of sludge.
Let us not speak of the monstrous immorality of such an attitude toward one’s own citizens. Let us only say that it will end with the fact that other nations will come to Russia, which will cleanse the territory from both ordinary Russian citizens and from the elite.
In the aforementioned Insurgent ABC, the young Banderites end their march in a burning Moscow. This is exactly what the current Ukrainian children are being taught.
This speech was published in the Essence of Time newspaper, Issue 484 on June 6.
