Churchill Was Right

About a lot of things but this in particular:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”

Here in Devín, it is the inclusion of Vienna that resonates. Until 1955, when Austria was granted independence, Vienna was similar to Berlin, administered by the four allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In 1946, a Berlin-like future was a possibility, with perhaps a wall in Vienna, the city of the waltz.

The free world instead faced the enslaved nations along the Czechoslovakian-Austrian border, along the Morava and the Danube. From the heights of Devín Castle, it is possible to see both Bratislava, and the outskirts of Vienna in the distance. A scenic, tranquil, 45-minute catamaran ride separates them today; during the Cold War the waters were rife with suspicion and terror.

It ought to be possible to see with greater clarity here, from the heights, as clearly as Churchill did, “the two great dangers which menace the homes of the people: war and tyranny.”

Yet in Slovakia, the government prefers not to see the reality of the Russian threat, immediately to the peace and security of Ukraine, and more broadly to the peace and security of Europe.

Churchill warned in 1946 about the threat of aggressive Russian imperialism. It had survived the fall of the tsar and rise of the Bolsheviks. It has survived anew the fall of the Bolsheviks and the rise of a gangster state.

The line no longer runs between Austria and Slovakia, and Ukrainian courage these last years likely means that the line will remain far to the east. That courage is rooted in strategic wisdom and moral clarity. At the confluence of the Morava and Danube both were required for many years, and both prevailed in part because the warnings of Churchill, who had been ignored in the ’30s, were heeded in 1946.

 

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 We were all warned.