The
dishonesty of all of this is patently obvious. Any rational
person can see that over the past ten years the Russians have
gone out of their way to be as inoffensive as possible – to
their own detriment as well as to that of their friends and
allies. They gave up an empire, dissolved the Warsaw Pact,
cut back on their armed forces and sent the Communists packing.
They even embraced the fashionable "market democracy"
ideology being peddled by the West. On issue after issue they
signed on to NATO’s agenda – for no apparent reason other than
weakness or eagerness to please. It is hard to see how much
further they could have gone to abase themselves short of
inviting NATO in to take over their country. Yet according
to the lunatics who run the American imperial metropolis Russia
remains as dangerous as ever.
"[T]oday,
the KGB’s influence is alive and well. Its main successor,
the Federal Security Service, or FSB, seems pleased to assume
the KGB’s mantle," writes Kramer. What, the same KGB
that carried out Stalin’s mass murders? The same KGB that
ran the vast Gulag that housed millions of political prisoners?
"The drive to rehabilitate the KGB gained momentum
late last year with the rise of Acting President Vladimir
Putin," Kramer continues. "Putin was a loyal KGB
officer for nearly 17 years. He ran the FSB for just over
a year....Putin has spoken fondly about his work in the
KGB. In a series of interviews for a book published just
last week, he endorsed the agency’s ‘principled’ behavior
and claimed that one of his main functions was to spy on
NATO." Sounds pretty damning until one applies a little
bit of common sense – always in short supply among
our foreign policy elite. In the first place, no one even
bothers to pretend that Putin was anything more than a standard
mid-level KGB officer. Second, in the world in which he
grew up – and things are perhaps not so different today
– NATO was the enemy. What else would he be doing but
spying on NATO? Third, no one ever held it against Boris
Yeltsin that he had been a member of the Politburo. If you
abjectly toe the Washington line you get to be called a
"fighter for democracy." And, finally, in 1988
the United States actually elected as President a man who
had once headed the CIA and had therefore overseen innumerable
anti-Soviet operations. The rest of the world, not to mention
the Russians, might not have looked upon this as benignly
as Americans do.
"The
effort by Putin and other Russian officials to restore ‘honor’
to the KGB’s historical reputation is deeply troubling,"
Kramer rumbles on. "Suppose that, after World War II,
the West German government had regarded its security forces
as proud successors of the Gestapo and SS....One of the
salutary consequences of Germany’s defeat... was the Allied
occupation of the country. Although it took decades before
many Germans fully acknowledged the enormity of Nazi crimes,
the system of historical accountability established by the
Western occupying powers had a lasting, positive effect.
The SS and Gestapo were – and still are – remembered
with the opprobrium and revulsion they deserved." That’s
nice, comforting official history for you. We are always
the good guys insisting on "accountability." But
history, as usual, is not that simple. Kramer has either
forgotten – or perhaps has never heard of – General
Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had headed Hitler’s anti-Soviet
intelligence operation on the Eastern Front – a by
no means junior post. After the War he became head of Germany’s
intelligence service, the BND, which he led right up to
the late 1960s. Evidently, due to the exigencies of the
Cold War, "accountability" had its limits. Gehlen’s
knowledge of the Soviet Union could not be allowed to go
to waste. In much the same way, Putin’s knowledge of the
West is what has helped to catapult him to the top. This
is not necessarily to reproach the successive US Governments
that worked with Gehlen. There may have been good reasons
for hiring him. But let us at least get adult history, not
fairy-tales for children. Much of the Nazi bureaucracy went
to work quite happily for the Federal Republic. Today, of
course, every German you meet will tell you at tedious length
how anti-Nazi he is. But anyone can say that now!
"Post-Soviet
Russia is not postwar Germany," Kramer sighs. "The
Soviet Union came to an end not through war, but through
internal collapse. Those in power in Moscow after the collapse
(many of whom had loyally served the communist regime) avoided
a genuine reckoning with the past." This, of course,
is a familiar refrain. The only way out for Russia is to
let the West come in and run the show for a few years. And
this is really the issue. Democracy is neither here nor
there. You do as the United States tells you, otherwise
you are not really a democrat. William Safire foams at the
mouth when he writes about Russia. Yet, not once does he
express concern about repression in Israel’s buddy, Turkey,
say. On the contrary, he denounces the Europeans for their
"racism" in not allowing Turkey to join the European
Union. "Mr. Putin... is far from a clear and committed
democrat," fumed the Washington Post recently.
"So far his record is defined by the war in Chechnya
and the obliteration of its capital, Grozny; by the disappearance
of Andrei Babitsky, a correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty who angered Mr. Putin’s government with his fearless
war reporting; by his decrees reimposing political commissars
in the army and compulsory military education in schools."
Russian
repression in Chechnya has certainly been pretty brutal.
But since the world, including the United States, does not
recognize Chechnya as an independent state, the Russians
are within their rights to defeat the secessionists. Turkey’s
war against the Kurds, supported and encouraged by the United
States, has been at least as brutal as anything the Russians
have come up with. Moreover, the repression goes on. Turkey
recently arrested and imprisoned three democratically elected
Kurdish mayors. The other day it sentenced former President
Necmettin Erbakan to a year’s imprisonment for statements
he made years ago. Safire said nothing. The Washington
Post found it hard to muster too much rage. "[B]ad
habits persist, in particular a tendency to jail those who
express views at odds with the nation's secularist principles....It
is not that Mr. Erbakan is himself a ringing voice for democracy.
His Welfare Party... has flirted – always in code –
with support for some elements of sharia, or Islamic law,
in place of Turkey’s firmly Western constitution."
Not the sharia! Wasn’t that what Bosnian President Alija
Izetbegovic introduced in Bosnia? But those hateful Serbs,
of course, had no right to seek to opt out of it. "It
is always a challenge for democracies to respond sensibly
to forces that threaten democratic values. But harsh restrictions
on speech themselves threaten democracy. Turkey needs to
ease those restrictions, as much for internal harmony as
to satisfy the EU." Imagine if the Russians, let alone
Slobodan Milosevic, had been imprisoning people with the
cheerful abandon of the Turks. Would the Post be
so understanding? Today, as always, selective liberal indignation
serves as handmaiden for US power.
