The Long War Upon UsBy Rod Dreher
February 24, 2022
Iam writing this just as most Americans are waking up to the news that Russia has invaded Ukraine. I wrote earlier this morning, when I awakened here in Budapest to the news, that nothing excuses this outrageous act by Russia. But in that post, I pointed out that we would be fools not to factor in the West’s blunders, beginning at the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union prostrate. For example, Americans have no idea at all how deep the Trianon Treaty of 1919 traumatized the Hungarian psyche, by dismantling Greater Hungary, removing two-thirds of its historic territories. The Slovaks, the Romanians, and others who benefited from Trianon (they lived in parts of Hungary where their own ethnic group was larger than ethnic Hungarians, prior to World War I) saw it as a victory for national determinism. The Hungarians saw it as a savage wound — and now, a century later, they still regard it as a monumental tragedy.
I had no idea about any of this prior to coming here. Do you know anything about Trianon? You cannot understand anything the Hungarian government does without factoring in Trianon. The Hungarians today are profoundly — profoundly — afraid of foreign domination, mostly because of Trianon. Whether you or I think that Trianon was a good treaty, a bad treaty, or somewhere in the middle, doesn’t matter. What matters is that most Hungarians are so grieved by it, even today, that the emotional and psychological power of that event cannot be overstated. This is why even though they want to be part of the EU, they push back hard against what they regard as unjust violations of their sovereignty by Brussels. It all goes back to Trianon.
So, when I read these days that much-quoted line Vladimir Putin uttered some years back, in which he lamented the tragedy of the USSR’s demise, I think of Trianon and the Hungarians. Though he was a KGB man, I don’t think Putin is a nostalgist for Bolshevism. He’s a nostalgist for Greater Russia — a Russia that was bigger, more powerful, and prouder on the world stage. If I had not come to Hungary last year and learned about Trianon, I am sure I would not have been able to grasp what this means to people whose countries have been dismantled or disempowered by war and historical fate.
Similarly, it has helped me to understand why so many Southerners feel so bitter about the Civil War and its latest iteration — the demonization of Confederate monuments and Southern culture. It’s not because anybody misses slavery. It’s because defeat and humiliation hurts like hell. A wise victor takes into account the pain of defeat, and doesn’t attempt to humiliate him. This is a lesson the victorious World War I allies did not learn in punishing Imperial Germany. Result: Hitler. It is perfectly understandable why the victorious American-led West pushed NATO’s borders so far to the East, taking advantage of Russian weakness — but it was a foolish mistake.
And don’t be under the mistaken impression that the US was a neutral outside broker in any of this. Here is the leaked transcript of the notorious 2014 phone call from senior US diplomat Victoria Nuland (now back in the State Department under Joe Biden) and the then-US ambassador to Ukraine. Nuland and the ambassador are talking about how America is taking advantage of the Color Revolution to select Ukraine’s next leader. If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you know this is going on, what do you think?
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-long-war-russia-the-west/
