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Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Moscow confused

 

Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova












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.