Bill Kristol and the Menshevik myth of democratic Georgia
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2895
by Justin Raimondo
The commander in chief of America’s laptop bombardiers, Weekly Standard editor Bill http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3275, the intellectual architect of our disastrous war in Iraq lays out a rationale for yet another catastrophic blunder in the foreign policy realm, this time in the Caucasus:
“In August 1924, the small nation of Georgia, occupied by Soviet Russia since 1921, rose up against Soviet rule. On Sept. 16, 1924, The Times of London reported on an appeal by the president of the Georgian Republic to the League of Nations. While ‘sympathetic reference to his country’s efforts was made’ in the Assembly, the Times said, ‘it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression upon Soviet http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3506.'”‘Unlikely‘ was an understatement. Georgians did not enjoy freedom again until 1991.”
You get the idea: in Kristol’s world, Putin’s Russia is Stalin’s USSR, and poor, doe-like little Georgia – a bastion of freedom – is in danger of being devoured by the insatiable Russian bear. Meanwhile, the world stands by, helpless, as appeals are made to a nation impervious to the very concept of morality.
To begin with, Kristol’s historical analogy is misleading: Georgia in 1924 was very far from a democracy. What he doesn’t tell you is that it was under the control of the Mensheviks, a faction of the Russian Social Democrats (later renamed the Communist Party) that lost out to Lenin’s Bolsheviks but was in fact very little different from its factional rivals. As the British writer Carl Bechhofer described Georgia’s Menshevik regime:
“The Free and Independent Social-Democratic State of Georgia will always remain in my memory as a classic example of an imperialist ‘small nation.’ Both in territory-snatching outside and bureaucratic tyranny inside, its chauvinism was beyond all bounds.”
George Hewitt, a professor of Circassian languages at London University, cites the colorful and well-traveled Bechhofer in an illuminating essay that lays out the grave error underlying American policy in the region:
“In the hope of avoiding a proliferation of an unpredictable number of small states, the international community in its collective wisdom decreed that it would recognize only the USSR’s constituent union-republics and would, thus, not give any encouragement to the yearning for self-determination that characterized some ethnic minorities living in regions endowed with only lower level autonomy according to the Soviet administrative system (such as the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia and the Autonomous Region of South Ossetia, both lower-status entities within the union-republic of Soviet Georgia). It was a huge irony that, in adopting this stance, the West was effectively enshrining the divisions created for his fiefdom by none other than the Soviet dictator Iosep Besarionis-dze Dzhughashvili, a Georgian known to the wider world as Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.”
Aside from memorializing Stalin’s policy of imprisoning ethnic minorities within larger administrative entities, refusing to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states allows the U.S. and the European community to maintain the fiction of Russian “expansionism.” According to Washington, the Russians invaded “Georgia”; Saakashvili’s invasion of South Ossetia doesn’t qualify as aggression, since how can you invade your own country? South Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of Georgia, you see. Just like a small mammal is part of the anaconda that swallowed it whole.
Hewitt goes on to point out:
“Had the Soviet Union collapsed during the first decade of its existence in the 1920s before Abkhazia was reduced in status by fiat of Stalin in February 1931 from being a fully-fledged republic, which entered the Transcaucasian Federation on 13 December 1922 in treaty-alliance with Georgia, to that of an autonomous republic within Georgia, and had the then League of Nations adopted the same principle of recognition later practiced by its successor, the United Nations, then Abkhazia would for decades have enjoyed independence and membership in its own right of the said international community.”
The same goes for Ossetia, which is today split into North and South, with the latter under the Georgian heel – as placed there by the half-Ossetian (on his father’s side), half-Georgian Stalin.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13292