Monday 21 April 2014

Slavs vs. NATO?

There is an article on the CBC website today about anti-Western feelings in Russia. Someone identifying himself as @FedupRU left this comment under the article:
I see no Slavic people in NATO...Germany, Italy,France, Britain etc....do they really care about Ukraine?.....Russia is a Slavic country and wants the best for the Ukraine...its obvious from the vote in Crimea that Ukraine cannot be trusted anymore to protect slavs...people in Ukraine want security first and then prosperity comes second.....Russia offers that.
It fires me up when someone says something that is, as far as I know, contrary to fact. So, when I saw the words "I see no Slavic people in NATO," I checked and found that the following Slavic countries were members of NATO: Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, and Slovenia. Together, their populations total 67,000,000. Montengro and Ukraine, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina want to join NATO. If they did, then NATO's Slavic population would rise to 115,800,000. For reference, the population of Russia stands at 144,700,000.

The second point is more fundamental. @FedupRU implies that only Slavs could possibly care about Slavs. I think that says more about him than about the world. Human beings, especially those with shared values, care about each other. Any country that wants to join NATO obviously shares values with NATO.

What are those values? NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen said, "In our NATO Alliance, nearly a billion people share not only the same values of freedom, democracy and humanity – they also share the capabilities to safeguard those values."

"Freedom," for many people whose countries were in the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, means making sure that Russian domination does not recur. Obviously, this is an lesson from history that some Russians still reject in favour of either a romantic Pan-Slavism or bitter revanchism.

No comments:

Post a Comment