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| Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova |
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| George F. Kennan |
Letters to the Editor, Jerusalem Post, Dec 30, 2020
In “Moscow ‘confused’ by Israeli anger at
envoy’s remarks to ‘Post’” (December
27), Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “All statements
by the Russian ambassador quoted in the publication are in line with Russia’s
well-known position on the Middle East.”
But that does not
necessarily mean that these well-known positions (such as there is “no proof
Hezbollah created the tunnels” crossing into Israel) have any connection to the
truth. After all, the motto of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984 was “War is
Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”
It helps to have
read Arthur Koestler, Artur London, Milan Kundera and Orwell, but what comes to
mind when I read what Zakharova said is what George F. Kennan, then counselor
of the US Embassy in Moscow, said in a September 1944 memorandum:
“It would be useful
to the Western world to realize that… the men in the Kremlin have never
abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion…
which underlay the German-Russian non-aggression pact of 1939.”
MLADEN
ANDRIJASEVIC
Beersheba
It is unfortunate that the Jerusalem Post edited out part of George F.
Kennan’s quote
which shows that this Russia’s policy of territorial and political expansion had always been there and predated
the USSR!
“It would be useful to the
western world to realize that despite all the
vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the
men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of
territorial and political expansion which had once
commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists, and which underlay
the German-Russian non-aggression pact of 1939.”
