As West leaves the front line, ‘the horrors of history’ return

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http://www.worldtribune.com/2014/03/11/as-west-leaves-the-front-line-the-horrors-of-history-return/

The West has left the forefront of history which is repeating itself in force and with dispatch throughout Eurasia.

While condemning the actions of Russia in Crimea, John Kerry said that the time of empires is long gone; we live in the “21st century, and not in the 19th century”. After speaking with Putin, Angela Merkel told him that he had lost touch with reality and that he lives “in another dimension”.

CrimeaUkraine-300x150In my opinion the time of empires has not passed and Putin is in full harmony with reality.
The United States, and with their assistance a significant part of Europe have created an isolated civilization: extremely successful and advanced, but isolated.

Geography played a great role because the U.S. and Britain are island states and mainland Europe is a peninsula. From a cultural stand point, this civilization has been based on ancient models of Greek democracy and Roman law; ethnically – on a relatively homogeneous population in a very limited space.

For millennia the giant Eurasia had existed in a completely different position that has never changed.

Mircea Eliade wrote with bitterness that his people, Romanians, like other Balkan peoples consistently lived in fear of the “The Horror of History”. It’s difficult to create and develop sustainable forms of democracy when you live in perpetual state of hordes, intrusions and tyrannies. Meanwhile, leading Eurasian powers – Russia, China, Turkey and Iran – were formed in exactly such an ominous environment: endless open borders, limitless vastness, mixed, diverse and often hostile to each other and its governments population dispersed over an infinite space.

Only through harsh centralized power was it possible to maintain such population, these areas and these boundaries. This was a natural prerequisite for creation of the empires.

Every Eurasian state – from Persian’s Achaemenids and ancient China (Tianxia) to Ottomans and Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union, Communist China and Islamic republic of Iran – desired to expand its boundaries to resist its rivals and hostile, spontaneously emerging entities (such the Mongols, The Mughal Empire, the state of Tamerlane), to keep rebellious population and augment the resources.

In the 19th-20th centuries these common threats were supplemented by the expansion of the West: The British Empire and the United States. No one, not even modern powers, had forgotten the “surprises”, in the face of nomads or Islamist gangs, by constantly bustling steppe spreading from the Caspian Sea to Mongolia.

The ruling power could not afford to discuss issues of law and justice in a state of permanent external hazards, especially when a significant part of population looked forward to enemy invasion. Any resistance had to be crushed by an iron fist and troops mobilized as promptly and as quickly as possible to launch an attack on the enemy on his own territory. Such a tactic, with different degrees of success, was used equally by Sassanids and Sultans after the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Ankara; the empire of the Great Ming in China and Shahanshah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after the invasion of Iran during World War II by Soviet and British forces; Stalin, Chinese Communists and now Putin.

Democracy in such circumstances was not just impossible – it was fatal.

It was perfectly clear to Montesquieu when he wrote that democratic societies are possible only in relatively small isolated ethnic homogeneous communities that