Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. What happened during World War II was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower, they created foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans, they were created for fighting on the battleground. Because they were not Aryans, they couldn’t be trusted. So, they were put under the command of Henry Himmler, under command of SS, and became known as SS Waffen units. And one of such units was created in Ukraine, with great difficulties, because Nazis didn’t consider Slavs to be generally worthy of even that sort of foreign legion formations. But they made an exception, because those people were coming from Galicia, which was part of Austria-Hungary, which means part of Austria, which means somehow were open to the benevolent influence of the Germanic race, and called the Division Galizien, or Galicia. Part of Ukrainian youth joined the division. One of the explanations was that they were looking at the experience of World War I, and seeing that the units, the Ukrainian units, in the Austrian army then played a very important role in the fight for independence. So that is one of the explanations. You can’t just use one explanation to describe motivations of everyone and every single person who was joined in there. So, they were sent to the front. They were defeated within a few short days by the Red Army, and then were retreating through Slovakia, where they were used to fight with the partisan movement there, and eventually surrendered to the British. So, that’s the story. You can personally maybe understand what the good motivations were of this person or that person, but that is one of the best, one of the very tragic and unfortunate pages in Ukrainian history. You can’t justify that as a phenomenon. So, from that point of view, the celebration of that experience, as opposed to looking at that, okay, that happened, and we wish that those young men who were idealistic or joined the Division for idealistic purposes had better understanding of things or made other choices, but you can’t certainly celebrate that. And once that happened, that, of course, became a big propaganda, a propaganda item, in the current war. We’re talking about 10,000-20,000 people in the Division, and we’re talking about 2-3 million Ukrainians fighting in the Red Army. And again, it’s not like Red Army is completely blameless in the way how it behaved in Prussia, in Germany, and so on and so forth. But it’s basically, it’s, again, we’re going back to the story of Bandera. So, there is a period of collaboration, and that’s what propaganda tries to define him by, or there is a Division Galizien by 20,000 people, and somehow it makes irrelevant the experience of 2-3 million people. I mean, just to clarify, I think there is just a blunder on the Canadian Parliament side, the Canadian side, of not doing research of, maybe correct me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding, they were just doing stupid shallow political stuff. Let’s applaud, when Zelenskyy shows up, let’s have a Ukrainian veteran, let’s applaud a veteran of World War II, and then all of a sudden, you realize, well, there’s actually complexities to wars. We can talk about, for example, a lot of dark aspects on all sides of World War II, the mass rape at the end of World War II by the Red Army, when they [inaudible 01:03:40] Germany. There’s a lot of really dark complexity in it on all sides. So, that could be an opportunity to explore the dark complexity that some of the Ukrainians were in the SS, or Bandera, the complexities there, but I think they were doing not a complex thing. They were doing a very shallow applaud. And we should applaud veterans, of course, but in that case, they were doing it for show, for Zelenskyy and so on. So, we should clarify that the applause wasn’t knowing, it wasn’t for the SS. It was for Ukrainian, it was for World War II veterans, but the propaganda, or at least an interpretation from the Russian side, from whatever side, is that they were applauding the full person standing before them, which wasn’t just a Ukrainian veteran, but Ukrainian veteran that fought for the SS. I don’t have any particular insights, but I would be very much surprised if even one person in the Parliament, I mean, the members of the Parliament actually knew the whole story. I would be very surprised.…

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