Gwynne Dyer: The irony of Vladimir Putin's visit to Normandy

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      The presence of President Vladimir Putin on the Normandy beaches on the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings was planned long before the current conflict over Ukraine, but it is a useful reminder of the fact that Russia is not some Asiatic tyranny on Europe’s eastern borders. It is a European country that has played a major role in the continent’s affairs for centuries.

      Not only were the Russians on the same side as the “Western” allies in the Second World War. They did most of the heavy lifting in the war against Nazi Germany, and they paid by far the highest price.

      While 850,000 American, British and Canadian troops were landing on the French coast in June 1944, 6 million soldiers of the Soviet army were fighting massive battles with the German army in eastern Europe. The land war on the Eastern Front was already three years old, and by June of 1944 the Russians had won: the Germans had already begun the long retreat that ended above Hitler’s bunker in Berlin eleven months later.

      The price the Russians paid for their victory over Nazi Germany was huge: at least 11 million military dead (compared to fewer than 1 million dead for the Western allies). No other country in history has lost so many soldiers, but in the end it was the Red Army that destroyed Hitler’s Wehrmacht: 80 percent of Germany’s 6 million military dead were killed on the Eastern Front.

      The main strategic significance of the Normandy landings, therefore, was not the defeat of Germany, which was already assured. It was the fact that Moscow had to accept that Europe would be divided between the victors down the middle of Germany, rather than along some line further west that ran down the Franco-German border, or even down the English Channel.

      President Putin, who began his career as a KGB agent working in Soviet-dominated East Germany, will certainly be aware of the irony that he is commemorating a military operation whose main result was to contain Soviet power. And his presence will remind all the other participants that the Second World War was not really fought to defend democracy from tyranny.

      Hitler never intended to conquer Britain, and was surprised when his armed forces overran France in 1940. He was certainly not out to “conquer the world”, a preposterous ambition for a country of only 80 million people. His real target was Russia: the “Jewish-Bolshevik” Soviet Union. And he couldn’t even conquer that.

      Unlike previous great-power wars, the two world wars had to be represented as moral crusades against evil because new wealth and technology turned them into total wars that required mass participation. If people are going to be asked to sacrifice vast numbers of their children in a war, they must be told that it has some higher purpose than the traditional one of settling disputes among the great powers.

      The people who lived through the First World War were fed that lie, but we no longer believe it now. To a remarkable extent, the countries that fought on the Allied side in the Second World War still believe that it was a moral crusade, because Hitler was a very evil man.

      So he was, but almost nobody in the countries that were fighting him knew about the death camps until the war was over. Moreover, the country that was carrying the heaviest burden in the war against Nazi Germany was a monstrous tyranny led by Joseph Stalin, a man who certainly rivalled Hitler in terms of how many millions of people he murdered.

      It seems churlish to insist that the Second World War was just another great-power conflict on the day when the last survivors of the generation who fought in it are gathering, probably for the last time, to honour those who died on the beaches of Normandy. But there is no other time when people will actually pause to listen to such an assertion, and it is important that they understand it.

      If the world wars were moral crusades against evil, then our only hope of avoiding more such tragedies in the future (probably fought with nuclear weapons) would be to extinguish evil in the world. Whereas if they were actually traditional great-power wars, lightly disguised, then we might hope to stop them just by changing the way that the international system works.

      That was the real conclusion of the governments on the winning side in both world wars. It’s why they created the League of Nations after the first one, and the United Nations after the second. Both organisations were designed to break the cycle of great-power wars by criminalising those who start wars and taking the profit out of victory (because nobody will ever recognise your conquests even if you win).

      The League of Nations failed, as first attempts often do, but the United Nations did not. There has been no Third World War, and no great power has fought any other for the past 69 years. Putin’s presence in Normandy is an embarrassment precisely because he broke the UN rules by forcibly annexing Crimea, but the enterprise is still, on the whole, a success. So far, so good.

      Comments

      25 Comments

      I Chandler

      Jun 4, 2014 at 3:07pm

      "Hitler never intended to conquer Britain,"

      Maybe he just intended to end the British Empire - we'll never know...Operation Sea Lion would've been difficult anyhow...with the trouble the Luftwaffe had in sinking British boats - not to mention the trouble of transporting thousands of horses across the Channel - the German Army was mostly horse-drawn.

      Chris B

      Jun 4, 2014 at 4:47pm

      Remeber that by the time Sealion went into effect the Luftwaffe was by far the biggest and most capable airforce in the war. If the Luftwaffe dominated the skys (which Goering had no reason to suspect otherwise) the Germans would have had tactical control of the island without stopping the supplies. Also give Hitler credit for stoping the campagin before it cost TOO many planes.

      Michael Zajac

      Jun 4, 2014 at 4:59pm

      A good article.

      But please stop calling the USSR “the Russians.” About two and a half million Ukrainians died fighting Hitler. Pretending they were Rissians is supporting Putin’s propaganda that asserts Ukraine is a fake country.

      Putin also likes to leave out that Stalin was Hitler’s eager trading partner and ally in conquest for the first two years of the war, while the two carved up Poland. The fact that Western Ukraine had always existed outside of Moscow’s domination until then is inconvenient for the imperialist mythology.

      Hypie\

      Jun 4, 2014 at 5:04pm

      This article was actually quite good up until Dyer reverts back to his tired old shilling which we must all be used to by now.

      “Putin’s presence in Normandy is an embarrassment precisely because he broke the UN rules by forcibly annexing Crimea”

      But deposing a properly elected government by externally funding and supporting violent thug protesters is apparently OK, right? As is dispatching the armed forces to shell, crush and burn those of your people who don’t agree and want nothing to do with you.

      As anyone who has been reading his articles about this situation knows, Dyer has shown himself to be nothing more than an extended mouthpiece for the likes of CNN, FOX, BBC, and other Western propaganda organs. He should save himself and his readers further embarrassment and pack it in.

      P.Peto

      Jun 4, 2014 at 5:53pm

      In the present circumstances I wonder why Putin {Russia] would even bother to come and commemorate an Anglo-American battle when his attendance is clearly not appreciated by the current western powers. Perhaps he hopes to use the occasion to personally defuse the present anti-Russian crises or to remind the West that Russia was once their indispensable military ally in defeating Germany. However it's odd that the West doesn't send dignitaries to commemorate the Russian victories at the battles of Stalingrad [1942] or Kursk[1943] which in effect broke the back of the German Wehrmacht. The Russians could have defeated Germany without the Anglo-American campaign to liberate France and the Low Lands. They did so because Germany had already been fatally weakened and they were in there for the spoils and to stop the military advance of communism from swallowing up the whole of Europe. They didn't launch the Normandy invasion [1944] for any noble reasons but rather to protect Anglo-American capitalist [elite] interests in Europe and elsewhere.

      Chuck Laidlaw

      Jun 4, 2014 at 7:40pm

      As usual with Dyer's words, this was a good read. One of the comment writers wrote that "Western Ukraine had always existed outside of Moscow's domination", with the unwritten implication that it had existed as an independent entity before 1939. Well, prior to WWI some of it was in Austria-Hungary, and some in the Russian empire. Between 1918 and 1922, Ukraine had a brief period when something vaguely resembling an independent Ukraine existed, but between 1922 and 1939 some was in Poland, some in Czechoslovakia, and some in the USSR. Until Khrushchev, a Ukrainian Communist party official before rising to bigger things, moved some lines on the map to make Crimea a part of the Ukraine SSR, it had been considered Russian territory.

      David English

      Jun 4, 2014 at 9:02pm

      @Hypie\ "... But deposing a properly elected government by externally funding and supporting violent thug protesters is apparently OK, right? As is dispatching the armed forces to shell, crush and burn those of your people who don’t agree and want nothing to do with you."

      Yes, in an International Law context, it is legal. What is not legal is changing the borders of a country. Borders were frozen, excepting established disputes, when the UN formed. Thus, as Dyer says, wars between major powers are no longer useful.

      This is why the Israeli conflict is never-ending... they cannot legally annex the territory they are occupying. They haven't lost, but they can't win. This is what the UN gave us. It says little to nothing about how nations govern their internal people. It says nothing about messing around supplying arms and motivation to rebel groups in a nation. It just says you can't annex territory. This prevents wars between major powers, or rather it did.

      Then Bosnia came along, with its "duty to protect" line. So, now we get Crimea in return. Let's hope it stops there. The UN is far from perfect, but it's the best we've got and it's been relatively successful at preventing major wars. It hasn't and isn't likely to solve all the other problems, but it did solve a rather important one.

      I Chandler

      Jun 4, 2014 at 11:13pm

      "Putin broke the UN rules"

      So sue him... Saying the International Court of Justice lacked jurisdiction ,when it ruled against the US and awarded reparations for distributing psyop manuals and planting bombs on planes,the US refused to comply. The US argued that the Court did not have jurisdiction, with the American UN ambassador dismissing the Court as a "semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body, which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don't."

      "no great power has fought any other for the past 69 years."

      Didn't the US fight China and the Soviet Union in the early fifties?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#U.S._threat_of_atomic_warfare

      "The people who lived through the First World War were fed that lie"

      Are you saying the people who lived through the SECOND World War were fed lies:
      "He was certainly not out to “conquer the world”, a preposterous ambition for a country of only 80 million people."

      Have they ever stopped lying?

      quinn

      Jun 5, 2014 at 12:14am

      The USA backed coup of the democratically elected government of Ukraine by pro right forces is the real issue, the intercepted phone call, where a Secretary of State said at the beginning of February that she had cleared it with the Secretary General of the UN puts into question who controls the UN.

      Western media is manipulating the real issues for the benefit of corporations and globalisation.

      Michael Zajac

      Jun 5, 2014 at 12:16am

      Chuck Laidlaw, my point is that the myth that the Ukrainians are “Little Russians” who have always been part of Russia is an outright lie.

      Regarding Crimes, all the lines on the map and many of the people on the ground have been moved at some point. Crimea once had a Ukrainian majority population, and a Tatar or Turkic one before that. But it is now part of Ukraine, according to the laws of civilized nations, and the specific pledges of the US, the UK, and the Russian Federation.