Nailing SA flag to despotic Russian mast compromises values
WINSTON Churchill, the dour co-creator of the postwar world, once famously described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Less reported, however, was the actual point he was making. “But perhaps,” he said, “there is a key. The key is Russian national interest.”
It was October 1939, the beginning of World War 2 . A year later Churchill was prime minister. Neville Chamberlain’s notorious Munich agreement with Hitler had sparked a rebellion in the governing Conservative Party. Hitler cynically saw the pact as a licence to invade Czechoslovakia. The war escalated.
Churchill told the House of Commons: “England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, but will get war.”
Chamberlain was forced to resign. Churchill went on to rally the populace against the war and acquit himself as the master strategist. The campaign created strange bedfellows; the Soviet Union lined up alongside western allies against Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union did most of the fighting against the Germans, and suffered the biggest number of casualties as a result. More than 20 million Russians are estimated to have lost their lives during the war.
With Hitler defeated, the Big Three — Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — met in Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 to divvy up the spoils of war. Stalin got pretty much what he wanted.
The whole of eastern Europe came under the Soviet sphere of influence, providing a counterweight to US power. With the unifying distaste for the Nazis finally removed, the world was divided between East and West, between communism and capitalism.
It was Churchill — rejected by an ungrateful British electorate after securing the peace — who in March 1946 was to give voice to the new reality. In Fulton, Missouri, with US president Harry Truman among the 40 000 in attendance, Churchill gave what is regarded as perhaps one of his most famous speeches.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” he said. And so the cold war was born. That division led to the biggest arms race in human history. It was to leave the Soviet Union splintered, bankrupt and humiliated, and communism as an ideology utterly discredited. The collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated throughout the world.
South Africa, for instance, lost its appeal as an anti-communist bastion. That contributed to a relatively smooth transition to democracy.
The gloating in western capitals after the fall of the Soviet empire only rubbed salt in the wound in Moscow. A bankrupt and corrupt Russia could only watch helplessly as its former satellite states, free of the Soviet yoke, rushed off to align themselves with the West.
Neoconservatives in Washington spoke giddily about a unipolar world where the US would have untrammelled power. Regime change became a new stick to be waved at wayward despots.
It is important to take into account these developments if Vladimir Putin’s aggression is to be understood. The Russian bear is a wounded animal and is intent on biting back. In fact, Putin said in a 2005 speech in Munich that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. It follows, therefore, that his aim is to restore Russia, if not the Soviet Union, to its former power and glory.
He is short, like Stalin. But he is walking in the footsteps of Hitler.
The similarities are striking: an appeal to national sentiments across borders, a plebiscite and then a takeover.
Hitler used the so-called Sudeten Germans to annexe part of Czechoslovakia. Putin used the same tactics to take over Crimea, and may well do the same in eastern Ukraine. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov this week referred to Russian-speaking Ukrainians as Russia’s interest.
Putin has thrown international conventions out of the window. He has run rings around Barack Obama. He does not have a congress to worry about. We are back to a situation almost akin to the cold war where East and West glared at each other across the trenches.
It makes the resolution of international dispute difficult. Syria, for instance, remains a gaping sore.
Smaller countries, such as South Africa, are caught in the crossfire.
But South Africa, bereft of a guiding principle or philosophy in its conduct of foreign policy, seems to have hitched its wagon to Russia.
Recently it was party to a Brics statement which pooh-poohed criticism of Russia’s takeover of Crimea. And on Syria, it has marched in step with Putin.
Russia is also to play a huge role in our nuclear policy. We are becoming Russia’s client state in its fight for supremacy against the US. Aligning ourselves with leaders who behave in such a rash and irresponsible fashion will make it difficult to take independent policies and stances that are in accord with our values.