The Wall Street Journal quotes Vladimir Putin’s justification for occupying the Crimea:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia reserves the right to use force in Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking residents there…….”
This was a ploy used by Hitler to assert control of the Sudetenland in 1938. Sudetenland is the name given to the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia, within Czechoslovakia, that had large German-speaking populations. Hitler encouraged Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten Nazis, to rebel, demanding a union with Germany. When the Czech government declared martial law, Hitler threatened war. This led to the September 1938 betrayal of Czechoslovakia by France and Britain. Adopting a policy of appeasement, the two countries agreed to give Hitler the Sudetenland, with Chamberlain describing the crisis as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. On his return to London, Chamberlain asserted that the accord with Germany signaled “peace for our time”.
Hitler enters the Sudetenland, Bundesarchiv, Bild | October 1938
In March 1939, German troops occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland on a similar pretext of protecting the German minority from persecution. War followed, leaving more than 60 million dead. Almost two-thirds were civilians.
Hopefully Western leaders have learned from history. Appeasement is not an option.
Read more at BBC History and Wikipedia: The Sudeten Crisis.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. ~ Winston Churchill
This is a nonsensical comparison put forward by the war hawks in Washington. First, Crimea was Russia’s gift to the Ukraine, not Texas or California that did not belong to the US to begin with. Second, Hitler’s Germany was not being encircled by a military coalition of 28 NATO countries like Russia is. Third, Britain, the superpower at that time, did not poise lethal missile ‘defense’ systems in Germany’s neighbors to neutralize it. Fourth, unlike the Germany’s bloody wars on neighboring countries, Russia’s ‘invasion’ of Crimea has been bloodless so far. Fifth, if the situation was reversed, the US would behave worse than Russia as it has already done in faraway countries that posed no threat to it except in the imagination of delusional American politicians with imperial ambitions.
The fact of the matter is Russia, together with China, stands in the way of the progression of the US-EU-NATO global empire project. It also has an abundance of natural resources that are too glittering a prize for the US and EU to not make a grab for. Everything else is a street drama for the gullible.
Incidentally, of the 60 million dead from Hitler’s war, Russia lost the most lives. The same Germany is today a leading NATO member.
The real danger is autocratic leaders. If you don’t respect the rights of your own citizens, what regard are you likely to show for the safety of others?
P.S. Roughly a third of those 20 million USSR deaths in WWII were Ukrainians.
1. I didn’t say Crimea is a part of Russia now. And your silence on Texas, where an American-engineered revolution preceded its annexation, is deafening.
2. South Ossetia and Abkhazia wanted to separate from Georgia. Just as the majority of Crimean people today want to separate from Ukraine because they fear the extreme right and neo-Nazis who overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine. In a trademark revolution engineered by such peace stalwarts as McCain, a sitting US Senator, and Nuland, a senior official of the American government on the streets of Kiev. The sun will rise in the West when their equivalents from Russia or China are allowed on American streets with Occupy protesters.
3. A look at the maps would have told you St. Petersburg is 10,500 km from Cape Town, South Africa, and 6,500 km from Vladivostok. But distances are meaningless when talking about national boundaries. A second look at the maps will show Russia’s non-NATO/EU only European land neighbors are Belarus and Ukraine. Other than Mongolia and China, the rest of its borders are formed of icy seas. If Ukraine joins the EU (and eventually NATO if the plot succeeds), European Russia will pretty much have its back to the sea except for Belarus.
4. But of course Russia is being hemmed in militarily by the relentless expansion of NATO into former Soviet Union states, in gross violation of the Reagan era assurance to the contrary. NATO is hardly a Sunday choir group.
5. Missile defense systems can be offensive if deployed to neutralize Russia’s capability to retaliate to a nuclear first strike. Right now, several NATO members are armed with nuclear missiles on their territories as forward bases for the US. Besides, if you wish to be held strictly to your definition of ‘defense’, pray educate me on the defensive nature of the US Department of Defense in wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan.
6. You are misinformed about Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. Shortly after the annexation of the former, its Jewish population was widely persecuted. Some 300,000 were eventually sent to concentration camps, where many of them died or were killed. In Czechoslovakia, over 10,000 were arrested immediately after its fall to Germany and 1,300 were executed. Ironically, the Czechoslovakian resistance wrested back independence from Nazi Germany with the support of the Soviet Union.
7. That’s nicely done about Granada, a little red herring. Talk about North Korea, a third of whose population (some six million) was killed during the Korean war, Vietnam, which lost four million lives in the Vietnam war, and Japan, where the entire cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized by atomic bombs. Altogether, including the post-9/11 wars of vengeance, an estimated 30 million people have been killed by American-inspired wars since World War II. That the US chose not to occupy the scorched earth of the countries it devastated is hardly a shining symbol of its morality or generosity.
8. Poland’s loss of life during the German-Soviet invasion in World War II is well-documented. What is perhaps less known is Poland was hardly the poor victim in earlier history. Its territorial ambitions resulted in hundreds and thousands of deaths (in proportion to population size at those times) in the Kievan succession war in 1018, the Polish-Muscovite war in 1605-18 and the Polish-Soviet war in 1919-21. Interestingly, a divided Ukraine fought in both camps in the last of these.
As for autocracy, it takes many forms. Sometimes identifiable with a single despotic ruler, at other times with imperial kleptocracies masquerading as democracies.
“Your silence on Texas …is deafening”
Like to think I can see both sides of an argument:
I stand corrected on the St Petersburg/Cape Town distance. Was told that by a Russian economist visiting Cape Town in the 1990s. It’s only 9500 KM by road from St Petersburg to Vladivostok. So it is a BIG country — as Napoleon and Hitler discovered.
I will leave it to others to debate your view of world history. You’re obviously on the red team and I, while claiming to be ambivalent, obviously prefer the security of the blue. Can I ask which country you live in?
So much could be said about places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya Syria (and even Israel). The US has been running joint operations with al qaeda for years for the sole purpose of expansion of empire. The same is true of the coup in Kiev where right wing snipers opened fire and ended a joint Ukraine EU truce of just hours earlier. If one doesn’t understand the logic of EMPIRE there is no chance that one can see through or understand the lies of today. Whether it is the lies of Obama, Kerry or our owned media and politicians. But ah… lets assume this following article is accurate and the people of the Crimea vote in favour or rather against Kiev… Consider that. And then there will be an election in Ukraine at some stage – perhaps now later than was agreed to with the EU being before the year is out. Lets just see what happens then. The last President of Ukraine – who was chased out at the point of a gun – was popularly elected not so long ago. http://nsnbc.me/2014/03/06/breaking-russia-ukraine-crimea-hold-referendum-16-march/
One doesn’t have to be pro Russia to appreciate what really happened – in fact its irrelevant – and you wont get an understanding from reading the MSM.
Thank you for the link. The story is now getting reported on mainstream media, so obviously there is little doubt who the snipers were. It shouldn’t surprise anyone the EU, and the US, suppressed the information that ran contrary to their plot. Even now, in spite of the revelation, the US has gone ahead with diplomatic sanctions against Russian and Crimean officials. One cannot fault the empire for lacking single-minded purpose!
Ignore the historical justification. No people should be subjected to green trucks without numberplates rolling past their front door. That is not democracy. I am for self-determination and if Crimea votes to secede from the Ukraine, I will support that. But any vote will be tainted while the Crimea is occupied.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Santayana)
The present Ukraine government could not wait for the next democratic election, nor even an early election. It grabbed power on the back of street violence by gun-toting, Molotov cocktail-lobbing masked neo-Nazis. It is already tainted. Where was all the hysteria when Saudi Arabia sent its army across the border to suppress unarmed protesters in Bahrain? Neither is a democracy. But both are ruled by ‘our despots’ which is all right, I suppose. History cannot be ignored for reasons of convenience.
We should protest equally to both….
Whether, it is Russia or USA, both should be criticised when they are wrong. Both have been equally guilty of the mess in Afghanistan. While the blame for Iraq lies more with USA and Uk, just like it does with Putin for Ukraine. Its all about gas and oil. What makes USA and UK great countries is that they have rule of law inside the country. However, these principles are conveniently forgotten by them in their international strategy.
‘just like it does with Putin for Ukraine’ are you sure about that? Haven’t you heard about
the news of the Ashton-Paet phone leak revelation
the news of the Ashton-Paet phone leak revelation
the news of the Ashton-Paet phone leak revelation
it should be all over the papers.
“Whether, it is Russia or USA, both should be criticised when they are wrong.” I agree.
“What makes USA and UK great countries is that they have rule of law inside the country. However, these principles are conveniently forgotten by them in their international strategy.” Agreed. Rule of law is the goal. What we should strive for is rule of law, internationally.
I am neither red, nor blue. In fact, I am a lifelong agnostic, and a cynic of politics and politicians. I am particularly allergic to empires. No good has ever come out them, least of all to countries that set out to conquer the world. Italy, Britain and Russia are pale shadows today compared to their heydays of empire. A history America should heed.
I just happen to be a humanitarian who is appalled by the trail of death and destruction left by the US (in collusion with EU and NATO) around the globe in the name of freedom and democracy. No other country has wrought this much havoc since the end of WW II. Like millions of others around the world, I feel betrayed by the country that was founded by people of great wisdom and which spoke poignantly against the evil of war at Nuremberg. No peacenik, I appreciate some wars are unavoidable. But not war as a way of life. How have ordinary Americans, who struggle today in an economy corrupted by debt and financial subterfuge, benefited from spending more than half the national budget on dubious defense and national security? Which other country spends this much on the machinery of war?
To answer your last question, I am an Indian who has spent more than half his life in Malaysia, where I live now after retiring from the UN. In the course of my career as a development economist, I worked in some 60 countries. I brushed shoulders in the corridors of power as many times as I enjoyed the simple hospitality of countless villages around Asia. The lesson I have learnt is this: the political hues that obsess the elite wash off all too easily from the universal fabric of human desire for prosperity and peace.
It pays to be skeptical of countries/politicians motives in this world. I think the same applies as in business: you can’t trust anyone, but you can trust them to follow their own self-interest. Now the US idea of freedom is the freedom to sell iPhones and Coca Cola, in order to enrich themselves, but what is Putin’s self-interest?
“I am particularly allergic to empires. No good has ever come out them, least of all to countries that set out to conquer the world.” I disagree here. Every empire has its dark side, but where they provided long periods of stability they were of benefit to civilization. It all depends on their goals: to promote prosperity or to subjugate and exploit.
If you will forgive the analogy, they are a bit like chemotherapy — nasty side-effects but a lot better than the alternative. Likewise, were it not for the British and the USA, would we not be living in Hitler’s Third Reich, Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Tojo’s Japanese Empire? And would we enjoy our present freedoms, including the freedom of speech we are currently exercising, in any of those alternatives?
I’m sure there was a time, Colin, when Paul C Roberts rated highly for you – and not so much for me. These day I like his take on world affairs – he seems to get most things right.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/03/06/looting-ukraine-begun/
No he never has. “Gullible”, “stooges”, etc. are too emotive for me.
P.S. “Ukraine’s agriculture lands will pass into the hands of American agribusiness.”
— China has agreement to farm land in Ukraine the size of Belgium.
Empires, by definition, are about plunder and pillage. If there is a bright side to them, it comes much later, after the violence and killing. I am not denying certain ‘eventual’ benefits, e.g., parliamentary democracy and a functional civil service in erstwhile colonies of Britain. However, these came at the stiff price of centuries of resource stealing, subjugation of natives on their own lands (a la South Africa), and a ruler-ruled divide that ended only when the British empire broke up. More to the point, the colonies had no choice because no cost-benefit analysis was presented to them. If such an argument had prevailed, there would have been no independent America for that matter, no Declaration of Independence, nor that wonderful document, the American Constitution. The freedom of speech you speak of came at the price a bloody war with Britain. That was the real chemotherapy, not the original conquest.
I am not advocating empires and colonies, especially when based on exploitation rather than free trade. We have yet, in history, to observe a benevolent empire that does not at all times pursue its own self-interest.
On your postscript about Ukraine’s loss of lives in WW II, it was a part of the Soviet Union at that time. And Stalin was from Georgia, the very same that cries foul today…
US and UK were indeed examples of rule of law. Once upon a time. Sadly, their international lawlessness is undermining their internal rule of law now.
I agree. They all transgress. But UK and US are still shining beacons compared to Russia — or am I just following the wrong news channel?
No, you are right. But as a charting professional (a very good one, if I may add!), you will appreciate trends and trajectories matter more than snapshots. Rule of law is on the decline in the US and UK, while it is on the upswing in Russia. Just look at the Snowden disclosures and the reaction they have drawn from US and UK governments. And contrast it against the relative leniency shown to Greenpeace and Pussy Riot activists, who would have been enjoying the long term hospitality of a Soviet Gulag in the not too distant past. No one in their right mind will claim rule of law in Russia is on par with that in the US and UK at this point in time. However, if we stereotype Russia on the basis of its Soviet past without giving it credit for recent progress, we will only push it back into that past. Conversely, if we do not condemn and stand up to the US and UK governments for the gross distortion of individual freedom and liberty, we will only encourage them to become the new Soviet Unions. Trends matter.