A lot of ink has been spilled and Web pages filled over Hillary Clinton’s recent remark that Vladimir Putin’s justification for annexing Crimea is precisely the one Adolph Hitler used to annex various territories in Eastern Europe. For Trouw of the Netherlands, historian Patrick van Schie writes that Clinton’s comments were not only accurate, they reflect another striking similarity between now and the 1930s: weak European leadership in the face of the aggressor.
For Trouw, Patrick van Schie writes in part:
Various West European leaders distanced themselves from the comparison made recently by Hillary Clinton between Russian annexation of Crimea and Hitler’s action in Czechoslovakia or Poland in the thirties. Comparisons with the Second World War should indeed not be made too easily. Yet Putin’s excuse that he “only” wants to protect the Russian population in Crimea and elsewhere is an exact copy of Hitler’s self-proclaimed role as patron to ethnic Germans in Sudetenland and the corridor between Germany and East Prussia. With her historical analogy, Clinton therefore hit the nail on the head.
The frequently mentioned reference to Soviet era is also in dispute. According to President Obama, there is no question of a new Cold War, as today’s Russia in not the leader of an ideological bloc and because the West isn’t looking for a Cold War. Here, too, the former secretary of state sees things more clearly. Whether or not there is a new Cold War will not be determined by the West, as Hillary Clinton said, but by Putin.
It is true that Russia is no longer the center of a communist bloc, although the Kremlin is openly capitalizing on nostalgia for the Soviet era, and Lenin is enjoying remarkable popularity among pro-Russian (often hired) protesters. However, in Putin’s Moscow, the West is again seen as the great enemy, and the right to independence of former satellite states is not really recognized.
Thus, Moscow considers the alliance of the Baltic States to NATO a decade ago to be an aggressive act on the part of Washington. The fact that the public and politicians in the Baltic States sought protection through NATO membership from their former colonizers in Russia appears irrelevant. As was the case in Soviet times, the regime in Moscow designates every East European who opposes Russian domination a “fascist.”
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