War in Europe
Putin has invaded Ukraine. Is it hysterical to prepare for total war with Russia? Or is it naive not to?
By
Anne Applebaum
Ukrainian servicemen stand in position during fighting with pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukrainian town of Ilovaysk on Aug. 26, 2014.
Photo by Maks Levin/Reuters
WARSAW, Poland—Over and over again—throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels—I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house.
extraordinary statement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote—and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of b*stards.”
But Novorossiya will also be hard to sustain if it has opponents in the West. Possible solutions to that problem are also under discussion. Not long ago, Vladimir Zhirinovsky—the Russian member of parliament and court jester, who sometimes says things that those in power cannot—argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries—“dwarf states,” he called them—and show the West who really holds power in Europe: “
Nothing threatens America, it’s far away. But Eastern European countries will place themselves under the threat of total annihilation,”
he declared. Vladimir Putin indulges these comments: Zhirinovsky’s statements are not official policy,
the Russian president says, but he always “gets the party going.”
A far more serious person, the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky,
has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes—perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city—to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.
Top Comment
The only way we would ever get involved in a "Total War" with Russia is if some republican whackjob like McCain was elected president and did something reckless.
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Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But
Mein Kampf also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.
But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication—and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either. So is it hysterical to prepare for total war? Or is it naive not to do so?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...uld_we_prepare_for_war_with.html?wpsrc=fol_tw
