This article appears in the January 17, 2020 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
A MOST TIMELY INTERVENTION
Vladimir Putin Upsets the British Geopolitical Applecart
[Print version of this article]
Jan. 12—In a speech to the Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007, that has now become legendary, Russian President Vladimir Putin shocked his audience by exposing the efforts of the western powers to destroy and subjugate Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. That speech—blunt and uncompromising—earned Putin the eternal hatred of the British establishment and its anglophile underlings in the United States and other NATO member states.
Now, President Putin has done it again, and the howls emanating from London and pro-British circles elsewhere are evidence that he has once again hit at a flank that is both revelatory and indefensible. In choosing to attack in the way that he did, Putin has identified certain historical truths which threaten the entire, carefully constructed British narrative of 20th century history. He has also lobbed a hand grenade into the current efforts to isolate Russia and sabotage U.S.-Russian relations. Since the Obama administration’s 2014 coup in the Ukraine—a coup utilizing leftover Nazi elements from World War II—the demonization of Russia has continued apace. Now Putin has upset that applecart, reminding the United States, as well as Europeans of good will, of the common effort shared by all of these nations to defeat fascism 80 years ago.
President Putin chose, as the venue for his intervention, a summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which met in Saint Petersburg on Friday, December 20, 2019, an environment far more congenial than his audience in Munich twelve years earlier. In addition to Putin himself, the summit was attended by Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kyrgyzstan President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, Moldova President Igor Dodon, Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon, and Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.
The subject matter of Putin’s address was a Resolution passed September 19, 2019 by the European Parliament, by a vote of 535 to 66, which places the blame for World War II jointly on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Resolution states that it was the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) which “allowed two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest to divide Europe into two zones of influence.”
This EU Resolution is the latest project of a group of institutions and agencies, all orbiting around the 2011-founded “Platform of European Memory and Conscience,” which seek to redefine World War II as a war against “totalitarianism,” not a war against fascism.
Vladimir Putin has called the charges contained in the EU Resolution, a “shameless lie,” and on December 20, he spent more than an hour reading from and commenting on previously secret historical documents, now only recently declassified and released by the Russian Federal Archive Agency. These include many official government documents from Poland, Germany and the Baltic States seized by the Red Army in 1944-1945. In doing so, the Russian President reconstructs from the original records what actually happened from 1933 to 1941. He states that those individuals who voted for the EU Resolution are “People who don’t know history. They can’t read or write.”
Putin Refutes British Revisionism
Most Americans who grew up from 1945 to 1975 were taught that the defining event which led to World War II was the Munich Pact of 1938, which allowed Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia. Unbeknownst to many non-historians, during recent years a school of World War II historical revisionism has attempted to rewrite that history, largely at the expense of the Soviet Union. Almost all of these writings, particularly those of Viktor Suvorov (a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected to the United Kingdom), have now been discredited, but the intention was never to write legitimately about past events, but rather to spread new narratives to the historically illiterate, all intended to contribute to the now unceasing anti-Russian propaganda. The EU Resolution blaming Russian and German “totalitarianism” as equally responsible for the war is merely the latest offspring of such historical fabrications.
In his speech to the CIS conference, President Putin begins by referencing that anti-Russian EU Resolution. He states that the Resolution prompted him to learn the truth of the matter. He says:
Where is the truth after all? I decided to figure this out and asked my colleagues to check the archives. When I started reading them, I found something that I think would be interesting for all of us. . . .
Here is the first question. We talk about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact all the time. We repeat this after our European colleagues. This begs the question: was this the only document signed by one of the European countries, back then the Soviet Union, with Nazi Germany? It turns out that this is not at all the case. I will simply give a list of them, if I may.
• The Declaration on the Non-Use of Force between Germany and Poland. This is, in fact, the so-called Pilsudski-Hitler Pact signed in 1934. In essence, this is a non-aggression pact.
• The Anglo-German maritime agreement of 1935. Great Britain provided Hitler with an opportunity to have his own Navy, which was illegal for him or, in fact, reduced to a minimum following World War I.
• The joint Anglo-German declaration of Chamberlain and Hitler signed on September 30, 1938, which they agreed upon at Chamberlain’s initiative. . . .
• There is the Franco-German Declaration signed on December 6, 1938 in Paris by the foreign ministers of France and Germany, Bonnet and Ribbentrop.
• The treaty between the Republic of Lithuania and the German Reich signed on March 22, 1939 in Berlin by the foreign minister of Lithuania and Ribbentrop to the effect that the Klaipeda Territory will be reunited with the German Reich.
• The Non-Aggression Treaty between the German Reich and Latvia of June 7, 1939.
Thus, the Treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany was the last in a line of treaties signed by European countries that seemed to be interested in maintaining peace in Europe. Also, I want to note that the Soviet Union agreed to sign this document only after all other avenues had been exhausted and all proposals by the Soviet Union to create a unified security system, in fact, an anti-Nazi coalition in Europe, were rejected.
As to the events of 1938-1939, Putin notes the repeated acquiescence of Britain and France to German expansionism. He contrasts this to the efforts of the Soviet Union:
The Soviet Union was trying to the utmost to use every opportunity for establishing an anti-Hitler coalition, held talks with military representatives of France and Great Britain, thus attempting to prevent the outbreak of World War II, but it practically remained alone and isolated. [France and Britain] were trying to urge Hitler to direct his aggression eastward [as seen in the Munich Betrayal].
Putin also points to the culpability of Poland in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, when Poland acted as a partner of Germany, mobilizing three divisions and seizing the Czech region of Zaolzie—this at a time when the USSR was pressuring France to honor its defense alliance with Czechoslovakia. Putin also quoted directly from several Polish government documents, as well as a recording of a phone conversation between Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the head of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Józef Beck, in January 1939, to show the depth of German-Polish cooperation during this period. He also read from a transcript of a conversation between Józef Beck and Adolf Hitler on January 5, 1939, where Beck supports Hitler’s plans to rid Germany of its Jewish residents.
Russia Declassifying Documents
President Putin also announced that Russia is now declassifying all government documents in its possession related to the events leading up to World War II, and that it is the only European nation to do so:
Western capitals are still keeping all this classified. We know nothing of their contents. But now we do not need to, because the facts show that there was collusion. The participants in it were not just Hitler, but also the then leaders of those countries. It was this that opened the road to the east for Hitler, it was this that became the cause of the outbreak of World War II.
Regarding the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement of 1939, Putin simply said:
The USSR, left alone, had to accept the reality created by the Western states with their own hands. The partition of Czechoslovakia was extremely cruel and cynical; in fact, it was robbery. It can be argued with all the grounds that it was the Munich collusion that served as the turning point in history, after which World War II became inevitable.
Reaction to Putin’s speech from the anti-Russian crowd has been shrill. On Twitter, U.S. Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher opined, “Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start World War II. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict.” To this the Russian Embassy responded, “Dear Ambassador, do you really think that you know about history any more than you do about diplomacy?”
Storm Over Asia
In his November 1999 feature-length film, Storm Over Asia, Lyndon LaRouche provides the historical background necessary to understand the current targeting of the Russian nation. In other words, LaRouche answers the question “Why?” and he reveals the motives of those who turned the 20th century into a Century of War.
As in Rudyard Kipling’s evocation of the imperial Great Game of the 19th century and the creation of British Geopolitics by Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan with Prince Albert Edward (the later King Edward VII) prior to World War I, British strategy has been obsessed with the destruction and subjugation of Russia. The obsession continued with the British and French designs to turn Nazi Germany’s war machine against the USSR, and it went into high gear after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, reaching a critical juncture with President Barack Obama’s sponsorship of the Nazi coup in Ukraine in 2014.
Since that event, the trans-Atlantic sewer press, together with the anglophile scum of the British and American establishments, centered around groups such as the Atlantic Council and the Henry Jackson Society, have escalated a demonic offensive to vilify Russia and to prevent at all costs a rapprochement between Russia and Donald Trump’s America.
President Putin, in his remarks to the CIS summit, made clear that he grasps the geopolitical nature of the past and present anti-Russian operations:
Both then and now, Russia is used to scare people. Be it Tsarist, Soviet or today’s—nothing has changed. It does not matter what kind of country Russia is—this rationale remains. We should also not confuse ideological terms—Bolshevik, Russian, whatever, our former common homeland, the Soviet Union. To achieve this, they will make a deal with anyone, including Nazi Germany; we can, in fact, see this.
It is clear—as seen in the September 2019 EU Resolution charging Russia with responsibility for the crimes actually committed by Britain and France—that voices of sanity are now a minority within Europe. In the United States, the problem is one of a powerful British faction within the establishment. More than 40 years ago, anti-Russian, British geopolitical thinking was brought into the White House by the likes of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Bernard Lewis-inspired “Arc of Crisis” policy was unleashed, targeting both Russia and China through the creation and deployment of Wahhabi “Islamic” terrorism. Brzezinski later proclaimed his allegiance to British geopolitics with his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
The actual history of U.S.-Russian relations,—as well as U.S.-China relations—particularly from the time of Abraham Lincoln through to Franklin Roosevelt, was, for the most part, one of friendship, defined by a shared antipathy to British geopolitical and colonial schemes. It is urgent that those congenial relations be revived today. We are not dealing simply with history. From the borders of China through all of Central Asia, into Southwest Asia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and North Africa, the modern-day British Great Game continues to lunge ahead. Terrorist attacks, sanctions, regime change—these still define the strategic environment. Trump’s November 2016 promise of an end to this geopolitical madness has been stymied by the ongoing impeachment attacks against him. A monumental battle over strategic policy is taking place, and the future hangs in the balance.
At the CIS summit, Vladimir Putin declared, “We will continue to talk about the events, the facts of the Great Patriotic War, to unveil and publicize archive materials in their entirety.” Thus, he has signaled his intention to confront the lies. History—and the future—is changed through such interventions.
A video excerpt of President Putin’s speech to the CIS conference may be viewed here, and a video excerpt of his follow-up press conference is also available.
