How the pictures are alike: Russia 1914 – Russia 2022
January 22, 2022 | Author: Andreas Unterberger
Pretty much in this way, the First World War started. At that time, one called it "mobilization" what Russia does now a hundred years later in threatening ways. At that time, Russia has tried to force other countries to force something to something. Also then, Panslavistic expansion efforts were the internal drive for Russian action. At that time, Austria-Hungary wanted to hold off his desire that Serbia should deliver the backers of the murderer of Sarajevo; Today, a whole series of countries between Finland and Ukraine is the aim of which freedom and sovereignty is to be restricted substantially, to which undoubtedly the free decision on accession to defense bundles is heard. At that time, the Russian mobilization triggered an ominous automatic, which ultimately led to a thirty-year world war until 1945. Although (also) in 1914 nobody wanted a big catastrophe. And today?
Is it that time again? Anyone looking for further parallels between 1914 and 2022 is referred to Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers" , there he will find hundreds (without the Australian-British historian Clark even once drawing the parallels towards the present).
History can repeat itself - but it doesn't have to repeat itself. Unfortunately, we only know in retrospect whether she did it.
There are currently four levels of difficult questions to which there are no simple answers. But you still have to look for:
- What drives Vladimir Putin deep down?
- Why is he now, for no apparent reason, raising a formidable force on land and sea between northern Europe and the Black Sea?
- What does he want to achieve with it?
- How should the West react?
What drives Putin?
In any case, the aggressive Russian mobilization is primarily related to the internal weakness of the Russian leadership. Putin's charisma has, to put it politely, faded. In contrast to his earlier years, he has to have his opponents thrown into a new gulag for fear of their growing popularity. For fear of losing what is left of his popularity, it is no longer enough for him to ignore it to the death.
At the same time, the country's economy has failed completely. It never arrived in the industrial or even the service age. Instead, old communist officials helped themselves in a predatory capitalism. As a result, Russia, like a third world country, continues to have its only strength in the export of raw materials. And in a still mighty army.
These two cards, raw materials and army, are played alternately by Putin in order to distract his own population from the internal weakness and fragility of his system through conflicts with the outside world.
At the same time, he feels humiliated by the West and can transfer this feeling to the population. He doesn't understand that the West - if only out of consideration for its own population - can and will never recognize a dictatorship as qualitatively equivalent.
Russia today is undeniably – again – a dictatorship that is not even willing to meet minimum standards in terms of democracy and the rule of law. And externally, Russia attacks other countries for no reason, stealing territories from them, although it actually guaranteed them the inviolability of their borders in international treaties. Russia is also killing opposition politicians abroad. The state-organized Internet hackers cause billions in damage.
Putin is certainly also a little disappointed that the gentle hints of a climate improvement compared to the US under Donald Trump have very soon faded towards nirvana. Even Trump was soon disillusioned with Russia.
Despite the end of communism, Russia's ideological expansionism also persists. In the process, the Marxist-proletarian urge to spread – with the staff not only remaining the same in Putin’s person – was replaced by a dull ideological mixture: Consisting firstly of Russian nationalism, secondly of racial pan-Slavism, thirdly of a rollback revanchism with nostalgia for Stalin’s greatness and fourthly an anti-democratism along the lines of "Dictators of all countries unite".
Even more absurd, but still relevant, is another motive that is also involved: that is Russian paranoia, which has been proven for many centuries. Though it has long been the largest country on earth, Russia has always felt threatened and encircled, and has always wanted to expand for its own safety. sick but true
Why now without a reason?
This question is almost the easiest to answer: Putin has recognized that the West is currently weaker than ever. For many reasons.
- The West is even unable to reason with a medium-sized power like Iran when it comes to nuclear armament.
- From Afghanistan to Syria, the West is in massive retreat. The former world police officers are today dominated domestically by a "What does that have to do with us?" feeling. Where Russia or China have not already taken on the role of supreme power, medium-strong powers such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia can compete for this role.
- In the United States, a president governs with recognizable signs of aging.
- The United States is also deeply torn and weakened internally by the left-liberal "Woke" movement, the rise of black racism (which seeks revenge on past white racism) and the deep hate divide between Donald Trump's Republicans and Joe Biden's Democrats. The country has lost its stable centre.
- At the same time, from Trump to Biden, isolationism is spreading, which is also reminiscent of the early years of the 20th century.
- Moscow rightly assesses Europe as even weaker. Whole books could be written about his weakness. Therefore here only in keywords:
- With Brexit, the militarily strongest power has been expelled from the EU in frustration.
- The rest of the EU is tearing itself apart in an internal colonialism. Left-liberal-woke political correctness seeks to humiliate proud nations like Hungary and Poland for ridiculous crimes (like banning gay and "trans" propaganda in children's and school books) and bring them to their knees.
- The millionfold mass migration from Islamic and African countries has massively weakened Western Europe and in some areas turned it into a Third World country.
- In addition, there is the massive aging of the EU-Europe, which – very similar to Japan, which was important 40 years ago – is also increasingly marginalizing it demographically.
- As a result of the ECB's policy, Europeans are rapidly losing the economic strength they had for a few decades, at least north of the Alps.
- French President Macron, the only one capable of a global strategic analysis, is facing the presidential elections in his country with his back to the wall.
- The worst sore spot of the European disease, and one that Putin is of course watching particularly closely, is Germany, where the agony of the Merkel years is followed by the ridiculousness of the Scholz government, which does not agree on a single important issue, not even within the coalition.
- Europe's final self-weakening is now occurring through Germany's energy policy, despite the fact that energy is at stake a country's most important source of prosperity and strength. It is no coincidence that Russia started mobilizing at the same time as Germany shut down three nuclear power plants. This deprived the largest EU country of its last chance to become independent of Russian gas and oil.
The only thing that seems surprising is that Putin did not wait for any formal occasion where he could at least rhetorically blame foreign countries for the escalation. Rather, he immediately put the thumbscrews on the democratic world as soon as their self-weakening became clear and irreversible: keyword Scholz, keyword Biden, keyword turning off the nuclear power plants. Apparently he fears – quite surprisingly – that the West could regain strength if it waits.
What does Putin want to achieve?
Like the tsars and then even more so Stalin, he wants a belt of occupied states around Russia that are wholly or semi-dependent. He does not want to grant full sovereignty to Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, or Georgia. He wants to make rules for them that restrict them more and more.
Some naïve people, like British Prime Minister Chamberlain in Munich in 1938, think: If you let him have his way and stop being a member of NATO and stationing troops, then you'll have peace, it's not so bad. However, these naïve people do not understand: as soon as these states can no longer defend themselves, it is gradually over for them. Then they will be similar to Belarus, that is, willless satellites of Russia. Belarus also fought for its independence from Moscow for a number of years, until step by step its regime, like Kazakhstan, became completely dependent on Russian troops and thus Russian orders.
Russia, on the other hand, is unwilling to take reciprocal steps: it is not offering for a second similar disarmament, permanent demobilization and a relinquishment of offensive arms along the line of its present sphere of influence as is being demanded of the pro-Western states west of that line.
Such a mutual offer would be worth examining and might even promote peace. The one-sided demand for a recolonization of this area, on the other hand, is not only degrading for the affected peoples and a mockery of the principle of the sovereignty of states under international law, which Moscow always emphasizes, but also clearly promotes war.
One-sided dictates under the threat of a mobilization of more than 100,000 men are a typical preparation for an attack, even if one protests that one does not want to attack under any circumstances. It is precisely these assurances that make Putin's deployment so dangerous. They are meant to appease the West while you arm yourself. Putin was not even able to give an acceptable reason for his mobilization.
What should the West do?
Of course, the West wants and should do everything possible to ensure that war does not break out despite Russian mobilization. But he can make himself much less susceptible to blackmail, because then the Russian demands will become more and more aggressive. Just as the gradual yielding to Adolf Hitler only encouraged him to go further and further. See Saarland, see Austria, see Czechoslovakia.
But instead of the pathetic whimpering about negotiations and the even more ridiculous screeching that Europe should sit at the negotiating table given Europe's inability to act, the following would be urgently needed in the face of clear and clearly unprovoked aggression:
- Intensive efforts for Europe's energy independence from Russia. In particular, this would include enlarging the technical structures for importing liquid gas. This would also include the reactivation of the mothballed German nuclear power plants. In other words, instead of saving the planet, the primary concern should be to save Europe. Saving from a dictator who once again sees it as easy prey.
- Rapid reconciliation with Great Britain, even if it is no longer in the EU.
- Rapid delivery of all necessary defensive weapons to the Ukraine, which is firstly willing to fight and secondly has been crying out for such weapons for a long time. So far, however, left-wing pacifists and friends of Russia have prevented this, especially in Germany. By refusing to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs for self-defense, Germany's left-wing government has become Russia's most important ally.
- Clear determination that any step across borders will result in a permanent halt and dismantling of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
- Clear listing of other sanctions that will automatically be imposed on Russia in the event of an attack, such as being banned from international financial platforms.
- Calling on Ukraine to immediately stop political criminal trials, particularly those against former President Poroshenko.
- preparation of a guerrilla war, which the majority of Ukrainians are ready for in the event of a Russian occupation,
- Of course, the hardest part is the last necessity, which would probably also be unavoidable in the event of a Russian attack: that would be reconciliation with the Turkish dictator Erdogan. Of course, this is only possible by holding your nose firmly and remembering that even Hitler could only be defeated when the West allied itself with another dictator who was even worse than Erdogan. There is no alternative to this step since Russia, China and Iran have scheduled joint naval maneuvers.
This can only be interpreted as the last step towards a military alliance between the three most dangerous dictatorships in the world. This cooperation also makes it finally clear: the world faces the greatest danger of an escalation overnight, at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
PS: Austria is not included in this analysis. Rightly so. After all, there are no traces of a strategically thinking foreign or security policy in this country. Certainly the country, surrounded by nothing but NATO states and Switzerland, can still feel relatively safe. It would be all the more important to have a clear public statement from the mouth of an Austrian Federal President, Federal Chancellor or Foreign Minister, as the President of Finland, the country with the longest direct border to Russia, has just said: "We want to be able to decide for ourselves whether we want to join a security alliance ." And in Sweden, also a neutral country, there has been a demonstrative move towards NATO in recent weeks.
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