The saboteurs, who damaged the Russian military plane in Machulyshche, were allegedly caught right away and the arrested have already confessed to everything.

And the "most severe purge", which was the government's response to sabotage, nevertheless, does not stop for a day all over the country.

Moreover, those who clearly have nothing to do with the explosion and had nothing to do with it are missing.

Everyone who at least once left a manifestation of their disagreement with the regime somewhere on the Internet - a photo, a post, a like... Not to mention such "terrible criminal offenses" as keeping the national flag or going out three years ago with an anti-Lukashenka poster .

Lukashenko during an interview with Agence France-Presse on July 21, 2022

The fact that in today's Belarus collective responsibility has actually been introduced for all those who have ever been noted for their skeptical attitude towards

Lukashenka

and his politics, the authorities do not particularly hide it.

The pro-government propagandist (and since last Saturday, a part-time member of the "Belaya Rus" political party)

Alexander Shpakovsky

publicly calls:

"Liberal babblers and fronds - in the camp, traitors to the motherland, corruptors and saboteurs - to the wall."

Alexander Shpakovsky

And no dialogue about reconciliation in society, because, according to Shpakovsky, any agreement with opponents "is made in order to lure into a trap and then kill."

And therefore:

"The only road map of "reconciliation": weapons on the ground - hands up - march to serve the labor duty - and then we'll see."

It would be possible to attribute implacable invectives to the maximalism and aggressiveness characteristic of this propagandist, but in reality, the actions of those who make decisions in today's Belarus fully correspond to the given scheme.

Shpakovsky is simply describing what has already become a fact.



The reality of the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Belarusian families today is anxiety for their loved ones who, for unknown reasons, ended up in prisons and forced exile.

And also the daily worry for one's own fate, because the atmosphere in the country is such that even the most law-abiding and socially inert person cannot feel safe.

There is one question in the Belarusian air: "When will it end?".

Although there is no answer and cannot be predicted.

It can be seen how many talk with visible irritation and anxiety about these diversions and about the ambitious plans of the oppositionists who fled to the West.

Like, it's easy for them to talk about resistance there, but for us, after every such sabotage, expect a new "cleansing" - detentions, arrests, searches.

The situation somewhat resembles the times of the German occupation during the Second World War.

The revenge of the authorities extends not so much to those who directly resist, but to random people who for some reason once came under suspicion.

How many similar cases were there during the war: partisans came out of the forest at night, sawed down telegraph poles by the road, and during the day the Germans came and burned the village closest to the sawed-off poles.

Who were cursed at the fire stations of their own houses by unfortunate people?

I know for sure from the stories of living witnesses of similar events, with whom I had the opportunity to meet and talk more than once: not only the Germans who did it.

And this is the peculiarity of "collective responsibility": the victims have a distorted perception of reality and they often shift part of the blame from those who are really guilty of the crime to those who tried to protect these victims in one way or another, but at the same time knowingly or unknowingly provoked them. the aggressor.

"Eradicate the intention to resist"

In general, totalitarian regimes never burdened themselves with moral suffering when it came to the destruction of political opponents in the struggle for power.

"Sometimes it's not up to the law" - this universal principle for dictators was not invented by Lukashenka at all.

The German Nazis, starting their conquest campaigns to the east in the late 1930s, assumed from the very beginning that "any resistance on the part of the local population will be punished not by the prosecution of the guilty, but by the creation of such a system of terror that will be sufficient to to root out the will to resist in the population" (a quote from the order of Field Marshal

Wilhelm Keitel,

the head of the Wehrmacht High Command, dated July 23, 1943).

On September 16, 1941, the same Keitel signed an order on the execution of hostages in the occupied territories in the east (from 50 to 100 local residents for the murder of one German soldier), and on December 16, 1942, he removed from German soldiers any criminal responsibility for killing partisans or brutal treatment of detainees suspected of helping partisans (any means were allowed without restrictions, including women and children).

Hundreds of burnt Belarusian villages, thousands of dead people, who were not guilty of anything, are the consequences of this very order, which untied the hands of the punisher.

The head of the Wehrmacht High Command Wilhelm Keitel signs the ratified terms of surrender of the German army Berlin, May 9, 1945

Before the German fascists, the principle of collective responsibility and extrajudicial executions were widely used by the Russian Bolsheviks.

Here, for example, are a few lines from Lenin's telegram sent on August 9, 1918 to the Penza Provincial Executive Committee in connection with the mutiny that occurred there: "It is necessary... to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, popes and White Guards;

dubious ones to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city."



In response to the leader's order, they obediently reported from Penza: "152 White Guards were shot for the murder of Comrade Egorov, a Petrograd worker sent as part of the food trade.

Other, even more severe, measures will be taken against those who dare to attack the iron hand of the proletariat in the future."

Wilhelm Keitel among other Nazi criminals on the dock during the Nuremberg Trials on September 30, 1946

The Bolsheviks quickly felt how effective terror is.

Later, concentration camps for potential enemies and executions without trial and investigation took on a massive scale.

Only in the autumn of 1918, according to the estimates of the press of that time, less than 10,000–15,000 people were destroyed in this way.



Later, under

Stalin

, the scale of political repression and mass terror grew to enormous proportions: the successor creatively developed the achievements of his predecessor and surpassed him in everything in the destruction of his own people.

How Masherov's parents died

The dramatic story of the family of

Igor

and

Daria Losikov

also evokes sad allusions to the darkest episodes of the Nazi occupation.

Daria, a courageous and self-sacrificing person, was sentenced to two years in prison just for telling the truth about her husband's political affairs.

In essence, this is revenge on her and their little daughter, who was left without parents.

The practice of using innocent relatives of partisans and underground workers (including their children) as hostages or objects of revenge by the occupation administration during the years of occupation, when fighting partisan resistance.



The former head of the BSSR

Piotr Masherov

blamed himself for the death of his mother until the end of his days.

54-year-old

Daria Masherova

was arrested in Rasony in September 1942 precisely for his son: they knew that at that time he was already in command of one of the local partisan units.

They interrogated, tortured, beat.

Then they were shot together with other arrested persons (some of them were really connected with the partisans, others were only suspected).

Masherov's sister later recalled that the partisan unit commanded by her brother came to Rasony 10 days after the shooting.

They found the grave of the executed.

Masherov recognized his mother and some of his acquaintances, including the little sisters of his friends.

The feeling of guilt that he did not take his mother to the forest in time and thus did not save her, as his sister recalled, did not leave Masherov for many years.

Piotr Masherov, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus,

By the way, an interesting fact.

There was such a practice in the Masherov detachment: when new partisans were recruited in the surrounding villages, they often staged their arrest (they pretended to take them into the forest by force, driving them with rifles).

This was done solely in order to avoid the persecution of relatives who remained in the village.



In general, Piotr Masherov suffered from totalitarian regimes in his life.

In 1937, his father, a simple collective farm worker, was accused of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to 10 years in the labor camps.

He died there, somewhere in the northern forest clearing.

It was rehabilitated only after Stalin's death, in 1959.

Masherov managed Soviet Belarus during

Brezhnev's

time .

Many contemporaries remembered him as a soft, non-vengeful and unkind person.

And, although Soviet dissidents of that period can recall many facts of persecution of dissidents, in fact, if you compare the political repressions of that time with today's, you can only smile ironically.

For keeping and reading anti-Soviet literature during Masherov's time, in the worst case, they could be expelled from the university (with the possibility of resuming studies after some time).

Compare with how they are punished for subscribing to opposition Telegram channels under Lukashenka.

Four children of Father Minaj

Another similar story, widely known thanks to the "Ballad of Four Hostages" by Arkady Kulyashov, which is included in the school curriculum on Belarusian literature, is a dramatic episode of the war, connected with the murder of the four children of the partisan commander Minai Shmyrov (Minai's parents) by the Nazis.

At the beginning of 1942, after several unsuccessful attempts to destroy the partisans in the vicinity of Suraj, the occupiers used blackmail as usual: they arrested Shmyrov's four young children and issued an ultimatum - they promised to leave them alive if their father surrendered.

The hostages were kept in Suraj.

The father knew about the ultimatum and even allegedly tried to surrender in order to save the family.

But soon he received a note written by his eldest daughter, 14-year-old Liza: "Dad, don't worry about us, don't listen to anyone, don't go to the Germans.

if you get killed

then we are helpless and we will not take revenge for you.

And if they kill us, dad, you will take revenge for us."



Minai Shmyrov did not leave the forest.

All four children, as well as his sister and mother-in-law, were shot by the Nazis.

Minai Filipovich Shmyrov, organizer of the partisan movement in the Vitebsk region during the Great Patriotic War

After the war, the former partisan commander was vilified in every way by the Soviet government - he was made a hero, a general, and a high-ranking commander.

He has a new family.

But, as relatives said, until his last days, the former partisan hero's pillow was often wet with tears in the morning.



Today, Lukashenka's regime is trying to build an official ideology, relying on the memory of that war, on the suffering experienced by the people, on the tragedy of Khatyn and hundreds of other Belarusian villages burned by the Nazis as revenge for popular resistance.

But at the same time, processes are taking place in the country that cannot fail to evoke direct analogies and parallels with the methods used by the occupying fascist regime in an attempt to suppress popular protest.

It is even surprising that these ambiguities and cynicism are not noticed by the Lukashenko officials themselves (especially in uniforms and epaulettes), whose lexicon today contains almost the same words that could be heard from Hitler's Gauleiters during the years of occupation ("cleaning", "roundup", "elimination of the underground", "extremist cell").

"I was only following Hitler's orders"

always led to the resignation and departure of former leading figures from the political scene.

In his opinion, this is a manifestation of weakness and a sign of a life catastrophe.

People stand near the wall in the Soviet Police Department of Minsk.

2020 year


What does this mean for those who are trying to organize resistance or public protests in today's Belarus?

First of all, you should be soberly aware of who you are dealing with, calculate the reaction of this regime to any act of disagreement with it.

It is extremely difficult to oppose something to terror, which is organized with the help of the state repressive machine.

In the 30s of the 20th century, terrified Soviet people, for whom there was no blame, obediently waited for a knock on the door, every night listening to the sounds from the street: whether the "furnace" was coming.

And what public protests were possible in those days?

No damaged Russian plane will solve the current problems of Belarusians.

And here's the fact that as a result, not only those who consciously take risks by carrying out this act, but also dozens (or maybe hundreds) of other people, most often completely random, who had and have nothing to do with sabotage, will be repressed. - that's for sure.

Of course, you can admire the courage of heroes who consciously choose self-sacrifice and suffering in prison cells.

But the question is: is all this worth the high price paid by thousands of people, which is measured by years of imprisonment and a crippled fate, in a situation where it does not significantly affect the strength of the regime, because it will obviously collapse under the weight of completely different circumstances.



... A great lover of fighting popular resistance through "collective responsibility", the author of numerous orders for arrests and executions of hostages, Hitler's field marshal Wilhelm Keitel was arrested after the war and appeared before the International Tribunal in Nuremberg.

He justified himself by the fact that he was "only following Hitler's orders."

Hanged as a war criminal on October 16, 1946, right after Joachim Ribbentrop.



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