We are at war...

My statement that "we are at war" yesterday in this blog may shock.

But wiser people than I foresaw the present situation.

Malcolm Fraser, former conservative prime minister of Australia, 1975-1983, set out the history that led to the mess in Ukraine in 2014 in this article in The Guardian.

Malcolm Fraser lacked audience: his former party dismayed at his drift from his former anti-Soviet passion, the other side unable to see other than the Malcolm they hated because he brought down Gough in the end of 1975. All that of course meant he was not listened to, was 'wrong' before being read. Malcolm lamented to me that he no longer had a party to vote for.

Stephen Cohen, eminent elder statesman of Russian studies in the United States, in 2014 set out possible Ukraine futures in this article in The Nation. He included these remarks:

§ Yet another risk factor is that the new Cold War lacks the mutually restraining rules that developed during the forty-year Cold War, especially after the Cuban missile crisis. Indeed, highly charged suspicions, resentments, misconceptions and misinformation both in Washington and Moscow today may make such mutual restraints even more difficult. The same is true of the surreal demonization of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin—a kind of personal vilification without any real precedent in the past, at least after Stalin’s death. (Henry Kissinger has pointed out that the “demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” I think it is worse: an abdication of real analysis and rational policy-making.)

§ Finally, the new Cold War may be more perilous because, also unlike its forty-year-long predecessor, there is no effective American opposition—not in the administration, Congress, the establishment media, universities, think tanks or the general public.

Opposition to the western ferocity now in Ukraine is muted because of simplistic human rights thinking on the left, notably in Green parties; plus entrenched hostility towards Russia. 

We ignore the evidence of history. It was especially the attitude of the British in negotiations for a USSR-UK-France treaty in 1939 that made World War II a reality. With collapse of the tripartite talks, Stalin turned to Germany and signed a nonaggression pact that enabled the carve-up of Poland and the invasion of France by Germany. [link] [link] [link]

Germany turned against the USSR in 1941 with an attack on Russia and countries in between. In World War II somewhere between 100 and 300 million people died, the greatest numbers of them civilians. There is general acceptance of Russian deaths over 20 million. I recall conversation with a senior officer in the Australian department of external affairs in the 1960s who dismissed such numbers of Russians as nothing but Soviet propaganda. Here are some numbers. What distinguishes the Holocaust within this overall much larger numbers was the extermination of classes of people: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, prisoners of war, more. But we need to see beyond the Holocaust.

Failures of diplomacy are pinned up for scoffing. Failures in war are so often eulogised. But far from anything Australia might eulogise, it's important to remember, as we follow the American grand strategic plan to take down Russia, that there is relevant history.

Since 1700, there have been four attempts to take down Russia.

Karl (Charles) XII of Sweden, a young king and supposedly a military genius, won lesser angagements against Russia but aiming for Moscow in 1709 lost much of his army, lost his Swedish empire and saw the rise of the Russian empire under Peter the Great.

Napoleon, definitely a military genius, in marching on Moscow, achieving a success in battle at Borodino outside Moscow. He then occupied a Moscow that had been abandoned and deliberately burned. His forces were decimated in retreat.

Hitler, a strategic genius better known for his tyranny and evil, needed the east for resources. His march on Moscow led to the unravelling of his empire, complicated by fighting on two fronts: against Stalin in the east, Eisenhower in the west, with British support.

And now we have two-front Biden. Taking on Xi and Putin at the same time.

We support Biden because, well, those others are bad guys, we know that. Though our economy is sustained by businesses trading with China, and Coles and Woolworths sell frozen fish, Alaskan Pollock, caught in Russia, exported through China. And of course our petroleum purchases, mainly via refineries in other countries, include Russian oil. 

... and we can't face thinking about war.