Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 16 – Seventy-nine years ago, on December 14, 1939, the League of
Nations expelled the Soviet Union from membership for its actions against Finland,
an act of principle by an organization most people consider to have been
incapable of that and one that has not been equaled by international bodies for
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia and Ukraine.
The
motion to exclude the Soviet Union for its actions was introduced by Argentina
on the basis of the League’s own 1933 resolution defining aggression, Russian
commentator Yury Khristenzen recalls, along with information about Stalin’s
bombing of Helsinki that has an all-too-disturbing echo in the words of Putin
representatives now (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5C153AA75C3E2).
At the time that Soviet planes were
bombing the Finnish capital, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov
insisted that the Soviet bombers were not dropping bombs but rather “food for
starving Finns. That led the Finns in
turn to refer to Soviet bombers as “Molotov’s bread delivery trucks.”
In a similar way, the Finnish army
began to refer to homemade weapons it used to fight the Soviet invaders as “Molotov
cocktails,” a name that has survived. Unfortunately, the principled position of
the League of Nations has not. To be sure, the League’s actions did not stop
Stalin, but they did underscore that the international community viewed him as
a criminal.
The great Russian memoirist Nadezhda
Mandelshtam famously observed that “happy is the country in which the
despicable will at least be despised.” Sometimes despising evil is all that someone
can do; but at the same time, it should be the minimum.
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