Back at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Alan Johnson offers a brilliant reading of the Caucasus crisis:

‘Finlandisation is back. During the cold war the term described those states which had a formal independence but existed in barely disguised servitude to Moscow. Finland, Jean-Francois Revel noted in his 1983 book, How Democracies Perish, “preserved the inviolability of its territory, what was left of it, and the right to live privately in a non-totalitarian society” but was forbidden to accept Marshall Plan aid, join the EEC or sign trade agreements with Europe. It took its orders from Moscow in foreign policy

This is the fate Putin (and some in the west) now seek to impose on Georgia. And now, as then, Russia hopes to impose Finlandisation by a mix of hard and soft power.

Hard power, needless to say, is offered by Russia’s military, though, as Stuart Koehl explained at the Weekly Standard, there’s more than meets the eye.

Soft power is supplied, just like during the Soviet era, by “useful idiots” intent on defending Russia’s mischief in the name of a number of seemingly benign causes – peace, justice, dignity and so on.

Johnson has one particular such apologist in mind – Seumas Milne, the former comment editor of the Guardian (and currently a regular Guardian columnist) for writing one such apology for Russian adventurism. One must give Milne credit for being coherent and consistent in his writing, at least. It is tempting to say that his apology is genuine, the fruit of his devotion to defending anyone who hates America and the Western way of life. He is not just defending Russia – something that may have to do with his nostalgia for Communism. He is intent on advocating an alternative world order that will ‘resist’ not just American hegemony as he sees it, but also the spread of global capitalism and free market economy. Which is why Milne seamlessly moves from defending Russia’s aggressive imperialism, to a defense of Iran’s regime, to an impassioned paean for Hugo Chavez’ “left-wing nationalism,” and support for Hamas.

Throughout these arguments there is a common thread that unites the seemingly different players: of Chavez, Milne said that

his oil-rich government has not only spearheaded a challenge to US domination and free-market dogma that has swept through the continent. It has also led the first serious attempt since the collapse of the Soviet Union to create a social alternative to the neoliberal uniformity imposed across the globe.

Of Iran:

Iran and its allies now offer the only effective challenge to US domination of the Middle East and its resources. It’s hardly surprising that the US is alarmed by the increased influence of an avowedly anti-imperialist state sitting astride a sea of oil, now making common cause with other radical, independent regimes in Latin America.

In his defense (or eulogy?!) of communism Milne hopes for a comeback much in the same vein:

With the new imperialism now being resisted in both the Muslim world and Latin America, growing international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for political and social alternatives will increase.

And as for Hamas, oh well, they are the “resistance.” Need one say more?

So let’s get back to Georgia – yet another US puppet for Milne, who dubs the country (and much of the EU as well) “former Soviet territory” in order to explain that Russia is just breaking the capitalist pro-American encirclement to reclaim its own:

Over the past decade, Nato’s relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia’s borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.

Anyone who understands anything about military matters would know that ten interceptors in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic are anything but “transparently targeted at Russia” and its several thousands nuclear warheads. The only transparent thing about this sentence is how faithful it is to the original found in the Russian. But what comes next is even worse:

As long as Georgia proper’s independence is respected – best protected by opting for neutrality – that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome.

That is what unites Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Hamas – or Hezbollah, China, and Zimbabwe – they could become, at least in Milne’s aspirations, an effective counterweight to the West.

It is not clear how forcing neutrality on Georgia – as Johnson aptly noted, Finlandization is exactly what Milne seems to have in mind – squares with Georgian self-determination. What if the Georgians want to be part of NATO, friends of the Americans, and offer their territory to bypass the Russian stranglehold on energy supplies from Central Asia to Europe? It is clear that Milne, like others, willingly offers himself to be the mouthpiece of any radical, crazy, authoritarian, violent, extremist, brutal and ruthless dictator or terrorist, as long as their brutality is directed at the West and their friends. Not only is Finlandization back, as Johnson writes, but also Lenin’s “useful idiots.”

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