Waving flag of the country of the European Union Republika Slovenija
The second view ( or from a nother viewpoint* )
From a legal, political, social, ethical point of view, the Russian attack on Ukraine is a despicable, immoral, absurd act, worthy of condemnation from all points of view.
There is no doubt about Vladimir Putin’s culpability in the Russian attack on Ukraine. The second question is what were the global, historical, ideological causes and triggers for a certain phenomenon, an event, to occur. It might therefore be a good idea to look at how Europe has always behaved towards Russia – including in the case of the ‚prelude‘ to today’s Russia-Ukraine war.
Let me describe this phenomenon in the words of Dostoyevsky, one of the greatest spirits of mankind:
When we drove Napoleon out in 1812, we did not make peace with him, as some few clairvoyant Russians advised and wished at the time, but we set out with all our might to save Europe from its conquerors and to make it happy.“
And what did they get in return? As a grateful return? Less than nothing!
„All these nations which we had liberated immediately, before they had even touched Napoleon, began to look upon us with the utmost disfavour and the most wicked suspicion. At the congresses they immediately united against us and took everything, but not only did they leave us nothing, but they also imposed obligations on us, voluntary indeed, but harmful to us, as it turned out later. And then, whatever the lesson we have learned, what did we do for the rest of the century and what are we doing now? Did we not help to strengthen the German states, did we not create their strength so that they are now perhaps even stronger than we are (…)?
Europe is ready to praise us, to pat us on the head, but it will not recognise us as its own, it despises us, tacitly and openly, as a people and as a race it considers us inferior to itself (…). It has ended up that everyone in Europe now has a stone in his hand and is ready to throw it at us at the first opportunity. What have we gained by serving Europe so much? Only its hatred… The Turks and Semites are closer to them in spirit than we Aryans.“ (A Writer’s Diary II, Beletrina, Ljubljana 2007)
Nowadays, Dostoyevsky would probably add: closer than we Europeans and Christians.
For the contemptuous attitude of the self-proclaimed only „true“ Europe towards Russia did not end, but was repeated in the case of Russia’s liberation not only of its own but also of other European territory from Nazi occupation in the Second World War. Objective historians and analysts recognise that Russia’s part in defeating Nazi fascism was decisive. The Soviet Union lost some twenty-seven million people in its war against it.
I believe that the fundamental question for today’s EU-Russian Federation relationship, which has knotted up with the announcement of Ukraine’s admission to the EU and NATO’s eastward expansion, is why the US and ‚Europe‘ did not keep their promise not to expand NATO eastwards after the dissolution of the Soviet empire. If they had kept this agreement, it could have marked the beginning of a new era of cooperation between „Europe“ (the EU) and the Russian Federation! So that the Russians would no longer have to worry about their security vis-à-vis the West. But, as in the case of the victory over Napoleon, when the Russian Bolshevik empire collapsed, the Russians did not demand that the promises made be written down and ratified… And the first thing that American hubris, together with its faithful servant „Europe“, did was to put missile formations on the Polish – and Romanian-Russian – borders, aimed at Russia! This has undoubtedly had an impact on domestic politics in the Russian Federation – the sense of threat is the humus for the establishment and maintenance of an authoritarian system. Especially when it is manipulated by a totalitarian power. Like Putin.
This EU decision was short-sighted, even blind. Russia, like much of Eurasia, is a treasure trove of minerals and goods of all kinds (wheat, oil, gas, etc.) and a veritable reservoir of intelligence, all of which would benefit from normal cooperation between „Europe“ and the Russian Federation! Working together, the EU and the Russian Federation would constitute a third world power, nestled between the two superpowers, the USA and China: a „third power“, a mediator between two superpowers which may themselves be competing with each other to the point of absurdity. But the link between the EU and the Russian Federation should be nurtured, watched over like a mote in the eye! The Nord Stream pipeline was a tremendous opportunity to start such a mutually beneficial link, but the gas did not flow through those pipes! But we could have started a new cooperation, a new hour of ‚European truth‘! If we draw conclusions – backwards – about the problem of Europe’s gas supply, which will now be „solved“ primarily by the US, we can see who is best served by such a „result“. For the US, many European political analysts write, the Nord Stream is unacceptable.
Action and reaction
It is an unwritten law that re-action is always worse than the action it is countered. And now we are witnessing a brutal attack on Ukraine by the Russian Federation! Nothing more unacceptable can be imagined! That Putin cannot win seems self-evident to me. A nation that wants freedom cannot be permanently subdued, and all totalitarian systems and all occupiers have experienced this, including the Russians in Afghanistan. But how much human suffering there is and will be, and all the consequences of the US-European sectarian policy, too, we have no idea. Instead of striving (after the collapse of the USSR) for cooperation – erecting barriers! What country would look on calmly at what NATO has been doing, putting missile and anti-missile systems around Russia wherever it can?
The Ukrainian leadership also bears its share of responsibility for the present catastrophe (as Prof. Dr Simon Malmenvall points out in the Catholic weekly Druzhina, 13 March 2022), since after 2000 it systematically enforced ‚the unity of the state system and the compulsory use of the Ukrainian language in public life‘. So that „the category of the Russian minority has been removed from official statistics“.
Will sanctions bring Russia to its senses? They will affect the population anyway, mainly the Ukrainian, Russian and European population.
I was initially prompted to write this piece by the speech of the seemingly mild-mannered Mrs Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission: I cannot forget her hostile enumeration of what ‚we will do‘ to punish the Russians for attacking Ukraine, and if that does not help, we will do this … I was irritated by the arrogance of ‚forgetting‘ that the Germans destroyed all the settlements, all the fields, killed every living thing: two and a half million Russian and Jewish inhabitants were killed just on the road to Stalingrad! What punishment did the Allies inflict on the German population after the war for this? Thank God they did not, it was bad enough for the people during the war itself! But now the Germans have ‚woken up‘ again, the Commission President’s views have been hardened even more, the Prime Minister has announced the radical militarisation of Germany; and two days after him, the Japanese President!
The criteria for dealing with different countries and alliances should be the same for all. There are different estimates and figures for wars and military conflicts since the end of the Second World War. According to one variant, between 1945 and 2001 there were 245 wars and military conflicts, coups d’état, in the world, of which the US started 201 (including Iraq and Afghanistan), and only 44 were not started by the US. Among the countries attacked were independent, sovereign states, or the US provoked coups, beheaded them and installed governments of its choice, etc. – and there were no sanctions from anyone for the aggressor US! Putin has also attacked before (Chechnya …) and therefore already deserved to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal, as Biden is now proposing! But if someone were to suggest that US Presidents who have started wars against other countries should be tried, we would laugh – it would be so unbelievable!
European helpfulness and hostility
As I see it, there is something very wrong with the EU behaving in a hostile way towards the Russian Federation on the one hand, and in a helpful and servile way towards the unscrupulous USA on the other. From now on – after Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the severing of the EU’s ties with the Russian Federation – Europe as a relevant subject in world politics and world history will be no more! Or not for a very long time.
The fact that our Prime Minister (along with the Slovak and Polish Prime Ministers) is going to Ukraine is primarily his action as a function of his personal pre-election struggle. His manipulation of people’s emotions in the face of the Ukrainian tragedy is blasphemous and concerns our internal situation, but in the light of EU relations, their behaviour is controversial; it is the policy of the European right, which is fed up with the ‚domestic‘ divide and is therefore spreading it externally.
At the moment, the weight of responsibility and blame for the war in Ukraine is on Putin! All the Slovenian, European, American and other media are writing and reporting about this. I myself have only written about another possible view of the conflict itself. In fact, I wanted to draw attention to the nature of European politics as it is concretely manifested in the attitude towards refugees in general. It was most accurately expressed in the government’s tweet:
„Ukrainian refugees come from an environment that is culturally, religiously and historically quite different from the environment from which refugees from Afghanistan come.“
What does this statement tell us? Ukrainian refugees are ‚ours‘, because they are something completely different from (non-native) refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, etc., and that is why we accept Ukrainian refugees and not those others. Ukrainian refugees are Europeans, in the European cultural, religious and historical sense. Refugees from Afghanistan, Syria … are non-European in cultural, religious and historical terms. The label is silent: in a racial sense. Because the labels listed (culture, religion, history) implicitly denote racial difference.
It is right that European countries should make an effort to take in Ukrainian refugees! But we must consider what is the basis on which all countries (including Germany, having realised that there are already enough of them for its future workforce) are afraid of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria … Wire fences, police, army, tracking dogs … Now the doors of European countries are wide open! Not only out of compassion for the suffering, but out of racial difference between one and the other. Slovenia is also taking in the unfortunate Ukrainian refugees – that’s right! But it has also hesitated and even returned families, even mothers with children, to Croatia …
A girl from Zimbabwe who was studying aerospace engineering in Ukraine was pushed away by border guards and forced to give up her place to the Ukrainians. She and her fellow Ukrainians were ‚treated like animals‘; because they are of a different race. „Why do Europeans“, asks Zorana Baković (Delo, 5.3.2022), „slip so easily into racism?“
Thus, „Europe“ has placed and practised racial sectarianism at the level of a principle of European politics. And this – alongside the horrors of the war in Ukraine – is the terrible thing that will now, I fear, be revealed in the character of the EU and all its countries! As long as sectarianism on a cultural and racial basis remains a fundamental principle of European politics – despite the understandable solidarity with the Ukrainians – the danger of wars on its soil will remain a reality! The signs are there: European countries are accelerating their rearmament. Germany too!
Does the Russian attack on Ukraine, together with the reaction of European countries to it, mean the end of the ‚European idea‘?
And a conclusion to this ’second look‘: Slovenians should work for coexistence between the EU and the Russian Federation – and also for its admission to the EU on the same terms as other countries! But the EU has been sending Ukraine hints, or even promises, that it even belongs in NATO, that it stands by it… But now it has turned its back on Ukraine. Of course, it cannot risk a conflict with the Russians! But the deception – either out of a mistaken certainty that the „Russian bear“ would not react, or out of omniscience for the fate of the other – has happened. The trusting Ukrainians are now on their own. Well, the EU and America will already be exporting arms to Ukraine …
A lofty attitude towards the Slavs
The historical distrust and the lofty attitude of „Europe“ towards the Slavs was even raised as a racial issue by Hitler’s Nazism, except that there were too many Slavs for him to undertake their genocidal murder like the Jews and the Roma; the Slovenes were „only“ cultucide. Such a suspicious, haughty attitude towards the Slavs remains in fact (perhaps unconsciously) even today.
We should also not forget the millennia-old interests of the Germans (which ring out from time to time in a speech!) and should therefore work for the rapprochement of all Slavic peoples or nations, instead of just agreeing to their dismemberment. Only in this way, under the assumption of a peaceful, new Slavism, would we secure a position of balanced Europeanness, knowing that part of the identity of Slovenes/Slovak women will sooner or later remain Slavic. And aware of the danger that threatens us (all of Europe!) from the Far East, which Zorana Baković reports in her article Great ideals have already hit the wall (Delo, 26 February 2022, p. 20): how, in a conversation with a Chinese leader, the latter pointed out that China would have to „open up the issue of the territories that were taken from us in the past by Tsarist Russia, and then by the communist Soviet Union“. In order to weaken and punish Putin/Russia, will the EU simply hand Siberia over to China? Or to be shared between China and America (which, like Trump’s desire to buy Greenland, bought Alaska from Russia in the 19th century)?
And what will the EU do if Putin completely loses his nerve and the Russians themselves depose him? Will it come to its senses and perhaps then realise that it, along with Russia, badly needs Siberia? And peace!
