Timothy Snyder: Ukraine Is Europe's Chance for Renewal

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/09/ukraine-russia-war-eu-membership-summit-versailles/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/Lu2ai

The European Union was an answer to war, a promise that the Second World War would not be followed by a third. That’s what everyone will tell you, from schoolchildren to prime ministers. Yet the meaning of that last world war has not been finally decided. Was it the beginning of a long period of European peace? Or a precedent for further wars of aggression in Europe?

The situation today is disconcertingly similar to that at the outset of World War II. Russian President Vladimir Putin now speaks of Ukraine as an artificial state and nation. In 1938 and 1939, Adolf Hitler spoke in just the same way about Germany’s neighbors. Putin prepared the way for his invasion with a litany of imaginary atrocities supposedly suffered by compatriots across the border. Hitler was the pioneer of atrocity talk as a pretext to aggression. He used such lies to absorb Austria, destroy Czechoslovakia, and invade Poland.

In Russia today, it is now a crime to speak about what came next. Joseph Stalin joined Hitler in the division of Eastern Europe in 1939 and helped him to begin World War II. These basic facts are rendered taboo by a Russian memory law that was sharpened just days before the invasion of Ukraine last month. The Soviet Union, a de facto German ally after August 1939, made its case for aggressive war in a similar way. Stalin claimed that ethnic brethren in eastern Poland required assistance in the form of invasion. Like Hitler, he portrayed Poland as an artificial state. Starting from different ideological positions, the Soviet and Nazi systems both demanded the destruction of the Polish nation. In practice, this meant the deportation and murder of the educated classes.

One way to treat this legacy is to rehabilitate it, as Putin is now doing. Even as memory laws and extraordinary censorship prevent any comparison from reaching the mainstream, Putin is plagiarizing the worst speeches of the period. It is not only that he claims that Ukraine is an artificial state and nation and has launched a war on that basis. He also draws the same conclusion as German and Soviet leaders: Any sign that the supposedly nonexistent nation exists must be eliminated. This means not just murdering the leadership but hunting down anyone deemed to represent the nation. Ukrainians today are fighting because they believe that this is what Russian occupation means.

*snip*