Bush's Moscow misstep

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/12/bushs_moscow_misstep/ By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist May 12, 2005 MOSCOW WAS the last place President Bush should have gone to mark the 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Russian soldiers goose-stepping through Red Square, dignitaries assembled in front of Lenin's tomb, the strains of the Soviet anthem introduced by Stalin in 1944 -- this was not a scene that the leader of the free world had any business being a part of. Of course it cannot be forgotten that the Russian people paid an enormous price during World War II -- 27 million dead, more than the losses of the other allied nations combined. Without Russia's enormous sacrifice, the Allies might never have prevailed. But neither can it be forgotten that Russia did not enter the war on the side of the Western democracies. On the contrary: It helped unleash the war as accomplice of the Germans. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed by the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers in August 1939 paved the way for the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army a month later. For nearly two years, Germany and the USSR were allies -- two years during which the Nazis overran Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France and sent wave after wave of bombers to attack Britain from the air. In the same two years, the Soviets occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and unleashed a vicious war against Finland. Only after it was invaded by Germany in June 1941 did Moscow belatedly become an ally of the West. Sixty years after V-E Day, moreover, Russia is the only major combatant in the European war that is not today a free democracy. Vladimir Putin has strangled his country's independent media, abolished the election of regional officials, driven a major corporation into bankruptcy in order to seize its assets, launched egregious prosecutions of businessmen who oppose him politically, and grossly interfered in the domestic affairs of neighboring countries. He is conducting a brutal war of butchery and scorched-earth destruction in Chechnya, and openly encourages nostalgia for the days of Stalinist empire and repression. The Bush administration may have no choice but to work with him on issues like nuclear proliferation and terrorism. It doesn't have to reward his creeping fascism with high-prestige presidential visits -- least of all on an occasion intended to mark the victory over Nazi fascism. What made all of this so much worse -- and the president's attendance at the Kremlin-sponsored pageant so much more troubling -- was Putin's repellent defense of Russia's prewar collaboration with Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union had been justified in signing the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Putin claimed, because it had to ensure the ''security of its western borders." His foreign ministry denied any wrongdoing in the Red Army's bloody occupation of the Baltic republics. ''One cannot use 'occupation' to describe those historical events," said the Russian ambassador to the European Union. But occupation was exactly what the Soviets inflicted on the Baltics, along with slavery, mass killing, and exile. Putin also described the end of the Soviet Union -- which led to the liberation of Eastern Europe and the emancipation of tens of millions of human beings -- as ''the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." In fact, the crumbling of the Iron Curtain was one of the 20th century's finest chapters, and Putin's inability to say so speaks volumes about his hostility to democracy and freedom. The real geopolitical catastrophe of the last century was not the fall of Soviet communism but its rise and rule -- the 70-year reign of a murderous ideology that killed more people, crushed more souls, and inflicted more cruelty than any other ''ism" in history. Nazi Germany in all its malignance never came close to matching the degree of evil achieved by Soviet Russia. But whereas a conscience-stricken Germany has deeply and contritely admitted its sins -- most recently on Tuesday, when every senior member of the German government attended the dedication of a new Holocaust memorial in Berlin -- Russia never has. It would be unthinkable for an official German celebration to include swastikas and pictures of Hitler, yet the Victory Day celebration in Red Square featured banners with the communist hammer-and-sickle and images of Vladimir Lenin. Russia's communist heritage has never been meaningfully repudiated. The atrocities of Soviet communism have never been punished -- or even, in most cases, owned up to. Which is why the pomp and circumstance in Moscow this week could not help being as much an exaltation of Russia's Stalinist empire as of the Nazis' defeat. So long as Russia refuses to break with its past, it will never be inoculated against a return to autocracy. No American president belongs on the Red Square reviewing stand next to the man who is dismantling what remains of Russian democracy -- and who still makes excuses for crimes like Molotov-Ribbentrop and the occupation of the Baltics. Free Mind's Comments in blue italics: During the 1934 Long March, China’s first powerful Communist figure, Zhang Guo Tao, lost out to Mao. Mao tricked Zhang’s army so that it was wiped out by warlords in Singjiang Province by telling him that it would be advantageous to open up a Soviet supply line. At the time, Zhang had 80,000 men while Mao’s army only had 30,000. Zhang later defected to the Nationalist side, to Dr. Zhu Jia Hua, while both parties were making a tribute to their joint ancestor, the Yellow Emperor’s tomb. Mao climbed to the forefront, to be the world’s despot, piggybacking on Stalin’s success in oppressing Europe. The Western Hemisphere seems not to want to include China as a serious ally, or not at all, for some odd reasons, as if Chinese are not human beings, and the Chinese don’t count, their sacred blood shed do not seem to register or of concern. Chinese people really do not like Russians, no matter what the propaganda says. I went with a group of students to study Qi Gong and martial arts at Shaolin Temple. We went for a foot herb medicine treatment, and massage. I asked the women there where they were from and was told they were from Manchuria. I was surprised because I don’t think Henan is a better economic place to be. But I was told by a massage owner why she came here to China proper to make a living. She gave me a curt answer: The Russians would never let go of these girls. Russians are infamous for bullying Chinese in Manchuria. The oppressed, like The Chinese or the Baltic nations, all know very well about the oppressors. It is not like by making a trip at the presidential level, people will put down or assuage their fear. Social rooted illnesses take ways to cure; they cannot be coerced by attending a pompous show at Red Square. Like the Hammer and Sickle as a symbol on the Soviet flag, the Chinese Communists have the 5-star flag, but to the oppressed it is the very repulsive symbol of annihilating the other side, the weaker, the kinder. To march forward toward peace, these symbols must be removed. If a Tang Dynasty farmer is holding a sickle in cutting wheat in an ancient calendar imagery, he is a diligent farmer. But for the communist having sickles, it means it is out getting their throats, and they can’t identify with that violent image. How to Integrate China? Part of the Integration process: Take the Sickle image out, throw out the Russian aggressive sickle. So to Integrate China back, or to make adhesive ties from Russia to the Baltics, it does take social works and for the sickle to be erased will be the best thing to do for China. However, it does take planning and to undo the symbol of hate crimes. This is most Chinese people’s desire, it is just that they do not want to have an uprising against the communist government, because they like Hu JinTao, and Wen JiaBao, but they don’t think of them as party great leaders so much as good Chinese men.