Pickled-brain Russian Colonel Blames Poland for WWII

Maybe it's the vodka, but Russian strategic thinking often verges on the phantasmagoric when it comes to bizarre out-of-the-box thinking. Col. K. published one of these wild and crazy apologies for the Molotov/Ribbentrop Treaty of August 1939 thusly:

The paper, titled "Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR's Role On the Eve of World War II," recounts how in the run-up to Germany's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler demanded that Poland turn over control of the city of Danzig as well as a land corridor between Germany and the territory now known as Kaliningrad.

"Everyone who has studied the history of World War II without bias knows that the war began because of Poland's refusal to satisfy Germany's claims," he writes.

Kovalyov called the demands "quite reasonable." He observed: "The overwhelming majority of residents of Danzig, cut off from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, were Germans who sincerely wished for reunification with their historical homeland."

Of course, there is a method to this loony-tune history, part of Tiny Vlad The Empoisoner's Rehab of Soviet history so we can all fantasize once again along Comintern lines:

The Kremlin presses a campaign to recast Russia's 20th century history in a more favorable light, [and] a research paper published Thursday on the Defense Ministry's Web site blamed Poland for starting World War II.

The unorthodox reading of history appears to be the latest effort by Russian historians to defend the Soviet Union and its leaders, especially their role in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Poland condemned the research paper.

Russia has angrily rejected claims that a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine amounted to genocide, and Russia's Supreme Court recently turned down an appeal to reopen an investigation into the massacre by Soviet secret police of Polish military officers and intellectuals in Russia's Katyn forest during World War II.

The generally accepted view is that Poland was a victim rather than the aggressor in the conflict, and that Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland marked the start of the war.

The fact that this factitious counterfactual appeared on the Defense Ministry website makes it a semi-official expression of what passes for "strategic thinking" at the highest rungs of the neo-Soviet madhouse being reconstructed by tiny Vlad. Although the Colonel in the Poland-bashing article can't hold a candle to Igor Panarin who predicts civil war and subsequent martial law across the US later this year [2009], a breakup of the USA into six "rump-states" by 2011, and the happy occurrence of a Russia/China "New World Disorder" shortly thereafter.

Panarin [is] a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, [whose thinking] meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End"—when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control. Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

I suggest that Igor and Col. K lay off the "little water" for a while and detox enuf to get off Mini-me Vlad's alternate-universe for a short breather before sloshing back into Vlad's vodka & fish roe hallucinations.