Issue of Numbers (Andrei Martyanov)

Andrei Martyanov is quite right, we Europeans are now Russia haters. It was not always like this, there was the “Wandel durch Annäherung”, or the change through rapprochement of Egon Bahr and Willi Brandt during the Cold War. Later there were many commercial ties. Now Russophobia is turning into mass hysteria. I see it every day in my daily newspaper, the hate-filled rubbish and falsehoods they publish! There is never a thought of the mistakes of EU Association Agreement, the planned failure of the Minsk Agreements, the US Maidan Coup, Nato expansion, the real US intentions etc. We have been brain-washed. At first I thought it was only P and 3B (Poland and the Baltic states), but now it is everywhere. We believe that our hatred will be the bullwark that will protect us from Russia.

My father taught himself Russian as a young man in the 1920s. He visited the Soviet Union a few times after WW II. He was not a communist. I have visited Russia twice. I also knew the President of the Austrian Soviet Friendship Society. He was not a communist. We are just normal people.

Hermann Lübbe is a German professor of philosophy, now 97, and he had a interesting interview with the Weltwoche periodical recently. He says this will pass. The world will be at peace again. WW II taught him and his countrymen “was geht, und was nicht geht”, what you can do and what you cannot do. He considers it to be quite wrong to condemn those who seek to understand the Russian point of view and to speak badly of “those who understand Russia”. Understanding is a good thing.

If you want peace you must understand the causes of the conflict. We in the West, even Europe alone, could and should have prevented it. It is tragic that it takes a war to be taught what you can do and what you cannot do. But that is fate. We are not the masters of our fate.