Opinion: Russia, Georgia, Finland and the history of victim-blamers
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Finland’s effort to help out with the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia — coupled with the energetic denunciations of Georgia and its American puppetmasters that are coming from what WashPost’s ed board politely calls Washington’s ‘foreign policy sophisticates’ — recalls a similar, shameful period in the history of American intelligentsia. When the Soviet Union launched its peacekeeping-in-force campaign against tiny Finland in 1939, plenty of Americans were willing to find that the real villain in that invasion was ... tiny Finland. Some of these folks, like U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Joseph Davies, were simply useful idiots who just never met a tightly controlled society they didn’t like. Others, like the writer Dalton Trumbo, were actual yeggs getting their orders from the Kremlin. Collectively, they provide us a shameful but valuable lesson in the dangers of thug apologism, as we try to assess how much, if at all, the Georgians are to blame for their own predicament.
I wish I could say today’s Los Angeles Times were immune to kneejerk anti-westernism, but back in the days before Otis Chandler, the paper was still under adult supervision. Here’s how the ed board described Stalin’s invasion at the time: