‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 13 March: A Secret Ceasefire?

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Today’s session opened with a discussion of the warlike positions that have taken hold among all strata of the Belgium population. Parents want paramilitary education added to the curriculum in the last year of secondary school. They want a military draft to be introduced and they say they are ready to send their sons to war against Russia!   In a country which has no military parades, which has no military valor to celebrate since several of their generals participated in Napoleon’s wars and invasion of Russia, this is striking.  I think the country’s armed forces held out for a week or two at the start of WWII, and more than 150,000 Belgians fled to England in the opening days.    And yet, today they are all lions!   But then no one seems to have asked the 18 year old boys how they feel about it.

After this we went on to discuss the cease fire that Rubio and Witkoff are now trying to sell to the Russians but about which we know very little.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

„Judging Freedom“-Ausgabe vom 13. März: Ein geheimer Waffenstillstand?

Die heutige Sitzung begann mit einer Diskussion über die kriegerischen Positionen, die sich in allen Schichten der belgischen Bevölkerung festgesetzt haben. Eltern wollen, dass der Lehrplan im letzten Jahr der Sekundarstufe um eine paramilitärische Ausbildung erweitert wird. Sie wollen die Einführung einer Wehrpflicht und sagen, sie seien bereit, ihre Söhne in den Krieg gegen Russland zu schicken! In einem Land, in dem es keine Militärparaden gibt und in dem es nichts zu feiern gibt, was mit militärischem Heldenmut zu tun hat, da mehrere ihrer Generäle an den Kriegen Napoleons und der Invasion Russlands beteiligt waren, ist dies bemerkenswert. Ich glaube, die Streitkräfte des Landes haben zu Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs ein oder zwei Wochen durchgehalten, und in den ersten Tagen flohen mehr als 150.000 Belgier nach England. Und doch sind sie heute alle Löwen! Aber anscheinend hat noch niemand die 18-jährigen Jungs gefragt, was sie davon halten.

Danach sprachen wir über den Waffenstillstand, den Rubio und Witkoff nun den Russen verkaufen wollen, über den wir aber nur sehr wenig wissen.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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