As some of my readers may have noticed, I am hooked on history, and especially those little tidbits of trivia from the past that make great fillers for the inevitable, uncomfortable moments during a social gathering when everyone seems to have run out of conversation. You can always break the silence with something like the one I just learned:

“Did you know that Abraham Lincoln, while President, once pardoned his own sister-in-law?” *

[* This is true. Source: “This Day In History,” HISTORY.com, December 14, 2024.]

(Though I suggest you might want to think twice before opening with that one, as it may well arouse the ire of someone in the crowd who is already pissed off at Joe Biden for pardoning his son. But presumably you know your friends’ political views well enough to judge whether it’s worth the risk.)

At any rate, I came across an item in that same column yesterday that caught my attention because — as my regular readers are too well aware — I am also hooked on Russia — her history, politics, music and literature, food, whatever — the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. So my eye naturally was drawn to this caption under the “World War II” header:

“1939. USSR expelled from the League of Nations”

“Aha!” said I . . . another wrinkle to be added to my brain, as I was not aware of the details of this incident. And what I learned today was further reinforcement of my belief in the adage I have repeated countless times:

“Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”

That also goes for those who intentionally ignore history. And we can all name a number of world leaders who fall into that category!

But I digress . . .

A little, very brief, background: In 1920, the League of Nations was established in the aftermath of World War I to provide a forum for resolving international disputes and to prevent major wars in the future. It was conceived as a result of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. But for complex reasons — far too many to detail here — it struggled to find its footing until it was finally displaced by the establishment of the United Nations in 1945.

Among the League’s other problems was the issue of what to do with Russia, which — in the midst of the First World War — had become embroiled in its own civil war and been reinvented by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

And then there was Germany.

Both Germany and Japan voluntarily withdrew from the League in 1933, and Italy left in 1937. As we all know, the rise of the Nazi party in Germany during the 1930s ultimately led to World War II and the Axis alliance. The three nations’ withdrawals from the League should have been an ominous sign of things to come.

But it was also around that time that the Soviet Union — by then a fully-established totalitarian state under the iron fist of Josef Stalin — was showing its true imperial aspirations. In September of 1939, Stalin’s troops invaded and occupied eastern Poland — thus earning its expulsion from the League of Nations — and . . . oh, here is where it begins to sound familiar . . .

“ . . . ostensibly with the intention of protecting Russian ‘blood brothers,’ Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who were supposedly menaced by the Poles.” [“This Day In History,” HISTORY.com, December 14, 2024.]

Yes, that was my true “aha moment.” And if it doesn’t ring any recent bells for you, then you haven’t been keeping up with what’s been happening in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s Russian military invaded eastern Ukraine . . . on the excuse of having to protect its Russian sympathizers from the allegedly oppressive “Nazi” regime in Kyiv.

And there it is: history repeating itself by recycling old excuses for new wars. Vladimir Putin has apparently run out of unique catch-phrases.

But he hasn’t run out of expansionist ambitions. Just as Stalin’s success in Poland inspired and enabled him to terrorize “Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia … into signing ‘mutual assistance’ pacts, primarily one-sided agreements that gave the USSR air and naval bases in those countries” [id.], and to invade Finland without justification, so Putin will claim the same authority if he succeeds in bringing Ukraine to its knees — whether militarily or through diplomatic negotiations in his favor.

And that simply cannot be allowed to happen, for the sake of the rest of Europe . . . and of the entire world.

The United Nations, NATO and the EU must succeed where the League of Nations didn’t. In today’s world, failure is not an option.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
12/15/24