The French celebrated Macron’s victory in their inimitable manner: with riots. As clouds of tear gas lay a smokescreen over central Paris last night, I was saying a quiet prayer 120 miles away.
Thank you, Lord, for letting us dodge the bigger bullet. A major European country has been spared a fascisoid government in Putin’s pay. Yes, such a government is bound to creepy-crawl out of the swamp somewhere. Soon, I fear. But – and I’m wiping my brow even as we speak – not yet.
Instead, France got a mainstream nonentity of the type Germans call Putinversteher – someone who understands Putin. In this context, ‘understand’ is a caustic euphemism having nothing to do with cognitive acuity.
‘Appease’ would be less sarcastic but more accurate. ‘Acquiesce’ or ‘collaborate’ would be even more to the point.
As you notice, over the past two months I’ve found it hard to look at European politicians outside the Ukraine’s frame of reference. Hence, as far as I was concerned, the choice facing the French was between Manny Macron’s recent accolade (“Putin respects France. He sets it apart from the rest of the West.”) and what Marine said during the 2008 crisis (“This crisis will enable us to turn away from America and towards Russia.”).
Both are repulsive, but Manny’s statement is marginally less so. Yet no such qualifications apply to what he and his German counterpart are actually doing.
It has been revealed that over the past few years several EU countries, but mostly Germany and France, have supplied €273 million’s worth of military hardware to Russia — in circumvention of international sanctions. And since the hostilities started, the EU has been paying a billion euros a day for Putin’s gas.
At least, neither Germany nor France is a signatory to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The US, Britain and Russia are, which means they guaranteed the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her relinquishing her offensive weapons, including nuclear ones.
The relative worth of such documents, as compared to the paper they are written on, is self-evident. But here’s an interesting twist.
The Russians are running out of most types of land-based tactical missiles. They do, however, have ample stocks of air-based ones. It so happens that these are exactly the rockets the Ukraine transferred to Russia in compliance with the terms of the Budapest Memorandum.
The upshot is that Ukrainians are being killed with weapons either supplied by Germany and France or tricked out of the Ukraine by the US and Britain. At the same time, Russia’s war effort is being largely financed by the EU’s single currency. A comforting thought, that.
At least the US and Britain are doing their best to arm the Ukrainians now. Had this effort started a few weeks earlier, the war could already be over, and thousands of lives might have been saved. But the Americans and Britons did see the light, if only belatedly.
The Germans, on the other hand, are refusing to help the Ukraine in any substantial way. Their justification for this craven behaviour is two-fold: military and historical.
Chancellor Scholz explained the other day that transferring any offensive weaponry to the Ukraine would denude Germany’s military capability so much that she would be unable to defend herself against any possible aggression. It’s good to see that the EU’s dominant member is governed by someone blessed with such a firm grasp of strategy.
The only country in Europe that could conceivably threaten Germany’s security is Putin’s Russia. The only way Russia could do so would be for Putin’s army to roll through the Ukraine, then gather momentum and keep going across Poland.
Ergo, Germany has a vested interest in the Ukraine either defeating Russia or at least checking her advance. And the best way to serve that interest is to arm the Ukraine. A statement of unwavering commitment to Nato wouldn’t go amiss either, and the same goes for France.
Yet it’s the historical argument against arming the Ukraine that raises my blood pressure some 30 points (diastolic). That was put forth by Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and her spokesmen.
They argue from historical guilt: “Many Germans find it hard to accept the idea that German weapons could again be used to kill Russians,” explained one of the spokesmen.
Until recently I had thought that German education is superior to ours, at least as far as the teaching of history is concerned. Now I’m not so sure.
The youthful Annalena must be too busy pursuing the destructive objectives of her Green Party to crack history books. Allow me to plug the most obvious gaps in her education.
In 1941-1945 Germany was at war not with Russia but with the Soviet Union. It was made up of 16 constituent republics at the time, of which the Ukraine was the second most populous one, after Russia qua Russia.
Hence German weapons were killing not only Russians qua Russians, but also people of other nationalities, including Ukrainians. In fact, the latter suffered greater military casualties than Russians in per capita terms – and far greater civilian ones.
This stands to reason: the Nazis occupied only six per cent of Russia’s territory and 100 per cent of the Ukraine’s. Therefore, Annalena would have a hard time explaining why Germans would object to supplying weapons to the Ukraine, while finding nothing wrong with supplying them to Russia.
A closer examination will reveal that in the current conflict it’s Russia and not the Ukraine that acts as the typological equivalent of Nazi Germany. Annalena could thus assuage her guilty conscience by repudiating Nazism and helping those who fight against it.
It has been clear to me for some time that the commitment of every EU member to the Ukraine is inversely proportional to its dependence on Putin’s gas. Germany’s is high enough to have turned her into a de facto client state of Russia.
France’s is lower, which is why Manny can afford the luxury of leavening his understanding of Putin with mild criticism and even some begrudging assistance to the Ukraine. Still, beats the alternative.
Félicitations, Manny!
I hear a resounding noise of nails being hit on heads and thus driven home. And I am more grateful that ever that we separated ourselves openly from the EU.
“Chancellor Scholz explained the other day that transferring any offensive weaponry to the Ukraine would denude Germany’s military capability so much that she would be unable to defend herself against any possible aggression. It’s good to see that the EU’s dominant member is governed by someone blessed with such a firm grasp of strategy.”
Besides the British, USA too might watch itself in this regard. War reserve stocks of Javelin USA already depleted by 1/3. Will take three to four years to replace what has expended to this point. And that stuff ain’t cheap.
Someone like Kim the North Korean might decide this is the time to take advantage of a situation.
Hard to get excited about such a “victory”. I have read in these pages that our political systems must be flawed if they fail to promote any candidates worthy of office, and I find it hard to disagree. While the causes of our revolution here are debatable (I side with Great Britain in most cases), the founding fathers did foresee a lot of the issues with mass public voting, and cringed at the idea of national politics and general elections. Unfortunately, even with our electoral college, we find ourselves just where they feared me might eventually head. It would take some considerable effort to pull back universal franchise, but even if possible, where to put the boundary? I suppose a test could be devised for a “voter license” – after all, a test is required to drive a car, and guiding a nation is far more important and exacting. That seems an impossibility, given the recent fracas over requiring just a form of identification in order to vote. That puts the burden on schools, or more importantly, with parents, to teach our young citizens the true purpose of government. We need the average citizen to understand how the choices he makes will affect the nation and the world. Heaven help us.
On the subject of “citizen”, I recently read a definition of it as, “someone who could rebuild civilization.” How many of us meet that standard?
Never mind the franchise. We’re at the point of questioning the wisdom of an elected head of state. Why are we doing this? Would a hereditary monarch really be any worse than Macron or Biden?
That still leaves us with the Senate, which I suppose we revert to the House of Lords, and the House of Representatives, which would leave all politics as local. But on arrival in Washington, D.C. they immediately learn that nothing gets accomplished without the old quid pro quo and that elected branch is corrupted. Perhaps term limits help with that problem? I’m not sure, though I am in favor of them.
I was appalled at the Russian banners waived by Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian Orthodox Christians celebrating the descent of the Sacred Fire on the Easter night. If I ever waived any flags at all, these would be the white-blue-white flags of the freedom-loving Novgorod Republic or Kievan Rus, without that nasty red band epitomizing bloodshed, but those Arabs support Russia no matter what for one simple reason: because she opposes the West that supports Ukraine. For the same reason of sheer anti-Americanism many people in France, Germany and Italy support Russia’s actions in the Ukraine. They hate the American dictate, as they put it, and for this pure reason they back any anti-American forces on the planet. Because the US supports Ukraine, they stand for Russia. They do not care a bit how the Kremlin treats its own people, let alone poor Ukrainians. In this way they just want to express their hate of “American imperialism”.
At the end of the day, neoliberal types like Macron aren’t all bad. The security risk posed by Le Pen was (is?) monstrous. An agent of Putin as president of France-NATO member and nuclear power! No, sometimes the boring choice is the right choice.