Motus Mentis

I haven’t said much here about the situation in Ukraine; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel to use this latest ruction as an opportunity to highlight the incompetence of this administration’s foreign-policy team, and anyway, others have beaten me to it. (I will, however, recall that during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney pointed out that Russia was still our primary geopolitical foe — to which Mr. Obama, with the blithe self-assurance of the pathological narcissist, jeered in response that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”)

The most obvious parallel is with the Sudetenland, 1938, as many writers have pointed out.

Among all the things I’ve read about the Ukrainian affair in the past couple of weeks, there were two that I remember as being of particular interest: this blog post from Ara Maxima, and this entry from John McCreary’s NightWatch. Both are worth your time.

Just today a reader and old friend sent me this item, from the Turkish political analyst Ceylan Ozbudak. (At the risk of sounding unprofessional, let me say right up front that Ms. Ozbudak, besides being, no doubt, a keen political observer, is also one muy hot tamale. (Normally, of course, as a gentleman of the “old school”, I’d be the last person to discuss a prominent female intellectual in this way — but given the effort and expense she has obviously put into this, I’m sure she won’t mind my bringing it to your attention. She is manifestly not the sort to hide her light — or lights — under a bushel.)

In the linked article, Ms. Ozbudak had this to say:

In an article in last week’s Russian Pravda, it was noted that if Ukraine was divided, then the status of the Crimean Peninsula ”“ returned to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Kruschev, would be open to discussion, and that would include Turkey having a say in the future of Crimea.

The reference to this claim is the “Küçük Kaynarca” (Karlowitz I) signed 230 years ago. As per this agreement, signed by the Russian Tsarina Catherine II on April 19, 1783, the Crimean Peninsula was taken away from the dominion of the Ottomans and handed over to Russia. However, one of the most important provisions of this treaty was the debarment of independence for the Peninsula and outlawing its submission to a third party: Should any such attempt be made, then Crimea would automatically have to be returned to the sovereignty of Turkey.

While the pneumatic Ms. Ozbudak herself clearly scores an eleven out of a possible ten, I can’t give her article full marks for accuracy. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was signed in 1774, not 1783, and what Catherine did in 1783 was simply to annex the Crimean Khanate, not as per the treaty, but in violation of it. (It is also not the Treaty of Karlowitz, which was a different pact, also humiliating to the Ottomans, that was signed in 1699.)

As it happens I had just been reading about Küçük Kaynarca in an excellent book called Worlds At War, by Anthony Pagden. In it he wrote:

The treaty of Küçük Kaynarca had also stipulated that the sultan recognize the “independence” of the khans of the Crimea. It soon became clear, however, that this had been intended only as a preliminary to full annexation. This duly followed in 1783. For the Turks, as Volney commented later, the Russian occupation had … inflicted on the Ottomans “the misery of the humbling of an ancient grandeur.”

So Ms. Ozbudak is drawing, I fear, more on her Turkish pride than on historical facts or contemporary realities when she imagines that the Russians will feel bound by this obsolete pact (that was itself violated by the Russians, with regard to the very territory now in question, less than a decade after its signing hundreds of years ago) to let the Turks have much to say about Crimea.

I have a feeling that what she’ll get instead will be something more like this.

One other thing about Ms. Ozbudak — I couldn’t help but notice, at the bottom of the page, the following:

Ceylan Ozbudak is a Turkish political analyst, television presenter, and executive director of Building Bridges, an Istanbul-based NGO. As a representative of Harun Yahya organization, she frequently cites quotations from the author in her writings.

Harun Yahya is a pen-name of one Adnan Oktar, who caught my attention a few years ago when he published the Atlas of Creation, a huge, glossy compendium of creationist hooey. He’s an interesting fellow: a “Sunni zealot”, and a fervent anti-Zionist, Koranic literalist, and author of a book called The Holocaust Deception. He’s also a handsome devil, as you can see here, and given that Ms. Ozbudak “frequently cites quotations” of Mr. Oktar’s, I wonder if they don’t get along very well generally.