¡No Pasarán!: 20 Years After Half of Europe Was Freed, a New Wall Is Being Built: on the Sovereign Territory of Georgia

20 Years After Half of Europe Was Freed, a New Wall Is Being Built: on the Sovereign Territory of Georgia

posted by Erik @ 11:28

As Europe remembers the shame of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939 and the Munich agreement of 1938, and as it prepares to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall and the iron curtain in 1989, one question arises in our minds: Have we learned the lessons of history? Put another way, are we able to avoid repeating the mistakes that cast such a dark shadow over the 20th century?

A dozen European luminaries, several of them leaders from the former Soviet block (Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Mart Laar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Otto de Habsbourg, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, André Glucksmann, Mark Leonard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adam Michnik, and Josep Ramoneda), sign an article in Le Monde called Le test géorgien, un nouveau Munich ? Is the Georgian Test a New Munich? they councel action from the the European Union, which, they remind us, "was built against the temptation of Munich and the iron curtain."

In order for the … historic commemorations to be meaningful both for Europe's collective identity and for its future, we urge the EU's 27 democratic leaders to define a proactive strategy to help Georgia peacefully regain its territorial integrity and obtain the withdrawal of Russian forces illegally stationed on Georgian soil.

…a big power will always find or engineer a pretext to invade a neighbour whose independence it resents. We should remember that Hitler accused the Poles of commencing hostilities in 1939, just as Stalin pinned the blame on the Finns when he invaded their country in 1940. Similarly, in the case of Georgia and Russia, the critical question is to determine which country invaded the other, rather than which soldier shot the first bullet.

As Le Monde's readers castigate the article, one of them writes:

Beaucoup d’européens et de français défendaient l’idée que l’annexion des Sudètes était conforme au droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes…Effectivement, la situation présente énormément de similitudes avec la situation en 39/39: L’europe libérale de l’ouest ne veut pas se battre pour de lointains alliés et est adepte d’idéologies américano/anglo-phobes qui amènent les foules à soutenir hier l’Allemagne nazie et/ou URSS et aujourd’hui Poutine.

Beaucoup de lecteurs du Monde ne réalisent pas une chose fondamentale concernant les pays de l’ex Europe de l’est:ils se sont toujours méfiés de la Russie expansionniste et se méfient de l’Europe de l’ouest qui les a trop souvent abandonnés aux ambitions impérialistes et totalitaires de la Russie.Cette sensibilité explique leur attachement à l’OTAN. On doit les écouter et oublier nos réflexes pro-cocos/pro-soviets/anti-US si nous voulons construire l’Europe politique et militaire avec ces Etats.

Previous Posts...

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

20 Years After Half of Europe Was Freed, a New Wall Is Being Built: on the Sovereign Territory of Georgia