Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 30 – If the West
doesn’t recall the 1936 Nazi Olympics when thinking about the World Cup
competition to be held in Russia in 16 days, then when will it? Tata Gutmakher asks,
adding that unfortunately it appears the West “doesn’t understand what is
taking place” and won’t boycott as it did in 1980 when the USSR invaded
Afghanistan.
And what is still worse, Dmitry
Bykov adds, is that if the West doesn’t stay away from this competition, the
likelihood is that Vladimir Putin will behave even more aggressively after the
World Cup competition is over than he has up to now, just as when after the
2014 Sochi Olympiad he invaded Ukraine.
Putin is billing the upcoming event
as “a championship of peace,” but in fact given what he has done, “it is a
championship of war.” For those who appear to have forgotten, Gutmakher says, “war
is when people are killed … when foreign territories are seized … when there
are many prisoners … when those who resist are risking their lives … [and] [when
you are hated only because you are among those who attack and seize.”
Is what Russia doing a “hybrid” war?
“No, my children, this is war. And deaths from it are not hybrid,” Gutmakher
says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5B0DCC6DDC8A2).
But apparently, “the Europeans do not understand what is happening: the purchase
of gas and support for pseudo-economic forms is more important for them.”
At least, she says, “let us not
allow this CHAMPIONSHIP OF WAR. Sixteen days remain. Now is the last chance” to
stand up for what is right against the forces of war.
Bykov adds another reason for taking
a stand against the World Championship. In the absence of such actions, Putin
is likely to behave as he did after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi when he
invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea (sobesednik.ru/dmitriy-bykov/20180529-dmitrij-bykov-avgustejshaya-osoba).
After the World
Cup, “we can expect the same thing that we saw in March 2014: a sharpening of the
foreign policy agenda and the fateful seizure of small but significant portion”
of a neighboring country. One would think that the West would finally
understand that, but unfortunately the evidence is otherwise.
Putin doesn’t care about the love of
his own people or the love of others: he knows these are always temporary
things. What he wants is fear and fear among foreigners in particular. “We are ‘the
big red machine,’” Putin wants them to understand. And he especially wants the
West not to interfere with his celebrations of himself as at the World Cup.
But not everything is going as he
wants: Sentsov is on a hunger strike, the international commission has blamed
Moscow for the downing of the Malaysian jetliner, and the war in the Donbass is
getting worse. And Putin is responding
by asking why everyone is trying to undermine our “main holiday”? and planning
for revenge.
The Kremlin leader clearly hopes he
can intimidate everyone into doing what he wants – and in that he has succeeded
– because of fears that he will otherwise behave even worse. But that didn’t work in 1936 and it didn’t in
2014. No one should be fooled now. Only
a tough line and in this case a boycott can send the right signal.
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