Europe’s Two Minutes Hate against Belarus

In the modern world, there are exactly four nuclear powers which have completely, entirely and voluntarily renounced their entire stock of nuclear weapons: South Africa (concurrently with its renunciation of apartheid, it should be noted), Kazakhstan, Ukraine and… Belarus. The same Belarus, under the same President, which is termed ‘Europe’s Last Dictatorship’ by the foreign policy apparatus of (nuclear powers and nuclear rights-holders) Germany and France, and which is apparently deemed enough of a threat to world peace and to the human rights situation in Europe (nothing to see in Greece, Romania, Italy or the Baltic States anymore; move along, folks) to warrant sanctions. Note well that these sanctions are said to be uniting Europe; nothing like a bit of thoroughly retro (though laughably misguided; these days Lukashenko is no more a Soviet than Nazarbaev or Kuchma or De Klerk) Cold War paranoia to distract people from the slow-motion economic implosion of that very same union. And nothing more convenient to the powers and global agenda-setters which would like to see an American or Israeli attack on Iranian soil against a nuclear weapons programme every bit as illusory as Iraq’s was. Because Belarus’ relationship with Iran – not its human rights record, not its president’s attitude toward homosexuality or toward the (detestable for very many good reasons quite apart from his sexual proclivities) German foreign minister – is the true issue here.

That having been said, should we not be listening to a country and a political figure who has been very active in actually pursuing the goals of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons by dismantling or deporting his country’s entire stock of nukes when it comes to issues of nuclear non-proliferation, rather than the likes of our current friends, like France, and our traditional friends, like Germany? (Okay, my apologies, in the spirit of Cold War nostalgia I simply can’t resist this one anymore:)


In all seriousness, though, the entire concept of a nuclear Iran is a.) a fiction which has been peddled about for well over a decade now with nothing to show for it by the very same vultures who brought you the Endless Global War on a Noun and the War to Destroy Weapons of Mass Destruction in to Get the Very Bad Man in to Make a Safe Haven for Liberalism, Democracy and the American Way in Iraq, and b.) even if true would be pretty much an irrelevance next to the 100-bomb-strong arsenal on the border to the east and the 400-bomb-strong nuclear arsenal sitting three countries away to the west. But the consequences of our actions based on these fictions are very real. The Belarusian regime stands for a set of pre-Soviet values of which, in first the social and then the economic madness of the Cold War, the West has apparently taken leave – a thoroughgoing critique not only of Soviet-style communism (exemplified by its own nuclear policy), but also of Western-style capitalism and neoliberalism. Allies for such a vision are very few and far between, but we should not be surprised that it found some small approximation of that vision in Iran (one of the three countries in the Middle East, along with Syria and Lebanon, which actually provides constitutional guarantees protecting the political and social rights of religious minorities, including Jews and Christians – a remnant of a proud tradition of Iranian religious humanism and social moderation going all the way back to the Achaemenid kings, which not even the ayatollahs dared to destroy in their ascent to power).

But more importantly, Lukashenko’s Belarus is one of the very few governments which has put its money (and its weapons) where its mouth was regarding nuclear disarmament. If they do not regard Iran as enough of a nuclear threat to warrant these broad-spectrum sanctions, why should we?