OPINION
APRIL 1016, 2014 | A9
www.TheEpochTimes.com/Opinion
Ukraine Crisis is Nothing Like
Invasions of Czechoslovakia
BUNDESARCHIV, BILD 183H13160, CC BYSA
By Martin D. Brown
Richmond American
International University
The overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych’s government and Russia’s occupation and annexation
of Crimea have been reported
through an increasingly murky
fog of propaganda. This has
included rival accusations of
alleged “fascist” leanings, and
numerous suggestions that the
Kremlin’s behaviour can be
best explained with reference
to key moments from Czechoslovakia’s history in 1938, 1939
and 1968.
These parallels have become so
ubiquitous that they have now
achieved the status of received
wisdom; they can be found in
articles from Chatham House,
the Economist, the Daily
Express, the Prague Post, the
Financial Times and the Washington Post. They are unconvincing. The current fashion
for linking contemporary events
with supposed historical antecedents – apparently, 2014 is the
new 1914 – raises serious questions about history’s ability to
accurately inform present policy.
More precisely, relying on tenuous historical parallels leads
to poor decisions and dangerously inaccurate conclusions.
Conversely, getting the history “right” may help achieve
a successful resolution for all
concerned. Given the EU and
NATO’s obligations to member
states bordering Ukraine and
Russia, and NATO’s decision to
bolster its Eastern defences, the
stakes here are far higher than
your usual argument within the
academy.
I’m no expert on Ukraine, nor
am I a closet supporter of either
the Putin regime or of the newly
appointed government in Kiev.
But I do happen to know a little
about Czechoslovak history, and
I am conceited enough to think
that historians are the people to
ask for advice on the soundness
of historical comparisons.
Back in the USSR
Let’s start with the alleged similarities between Ukraine and
the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of
Czechoslovakia in August 1968,
as suggested by the current
Czech president Miloš Zeman
Crimea 2014? No.
amongst others. These can be
easily dismissed. The invasion,
or “invited occupation” if you
accept the official Warsaw Pact
line, was conducted by multinational forces from the Soviet
Union, Bulgaria, Hungary and
Poland after repeated warnings from Leonid Brezhnev to
Alexander Dubček over the
pace of his reforms. No territory was annexed, and no fascists or suppressed minorities
were involved.
It was an invasion, but beyond
this banal association the comparison tells us nothing. It simply conflates the current Russian Federation with the former
Soviet Union, and legitimises
the suggestion that we’ve begun
a “New Cold War”. What’s far
less apparent is whether the “lessons” of the last Cold War have
been fully digested by NATO, or
by anyone else. Cold War historiography remains a dynamic
area of study, and even seemingly simple questions such as
“who started it?”, “what was it
about?”, “why did it end?” and
“who won?” remain fiercely disputed.
The point is that history is a
debate, not a statement of fact or
a common vision of the past, as
anyone familiar with E. H. Carr,
Richard Evans or even Herodotus would already know.
Nazi Germany’s annexation
of the Sudetenland in 1938
appears to offer more fruitful
allusions with today’s Ukrainian crisis, but here too the historical details undermine the
argument. The Nazi regime did
not invade the Sudetenland; the
territory was transferred to German authority under the terms
of the Munich Agreement,
signed by Britain, France, Italy
and Germany. Some 150,000
refugees, mostly Czech speakers and anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans, fled the region after the
agreement was signed. Poland
and Hungary also used this
opportunity to seize swathes
of territory for themselves.
It was not until March 1939
that the hyphenated post-Munich second Czecho-Slovak
Republic collapsed, when Slovakia succeeded from the federation and the republic’s
infirm president, Emil Hácha,
“requested” (after being threatened with the aerial bombardment of Prague) that Berlin
accept Bohemia and Moravia
as a “Protectorate”. There was
an invasion of sorts in March
1939, but not in 1938. Neither
era offers a useful parallel to the
events in Ukraine over the past
six months.
Once again these skeletal facts
belie decades of vigorous historiographical dispute. There
simply is no generally accepted
single interpretation of the massively controversial Czechoslovak episode. There are various
widely differing explanations of
Hitler’s motivations, of British
and French reactions, and of the
success or failure of Appeasement. You would never know
this from reading the one-dimensional accounts comparing
Czechoslovakia’s demise with
Ukraine.
Whatever the morality, rectitude or legality of these events,
the transfer of the Sudetenland to German authority was
internationally sanctioned at
the time, unlike the referendum and annexation of Crimea.
Even the German “Protectorate” received relatively widespread de facto recognition
prior to the outbreak of war in
September 1939, including from
Britain, which kept the Munich
Windmills Are Things of Beauty
DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION
By David Suzuki
I have a cabin on Quadra Island
off the British Columbia coast
that’s as close to my heart as
you can imagine. From my
porch you can see clear across
the waters of Georgia Strait to
the snowy peaks of the rugged
Coast Mountains. It’s one of the
most beautiful views I have seen.
And I would gladly share it with
a wind farm.
Sometimes it seems I’m in
the minority. Across Europe
and North America, environmentalists and others are locking horns with the wind industry over farm locations.
In Canada, opposition to wind
installations has sprung up
from Nova Scotia to Ontario to
Alberta to B.C. In the U.K., more
than 100 national and local
groups, led by some of the country’s most prominent environmentalists, have argued wind
power is inefficient, destroys
the ambience of the countryside, and makes little difference to carbon emissions. And
in the U.S., the Cape Wind Project, which would site 130 turbines off the coast of affluent
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has
David Suzuki
come under fire from famous
liberals, including John Kerry
and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.
It’s time for some perspective.
With the growing urgency of
climate change, we can’t have it
both ways. We can’t shout about
the dangers of global warming
and then turn around and shout
even louder about the “dangers”
of windmills. Climate change
is one of the greatest challenges
humanity will face this century.
Confronting it will take a radical
change in the way we produce
and consume energy—another
industrial revolution, this time
for clean energy, conservation,
and efficiency.
We’ve undergone such transformations before and we can
again. But we must accept that all
forms of energy have associated
costs. Fossil fuels are limited in
quantity, create vast amounts of
pollution, and contribute to climate change. Large-scale hydroelectric power floods valleys and
destroys habitat. Nuclear power
plants are expensive, create radioactive waste, and take a long
time to build.
Wind power also has its downsides. It’s highly visible and can
kill birds. But any man-made
Agreement on its statue books
until the early 1990s.
It is also often claimed that the
Sudeten Germans are supposedly analogous to the Russian
speakers of Crimea, and Putin
to Hitler. But there’s little evidence to support these ideas
either. The current ethno-linguistic make up of Crimea and
the Baltic States is the direct
consequence of repeated deportations and resettlements perpetrated by the Soviet Union
since the 1940s. Conversely,
relations between the Czech
and German speaking populations of the historic Bohemian
Crown Lands (České korunní
země) were rooted in centuries
of co-operation and co-existence, as well as a healthy dose
of conflict.
It was only with the gradual emergence of rival national
identities during the 19th century that a common Bohemian
inheritance in the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave way to concepts of “Czechoslovakism”,
and Bohemian Germans began
referring to themselves as Sudeten Germans.
There is a far better comparison to be made with the USSR’s
structure (not to mention cars
and house cats) can kill birds—
houses, radio towers, skyscrapers. In Toronto alone, an estimated one million birds collide
with the city’s buildings every
year. In comparison, the risk
to birds from well-sited wind
farms is low. Even the U.K.’s
Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds says scientific evidence
shows wind farms “have negligible impacts” on birds when
they are appropriately located.
Improved technologies and
more attention to wind farm
placement can clearly reduce
harm to birds, bats, and other
wildlife. Indeed, the real risk to
flying creatures comes not from
windmills but from a changing climate, which threatens
the very existence of species
and their habitats. Wind farms
should always be subject to environmental-impact assessments,
but a blanket “not in my backyard” approach is hypocritical
and counterproductive.
Pursuing wind power as part
of our move toward clean energy
makes sense. Wind power has
become the fastest-growing
source of energy in the world,
employing hundreds of thousands of workers. That’s in part
because larger turbines and
greater knowledge of how to
build, install and operate them
has dramatically reduced costs
acquisition of Sub-Carpathian
Ruthenia (Podkarpatská Rus),
which had been part of Czechoslovakia since 1918. We now
know Nikita Khrushchev, who
became premier of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic
late in the war, engineered the
Soviet absorption of Ruthenia
in June 1945, apparently at the
behest of the local population.
The parallels here, especially
with the role of the Ruthenian
population, are far stronger
than in any of the other commonly cited examples.
It is easy to understand the
appeal of these associations.
They calm fears of an uncertain
future with reassuring reflections back to a comfortingly
misunderstood parable from
the past, while effortlessly transforming ‘unknown, unknowns’
into ‘known, knowns’ with supposedly predictable policy outcomes. But majority of these
comparisons are at best insubstantial, they reveal little useful
information about either epoch
and are primarily employed in
the service of a politicised populism.
As the eminent British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, who
was key figure in the formation
of British policy towards Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten Germans, explained, “I don’t think
anyone can apply this past experience, even if one can accumulate a large number of examples
of it, to the future and make predictions on the strength of it.
Our knowledge of the “variables” will never be complete
enough.”
The bottom line is that nationalism is the real issue here, not
“fascism”, and not a renewed
Cold War. NATO won’t gain
any useful insights for future
policy from looking back at the
1960s or the 1930s. If we look at
the situation that way, the outcome seems all too clear: war
with the Russian federation,
followed by the forced removal
of all Russian speakers from
Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic region. After all, this was the
fate that awaited the Sudeten
Germans of Czechoslovakia.
Martin D. Brown does not work
for, consult to, own shares in or
receive funding from any company or organisation that would
benefit from this article, and has
no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read
the original article.
Views expressed in this article
are the opinions of the author(s)
and do not necessarily reflect the
views of Epoch Times.
over the past two decades. Prices
are now comparable to other
forms of power generation and
will likely decrease further as
technology improves.
But, are windmills ugly?
Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the U.N. Environment
Program from 1976 to 1992,
told me belching smokestacks
were considered signs of progress when he was growing up
in Egypt. Even as an adult concerned about pollution, it took
him a long time to get over the
pride he felt when he saw a tower
pouring clouds of smoke.
Our perception of beauty is
shaped by our values and beliefs.
Some people think wind turbines are ugly. I think smokestacks, smog, acid rain, coalfired power plants, and climate
change are ugly. I think windmills are beautiful. They harness
the wind’s power to supply us
with heat and light. They provide local jobs. They help clean
air and reduce climate change.
And if one day I look out from
my cabin porch and see a row of
windmills spinning in the distance, I won’t curse them. I will
praise them. It will mean we’re
finally getting somewhere.
Views expressed in this article are
the opinions of the author(s) and
do not necessarily reflect the views
of Epoch Times.