Watch World Remembers Beginning of World War II, a report by English-language TV station Russia Today highlighting the difficult history between Russia and Poland.

Vladimir Lensky, the New York bureau chief for Russia’s Channel One, discusses Russia’s role and responsibility in World War Two.

In a Russian language blog on Moscow radio station Echomoscow’s website, writer Sergei Shagunov comments on Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent article in a Polish newspaper about the Soviet-Nazi pact to split up Poland in 1939.

Read the full post here in Russian. The following excerpts were translated from by Worldfocus producer Christine Kiernan.

It is frequently necessary to disagree with Vladimir Putin, but in his article published in the newspaper “Vyborcha” [the Polish newspaper], there are strivings for objectivity. Today this is rare thing. Of course [even-handedness] is possibly only when there is open discussion. …The 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War is reason for a sharp, honest, difficult conversation.

Poland was up until the end a [partner] of Hitler, participating in the invasion of Czechoslovakia… and its minister of foreign affairs Bek spoke about pretensions to Soviet Ukraine… It’s necessary to remember that England France from the beginning shut their eyes over Germany’s armament, then gave Czechoslovakia to her, and finally, drew out and [ruined] Moscow discussions about the creation, together with the USSR, of an anti-German coalition. So Hitler broke the East. ..

Yes, the Soviet Union was totalitarian. But even totalitarian states have their own interests…..For example, interests of safety.

A simple question: was it necessary to sign an amoral supplement to the Soviet-German pact?

Everyone was amoral, including Poland. Everyone is guilty in the war. To different degrees? Perhaps. But all the same – guilty.

Writing in the UK’s The Guardian, Anita Prazmowska says that despite Putin’s subsequent efforts to praise Polish bravery during the war, the timing of his comments will strike many Poles as misplaced. Read the full post here.

1 September is seen in Poland as a beginning of its enslavement, first under Nazi domination and then, after the war, to Soviet domination. 1 September is a time of grieving. One can’t really expect Poles to see this as a date for reflection on the shortcomings of their own governments’ policies in 1939 and subsequently. Thus Putin has on the one hand accepted that the Soviet Union was wrong, but he has also publicly reminded the Poles that they too have to address some unsavory moments in Poland’s history. The fact that he spoke of the Russian people being victims of both Stalinism and of Nazism has done little to soothe Polish anger.

Gibraltar was ceded to Britain in 1713.

“Spain’s foreign minister,” we are told, “met [in Gibraltar] Tuesday with his British counterpart and with the head of Gibraltar’s local administration in the first visit by a Spanish Cabinet official to the British colony.”

Hardly the top of the news, you say — but it reminds me of how crisis points in the world wax and wane in importance. Gibraltar was a strategic fortress for Britain and the Allies during World War II — and Britain vowed to hold onto it forever, or at least, according to legend, as long as the Barbary apes remain on station.

Gibraltar is an outcropping of rock, a British territory roughly 1,093 miles south of London, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and attached to Spain by a neck of land. It was ceded to Britain in 1713. Spain wants it back, but don’t hold your breath.

News Item 2: “The Rock of Gibraltar is echoing to gunfire for the first time since the Spanish attacked Britain’s Mediterranean toehold nearly 300 years ago.”

British soldiers are training in Gibraltar’s maze of underground caves to seek and destroy al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan, previously believed to be impervious.

Sky News quoted Captain Charles Bonfante, of the British Army’s Royal Gibraltar Regiment, on the subject. “As a training area, this is unique…I did a tour in Afghanistan, around Musa Qala. One of our battles was fought in underground tunnels, just like this.”

Interesting, and Sky News doesn’t have it quite right. Gibraltar has heard gunfire in modern times. It had complex, secret gun emplacements during World War II, ready to fight off any invasion by Hilter, if he decided to speed to the Mediterranean coast. Several years ago, I interviewed Jean-Francois Nothomb, a prominent underground leader who snuck in and out of Gibraltar during World War II. Nothomb was a protagonist in my book, Freedom Line, which detailed the rescue of Allied pilots from Nazi territory.

He recalled going for a stroll one day in Gibraltar on a promontory overlooking the harbor. “What appeared to be a stony mound suddenly gave way to a sliding pedestal and he could hear the sound of gears and motors. Suddenly a two-man gun emplacement rose out of the earth, with two helmeted British gunners at the controls. This was no ordinary field. What had appeared to be a natural landscape was actually a stage set for antiaircraft guns.”

Hilter was diverted from his designs on Gibraltar by his overriding passion to focus on an invasion of Russia to the north instead. German presence in Gibraltar would have created a dominant position at the entrance to the Mediterranean. British and American analysts at the time went as far as to say that Hitler could have won the war if he took Gibraltar.

Fascinating to me that 70 years after playing a strategic role in World War II, Gibraltar is now a training site for soldiers seeking a latter-day enemy, Osama bin Laden.

I wouldn’t argue for or against the notion that this is the time for Britain to give up this last relic of the empire. But it sure has a colorful history. I’ll take the democratic line: Here’s a vote for self-determination of the 30,000 people of Gibraltar.

- Peter Eisner

Photo courtesy of Flickr user cwgoodroe under a Creative Commons license.

Turkey admits to World War I-era mass killings in Armenia but denies that it was genocide. A memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, commemorates the killings.

The word genocide was coined in the wake of the Holocaust.

Since then, the term has been used in varying contexts to describe modern conflicts, from Rwanda to Darfur. But the term itself has become a source of conflict, as many look to whether or not governments and leaders recognize and punish genocide.

The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” and a convention criminalizing genocide became law in 1951.

Some people have been prosecuted and found guilty of genocide, including Rwandan politician Jean-Paul Akayesu and Serbian General Radislav Krstic.

However, while the U.S. has pointed to genocide in Darfur, the United Nations has refrained from using that term to describe the killings in Sudan.

The “Killing Denouement” blog discusses the historical use of the term and modern debates surrounding its usage:

Is Gaza a genocide; is Darfur a genocide? Where do you draw the lines between ‘land conflict’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide’, and what are the political value(s) of doing so? And how does something get designated as genocide anyway - is it, legally, only when the ICC at the Hague says so?

[...]The Rwandan genocide is popularly characterised as one of the most shocking massacres of a century already stained by violent bloodshed. Much of its associated visceral horror comes from the situation of neighbours turning against each other. Not unlike its historical cousin of the Nazi Holocaust, it too was structured around several poles of binary opposition. Citizen and subject; native and settler. Hutu and Tutsi; Nazi and Jew. Both of these atrocities have seeped their way into the collective Western consciousness, and have come to function as embedded points of reference for future conflicts.

The “Presidential Blog” writes about the debate surrounding the Gaza war and its casualties:

I see how the name-calling and the evocations of other historical horrors take us all further away from understanding, further away from any hope of resolution on a human scale. Comparisons to “genocide” or “apartheid” simply raise the rhetorical stakes; they may help speakers or writers score points (in their own minds and the minds of the like-minded) but they do nothing to advance shared understanding.

On the contrary.

Mahmood Mamdani of “Pambazuka News” points to similarities between violence in Darfur and the war in Iraq, exploring how the conflicts are named differently:

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

Flickr user “Bullneck” posts an image of a protester with a sign declaring genocide, and argues that the word is misused:

Here’s an idea: Why don’t we all put the term ‘genocide’ (and ‘Holocaust,’ too) on a hiatus from placards and instead use words with more meaning, rationality, and thought? The only situation which calls for the use of such terms would be something akin to Rwanda in the ’90s. Everything else is self-righteous hyperbole which cheapens the word’s meaning.

Blogger “Stacey Perlman” argues that governments use alternate terms to avoid responsibilities:

The genocide in Darfur has gone on since 2003 and has not gained the attention it deserves. Other genocides include Rwanda in 1994 and the Cambodian Killing Fields in 1975. Not to mention the death of 11 million people, 6 million of them Jews, in the Holocaust during WWII.

Perhaps lesser known is the first genocide of the 20th century. No, it wasn’t the Jews in WWII, it was the Armenians in 1915 during WWI. It is estimated that one and a half million people died between 1915 and 1923. There is still controversy surrounding the mass murder of these people as the Turkish government has continually denied it ever happened.

In Kenya, the recent election controversy was the straw that broke the camel’s back after decades of tension from grudges over land. Using a term like “ethnic cleansing” is an easy way to avoid providing aid. [...] Until the situation is deemed “genocide” no legal action needs to be taken, which is disturbing. Ethnic cleansing is not any less minor of a situation than a declared genocide and efforts should be made to combat it.

The “BlogCritics” blog writes that Western governments only deem mass killing genocidal when economic interests are involved:

After the horrors of World War II, the world said “never again” to horrific mass killings. But, due to the Cold War tensions, idealistic ideas such as this one were abandoned in favor of realist politics and fighting for self-interests. “Never again” does not mean “we will do everything to stop genocides from happening anywhere in the world.” The Western world in particular considers stopping genocides only in countries where they have economic or other interests.

That is why in 1994 the American government did not want to use the term “genocide” to describe the fastest genocide in recorded human history that took over 800,000 lives in Rwanda in only 100 days. [...] Calling the mass slaughter “genocide” would obligate the US and other governments, signatories of the Resolution 260A(III), to intervene and stop it. But the US and other Western countries did nothing because they had no interests in the small, overpopulated, and poor African country. That a whole ethnic group was being exterminated in front of the whole world was not enough.

Blogger “Erica Thurman” argues that omitting gender from the definition of genocide allows violence against women:

Discourse of human security as it relates to women appears to avoid the “G” word—genocide. This is perhaps because the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (Convention) fails to identify systematic sexual based violence as an act of genocide. Various threats to human security are gender specific. Rape, forced impregnation, maternal mortality rates and sexual slavery are components of human insecurity which have to be viewed through a gendered lens to recognize “who is affected and how, and what specific forms of protection or assistance are needed by whom.” [...]

A finding of systematic rape as genocide would serve two purposes. The first would allow the violence against African women to be classified as genocide, thereby compelling the international community to act to prevent future occurrences of this heinous crime. Secondly, the finding of rape as genocide would introduce the idea of sexually specific crimes in the discourse of genocide which could subsequently compel an amendment to the Convention establishing women as a protected class against genocide.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Rita Willaert under a Creative Commons license.

Worldfocus.org reported from Teterboro, N.J. during one of the anniversary celebrations. The German government saluted the veterans who flew over 275,000 flights into Berlin and delivered 2.3 million tons of supplies.

Gail Halvorsen, the original “candy bomber,” recalls post-war life in Germany and explains what made him decide to parachute candy over the skies of Berlin. At the celebration, Halvorsen co-piloted the same 1945 C-54 war plane he had flown during the airlift — this time wiggling his wings over New York City.

The tarmac at Teterboro Airport sizzled as the ground crew doused it with water in preparation for the “warbird’s” takeoff. The 63-year-old war plane had flown during World War II and hauled coal, food and medicine to 2 million Berlin citizens during the Soviet blockade of the city in 1948.

With cameras hoisted over our backs, Channtal Fleischfresser, Katie Combs and I climbed the ladder into the C-54 cargo plane. We were told to ignore the smell of burning rubber or the pings in the orange oil drum (anchored in at Katie’s knees.)

We watched 88-year-old retired Colonel Gail Halvorsen glide up the ladder to co-pilot the 30-minute flight. Colonel Halvorsen  — the original “Candy Bomber” — dropped parachutes filled with chocolates, candy and sticks of gum to Berlin children during the 14-month airlift. Children on the ground would look to the sky and wait for a plane to wiggle its wings — the signal for falling treats.

The Colonel recounted a story of a little girl named Mercedes who lived next to the open field where he dropped the candy. She wrote him a letter telling him that the roar of his plane frightened her chickens, but she could forgive him if he dropped the candy closer to her home. They wrote back and forth and finally met in Berlin in 1972. Halvorsen’s family has visited Mercedes, her husband and two sons 35 times, most recently this July.

The smell of burning rubber dissipated, but the air hung still and heavy in the un-air-conditioned cabin. The plane cruised at 150 miles per hour, bobbing up and down New York Harbor. We settled into the blue patent leather seats and tipped our heads back imagining the sacks of flour, bags of coal and Colonel Halvorsen in the cockpit wiggling his wings before landing…in New Jersey.

- Lisa Biagiotti