US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken speaks remotely at the United Nations European Headquarters in Geneva on March 1, 2022. The United States is the only country, along with Ukraine, to vote against a Russian resolution aimed at combating the glorification of Nazism. SALVATOR DI NOLFI / AFP
The UN and NATO will hold a “double discourse” on Nazism, the France-Soir conspiracy website accuses. In support of his point, he cites as an example the vote organized at the end of 2021 at the UN General Assembly to combat the “glorification of Nazism”, an argument widely circulated in pro-Putin circles.
On December 21, 2021, “the UN resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance was adopted with 130 votes in favor, 2 against (USA, Ukraine) and 49 abstentions”, recalls, for example, a very common tweet in mid-March.
While the Kremlin justifies the war in Ukraine by “denazification” of the country, Washington’s and Kyiv’s opposition to this resolution is interpreted as inconsistent, even as an acknowledgment of the neo-Nazi sympathies of Vladimir Zelensky’s regime. The reality behind this vote is far more complex.
Russian resolution has divided the UN since 2012
The UN resolution against the glorification of Nazism has been introduced annually by the Russian Federation since 2012. This non-binding general text calls for vigilance in the face of modern forms of xenophobia and the rehabilitation of the Third Reich.
Each year, this resolution is approved by an overwhelming 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 early years, Ukraine since 2014, and the US each time.
The object of this text seems to be very consistent. However, in 2017, the UN reported a “lively debate” and the results of the vote regularly cause disappointment and “regret” in Russia.
Countries opposed to this resolution emphasize that they are in no way apologizing for the Third Reich. “We reaffirm our strong condemnation of all forms of Nazism, neo-Nazism and intolerance,” Ukraine said in 2019, recalling that 8 million Ukrainians died during the Nazi offensive. For its part, the United States specified that in 2020 [joindre] international community in condemning the glorification of Nazism and all forms of racism, xenophobia, discrimination and intolerance.”
Fear of the instrumentalization of history
Nazism has been central to official Russian historiography, which Vladimir Putin has promoted with seven memorial laws since 2000. The USSR as a nation that heroically defeated Nazism, even if it meant hiding the shadowy parts of the Soviet army, such as the massacre of thousands of officers, including Poles, at Katyn in June 1940.
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Analyzing the reasons for Canada’s “no” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the human rights NGO responsible for monitoring compliance with the UN mission, explained in 2015 that Russia’s resolution should be interpreted as an element of a “rhetorical war” in which “everything that retreats from Russian nationalism, is discredited under the label of fascism or equated with collaboration with the Nazis during World War II.
At present, for Moscow, the rather tenuous accusation of “Nazism” covers up both adherence to the teachings of Hitler and the slightest sympathy for Atlanticism. It is regularly used against neighboring states such as the Baltic states in 2007 and 2013 or Ukraine. Thus, the Russian resolution in the UN is perceived by the latter as a threat. In 2014, Lithuania denounced an “insulting” maneuver coming from a country “which is brutally attacking neighboring countries” by invading Georgia in 2008 or Crimea in 2014. “Russia is trying to attack the Baltic countries and write history in its own way,” complained then, in 2020, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius.
In solidarity with its member states and allies bordering Russia, the European Union abstains every year. In 2020, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian justified this diplomatic stance by condemning the Russian resolution at the UN as “a simplistic speech designed to divide Europeans by equating all opponents of Soviet troops with the Nazi regime, [qui] reduces the fight against racism to issues of memory associated with the Second World War, the representation of which is a distorted representation.
The American and the Ukrainian have no specific reasons
While members of the European Union or NATO abstained from voting on the text at the UN in December 2021, the United States and Ukraine spoke head-on for slightly different reasons. For Washington, this is about protecting the American constitution, or rather its first amendment, which allows the expression of all opinions, even the most hateful ones.
As for Ukraine, which abstained in 2012 and 2013, the transition to “no” was made in 2014, the year of the Orange Revolution, the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas. In 2019, the Ukrainian delegation to the UN justified its opposition to the Russian double game, which presents itself as a hero of the anti-fascist struggle, but ignores the German-Soviet pact of 1939 or millions of starvation deaths. in Ukraine in 1932-1933 by the Stalinist regime.
First of all, she denounces in our time “the links that Moscow is trying to establish with far-right political forces on the continent and beyond”, as well as “the suppression of democracy in Russia itself and its aggression in the course against Ukraine.”