‘Poor Little Georgia’ – Not!
Bill Kristol and the Menshevik myth of democratic Georgia
by Justin Raimondo
The commander in chief of America’s laptop bombardiers, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, can always be counted on to reveal not only the content of the neoconservative party line, but also, in so many words, the impulse that motivates it. In his latest peroration from his perch at the New York Times, the intellectual architect of our disastrous war in Iraq lays out a rationale for yet another catastrophic blunder in the foreign policy realm, this time in the Caucasus:
“In August 1924, the small nation of Georgia, occupied by Soviet Russia since 1921, rose up against Soviet rule. On Sept. 16, 1924, The Times of London reported on an appeal by the president of the Georgian Republic to the League of Nations. While ’sympathetic reference to his country’s efforts was made’ in the Assembly, the Times said, ‘it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression upon Soviet Russia.’
“‘Unlikely’ was an understatement. Georgians did not enjoy freedom again until 1991.”
You get the idea: in Kristol’s world, Putin’s Russia is Stalin’s USSR, and poor, doe-like little Georgia – a bastion of freedom – is in danger of being devoured by the insatiable Russian bear. Meanwhile, the world stands by, helpless, as appeals are made to a nation impervious to the very concept of morality.
To begin with, Kristol’s historical analogy is misleading: Georgia in 1924 was very far from a democracy. What he doesn’t tell you is that it was under the control of the Mensheviks, a faction of the Russian Social Democrats (later renamed the Communist Party) that lost out to Lenin’s Bolsheviks but was in fact very little different from its factional rivals. As the British writer Carl Bechhofer described Georgia’s Menshevik regime: (more…)