Michael Totten walks the dog back to the house. This didn’t start on August 8th, 2008. It’s a long game:
“A key tool that the Soviet Union used to keep its empire together,” Worms said to me, “was pitting ethnic groups against one another. They did this extremely skillfully in the sense that they never generated ethnic wars within their own territory. But when the Soviet Union collapsed it became an essential Russian policy to weaken the states on its periphery by activating the ethnic fuses they planted.
It took almost thirty years for the consequences of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse to be felt in the violent birth of, and violent reaction against the state of Israel.
Things happen faster these days.
it’s all about those pesky autonomous okrugs…
so glad now that i actually took that “Russian Roadmaps” elective…
those that don’t study history are bound to repeat it.
And why surprize this is not in the news? Not used to this by now? Yet we must all know who the Hollywood elites are dating
Oi Vey
Seems to me there are some big differences between the birth of Israel and the violence in Georgia.
For one thing World War II brought in Israel-without it Britain would have been able to keep the Mandate.
Second Britain stumbled into the ethnic violence of the last of the Mandate days because it never could decide if it wanted Balfour’s Palestine or Churchill’s.
Skippy,
I haven’t made a study of it but was not the Balfour declaration dated 1917? Perhaps it was related to great power tradesies from WWI and only WWII forced the ‘great power’ to move forward and acknowledge its prior agreement?
I suspect that there was a huge amount of angst from the ‘great power’ and its allies as they were forced to face the realization that their failure to provide refuge for jews as the nazis built up to a full scale extermination could be traced back, in some small way, to the failure of the UK to do what it had promised. Nobody would take the jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust. By 1948 most of the grown ups at the UN had to accept that facts. Of course they were also watching the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Europe as every german was expelled from any country that was not named germany. There was a lot of acceptance of the idea that every ethnic group deserved a place to go where, when the chips were down, they had to take you in.
Just looking at the original goals of the UN decolonization program made that clear. It was amusing to watch its corruption over the years as it succumbed to the UN blight and the UN started to turn its back on self-determination.
I think what I was trying to say was that the collapse of empire – the Ottomans, in this case – leads inevitably to the rise of otherwise suppressed tribal and ethnic tensions. Great Power “lines in the sand” insufficiently considered the consequences of thrusting into forced union ancient animosities. Look at Lebanon (or Iraq, for that matter), where a series of questions had to be asked before you knew whether you hated someone enough to kill him.
What the hell is an Ossetian (or Abkhaz) anyway?
Well, Balfour put out the idea of a Jewish Homeland-which the British subsequently discovered was an idea they really did not like, because after the war they wanted to court favor with Arabs not Zionists.
As for the decolonizing, well you are right. Not every little slip of real estate should be its own nation. FDR let that genie out of the bottle and Churchill warned him about it at the time.
for Lex: also remember that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire was the perfect vehicle for the western powers (of which France was the weak sister at the bargaining table) to set up a buffer zone while whilst dividing up the Ottoman possessions (they chose ‘poorly’ in picking the losing side, late in the 4th quarter)…
thus France got the northern band of territory, effectively setting them up as the allied trip wire against Ivan’s ambitions southward, in search of warm water ports….
as for Ossetians and Abkhazi, suffice it to say that they just “don’t like them revenuers” round those parts… (say it with a hillbilly accent and a shotgun and you’ll get the flavor)
lex:
the answer to your last question can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304141/