How Extensive are Putin’s War Aims?

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Let’s put aside, for the sake of this article, the issue of state sovereignty and the inviolability of borders, and examine the Ukraine war through the lens of ethnicity. First, some history.

We can all agree that from the instant he took power in Germany, Adolf Hitler was a monster, who committed arguably the greatest crimes in known human history. (My own parents were in a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War.)

But from January 1933 through to the Munich Crisis in September 1938, all his territorial acquisitions were irredentist. This is a term that refers to the belief that a territory inhabited by a population having the same identity, but now living in a different jurisdiction, should be reclaimed by the nation. Combined with extreme nationalism, it is a dangerous combination but is technically containable.

When Hitler’s troops marched into the Saarland in 1936, followed in 1938 by Austria and then the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, they were all German-majority entities which (to their shame!) welcomed the Nazis. Maybe that’s part of the reason British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave way to Hitler’s demands at the notorious Munich conference.

Hitler only became a full-fledged imperialist when he marched into the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939. And, of course, in his invasion of Poland later that September, it became clear he was out to conquer and destroy non-German nations.

Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, when he took his share of Poland that same month, was actually also an irredentist, as these were areas with Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian majorities. He even returned Lithuanian-majority Vilnius to the still-sovereign Lithuania. But Stalin too became an imperialist when he attacked Finland that December, and in 1940 when he grabbed the three Baltic republics.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, a sovereign Ukraine was one of the states that emerged, within the same boundaries it possessed as a Soviet republic. Ukraine had been a distinct political entity only as a Soviet republic, and approximately one-sixth of Ukraine’s 44 million people were ethnically Russian. The new country was effectively a binational state, with ethnic Ukrainians and Russians fairly equal in terms of political power.

This changed in 2014 when nationalistic Ukrainians took over the country, leaving the Russian minorities, most of whom live adjacent to Russia, fearful. It was at that point that Russian President Vladimir Putin took control of Crimea, while separatist Russians in the Donbas areas of Donetks and Luhansk created de facto statelets. And so the current crisis began. 

The question now regarding Putin is this: is he being an irredentist, wishing to conquer and keep ethnically Russian and Russophone parts of Ukraine – Crimea, the Donbas region, and maybe Novorossiya (New Russia), areas that had never been ethnically Ukrainian? Or is he now an imperialist, wishing to conquer all of Ukraine (and perhaps even more of Europe)?

This is actually a distinction with a difference, regardless of the horrific atrocities now being committed, because it will have a bearing on how to end this conflict without it spiraling completely out of control.

If there is no possible road to peace, it may turn into a wider NATO-Russian war and a potential nuclear conflagration causing incalculable damage. That disastrous outcome would leave much of Europe and North America in ruins for the foreseeable future.

 

 

Sacrament of Reconciliation

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Rwandan genocide that began in April 1994 unfolded with shocking speed. It only lasted around 100 days but left hundreds of thousands dead.

There were too many genocide perpetrators for the courts to try, so the government instituted gacaca courts in the villages, based on traditional Rwandan judicial principles. The prisons filled up with those convicted.

There have been some positive instances of reconciliation in Rwanda since then. Although the government has been involved in most, some have been facilitated through the Roman Catholic Church.

While Catholicism is the majority religion practised in Rwanda there was a loss in the moral credibility of the church. Throughout the genocide, many Rwandans turned to places of worship to seek refuge from violence, only to be turned away, resulting in so many deaths that churches throughout the nation became hosts to mass graves.

During the genocide, even priests and nuns were known to have committed murders. “People had faith in their religion,” Rev. Nathan Gasatura, the Bishop of Butare, said.

“It is a shame that some churches and religious leaders that were supposed to protect people ended up participating in the mass killings instead. It completely changed everything. Many people switched religions after that.”

But at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Kabuga and the Mushaka Holy Spirit Church in Mushaka Parish, Rwandans have come together and using faith as progress towards reconciliation.

The healing occurring at each of these places of worship is very different. In Kabuga, many have begun to re-experience their faith through a series of ceremonies. Throughout these, there is a heavy association between the crucifixion of Jesus and the suffering of the genocide.

A physical statue of Jesus is moved throughout multiple locations to represent the stages of his suffering. On Good Friday Jesus is removed from his place on the cross into one of the many on-site chapels.

There is a ceremony of burial held for Jesus which reflects traditional local burial customs. A vigil is held in which participants place flowers atop Jesus as offerings which can be seen to foster a sense of unity.

The symbolism of its relation to the genocide can be seen in the act of burying “genocide weapons” such as machetes, grenades, clubs, and spears at the feet of Christ the next morning.

Confessions are written on slips of paper and placed in a basket next to the physical representation of Jesus and are burned weekly to free visitors of guilt or shame they may feel linked to their experiences of the genocide.

This form of worship is referred to as “popular piety,” in which Jesus serves as the “sacrament of reconciliation.” Individuals can visit the site at any time of the day or night making it accessible to all within the community.

At the Mushaka Parish, relationships between those who are returning to the community having served their time for crimes they committed during the genocide, and those who may be considered victims of their crimes, have come together through the church. Each group is assisted for six months before a reconciliation ceremony is held.

Initially, there is a five-day retreat involving many hymns and prayers. Since the sins and harm caused by the genocide were largely social, “penitence” must involve the community. The former perpetrators engage in public acts of service towards their victims, often in the form of labour, such as making repairs or farming.

Finally, at the end of the six months, there is a large Sunday celebration held in which relationships are restored and bread is broken. Families of both sides are involved in a ceremony of blessings from the priest followed by a large feast.

As part of this ceremony, any weapons that were involved and are still in possession of those being reintegrated into the community are given to the priest to be placed at a local memorial site dedicated to victims of the genocide.

This final healing service is said to cure the physical, spiritual, and psychological damage of those involved.

The Ukraine War Was Not Inevitable

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

There are two opposing schools of thought regarding Vladimir Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine. The first holds that Putin was reacting to the West’s contempt for his security concerns as NATO got closer to his borders. The second believes that the lack of response to a series of earlier aggressive acts encouraged him.

The latter, more favoured by neoconservatives, has a simple premise: Whenever one of the West’s enemies strays from the straight and narrow, any failure to administer immediate punishment is seen as encouraging them and provoking more serious aggression in the future.

In Ukraine, it is not the growing U.S. presence on Russia’s borders that explains, even partly, the Russian offensive, but the fact that NATO denied Kyiv the military means to deter its powerful neighbour. For them, the West’s fault is not NATO enlargement but allowing Putin to intervene in Georgia, then Syria, then Crimea. After that, why would he stop at the borders of Ukraine?

Yet this tragedy could have been avoided. Most experts acknowledge that the Bush administration was playing with fire in 2008 when it held out the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, in full knowledge that it would be impossible to protect it in the event of aggression. This attitude was all the more reckless given that in Munich, the previous year, Putin had expressed his concern that NATO had put its frontline forces on Russia’s borders.

Great powers naturally tend to equate their security with the defence of their zones of influence, by force if necessary. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out on Feb.10, “Even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin, Russia, like the United States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its neighbours. Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?”

In February 2019 Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a constitutional amendment committing the country to becoming a member of NATO. As Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, noted in “Putin’s War in Ukraine is a Watershed. Time for America to Get Real,” (The New York Times, April 11), “the West erred in dismissing Russia’s legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop on the other side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine.”

Indeed, Kupchan adds, “Moscow’s objections to NATO membership for Ukraine are very much in line with America’s own statecraft, which has long sought to keep other major powers away from its borders.” The exercise of hemispheric hegemony continued during the Cold War, with Washington determined to keep the Soviet Union out of Latin America.

After Russia hinted that it might deploy its military to Latin America, State Department spokesman Ned Price Jan. 27 replied, “If we do see any movement in that direction, we will respond swiftly and decisively.” Shouldn’t Washington have given greater credence to Moscow’s objections to bringing Ukraine into NATO?

NATO has avoided direct involvement in Ukraine in order to avert war with Russia. Even as they impose severe sanctions on Russia and send arms to Ukraine, NATO does not deem the defence of the country to be a vital interest.

“But if that is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a security guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense? asks Kupchan.

Russia has now sent a formal diplomatic note to Washington warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict there.

It is hypocritical for Westerners to be indignant today about the similar crimes they themselves committed, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which 15 of the European Union’s 27 member states took part. Ukraine, too, was involved in this.

As the British columnist Peter Hitchens contends, in “How NATO Lost its Way” (Compact, March 22), NATO, once an apolitical defence organization, has become an instrument of a new idealism. “We have all heard about beating spears into pruning hooks, but NATO has done something much more adventurous. It has beaten a shield into a sword.”

 

Absurd, Rabid Hatred of All Things Russian

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

The war fever in Canada on behalf of Ukraine, noble though it might be, suggests to me that this is a form of submerged Canadian nationalism that has been repressed for many years by our woke globalist ideologues and so dare not speak its name, lest it be called homophobic, misogynist, white supremacist, and racist (as the Ottawa truckers convoy found out).

So getting behind this war is cost-free and a safe outlet for this otherwise forbidden feeling, which is now projected onto Ukraine – a country that until a few months ago few Canadians cared much about, as it didn’t even exist until 1991, when the Soviet Union crumbled.

Call it “patriotism by proxy.” It’s a safety valve, a way of letting off nationalist steam, especially as it brings back memories of the Cold War, the iconic 1972 Canada-Soviet hockey series, and so on, when Canada was, in their eyes, a more robust and perhaps “normal” country.

There was nothing like this even during the years when we were fighting in Afghanistan 2001-2014, where Canada lost 158 soldiers and 7 civilians.

Nor it this feeling confined only to Canada. Our American friends have also succumbed. In an article entitled “The End of Citizenship,” Professor Michael Lind, who teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote the following in the March 27 Tablet news site:

“With few exceptions, Americans of left, right, and center rallied around the national colours. Postmodern multiculturalism and anti-Enlightenment paleoconservatism suddenly were marginalized by romantic nationalism of the 19th-century variety.”

As war fever swept America, they joined in denouncing not only the enemy government but also the enemy people and their enemy music, literature, and cuisine. Americans displayed the national flag and pledged undying hatred of the nation’s foes.

But the nation that Americans celebrated was not their own, but rather Ukraine. “Liberal Americans who would have thought it vulgar if not fascist to wave the Stars and Stripes took selfies with the blue and gold of Ukraine’s national flag.”

The sudden outburst of vicarious Ukrainian patriotism on the part of many Americans seems like a Freudian “return of the repressed.” Taught that celebrating their own national traditions is racist and xenophobic, many Americans found an outlet for a lost sense of belonging by borrowing the national pride of another nation.

And the obverse, as in all ultra-nationalism, is unbridled demonization of “the enemy.” There is a pent-up rage that is finding expression in the hatred of all things Russian – its arts, sports, food, you name it. Even people dead for decades or even longer are “cancelled,” their very names and work erased. There are many such examples, from composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut.

Some actions verge on the ridiculous. FIDE, the International Chess Federation, forbade Russian chess players from competing under their nation’s flag. FIFe, the International Cat Federation, used the following language: “No cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe pedigree book outside Russia.”

Never before the outbreak of the war has there been such a pervasive urge to place an identity -- Russian -- under the yoke of collective responsibility. Google the website of the iconic Russian Tea Room, a landmark in Manhattan since 1927, and a special message appears informing you, in bold capitals, that “WE STAND AGAINST PUTIN AND WITH THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE.” The words “SOLIDARITY WITH UKRAINE” is superimposed on a Ukrainian flag.

Russian professionals have been summarily dismissed or prevented from working unless they denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin. When has the expectation become acceptable that artists, performers, intellectuals, academics, and sports stars of Russian origin should engage in public political rituals in order to justify their professional status?

New Republic writer Matt Ford in his March 7 article, “The Russian Cultural Boycotts are Going too Far,” emphasized that speaking out can be dangerous. “I’m uncomfortable with demanding that citizens of an authoritarian country must denounce a regime that is more than willing to kill those who criticize it, even if they live overseas.” This reeks of McCarthyism. How very sad.

If the desired aim is to divide the Russian ruler and his people, collective punishment is not how to do it.