Exactly 76 years ago today, an autocratic nationalistic dictator stood in Vienna and declared: The oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich. As leader and chancellor of the German nation and Reich I announce to German history now the entry of my homeland into the German Reich. Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier (into Austria) there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators. Several days earlier, German soldiers crossed the border and forcefully occupied Austria. The German government claimed that Austria was in a state of rioting and civil disorder, and that the Austrians had begged Germany to use its army to restore order. None of that was true of course, but it didnt matter to a government that was intent on violating international treaties to forcefully integrate new territory on the basis that they and the people living there had a common ethnicity. A month later, a referendum was held to legitimize the annexation, but of course it was already a fait-accompli. The official results claimed that 99.73% of voters had voted to join Germany. Today of course, a similar sham of a referendum is about to be orchestrated in Crimea tomorrow, in which the voters will select from one of two choices: join Russia, or remain independent. There will be no option on the ballot to rejoin Ukraine. Already, the occupying government is detaining and harassing opponents of the referendum. And already, Russia has massed its armies on the border of eastern Ukraine, and has used claims of riots in Donetsk to assert its right to protect its people there in Ukraine. If Putins expansionism is unchallenged in Ukraine, where will it end? Will claims be made on Transnistria in Moldova, which is already occupied by the Russian Army? When the Lukashenko regime, Russias puppet in Belarus, falls (as it will, eventually), will Russia once again launch a 1956/68 style invasion on the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians (of which Belarus has plenty). Should Kazakhstan and Latvia, both with sizable ethnic Russian populations of their own, fear a Russian Anschluss? Poland (invaded three times by the USSR in the 20th century), Lithuania and Latvia (both illegally annexed by the USSR per an agreement with Hitler and held until 1991) apparently all take the situation seriously enough to invoke Article 4 of NATO, alerting the rest of the alliance to the potential for them to be attacked. Once again, the free world is confronted with an ethnocentric autocrat who uses deception as well as naked aggression to enforce his territorial ambitions on to defenseless neighbors. Will Putin be disabused of the notion that he is some 18th Century Tzar Of All Rus?
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 04:42:20 +0000
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