.
All week, young
toughs in Moscow have besieged the Estonian embassy to
harass Ambassador Marina Kaljurand.
Her bodyguards had to use a mace-like spray to drive
back the thugs, who call Estonia a "fascist country."
Estonian diplomats and their families are being pulled
out of Moscow and sent home.
Relations between
the countries are about to rupture, if the Kremlin does
not reign in the bully-boys.
Behind this nasty
quarrel is the decision by Estonia to move the
giant statue of a Red Army soldier, and the remains
of Soviet soldiers, from the center of its capital,
Tallinn, to a military cemetery. In Tallinn, patriots
and nationalists have clashed with citizens of Russian
ancestry over the perceived insult to Mother Russia and
the "liberators" of Estonia from the Nazis.
Both points of view
in this quarrel are understandable.
To Russians, who
lost millions of their grandfathers, fathers and uncles
in the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army liberated
Europe from Nazism, and their sacrifices ought to be
honored. And the Estonians are a pack of ingrates.
To Estonians, the
Red Army did not liberate anyone. Having won their
independence from the Russian Empire in World War I,
they were raped by Russia—to whom they had been ceded as
part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In June 1940, the Red
Army stormed into the three Baltic republics, butchered
the elites and shipped scores of thousands off to
Stalin`s labor camps never to be seen again.
While the Soviets
were expelled from the Baltic republics by the Germans
in 1941, they returned in 1944 and held the Baltic
peoples in captivity until the Evil Empire collapsed. It
was only then that Estonia regained her independence and
freedom.
Why should
Estonians honor a Red Army that brutalized them and,
after driving out the Germans, re-enslaved them for half
a century?
Why should this
issue be of interest to America?
If
President Putin decide the Estonians need a lesson,
and sends troops to teach it, the United States, under
NATO, would have to treat Russian intervention in
Estonia as an attack upon the United States, and declare
war on behalf of Estonia.
So we come face to
face with the idiocy of
having moved NATO onto Russia`s front porch, and
having given war guarantees to three little nations with
historic animosities toward a nuclear power that has the
ability to inflict 1,000 times the destruction upon us
as Iran.
Latvia, too, is now a member
of NATO. And Latvia, too, has a quarrel with Moscow over
its treatment of the descendants of those Russians whom
Stalin moved into Latvia to alter its ethnic character.
Their children and grandchildren have grown up in
Latvia, and know no other home, though they are
unwelcome to ethnic Latvians.
Settling these
quarrels is essential to peace in Europe. But the notion
that Russian intervention in a Baltic republic should be
met by a U.S. declaration of war, or any attack upon a
nation with thousands of atomic weapons, is the
definition of insanity.
Nor are these the
only quarrels we have with Putin`s Russia that could
explode into full-blown crises. Washington has persuaded
the Czech Republic and Poland, two former Warsaw Pact
countries, to accept radars and missiles for a U.S.
anti-missile system.
We say the missile
defense system is directed at Iran. Russians see it as
of a piece with the move eastward of NATO and targeted
at them. Can we blame them for so thinking, when we
responded to their pullout of troops from Central and
Eastern Europe by bringing Central and Eastern Europe
into a U.S.-led alliance?
If the
Russia-baiters in this capital have their way, Ukraine
and Georgia will also be brought into NATO. That would
commit us to go to war with Russia over control of the
Crimean peninsula and the Russian-speaking Donbass of
eastern Ukraine, and over the birthplace of Stalin and
who should control South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
"Moscow would
not dare intervene in the Baltic republics!" comes the retort. Perhaps not. But the Russians are now fiercely
nationalistic and anti-American. And it is always a
mistake for a great power to cede to a minor power the
ability to draw it into a great war. Just as it is
always a mistake to hand out war guarantees one cannot
honor.
In March 1939,
Britain gave a war guarantee to Polish colonels who had
not requested it, a guarantee Britain had no way of
fulfilling. The war that followed cost Britain her
empire and Poland 50 years of freedom.
In August 1914,
King Albert of Belgium informed King George V that the
Kaiser`s troops had crossed his border. He invoked a
treaty assuring Belgian neutrality that the British had
signed—in
1839!
So, Britain
declared war, and 700,000 Brits perished in the Great
War that hurled the West onto its present path of
self-destruction.
And the march of
folly continues on.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan needs
no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,
can be ordered from
Amazon.com.
