The United Nations and NATO would hold a ” double speech ” on Nazism, accuses the conspiracy site France-Evening. To support his point, he takes as an example a vote organized at the end of 2021 at the UN General Assembly on the fight against “glorification of Nazism” – a very shared argument in pro-Putin circles.
On December 21, 2021, “A UN resolution combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance was adopted by 130 votes for, 2 against (United States, Ukraine) and 49 abstentions” , recalls, for example, a very shared tweet in mid-March.
While the Kremlin justifies the war in Ukraine by “denazification” of the country, the opposition of Washington and kyiv to this resolution is interpreted as an inconsistency, even an admission of the neo-Nazi sympathies of the regime of Volodymyr Zelensky. The reality behind this vote is much more complex.
Russian resolution has divided the UN since 2012
The UN resolution against the glorification of Nazism has been tabled every year since 2012 by the Russian Federation. This non-binding text of general scope urges vigilance in the face of modern forms of xenophobia and the rehabilitation of the IIIe Reich.
Each year, this resolution is approved by a large majority. However, almost all NATO countries, including the European Union – and France in particular – abstained, while a handful of States voted against: Canada and Palau in the first years, Ukraine, since 2014, and the United States, each time.
The object of this text is apparently very consensual. However, in 2017, the UN reported “lively debates”, and the result of the vote regularly arouses disappointment and « regrets » of Russia.
The countries that oppose this resolution emphasize that they are in no way advocating the IIIe Reich. “We reaffirm our utmost condemnation of all forms of Nazism, neo-Nazism and intolerance”, insisted Ukraine in 2019, while recalling that 8 million Ukrainians died during the Nazi offensive. For their part, the United States specified, in 2020, ” I know [joindre] to the international community in condemning the glorification of Nazism and all forms of racism, xenophobia, discrimination and intolerance”.
The fear of an instrumentalization of history
Nazism occupies a central place in official Russian historiography, which Vladimir Putin has promoted with seven memorial laws since 2000. The Second World War, described as “great patriotic war” since the Stalinist era, is rewritten in a Manichean way, presenting the USSR as the nation that heroically defeated Nazism, even obscuring the shadowy parts of the Soviet army, such as the massacre of thousands of Polish officers, among others, at Katyn in June 1940.
In an analysis of the reasons for Canada’s “no”, Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a human rights NGO responsible for monitoring compliance with the UN mission, explained in 2015 that that Russia’s resolution should be interpreted as part of “rhetorical war” in which “everything that deviates from Russian nationalism is discredited under the label of fascism or equated with collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War”.
Currently, for Moscow, the very stretchable accusation of “Nazism” covers both adherence to Hitler’s doctrine and the slightest Atlanticist sympathy. It is regularly used against its neighboring states, such as the Baltic countries in 2007 and 2013, or Ukraine. The Russian resolution at the UN is thus perceived as a threat by the latter. Lithuania denounced in 2014 a maneuver “insulting”coming from a country “which carries out attacks against its neighboring countries in a brutal manner” by intervening in Georgia in 2008 or in Crimea in 2014. “Russia is trying to attack the Baltic countries and write history in its own way”lamented then, in 2020, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Linas Linkevicius.
It is in solidarity with its Member States and allies bordering Russia that the European Union abstains every year. In 2020, the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, justified this diplomatic position by denouncing the Russian resolution at the UN as “a simplistic discourse intended to divide Europeans, by equating all opponents of the Soviet forces with the Nazi regime, [qui] reduces the fight against racism to questions of memory linked to the Second World War, of which it presents a distorted vision”.
The specific reasons for the American and Ukrainian no
If the members of the European Union or NATO abstained during the vote on the text at the UN in December 2021, the United States and Ukraine came out head-on against, for slightly different reasons. For Washington, it is a question of defending the American Constitution, and more precisely its first amendment, which authorizes the expression of all opinions, even the most hateful.
As for Ukraine, which had abstained in 2012 and 2013, the switch to no was made in 2014, the year of the “orange revolution”, the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war of Donbass. In 2019, the Ukrainian delegation to the United Nations justified its opposition by the Russian double game, which presents itself as a hero of the anti-Nazi struggle, but ignores the German-Soviet pact of 1939, or the millions of deaths due to famine in the Ukraine of 1932-1933 brought about by the Stalinist regime.
Above all, it denounces in contemporary times the “connections Moscow is trying to make with far-right political forces across the continent and beyond”and the “repression of democracy in Russia itself and its ongoing aggression against Ukraine”.