The Chief of Germany's Navy, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, has resigned after a controversy erupted over remarks he made during a recent visit to India.
The Chief was commenting on the crisis in Ukraine. Russia has made it clear that Ukraine cannot become a part of NATO nor can NATO or the US place nuclear missiles there because these pose a fundamental threat to Russian security. It is not a position that reasonable people can quarrel with. When the former Soviet Union wanted to place missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy was ready to risk a nuclear exchange. The Americans have made it clear that they will not tolerate Russian missiles in Latin America. But the West has a different set of standards when it comes to threatening Russia.
Schönbach said that talk of Russia wanting to invade Ukraine was "nonsense" and that Russia and Putin deserved respect. He also said that Ukraine could never hope to win back Crimea which Russia had annexed.
These are nothing but statements of fact- you could say that plain truth. Alas, truth is not what authority wants to hear. Within any system- whether it is government or a company- you are expected to toe the official line, not speak the truth. Schönbach's remarks evoked such fury in Germany and its allies that he had to quit.
Former CIA chief and former defence Secretary Robert Gates lays down the official line in an article:
Since becoming president in 1999, Putin’s objectives have been straightforward: to restore and expand central government authority (not to mention enhancing his personal dominance and wealth), and to return Russia to its historical role as a major power.
Anything wrong with those objectives? Are the objectives of any other major country, including the US and China, very different?
Gates quotes John Kerry, former US Secretary of State:
After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, then US secretary of state John Kerry complained: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in the 19th-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.”
That's more than a little rich. Anybody remember the US invasion of Iraq?
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