Re: Oooops....

In article <1187971140.262102.12080@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"santaka13@xxxxxxxxx" <santaka13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<deletions>

Eugene is trying to talk up the role of the Balts in the whole Soviet
disaster (all 50 years of it), but what he cannot see is that he is
blaming the victim. Foreign interference in the Baltic states was the
SINE QUA NON of all the *** that went on 1940 - 1991.

I am doing no such thing. I am pointing out that some, a very tiny
number, Balts were eager to undermine and subvert their countries in the
name of what they were convinced was historical inevitability, just as
some Russians and other had been willing to do the same thing to Russia
a generation before. What unites these people is their belief in what
they considered to be a kind of forced modernity. Their Russianness or
Balticness was not only of secondary importance, being a matter of the
accident of their birth, it was something that they wanted to destroy
because they were certain that they had a better alternative to offer.

Had the foreigners not interfered, there would have been no
opportunity for opportunists and misfits to collaborate with either
reds or browns, and the dreadful social scars inflicted on the Baltics
would not have taken place.

Look as the map. It's not going to happen. The people living in large
countries are always going to think that they have the right to put the
screws on, in addition to actually screwing, people in small countries.
That is why it was so important that the Baltic countries pool resources
and get some of the benefits of being a large country by joining the EU
and NATO.

It reminds me of a case where a poor *** was framed for murder and
sent to jail, perfectly innocent. By the time proof of his innocence
emerged, the poor wretch had been involved in a fight in the prison -
where he never should have been - and had ended up killing someone.

Argh! A horrible story, but not quite appropriate. Communists are
something like Moonies. They are convinced that they have seen the
light, and they have to have you join them. It didn't take a large
number of such people to subvert the provisional government that took
over Russia after the fall of the Czar, nor is it surprising that a few
Balts also caught the infection. Although the Soviet Union obviously had
some background influence in the murderous 1924 Estonian coup attempt
that I wrote about yesterday, it was basically a case of a band of
Estoniand who thought that they could pull off something analogous to
what Lenin and his band of thugs had pulled off in the Winter Palace a
few years before.

Yes, a few Balts did some shitty things, and they must answer for it
personally - but the invading bastards who set up the disatrous scene
that made all this happen are a hundred times more guilty.

What Eugene also can't see is that if Putin were worth any positive
words, it would be because he were apologising for the past and taking
steps to ensure nothing remotely like that ever happens again.
Instead what is he doing ...?

I think we have to accept the fact that Russia has done all the
apologizing that it is going to do. Certainly Gorbachev and Yeltsin
apologized in speech and writing for many things that the USSR did,
while Putin regards himself as still having been a stripling - he was 38
when the USSR collapsed - with no need to apologize for stuff done by
the political generation before him.

I don't particularly like Putin, but I am not surprised by the direction
he has been taking. Russia needed discipline, he was able to supervise
its imposition and maintenance. In the absence of strong leadership from
Washington or any major European capital Putin, for lack of anything
better, has become more assetive. For all the negative vibes, his speech
in Munich generated last February, many of the points that he made were
both valid and intelligent [the full English translation is at
http://www.securityconference.de/konferenzen/rede.php?sprache=en&id=179;
BBCs commentary on it is at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6350847.stm; a more analytical
commentary can be found at
http://www.ia-forum.org/Content/ViewInternalDocument.cfm?ContentID=5902
]. For all his faults, Putin will leave a more positive legacy behind,
particularly if he stands by his word and steps down after this term,
than his colleague in Washington D.C. will leave.

That, I maintain, is the bottom line. Russia is not yet a good neighbor
for the Baltic countries, but it is building the prosperity and
self-confidence to become one. Both the airplane crash in Lithuania last
summer and the Bronze Statue affair in Tallinn this spring were, when
all is said and done, resolved in a civilized manner.

Be thankful for little gifts.

Regards,
Eugene Holman
.