Vladimir Putin has been preparing for this moment ever since the Berlin Wall, like Humpty Dumpty, came tumbling down. The eight oil pipe lines that run across Ukraine from Russia to Europe traverse sacred ground, for it was Ukraine that bore the brunt of Josef Stalin’s man made famine in 1932-33.
Germany – which, unlike Ukraine, is a part of NATO – may have
forgotten its Berlin Wall. It’s been twenty seven years since former President
Ronald Reagan visited Germany and shouted to free Western Germans within sight
of the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall.”
To be sure, Mr. Reagan had some help in dismantling the
Soviet Union from Pope John Paul II, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of "The
Gulag Archipelago," Mr. Gorbachev, and the bloody history of the “evil empire,” which
included Stalin’s man made famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor,
in the course of which some five to eight million Ukrainians starved to death,
losing both their lives and their country, the forcible incorporation into the
Soviet Union of free states, including what Winston Churchill later would call in
his “Iron Curtain Speech” the great cities of Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague,
Bucharest and Sofia.
Mr. Reagan also had some help from Saudi Arabia, which
agreed to drop the price of its oil, resulting in less demand for oil from Soviet
Russia. Fewer petrodollars, powerful voices in the West raised in unison
against oppression, along with a military buildup and the prospect of a defense
shield, upended the Soviet Union. Like planets seeking their natural orbits
following a reduction in gravitational pull from totalitarian Russia, former
satellites of the Soviet Union reached accommodations with the West and Europe.
After a century of partitioning, Poland was free. Indeed, there were some in
the West who thought Poland was free the moment the Pope’s foot touched the
soil of his native country. Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Hungary were free. The
great cities of Eastern Europe were free at last.
In March, 1957, the great apostle of liberty in France,
Albert Camus, grieving over the loss of so many lives following the brutal
crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, wrote his essay, “Kadar Had His Day Of Fear.” Kadar was the Soviet’s man in Hungary. No suppression of the patriotic
longing for liberty and solidarity is possible without the enthusiastic co-operation
of the Kadars of the world.
This is what Camus wrote as the Hungarian Revolution was
being suppressed by Soviet troops:
“I am not one of those who long for
the Hungarian people to take up arms again in an uprising doomed to be crushed
under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor
virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like football enthusiasts on
Saturday evening after a big game. There are already too many dead in the
stadium, and we can be generous only with our own blood. Hungarian blood has
proved to be so valuable to Europe and to freedom that we must try to spare
every drop of it.
“But I am not one to think there
can be even a resigned or provisional compromise with a reign of terror that
has as much right to be called socialist as the executioners of the Inquisition
had to be called Christians. And, on this anniversary of liberty, I hope with
all my strength that the mute resistance of the Hungarian people will continue,
grow stronger, and, echoed by all the voices we can give it, get unanimous
international opinion to boycott its oppressors. And if that opinion is too flabby or
selfish to do justice to a martyred people, if our voices also are too weak, I
hope that the Hungarian resistance will continue until the
counter-revolutionary state collapses everywhere in the East under the weight
of its lies and its contradictions.”
After oceans of blood were shed, after Stalin had starved
into submission the people of Ukraine, after Winston Churchill had warned in a
speech given in the United States that slowly but inexorably an Iron Curtain of
oppression was descending over the great cities of Europe, after Solzhenitsyn began
to draw back the covers on the Soviet’s vast Gulag, after the Pope’s foot had
touched down in Poland, reifying the resistance in Eastern Europe, after Reagan’s
challenge to Gorbachev, what Camus called “the counter-revolutionary state” did
collapse everywhere in the East "under the weight of its lies and contradictions.”
And so today, as Soviet ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin
threatens Europe with a stoppage of a flow of oil, as he labels “neo-Nazis” the
children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the small farmers his idol
Stalin had shipped off to the Gulag, as he begins to turn against the West
the stratagems used effectively by Reagan to hasten the collapse of the
counter-revolutionary state, the West looks about in vain for a Churchill or a
Solzhenitsyn or a Camus or a Reagan.
Comments
As Don Rumsfeld says, options are few when we've driven ourselves into a cul de sac. And, driving into a cul de sac is more likely when our commander in chief is driving while purposeless. Driving with no purpose all that can be done when the commander doesn't care about our country or its interests vis a vis the other nations on the planet.
The U.S. very probably has more commitments abroad than we are capable of keeping. (And, certainly more than Obama is either interested in or capable of keeping.) A reconsideration of our national interests after the Cold War has not been accomplished except in a hap hazard, ad hoc, reactionary manner. It's not to say we have no interest in Ukraine, just to say that I haven't heard a public discussion about what it might be, and I haven't heard a declaration of our interest there from any Prez since 1989. While the U.S. has an interest in upholding the law of nations, if not in upholding the "human rights" clap-trap, international law is not in and of itself sufficient to justify military action. (I believe, at this point, that I was mistaken to have supported the 1990 Gulf War.)
Whatever our international commitments, our military should be strong, or as strong as possible given the pressure our welfare state will be putting on the budget. President Obama is cutting the military budget with no consideration to national interest, without establishing what our actual military needs might be. And, his feckless policies have created a power vacuum from northern Africa, through the middle East, to the South China Sea. We need to pray not only that things don't completely fall apart in the next three years, but also that we'll be able in the course of the coming years to fix the messes this worst of Presidents will have left.
And, let's pray that Conrad Black is correct in his relatively cheery prognostication.
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Ukraine Will Prevail
By Conrad Black
March 5, 2014 7:00 AM
From my most recent NRO article, on Putin’s overreach and the future of Ukraine: “Ukraine will be independent, possibly after a partition to save Russia’s ill-favored face, possibly even after repulsing a general Russian assault, and it will join the West. German influence will prevail over Russian in Eastern Europe, and the West will ultimately show Russia the way to being a great nationality not only in cultural, folkloric, and geographic terms, but as a civil society.”