Talk:Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations

A quick comment

I know the rules about OR and blogs, but somebody posted on their blog one of the issues of ABN Correspondence from 1970 here: ABN Correspondence. Some of the statements made here are quite troubling, such as the claim the Croats won their "freedom" on 10 April 1941 in the form of the Independent State of Croatia, which was unfortunately "buried" by the Yalta and Potsdam agreements (see page 34). One would never know from reading this article about the genocide waged by the Ustasha regime against Jews, Serbs, and Romany during these four years of "freedom". One gathers that this article was written for an English-language audience who did not know much about the Balkans. Hence the article begins with an account of the first Croat state in the Middle Ages in order to prove that the Croats are a nation. The equivalent would be if somebody were to begin an article on France that ponderously began by tracing how the French state's origins go back to the kingdom founded by the Franks in the 6th century AD to prove that the French are a nation. That may explain why the article says Croatia won its "freedom" on 10th of April 1941 as apparently the writer of the article assumed the reader would not know the Independent State of Croatia was in fact created by Nazi Germany following the German invasion of Yugoslavia, which began on 6th of April 1941.  

The article claims: "Tito’s Communists are guilty of murdering at least half a million Croatian victims who fought for freedom and independence of Croatia", which seems to be a reference to the mass executions of Ustashi in 1945. It is strongly implied here that the government of Yugoslavia was engaged in genocide at present against the Croats with the line "the Croatian people do not intend to be be exterminated". Yugoslavia under Tito was not a democracy, but by no reasonable standard can be claimed that in 1969-1970 that Tito was engaged in genocide against his fellow Croats. Nor is it is true that Tito operated on the orders of "Russian Communists from Moscow"-it seems that whoever wrote this was ignorant of the Tito-Stalin split of 1948. The viewpoint being expressed here is entirely consistent with those members of the Croat diaspora who were nostalgic for the Ustasha regime.

About a conference held in London by the ABN on 9 November 1969, it is stated: "The London conference was opened by Lady Jane Birdwood. She was followed by Mr. John Graham, Sir Ian McTagert and Czech air force colonel, Shikl, who fled to the Westwith his family only two months before" (see page 38). Lady Birdwood was an outspoken anti-Semitic and a fascist. It is very revealing that the ABN would invite someone like her as as their opening speaker. The wartime careers of the ABN leaders like Ferdinand Ďurčanský, Radasłaŭ Astroŭski, Horia Sima, and Yaroslav Stetsko bear much scrutiny. One might also note the language and even the name of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations as it is always Bolsheviks and Bolshevism that it was struggling against, not Communists and Communism. This might sound like a matter of mere semantics, but it is not. In Nazi propaganda, the preferred terms were Bolshevism and Bolsheviks (or even more commonly as Judeo-Bolshevism and Judeo-Bolsheviks), not Communism and Communists. The Nazis almost never used the terms Communism and Communist, much preferring Bolshevism and Bolsheviks. Likewise, in Nazi propaganda Europe stood for everything good and beautiful in the world while Asia was a by-word for everything evil and ugly in the world. In Nazi propaganda, the Red Army was always described as the "Asiatic hordes", a demoniacal, hellish force from the depths of Asia threatening European civilization with utter destruction. In ABN propaganda, the Russians always identified with Asia, and likewise portrayed as a demoniacal people. The conception of the ABN of the Soviet Union as dominated by Russians and Jews with the other peoples of the Soviet Union had to struggle mirrors precisely the viewpoint of Alfred Rosenberg, the Baltic German völkisch "philosopher" who served as the Nazi Minister of the East. The Nazis depicted the Russians as a monstrous, demoniacal people with a genetic predisposition towards extreme violence owning to an unfortunate infusion of "Asian genes" owning to the Mongol conquest of Russia in the 13th century while the peoples of Europe were white and thus were naturally the best and greatest people in the world. The ABN's statements about Russians having "Asian genes" and being naturally nasty as a result perfectly mirrors the Nazi conception. Given the way this group made up of people from the far-right and through changed its rhetoric a bit after 1945, was openly nostalgic for governments and groups that collaborated with Nazi Germany, should not this group be classified as far-right?--A.S. Brown (talk) 21:56, 12 June 2020 (UTC)   

Also, should this be used as a source: Eastern European Unity Under Russian Communism and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations: Conception: Ideology and Conferences. It's somebody's MA thesis. It is my understanding that undergraduate papers or graduate papers constitute reliable sources. A great many of the claims made here such as the ABN holding its founding conference in 1943 in the depths of a forest, which was rudely interrupted by German forces showing up, whom the assembled delegates promptly fought off, sound very, very dubious. Guerrillas generally flee when confronted with superior military forces, so the claim of a pitched battle ending in the victory of the delegates sounds like a fantasy, written by somebody who evidently does not know much about guerrilla warfare. In the same way, many of the statements made here such as Stetsko giving a heroic speech declaring Ukrainian independence in Lviv against Nazi Germany are wrong. Stetsko did indeed give a speech in Lviv in 1941 declaring an Ukrainian state. Stetsko in his declaration of Ukrainian independence made it clear this new Ukrainian state was going to be allied with the Reich in the "New Order in Europe", giving as his models Slovakia and Croatia. This being the early days of Operation Barbarossa when a German victory over the Soviet Union was taken for granted, the Nazis did not feel that they needed Ukrainian support, and Stetsko was asked to withdraw his declaration of independence. When he refused, he was imprisoned. Later on, as became clear that the war against the Soviet Union was going to be a long one and as the Wehrmacht's losses piled up, the Nazis, especially Alfred Rosenberg, got more interested in the "political warfare" approach of trying to undermine the Soviet Union by appealing to nationalism in non-Russian peoples. Contrary to what in being claimed in this MA thesis, it was the Nazis that set up the ABN in 1943. There are so many errors here that this does not seem to be a RS.--A.S. Brown (talk) 05:36, 13 June 2020 (UTC)    

This 1959 US Congress resolution claiming "freedom"

while denying freedom to the native peoples of North America and the Africans imported and kept as slaves for too long time. Typical! L.Willms (talk) 07:24, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Ultra nationalist

Three things: 1. formed by ultra-nationalists. 2. its members are ONLY ultra-nationalist organisations. 3. it equalizes communism and nazism on paper, however countries that were controlled by it and did that, like 2014+ Ukraine, have in reality prosecuted just the communists. 78.34.162.8 (talk) 20:04, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

So in your opinion Ukraine is today "controlled by it". What exactly do you mean? 178.190.187.252 (talk) 21:25, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Probably because most of the Nazi collaborators are dead, whilst this isn't true for communist perpetrators. Communism ended more recently than WW2 did. 90.241.246.235 (talk) 06:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

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Care with sources

This article extensively uses Stephen Dorril without much attribution, as well as other popular non-scholarly authors. We need to be careful about which sources are reliable here, and attribute more. BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:32, 17 March 2023 (UTC)