Who Whom? Who Actually Started the Aggression in Eastern Europe?

Below I respond to various comments on the Russophobia’ posting (my comments are marked ****):

‘Mike B’: ‘Mr Hitchens talks about blindspots, but he appears to have one himself when it comes to Ukraine. He talks about the horror and evil of the Soviet Empire, but does not mention the specific horrors inflicted on that country by Moscow (and I speak of the source of the power, rather than the provenance of its leaders). In particular, I would mention the Holodomor, the great famine, in which several million, perhaps as many as 7.5 million Ukrainians perished. It was certainly caused by the Soviet leadership and was likely a deliberate plan by Stalin to undermine Ukrainian nationalism.

 

 

****I respond. There is no question that Stalin deliberately created a famine which killed appalling numbers of Ukrainians. The difficulty with the concept of the ‘Holodomor’ is that the same famine also killed huge numbers of Russians and others, in Russia itself and in North Kazakhstan.  I think any careful reading of history suggests that it was a Communist act of class war against independent peasants, not an act of racial murder. This does not make it any less appalling. It just alters its significance and, in my view,  reflects poorly on those who promote the idea that it was a racial murder, comparable with the Shoah or Turkey's Armenian genocide.

 

 

Mr ‘B’ adds: ‘As for the EU, it is Ukraine which is seeking membership of that organisation, not the other way round.

 

****I respond. Technically, this is true. But if you insist on examining this whole controversy at face value, you will (as so many do) repeatedly miss the point of it.  Before you apply, you ahve to consider that your application wiol be taken seriously. In 1962, the then Common Market wouldn't even consider Britain as a member. Now it propsoes to admit Ukraine, one of the most bankrupt and corrupt states on Earth?

 

Even in the decade after the end of the Cold War, the idea of Ukrainian membership of the EU or of NATO would have been considered absurd. It was 2004 before the major Warsaw Pact countries joined, plus the Baltic states. And that was under American pressure. So the real force behind the application might reasonably be stated to be neither the EU nor the applicant states, but the USA. The USA’s purposes are political. They are part of its policy originating in 1916, but frustrated by subsequent events until 1945, of stabilising Europe by federalising it. This policy is also (as I shall discuss below) the revival of the German liberal scheme for a ‘federative empire’ involving limited sovereignty for its members, dating from 1915.

 

Soon it really will be impossible to argue this any more with anyone who has not read Adam Tooze’s book ‘The Deluge’, which I have so many times recommended here as essential for an understanding of what is happening. I must especially urge my persistent automatic critics, such as Mr ‘P’, to read this book. They really would learn something from it, and would at least be able to disagree with me intelligently, rather than regurgitating stuff they have got off the web, or from Conventional Wisdom Weekly.

 

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‘Horace’: ‘But why do you keep trying to justify Russia's invasion and occupation of sovereign Ukraine territory today? No one is threatening Russia;

 

 

***I reply: that surely depends what you mean by ‘threatening’? Russia, being a land power without natural borders, follows the normal policy of land powers (though unknown to sea powers and islands), of caring very much about the state of its immediate neighbours. Some of the people who lecture Russia about its interest in Ukraine should talk to Canadian politicians about their relations with the USA.  If the USA thought for a moment that Canada was incapable of defending the Arctic approaches to North America, it would step in to Canadian affairs directly.  And I hate to think what would happen if Mexico acquired a pro-Iranian, Moscow-friendly,Chavez-style government.

 

Russia is particularly sensitive about the Baltic states (because they control air and sea access to its former capital  and highly strategic major city, St Petersburg, and indeed provide the classical land invasion route used by western invaders of Russia in the past ),  and Ukraine, because much of Ukrainian industry is still closely integrated with Russian industry, especially military industry.

 

Russia is also interested in Ukraine because of its obvious strategic importance, and access to the Black Sea, Crimea and its much-valued naval station at Sevastopol.  It is perfectly reasonable for Russia to be concerned. Because the incorporation of the Baltic states into NATO and the EU was achieved at a moment of historic weakness, Russia has accepted this and has made no move to attempt to reverse it, though it could easily do so by following the example of the EU and the US, and stirring up ‘colour revolutions’ among the Russian populations of these countries, and by other covert means well known to all modern diplomatic and secret services.

 

Likewise, Russia has accepted Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian blackmail over Sevastopol (the supposedly pro-Moscow Yanukovych (this claim is so funny to anyone who knows the region)  used Russia’s desire to keep a foothold in Sevastopol to drive a very hard bargain over energy supplies).

 

Russia has however warned repeatedly and clearly that it is no longer prepared to accept any more of the repeated humiliations imposed on it since the collapse of the USSR. It has not sought to reopen existing settlements. But it has said that enough is enough.

 

In February 2007 Mr Putin warned at a Munich conference in a widely-reported speech that he regarded the eastward march of NATO as a ‘serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust’. He reminded listeners of what the NATO general secretary, Manfred Woerner, said in May 1990 ‘the fact that we are not ready to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee’. Where are those guarantees?’ For of course the armies of Poland, the Baltics, the Czech Republic etc are now NATO armies, all weell beyond the borders of Germany, andthey conduct exercises with NATO forces close to the Russian border.  

 

I might insert here the well-known exchanges between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker, then the USA’s Secretary of State, In Mr Baker’s own account of his 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he wrote :’NATO, whose juris[diction] would not move eastward’, plus the letter Baker wrote at the time to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also saying he had offered the USSR ‘ assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its current jurisdiction’.

 

Since 1989. Moscow has yielded control over roughly 180 million people, and 700,000 square miles of territory (in Europe alone), without fighting or losing a war or firing a shot. This is the aggressor?

 

All Western diplomats and governments were aware of these warnings, many times repeated by Mr Putin over many years. They were also free to ignore them. But they knew that if they ignored them, they might provoke a reaction. They did ignore them.  Whose responsibility, then, were the events which followed?

 

As long as Ukraine remained non-aligned, Russia would not act. When an attempt was made to align Ukraine with a rival alliance, Russia used all its diplomatic and economic power to prevent it, a clear sign that Moscow intended to resist the change. When Moscow succeeded, and Yanukovych  said he would not sign the Association Agreement, the ‘West’  continued to press for Ukrainian realignment. Once again, whose fault was it that Russia responded? Who was pushing his pwoer into teritory where it ad not opreviously been, the classic definition of aggression? 

 

No reader here can be in any doubt of the involvement of Western governments, though cash subsidy and personal endorsement, in the pro-EU demonstrations in Kiev. No-one can deny the violence of these demonstrations, as it is beyond doubt (103 protestors and 20 police officers died according to UN figures). No-one can deny the lawless and unconstitutional method of the overthrow of Yanukovych’s government, for it is also demonstrable.  The lawful impeachment process set out in the constitution was not followed.

 

How then can anyone claim that the only ‘aggression; in this dispute came from Moscow?

 

 

‘Horace’ continues: ‘ Nato is a defensive alliance only’.

***I reply: Only if you are astonishingly literal-minded.  NATO has extended its ‘defensive’ guarantee over a huge swath of territory, once Soviet-controlled, later non-aligned, which it previously was not pledged to defend and out of which it had promised to stay. The expansion of a defensive guarantee is surely an assertion of power, where power was not asserted before. If a patch of land lay between your garden and your neighbour’s, which had previously belonged to you but had then (thanks to your financial troubles) been mortgaged, and your neighbour then bought it and put up large signs on the fence saying ‘Keep Out or Else!’, who would be the aggressor?

 

 

‘Horace continues’ : ‘ Russia must be forced out of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova one way or another. It has plenty of its own land. Strangely it does not support separatism within its own borders, yet initiates a bogus 'insurgency' in Ukraine. The sooner Ukraine joins both Nato and the EU, the better it will be for them and for peace in Europe.’

 

***I reply ‘Must’? Why ‘must’? Who says? For whose benefit? Better for whom?  Is ‘Horace’ prepared to die, or for members of his family to die, in this cause? Is he ready to send other people’s sons, brothers, fathers and husbands to die in this cause? For what end? To prove that history repeats itself?

 

 

 

 

Mr ‘Bunker’  writes: ‘Of course there is no Greater Germany today (but I know what Mr Hitchens means), only a much Lesser Germany integrated together with 27 other countries into the EU. And it is a democratic country that has little to do with the terrible events prior to 1949 except in the memories of those old enough to have been alive then. For the vast majority of Germans today, that is all "history". They have to come to terms with it, but that is another matter entirely, and, I claim, has little, if anything, to do with present-day relations with Russia.’

 

****And I reply : Nations, unless destroyed, remain much the same. They still need food, land on which to grow it, labour, raw materials, markets, access to the sea. Germany, much the same shape that it was in in 1914, has the same needs and the same obvious solutions to them. These solutions were dreamed up by civilised liberals much like those who rule Germany today. I would imagine most Germans, like most British people, are poorly informed about the real nature of politics. It that does not mean that these impulses have ceased to exist. They are just expressed, in ways clearly prefigured by Naumann and von Kuehlmann, through the means of the EU. I have dealt with this question again and again, notably in this article: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/some-thoughts-on-german-domination-of-the-european-union.html

 

 

‘The Wiki Man writes:  ‘And if you say the EU is not 'aggressively expanding' you are deemed to be a 'denier'. If you say that Russian tanks rolling over the border is in fact aggression you are deemed to be an ignoramus of history. Apparently Ukraine's sovereign statehood and membership of the United Nations in that capacity is as nothing compared with Russia's 'legitimate sphere of influence'. And if you say that the corrupt Yanukovych was ousted by a revolutionary groundswell, the pro-Russian faction on this blog become all precious about the meaning of 'legitimacy'. Never mind the hundreds of 'illegitimate' revolutions in history that have unseated intolerable regimes and gone on to establish presumably illegitimate democracies. The American Revolutionary War was one of them. ‘ 

 

****And I reply: Well, if the Wiki Man (whom I have never called a ‘denier’) paid any attention to the facts I ceaselessly adduced, and could learn to tell propaganda from fact, he wouldn’t have so much trouble. He may redefine legitimacy any way he likes.  He won’t get round the fact that the current government of Ukraine came to power following a lawless unconstitutional putsch, and- whatever you think about that – simply cannot be portrayed as the shining vanguard of law-governed democracy. One or the other. Not both. I might point out that the American Revolution derived its legitimacy form its accurate complaint that the 13 colonies were taxed by Westminster, but not represented there. The violent putschists of the Euromaidan overthrew a government elected in what even its enemies concede were free and fair elections.