Clown World is a constant source of historical disinformation, when it isn’t outright fiction:
Kaja Kallas, the de facto EU foreign minister already notorious for her chirpy incompetence, has done it again: displayed such elementary ignorance that you have to rub your eyes and double-check before you believe it’s true. But – as always with her – it is. This time, she has informed the world that Russia has not been attacked by anyone for a hundred years.
Those Nazi generals who planned Operation Barbarossa – the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union (and thus very much Russia) that left 27 million Soviet citizens dead – are probably spinning in their graves. Yes, blinded by prejudice and ideology (“values”) they badly underestimated the Russians (sounds familiar?) and lost (catastrophically). But having your whole 3-million-men-150-division operation wiped out Orwell-style?
And what about the many other Europeans who joined the Nazis, either from the beginning or later, with official contingents or as volunteers? The Romanians, Finns, Italians, Spanish, Croatians, Belgians, French, Norwegians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and, last but not least, Balts, such as from Kallas’s native Estonia?
And let’s not even start about those prickly Japanese! They, too, got a drubbing at the 1939 Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol clash (and yes, it took place on the edge of Mongolia, a Soviet client state), but, again, pretending they never even tried?
Being historically illiterate to such an extent seems almost pitiable. Where geometry has made former German Foreign Minister Annalena “360 degrees” Baerbock intellectually immortal, it is history where Kallas reaches peak benightedness.
That is especially disturbing because failing so badly, in particular in the history of last century’s great wars, makes Kallas a very dangerous person. The reason is as simple as 1,2,3: Together, the last two World Wars – both caused by Europeans – cost up to over 81 million lives.
To quote Norm McDonald, isn’t it just amazing that the good guys always won?
No one is pretending that the historical Russians, the Soviet Union, modern Russia, or modern China are government by angels in human form who have nothing but the best interests of humanity as a whole in mind.
But the obvious historical fact is that it is Great Britain, it is the USA, it is the nations of Europe, and it is Israel that are the violent aggressors over the course of the last 200 years. The USA didn’t establish the Pax Americana and 750 military bases in over 80 countries because they’re defending America’s borders. Israel hasn’t attacked Gaza, Syria, Iran, Qatar, Lebanon because they are defending themselves. And while I do believe that Stalin was preparing to attack the Third Reich, that doesn’t change the fact that Germany invaded the Russian homeland.
China, meanwhile, has been repeatedly invaded and occupied by everyone from the Mongols and the Japanese to the British and the Americans. Its historical sins, which were particularly great in the 20th century, have for the most part been committed against its own people.
Free Tibet? How about free Texas and the rest of the Confederate States of America first.
Binary thinking is bad enough, since most of the time there are no good guys. But binary thinking combined with historical fiction is pure Clown World delusion. And delusion is no basis for debate, diplomacy, or democracy.