Letter to the editor: Why history matters

Mark Twain is credited with the quote “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

Putin says one reason for his invasion of Ukraine is to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. That statement operates on an Orwellian level as a vile and malignant lie. It is Putin who is following the Nazis’ path to war in the 1930s.

Anschluss with Austria, spring 1938? Check. See the “friendly takeover” of Belarus at the request of its dictator, Lukashenko. Demanding that a border area, the Sudetenland, filled with ethnic Germans be incorporated into the Reich to prevent a fictitious genocide? Check. See the recognition of the “independent separatist republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Full-scale invasion of the rump state of Czechoslovakia in spring 1939? Check. See the current invasion of what is left of Ukraine.

What’s next? Demand for a land corridor connecting Russia’s Kaliningrad province, currently surrounded by the independent nations of Poland and Lithuania, replicating Hitler’s demand for a land corridor connecting the Reich with Danzig? Perhaps. Invading Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which, like Ukraine, were part of the Tsarist and Soviet Empires, with or without the use of the Russian equivalent for the word “lebensraum”? Perhaps.

Abraham Lincoln stated, “It has been said of the world’s history hitherto that might makes right. It is for us and for our time to reverse the maxim, and to say that right makes might.”

Does might make right? Shall we accede to that noxious creed? That is a question that has stalked us since the beginning of time. That is why Ukraine, and history, matter.

Eric Falk

North Huntingdon