By Bruce Walker, AMERICAN THINKER
The gradual re-conquest of the old Soviet empire by a former officer of the Soviet Gestapo ought to worry us a lot. If Putin succeeds in making Ukraine a virtual vassal of Moscow, then all the other appendages of that empire – the Baltic States, the Warsaw Pact members, Belorussia, Transcaucasia, and the sprawling Muslim nations that were once part of the Soviet Union – will have begun, willing or not, to gravitate back to Great Russia.
The question is not ideology, as it seemed to be in the Cold War. Hillary actually came close to the truth in her speech on March 5. This is nationalism, augmented by the desire of a strongman, in control of an economically fraught nation, to make his people feel that foreign nations are the problem.
Ideology is not the problem. In fact, ideology was not the problem during the Cold War. No sane person thought so by 1968, when Moscow ended the rule of Czech Communism and the “Prague Spring” by asserting the right of Russia to intervene when other communists nations went astray. The Brezhnev Doctrine, which came out of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, represented the nationalistic hegemony of Russia in the whole of Eastern Europe.
What we are seeing in the creation of today’s Putin Doctrine is the reassertion of the right of Great Russians to organize Eastern Europe as they think fit. In the decade after the First World War, the Bolshevik Regime in Moscow, which at first had disavowed any imperialist claims, reversed itself, and Lenin, who had proclaimed that “imperialism” was the last stage of capitalism, reabsorbed into the Great Russian Empire most those lands that caused people to call Tsarist Russia the “Prison House of Nations.”
In 1945, the erstwhile ally of Hitler, the Soviet Union, was able to make subject states of the rest of Eastern Europe. Throughout this period of Great Russian empire-building, the Ukraine held decisive importance as by far the largest nation outside Russia in the region, with a population greater than France’s and agricultural and industrial power equal to a major power in Europe. When the Soviet Empire dissolved, the critical loss was Ukraine, without which the Russian Federation shrank to a size only half of the old Soviet Union.
Nationalism motivated by strongmen has proven the catalyst for great wars in Europe. Ominously, these wars have come when few saw war on the horizon. The absorption of the Ukraine back into the Empire of Great Russia ruled by Putin is the biggest single annexation of one nation by another since that last time Great Russia consumed Ukrainian independence over ninety years ago. If the Ukraine is truly gone, and Russia is suddenly fifty million greater, then it is hard to see what can stop more and more Great Russian pressure on the remaining and smaller parts of its own empires of tsar and Bolsheviks.
Western Europe is already being slowly poisoned by a sovereign debt crisis that seems certain to sink the government finances of nations like Spain and Italy. These same nations face a slow native birth rate, with the high immigration of Muslims and high birth rates among those Muslims in Western Europe. Add to that a dread of war and a dependence upon energy and trade with Russia, and the survival of those restraints upon Great Russian dreams of new empire that nations like Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland have represented become even more vital to preserving peace.
The Obama Doctrine, assuming that there is such a thing, seems to be that America should be meek and apologetic throughout the world, except, perhaps, to slight our truest allies like Britain and Israel. America, our president appears to believe, is the author of all mischief in the world, which is a notion so perverse and profoundly silly that only a leftist could believe it.
Until now, the costs of Obama’s deconstruction of American influence in the world have been largely hidden from view. If Ukraine is forced to rejoin its Slavic overlord of Great Russia because our nation now has no power to stop this calamity, then the stakes will have increased dramatically in a world already snarling with serpents in Pyongyang and Tehran.
Ukraine matters. Ukraine as a free and independent nation insured that no world wars could begin in Europe. That check on madness, it seems, is now gone. The peace of Europe now rests with a man who grew to power in the bowels of the KGB, the most monstrous organization in the world. What can we do now? Not much.
yamit82 Said:
Darlin, your beginning to sound like Gov., Perry!!!!!!!!
Terribly stupid article.
The main center of attention of the US administration in foreign policy is: The future of the Palestinians!!!! Everything else comes 2nd.
Russia has influence over Western European countries because of its oil. USA can supply them with their oil needs if the current US Administration is willing to do so. Because of its ideology until another administration takes over, oil export to Europe may not be possible. Without their oil needs met, Europe won’t be able to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine as well as others under the former USSR control.
@ LtCol Howard:
@ Ted Belman:
And I shall remove my hex immediately.
I value what Yamit has to say also. The comments he spoke of were release 2 days ago. They were hiding in Spam, not Moderation. The reason that they were put there was because they exceeded the maximum length. I am sometimes a bit slower to check Spam. I’ll try harder.
Please post Yamit 82 comments immediately.
He has strong opinions, presents a lot of useful information and many unique insights.
We all benefit from his participation and delay of his comments deprives us of the benefit of reacting to (strongly agreeing, or strongly disagreeing) with his contributions.
So Ted, please post them unfiltered and let us consider them.
yamit82 Said:
No horns either nice round smooth pink tender [running out of adjs.] flesh.
honeybee Said:
Nice, Real Nice of you, You need a good whuppin and you know where.. 😛
@ yamit82:
NANY NANY HA HA I GOT A HEX ON YOU
Comment in moderation for the 50th time in 3 days. Thanks a lot.
The cold war was never ended only the balance of relative power hid the fact along with the naivety of Americans who wished to believe what they wanted despite the evidence to the contrary.
Russia pulled the same gambit when they invaded Georgia and South Ossetia when Bush was President and America did nothing then. Russia forced America to cancel Missile Defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic because the Russians threated to counter with their own systems in Kaliningrad ( formerly called Königsberg, is a seaport city and the administrative center of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea).
Ukraine occupies a very bloody place in the history of Eastern Europe. Sandwiched between Poland, Austro-Hungary and Russia and being neither Polish nor Russian in language, faith and ethnic culture, it always found itself in a very bad neighborhood. Stalin and Khruschev starved five million Ukrainians to death in the 1920s to enforce their agricultural collectivization program. Much of Ukraine served as the battlefield between the German and Russian armies during World War II.
Ukrainian nationalism was squashed by the heavy hand of the Soviet Union until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Putin, in his inimitable fashion, mocks the impotence of the United States and the West and things look fairly bleak for the future of Ukrainian independence. There is no one in the Ukraine, I believe, that thinks that the United States or the European Union is prepared to ride to Ukraine’s rescue. And so, like many other countries, Israel included, Ukraine has the bad fortune of having to live in a very bad neighborhood.
Why I don’t give a damn about the Ukraine and believe they are deserving of whatever the Russians and Putin meet out to them.
The great pogroms of 1648 and 1649 that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews were led by the Ukrainian nationalist Bogdan Chmeilitzki. There is a statue in his honor in the main square of the city of Kiev. To Ukrainians he is a national hero. To the Jews he is recorded in our history as a villain first-class, a murderer of women and children and is listed together with Haman and Hitler in the unsavory pantheon of Jew haters and anti-Semites.
In World War II and the ensuing Holocaust, a substantial number of Ukrainians served in the SS, were camp guards in the concentration and killing camps and were willing collaborators with the Nazis in rounding up the local Jewish population for deportation and murder. Now naturally the Ukrainians were no different than most of the populations of Europe in the 1940s. What is pretty clear though is that most Ukrainians would prefer their country to be judenrein.
It seems to me that those Jews living in Ukraine and who somehow have not previously absorbed the lessons of Jewish history regarding Ukraine and the Jews would do well now to think again about remaining there.
Whatever the future of the Ukraine will be, it should be obvious that there really is no Jewish future possible there. It is perplexing and fascinating at one and the same time to witness how the Lord is staging this drama for us in this season of the year. Purim begins Next Sunday Eve.
This has nothing to do with nationalism and everything to do with religion. The neo-Nazis taking over Ukraine are the same people behind the bloody war over the collapse of Yugoslavia. They are Catholics. The Russians are Russian Orthodox. In the former Yugoslavia, the ones who were on the defensive were Serbs, Serbian Orthodox up against the Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and the Catholics in Slovenia and Croatia. Croatia in particular were an independent cleric fascist state aligned with the Nazis during WWII and they committed horrible genocide against the Serbs living in Croatia. And also these Ukrainians were aligned with the Nazis during WWII and committed genocide against the Jewish population.
Crimea was artificially attached to Ukraine by the Ukrainian Kruschev. If the Soviet Union was a tool of Russian Imperialism, then we would have seen more Russian leadership as head of the Communist party dictatorship. But few of the people in that position were Russian. Kruschev was Ukrainian. Stalin was Georgian. Gorbachev was also Ukrainian. All poor candidates for Russian nationalists.