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From Versailles to Potsdam. Vladimir Putin’s View on the Origins of the World War
As Walter Rathenau, a famous German industrialist and liberal politician of Jewish origin, once remarked, “There is no point in history, no law”. Although his words applied to the Kaiser’s Germany of the early 20th century and not to Putin’s Russia of the early 21st, they are of extraordinary relevance today. Rathenau while remaining a staunch German patriot, prophetically foresaw the defeat of the Kaiser’s regime, which in August 1914, entered into an all-out war unprecedented in the history of civilisation. The new World War that Russia has presumptuously entered on February 24, 2022, and which modern Germany is trying so hard to avoid, shows that Rathenau’s country has learned this lesson better than the current masters of the Kremlin.
As we know from historical excursions, which in recent years have been generously supplied to the public by Vladimir Putin, the reason for the outbreak of a new world conflict in the late 1930s was the “national humiliation of the Germans” in Versailles in 1919 and the desire for historical revenge. Revanchism and the outraged national ego of the German elites and middle classes, who had lost their empire, the thousand-year-old “Reich,” and suffered unheard-of humiliation after World War I, were supposedly the main factors that ensured Hitler’s victory. Moreover, all this…