Cassi Creek:
Those who fail to
learn history are doomed to repeat it.
This is, of course, a paraphrase of someone else’s
words. That in no way diminishes its
veracity.
We currently
see the GOP blaming the invasion of Crimea by Russia on Obama. Included in the finger pointing and outright
failure to understand the history of the region and/or its populace, we find
the GOP trotting out the invasion of Poland in 1939.
While there are
direct similarities to the “invasion to protect ethnic Germans from being
repressed by bordering nations, there are also historical factors that the GOP
seems too willing to overlook.
Ukraine has
been an unwilling conquest of the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union for
centuries. The possession of Ukraine by
one foreign power or another is also tied to the need for a warm water port to
allow commercial and naval ships to find safe harbor.
In some ways,
I believe that the Crimean populace may well wish to be back under the Russian
flag. History has yet to answer that
question, but the Black Sea port on the Crimean Peninsula has always been and
will remain a huge factor in the resolution of Putin’s latest land grab.
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