Dear Editor,
Reference is made to a letter written by former president Donald Ramotar (SN 2/7), in which he said: “We are on the eve of the 80th Anniversary since the end of the second world war, which resulted in the defeat of Hitlerite Fascism. At that time many pledges were made. The main cry was “Never Again.”
I respectfully disagree. “Never Again” was not the “main cry” at the end of the Second World War, which ended in 1945. That was a pledge within the Jewish community which suffered a loss of an estimated 6 million lives.
The distinction is important especially given what is happening in the Middle East, and what continues to occur in the West where free speech is no longer an assumed right, all because of a deliberate mischaracterization of what happened in the Second World War.
My nana, Mr. Cyril Kowlessar, from Leonora (WCD), fought in the Second World War. He was a member of the British Royal Air Force and was wounded during service in Europe, having sustained a bullet wound behind an ear. Respectfully, submitted here is a photograph of him.
He survived and eventually passed in 1989 in Guyana. He had indicated that over 20 million Russians died and that it was the Russians who dealt the critical blow to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis; that because of the leadership of distinguished soldiers such as Marshal Georgy Zhokov, the Russians successfully resisted the Germans from conquering Russia—but at a great cost, with Russian corpses stacked 5-to-6-bodies high alongside some city streets.
This, of course, is hardly told in the West by a media and entertainment industry (Hollywood), both of which are still saddled with anti-Russian bias. The US, which is often depicted, inaccurately, as the ultimate saviour of everyone—did not enter the war until 1941 or 2 years after it began.
It is important, again, that the past be described accurately and not necessarily as it is—to pander to those powerful groups of persons in the West who control the means of describing this past and by extension, levy sanctions against others for whatever protest they dare say in and about the present.
Sincerely,
Rakesh Rampertab
