It is hardly surprising that Denis MacShane has added
his voice to the chorus denouncing Putin for being some Neo-Stalinist-cum-Nationalist, a man who is uniquely responsible for presiding over the falsification of history to advance an imperialist power agenda.
MacShane wrote on the eve of the Westerplatte ceremonies in Gdansk, commemorating the start of World War Two, that Putin was unlikely to apologise for the massacre of 20,000 Polish reserve officers at Katyn in 1941.
Will Putin now apologise for this Russian crime against humanity? The signs are not good.Well, they were considerably better than Barack Obama apologising for the invasion of Iraq, the deaths of up to one million Iraqis, or any mainstream American politician apologising for anything the USA has done, for example apologising for Vietnam.
In fact, Putin
did actually show regret in contradiction to MacShane's confident predictions that he would not.
What MacShane did not mention was that the day before on August 31st in a letter to Gazeta Wyborza Putin apologised for both the Katyn Massacre and the Nazi-Soviet Pact which he called 'immoral'. Though hedged that a little by claiming,
"All attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 through various agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable...We must admit these mistakes. Our country has done this.'Professor Norman Davies
'told Gazeta Wyborcza that his first reaction to Putin's speech had been one of joy'.
Vladimir Putin took a step forward in this matter, which up to now in Russia [has involved] either silence or aggression. He admitted that the war broke out in 1939, not 1941. This was a surprise for the Russians. Secondly, Putin condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which for the Russians was until recently a figment of enemy propaganda”
Davies has done more than any historian to show the iniquity of Stalin in carving up Eastern Europe and topromote understanding of Polish history in Britain ( and in Poland ) Also, unlike MacShane, Davies is averse to the use of history for propaganda purposes.
In
Europe at War: No Simple Victory ,Davies has claimed that Second World War mythologies are still playing a potentially hazardous role.
'History is always liable to political manipulation. But the Second World War, which in large measure created the present-day world, presents special temptations. For fifty years the two superpowers that emerged in 1945 pursued their separate visions of the war as an integral part of their rivalry. Then in the 1990s, after the USA was left as the sole superpower, a new, and more Americanocentric view of the Second World War appeared. Steven Ambrose became the historian of the hour, and Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List became the war films of the decade.There can be little doubt that the Ambrose-Spielberg axis, combining a specific historical stance with the preferences and commercial power of Hollywood, chimed perfectly with the rise of the 'neoconservatives' and the declaration of a new American century'. Nor was it co-incidental that President George W Bush kept a bust of Winston Churchill on his desk and a copy of Ambrose's D-Day by his bedside.When planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was only to be expected that the chief of the Pentagon would like his president to Winston Churchill and Saddam Hussein to Hitler.It all formed part of the same package. A very superficial and Americanocentric view of history was a necessary adjunct to the reigning Americanocentric view of world affairs'.This crude Americanocentric creed is shared by MacShane and many others who backed the US invasions of Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq as a means of defeating Fascism and new 'Hitlers'.
It is precisely in order to project the charge of Fascist-Imperialism on to Russia that MacShane writes,
He( Putin )has banned any showing of Katyn in Russia. Moreover, there is now a sustained effort to re-write history by proclaiming the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which gave the green light to Hitler to invade Poland as a master-stroke of Russian statecraft.Putin has nowhere claimed it was a 'master-stroke' and is not to be held responsible for what other historians or propagandists have asserted to be the truth. Nor should that be conflated with Russia's assertion of its national interests.
Following the Russian invasion and occupation of contested Georgian territory last year and the consequent surge in jingoistic and nationalist fervour, Russian historians, politicians and journalists are finding new merits in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. So much so that Putin is now on record in a Polish newspaper stating,
'It is possible to condemn - and with good reason - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded in August 1939.....'unacceptable from the moral point of view and had no chance of being realised'.Nor can any comparison be drawn between the incursion into Georgia to defend South Ossetia, after Georgia attacked Tskhinvali on the night of 7th August 2008 and shot dead 15 Russian peacekeepers, and the entire partition of Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin.
Such comparisons are pure propaganda in the truest Orwellian sense cynically masquerading as a brave anti-totalitarian position of the sort MacShane and other ahistorical hacks believe that Orwell would have endorsed. A kind of doubleplusgood doublethink.
The historian Natalia Narochnitskaya, for example, has argued that the Baltic states and Polish territory occupied by the Red Army were "in the Russian sphere of influence". So that's all right then.
Clearly it is. But if one were to single out MacShane as an official historian wheeled out to justify Anglo-American 'nationalist fervour', then it could equally be thought that Britain was under the heel of a centralised lie machine spinning out lies and bogus history.
Narochnitskaya is not officially employed by the Kremlin to fabricate history, certainly less so perhaps than MacShane who has been a member of Blair's government.
Narochnitskaya has been a member of some minor nationalistic parties and is now director of the Institute for Democracy and Co-operation in Paris.
The aim of this organisation is not really so different from Western think tanks whose members are often there to provide propaganda justifying NATO expansion.
Rather like the Neoconservative Henry Jackson Society that MacShane belongs to and whose allies there include the leading architects of the Iraq War like Richard Perle.
Another historian, Pavel Danilin, asserts that the arrival of Russian troops after the Wehrmacht had defeated the Polish army "was not an aggression." Instead it was "about defending the population of a state that had ceased to exist".This is clearly an untruth about an event that happened long ago. Important but quite different in importance to the present fabrication of history involved in claiming Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction or that Russia attacked Georgia.
Again there is
no evidence that Danilin is some Putin court historian which does not prevent MacShane from drawing stupid conclusions.
If this is the official line as nationalist patriotism grows in Russia, the chances of Vladimir Putin using today's Gdansk event to say sorry for Stalin's alliance with Hitler and the annexation of part of Poland as well as the Baltic states are slim.Well, no Putin was not going to use the Gdansk ceremony do fall down on his knees like Willy Brandt did in Warsaw at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Rising of 1943. That uprising was lead by Jews and not Poles, though it's often confused with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
On that score, then perhaps Lech Kaczynski should fall on his knees and say sorry for the number of Jews murdered by Polish citizens who craved their property and collaborated with the Nazis in doing so. Especially as the pogroms and killing went on after the Second World War ended.
This constant obsession with gesture politics is really nothing to do with concern for the dead but a kind of justice for them which can open old atavistic hatreds and wounds in order to advance power claims and score cheap propaganda points
The point is that Putin has shown regret as part of an attempt to improve relations with Poland diplomatically.
What MacShane is asking for, for Putin to fall on his knees and beg forgiveness, is not going to happen and pretending he ought to, whilst concealing the Wyborcza interview, is a disingenuous attempt to stir up fear and resentment towards Russia.
So any 'nationalist patriotism' is necessarily bad if any aspect of it fits in with what MacShane believes could be interpreted as 'an official line'. One that clearly includes the uncomfortable fact that the Second World War
was won on the Eastern Front.
Which is partly what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was getting at when he claimed,
"Freedom came from the east....Russia, once again, fulfilled its historic mission to save Europe from forced unification and its own madness. Victory was achieved at too great a price for us to simply let it be taken away from us. That is where we draw the line.But what is also perhaps insinuated here is that any assertion of NATO power into areas that are considered 'Russian' will be interpreted as an attempt to undo the recovery of the lands that were taken from Russia by Nazi Germany and that belonged to it before 1939.
Most obviously this includes Ukraine and Belarus and not the Baltics or Poland which were allegedly 'taken' as part of a defensive measure against Nazi Germany in the absence of any reliable alliance from the West.
This is another way of telling NATO expansionists that Russia will defend it's interests in what have traditionally often been considered the East Slavonic lands of 'Rus' that have large numbers of Russian speakers. Not Georgia nor the Baltics.
As Lavrov states,
'If someone wants to have a new ideological confrontation with Europe, then historical revisionism and attempts to turn history into a practical political instrument is a direct path toward this confrontation'.This does not go down well with NATO expansionists who see NATO not as a projection of US Imperial power into Eastern Europe but a voluntary alliance of free states, though the elites who take them into it have often been trained and educated in the USA.
Moreover, NATO expansionists in the West like MacShane conveniently ignore the 'revisionism' that has been going on in the Baltic States by Maar Laar or other politicians in NATO states trying to rehabilitate the Baltic Waffen SS legions who fought against Stalin after 1941.
Saying sorry is risky politics, as those Labour politicians who have dared say British imperialism was noxious find out to their cost.Well,most Labour politicians have
not apologised for the British Empire and it is not particulary clear if MacShane thinks that Prime Minister's Blair or Brown should or should not have. What Brown has said though is that 'the days of apologising for the British Empire are over'.
More to the point in conscripting history for propaganda reasons, Blair and Brown have sought to use the language of British Imperialism's civilising mission to justify 'liberal interventionism' from Kosovo, to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now given the invasion of Iraq was a unilateral act of aggression by the USA that breached international law and was designed to control the oil fields in Iraq, it is blatant hypocrisy to then turn around and accuse Russia of being some imperialist aggressor.
The comparison with Iraq, if any is to be made would be with the Russian conflict with Chechnya. Yet that is not to be done not simply because the brutality in Iraq and Chechnya have been appalling but because Chechnya was invaded when Russia was a Western client under Yeltsin.
Given that MacShane and other foreign policy neoconservatives want to see Putin removed by pro-Western 'democrats' or 'reformers', who will start to give control of Russia's oil and gas wealth back to Western corporations, that historical comparison is off the agenda.
Is Putin big enough to say sorry? Or does Russian belief that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was sound diplomacy tell us what Russian foreign policy in the 21st century will be like?What MacShane understands by "Russian belief "is curious. Putin does not reflect presumably what every Russian 'believes' or has been taught to believe, as if every Russian is living in an information black hole or where history is all routinely falsified as in 1984.
Though a campaign of 'revisionism' has been encouraged by the Kremlin, it is mostly intended as propaganda of the sort that regularly appears in newspapers in the West without the need for centralised state direction because it works subliminally through corporate journalism.
MacShane's brief is to produce propaganda that justifies a transatlantic power block stretching into Central Asia by claiming that battles and skirmishes on these expanding frontiers of a New Europe are part of a battle to a create a growing sphere of freedom and liberty.
The facts are only as important as are necessary to fit the prescriptions of the propaganda creed.
Today he was told bluntly that the Russians did not bring freedom to central Europe, that they stabbed Poland in the back in 1939 following the Nazi invasion, and that the Kremlin's imperial ambitions remain a danger today, as shown by last year's war against Georgia.
This should read that Polish politicians and journalists
have claimed that Russia did not bring freedom to Central Europe.Which, of course, would be true because the Soviet Union defeated Nazism and drove out Hitler's forces. And then imposed Stalinist totalitarian regimes.
Yet Putin is not Stalin and Russia is not the Soviet Union and has no ambition to do so.
Which does not stop Harding repeating the untruth of 'last year's war against Georgia' being repeated as if it were a simple fact. Harding should have written 'what
Polish politicians regard as last year's war
against Georgia'.
Now drawing attention to historical fabrications is something that should be done. Yet so to should journalists at this moment be challenging the misuse of history to justify foreign policies of the USA and UK that have unleashed death and destruction.
Setting the historical record straight with regards the Nazi-Soviet Pact is important. Equally important is that the propaganda being made from the oversimplified Good War mythology of World War Two that has since been conflated with any War that the Anglo-Saxon powers fight.
Whereas recent attempts in Russia under Medvedev to whitewash the crimes of Stalin are somewhat sinister, more ominous is the propaganda in the West which is far more insidious because not recognised as being just that.
Moreover, because the USA and UK were once democracies with real political debate and opposition ( instead of as they are now in being single ideology states dominated by two almost identical parties )our history and freedom from totalitarian regimes is seen as somehow the guarantee of essential and eternal righteousness.
Here are some bogus parallels or, at least historical analogies, that are actually contentious but designed to serve geopolitical power ambitions by distorting history to serve current power agendas.
The neoconservatives have been the worst offenders,
"I believe that. I believe that [the revolt of passengers on the hijacked flight 93 on September 11, 2001] was the first counter-attack to World War III."(George W. Bush, May 6, 2006)
However, it is in that most neoconservative dominated of nations Poland where foreign policy is dominated by a particularly messianic interpretation of 'anti-totalitarianism' that can be used for reasons of "public diplomacy".
That is to pretend that it's bid to become a regional power in the US dominated global order is always necessarily a defensive one against the spectre of the seamless tradition of Evil Muscovite Imperialism or Asiatic Islamofascist hordes from the East.
One would have thought that Poland of all nations would be wary of Bush's use of the 9/11 Attacks to embark on a global bid for hegemony which, even if it would be absurd to compare it too closely with the Third Reich, showed analogous behaviour to it far more than Putin to Stalin.
Yet in the case of Adam Michnik the exact opposite has been the case.
'
...watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge.This is not the place to analyze the ideology that, while disfiguring the religion of Islam, creates a crusade against the democratic world. Saddam Hussein takes part in this just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. He asserts that in the holy war with the "godless West" all methods are permitted. Waiting for this sort of regime to obtain weapons of mass destruction would be plain recklessness.It is hard to see why so many in Polish political life who cared about language and truth could have failed to see this ideologically driven drivel as anything else but a rationalisation for supporting just any foreign policy or war the US pursued regardless of investigating the facts.
Iraq did not threaten Poland or the USA and there were no links connecting Saddam Hussein to the Al Qaida terrorist network: they actually hated each other. The way Poland cravenly acquiesced in this illegal invasion for oil
betrays its moral opposition to totalitarianism.
One reason it did so is that like the USA, Poland has Imperial pretensions that it refuses to recognise as such and prefers to believe is part of its role as a liberating redeemer nation, that the fate and freedom of the West hinges on Poland's role.
In this messianic and cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, Poland shows a similar and almost psychopathological devotion to ramping up the stakes of the conflict with Russia through it's total compliance with the concept of having a Missile Shield based there.
A belief that is shared by MacShane whose Polish roots ( his original name was Matyjaszek )make him ideal to work on forging the neoconservative vision of Anglo-British ties in his capacity as Minister for Europe.
Commenting at the Katyn Memorial Wreath Laying Ceremony in Gunnersbury Park, London in 2005 and after Pope John Paul II's death, MacShane said,
Poland has always fought as Poles say 'for our freedom and yours.' This week the world's greatest champion of freedom will be laid to rest. There is no better tribute we in Britain can pay to the memory of the men whose bodies were found in Katyn nor to the man whose body lies in St Peters than to build a strong Poland-UK partnership for the 21st century and ensure Poland and Britain shape a Europe of peace, justice and democracy and a Europe working to combat poverty, repression and the denial of family, faith and democracy in every corner of the globe.Actually it ought to be an insult to use the previous failure of Britain to honour it's commitment to Poland during the Second World War to launch a war against Iraq that was based on such lies, manipulation, and deception that had more
in common with totalitarian regimes.
Poles at the Katyn Memorial service could have pointed out that the Polish Pope actually opposed the invasion of Iraq.
That war crimes have been committed in Iraq, cities like Fallujah strafed and napalmed and civilians incinerated. That these crimes are equivalent to the atrocities in Chechnya covered by Anna Politkovskaya.
They could point to the development of an extensive network of CIA detention centres across the globe from Bondsteel to Bagram operating regimes of torture and illegal detention. That Polish troops have been sent to fight and die in futile battles no less than they did under Napoleon.
The fact that the US administration has used a language of power similar to totalitarianism whether 'extraordinary rendition', 'ghost detainees', 'repetitive administration', i.e beating, means that notions like a 'war on terror' are essentially meaningless.
Instead of dealing both with Russian attempts to mythologise World War Two, and US and UK attempts to do the same to promote repellent foreign policies, Polish populists and the media have simply worked themselves up into a frenzy of shrill and indignant hatred over something that happened over half a century ago.
Not least when it is all a form of bad faith, a divertion from what is actually happening now.
Rather than look to World War Two, it might be better to look at the late nineteenth century, imperialism, and the Great Game for Central Asia which is being replayed now and that ended up with the First World War.
The arbitrary jailing of a leading activist ( Yevgeny Zhovtis ) has dramatised concerns about Kazakhstan's human rights record as it prepares to assume the chairmanship of Europe's top body overseeing democracy and human rights, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
