Category / Cultural observations

by omniagallia

Lesson Learned, Appeasement Averted.

CONTEXT: Today marks one year since ‘Operation Barbarous’ – the criminal (in multiple senses), cruel invasion of a peaceful sovereign state, Ukraine, by a larger overbearing neighbor – began. Russia, the aggressor, is led by Vladimir Putin, a man who seems to be guided by a bizarre blend of KGB cynicism and 19th Century Czarist national Chauvinism. By an arrogant megalomaniac who cannot accept that Might does Not make ‘right.’

Beyond the perennial horrors of war and the anachronistic indifference to (along with outright targeting of) civilians and their well-being, this state-sponsored felony has been both a terrible spectacle and an economic shock for a world still reeling from a Pandemic. But my post below finds optimism that we are not wholly unable to learn from the mistakes and tragedies of the past; at least, not if we have wise, proportionate leadership. Something Russia has now been lividly proven to lack; and not for the first time.

President Biden’s age is often cast as a liability, but at the moment, its accompanying frame of reference may prove to be a priceless advantage.

Born in 1942, he can have no memory of the Munich Conference of 1938, from which the accompanying black and white image of British Prime Minister Chamberlain comes. But Biden grew up in world a still shattered, reeling and heartbroken from World War 2, set in motion in no small part by wishful thinking like Chamberlain’s, of believing that a palpable brute like Adolf Hitler could be ‘appeased’ by capitulating to his outrageous blackmail in forlorn hope that he would refrain from further, and worse ones.

But ruthless men, like Hitler, Stalin and now Putin – seemingly closer in nature to wild animals than to humans – will, like wild animals, interpret appeasement (mercy, kindness, generosity, moderation, etc.) as signs of weakness and/or irresolution, and exploit them savagely.

In the famous image here, Chamberlain waves a piece of paper signed by himself and Hitler, on which the latter promised he has ‘no further territorial ambitions in Europe,’ in return for the British and French having just ceded him Czech territory (that was not theirs to give). In any case, Hitler’s promise was a cynical lie, and his ‘territorial ambitions in Europe’ were just getting started. A few months later, in March 1939, Hitler would absorb the rest of Czechoslovakia, in sneering contempt for his vow not to do any such thing.

After caving in at Munich, the western democracies began to prepare madly for war, but the Nazis had too great a head-start on them. Besides which, military conquest was by then the main preoccupation of German society, industry and economy, a focus that any peace-loving and sensible people – like the French or British – would be loath to accept. 

In September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland, finally provoking the western democracies to declare war on Germany.  He could have been stopped with relative ease when he re-occupied the Rhineland in 1936, had the French and British governments of the day recognized, or admitted, what a fiend they were dealing with. Several other such brazen tests of will were committed later, but after the Czech Sudeten Crisis was ‘resolved’ at Munich in 1938, it was no longer possible to ignore Hitler’s actual doctrine: ‘Winning’ is all that matters, and justifies any evil done in its pursuit. 

(Chamberlain gets a partially bum rap on appeasement; he was not just some foolish sap who couldn’t see what Hitler was, as simplistic versions of these events imply. But he didn’t want to divert revenues from civil functions to massive war preparation until it was unmistakable that Nazism was an existential threat to Britain, for every penny spent on rearming had to be taken from needs like roads, education, hospitals, etc.; proper priorities of any regime serious about serving its citizens. Besides; only a madman, like Hitler, would Not move Heaven and Earth to avoid another war like the 1914-1918 nightmare.)

So now, President Biden, having grown up in a world that had just paid a ghastly price for not confronting villains before their power peaked, has the experience, wisdom and resolution to recognize Hitler-like deeds and attitudes when he sees them, only this time, coming out of Moscow. And to reject Chamberlain’s well-meaning, but catastrophic strategy of yielding to a thug, hoping he’ll stop acting like a thug. Why would a jumped-up gangster do that, when ‘thuggery’ keeps getting him what he wants?

‘Sieg Heil’ translates to ‘Victory, Hail,’ and lying is the least of the crimes someone like Hitler would commit to come out on top. Brutes in suits like him think ‘Just weaklings and fools will play by the rules.’

(A rarely-voiced observation: Too many business people have parallel ‘win-no-matter-how/rules-are-for-suckers’ attitudes. I consider that mindset ‘Fascism lite.’ They may seek cash instead of conquest, but slow poison is still poison, warping our world.)

Much later, Churchill said of prewar efforts to indulge Hitler, ‘The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.’ I cannot consider attributes like mania to avoid repeating the horror of the Great War – as any sane, righteous person would do – as ‘weakness.’ However, I will grant that the danger Nazism posed should have been recognized much sooner than it was.

Moreover, the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Putin, in addition to exploiting any decency and rationality of their opponents, had another advantage, whose import we should never underestimate:

The wicked don’t give a damn who gets hurt. The righteous must do so.

Thus today, Putin is just fine with sacrificing the lives of his own soldiers and Ukrainian ones (as well as civilians) because, as always for such feral personalities, self-interest and ‘saving face’ are far more important than preserving lives. In this, Putin has more in common with his idol Stalin than with Hitler, for whom German blood was sacred, to be spent sparingly (though of course, he felt other peoples’ blood was worthless).

In contrast, Stalin, after Hitler invaded the USSR in June of 1941, threw masses of Soviet youth into the gears of the monstrous Nazi war machine to slow, and eventually jam it, with Asiatic callousness. Soviet victory came at a profligate price in lives – 20 million at least, soldiers and civilians – that no free society would have tolerated (although this toll was kept secret for decades). Especially because prewar miscalculations by Stalin, like his paranoid purging of his best army officers, had made his land look, to the Nazis, so temptingly vulnerable. As indeed it was.

Sadly, the Russian populace today still seems to assume heartlessness, brutality and criminal pride are, and should be, how rulers think and act.

Fortunately however, one thing Hitler and Putin don’t have in common are capable armed forces. Whereas by 1939, the German Wehrmacht was the best-led, most efficient, technologically advanced military in the world, ambient Russian culture today seems to allow the most beast-like men to attain power, less by brains or competence than by willingness and cunning to crush rivals.

This mindset is incompatible with successfully running a 21st Century nation, or economy – or army. Those activities now demand finesse, forethought, abstract conceptualization – all things that Monomakh-niacal apes like Putin grasp barely, if at all. Let alone practice expertly.

This is being written immediately after President Biden’s surprise 2/22/23 visit to Kyiv, shown in the bright color photo adjacent to the one of Chamberlain. Biden made this determined gesture to demonstrate America’s practical and spiritual solidarity with Ukraine’s sacred task of thwarting the Counter-Evolutionaries – Putin firstly, but all who assume the rest of us should just bow to them like we are lesser wolves and they are our bigger, fiercer Alphas – of the world. And by defending and saving their nation, preserving, in the largest sense, a path forward for our whole species, rather than our reversion to rule by brute force alone; as Hitlerist dogma advocated.

It should be born in mind that Kyiv at the time Biden went there was by no means entirely safe from sudden assault by (civilian/ infrastructure targeting) Russian missiles, so such a visit took considerable personal courage. Regardless of what risk mitigation strategies were used to protect him, Biden had to walk into a place still liable to ferocious, indiscriminate attack. Fortunately none materialized, but there could be no guarantees against them.

Perhaps Biden was willing to accept such a hazard because – having grown up with the consequences of not pushing vicious tyrants back – he decided that helping to protect America and the West (both by his brave gesture and by providing Ukraine first class military hardware) was his duty as unofficial ‘Leader of the Free World.’

A duty worth compromising his own security, and if need be even losing his life. In that case, remembering that his sacrifice was made trying to help achieve a world in which peace, not the exercise of raw power, is the Status Quo would be his finest memorial.

Putin is furious at getting the kind of forceful pushback Hitler never got till after Munich, by which time he was already too powerful to be defeated except at unspeakable cost. So now we are watching while he writhes in outraged pride. And it is Biden’s mature, equitable version of ‘manhood’ that may help save us from domination by Putin’s primitive, violent variety of it.

by omniagallia

Giving a Devil his Due

The accompanying photo is from the Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) by the Nazis in World War II. It shows one incident of German troops’ constant terrorizing of the encircled starving, freezing residents with bombs and artillery. Hitler had ordered the city leveled, so much of this destruction was indiscriminate, with no purpose but to torment and demoralize the trapped civilian population. However, much of it was aimed at vital facilities; power generation, sanitation plants, food storage, etc.

Sound familiar? It should, for it is very largely what Russia – Putin – is now doing on a nationwide scale to Ukraine, to try to win a war he was delusional enough to assume would be easy. Instead, the Ukrainians have gallantly defended their homeland – a ‘real country’ – so now he is lashing out with frustration at a people he may have truly imagined would welcome his rampaging troops as liberators from the ‘Nazis’ he claimed now rule in Kyiv.

And here’s a truly disgusting paradox: Putin was Born in Leningrad, where this photo was taken! That was well after the Siege was over, but growing up, he must have witnessed many of its scars rebuilding, and heard many of its horror stories. An older brother died of disease due to the blockade, so Vladimir never met him.

Could there possibly be a more grotesque irony than Putin claiming he is acting to expel ‘Nazis’ from Ukraine, when he is ordering things done to its citizens in the same vein as was done to his hometown – in fact, to much of the USSR – by Hitler? Targeting life-sustaining Ukrainian public infrastructure is exactly the sort of thing the Nazis did to enemies, especially subhuman (in Nazi dogma) Russians. And can he sincerely believe that world opinion will swallow the torrent of lies he has told to rationalize his belligerence? That would be laughable were it not so monstrous.

The dissonance between Putin’s youthful experience and his current actions defies description. He is ordering harm to innocents in ways that no one with the worst siege in history in his personal background would dream of doing if he had the least conscience, decency or goodness of heart. Putin must know, first hand from survivors of the ‘Blockada,’ how hideously traumatic it is for helpless people to have military forces inflict random violence upon them.

In fact – horrifying thought – perhaps recalling that is what gave him the idea of doing such in Ukraine.

In his offenses against all that is humane, he acts as if he absorbed only the worst lessons of the ghastly crucible his elegant birthplace withstood: Life is cheap, not cherished; Make civilians suffer; Any horrific deed is acceptable to prevail; Winning is all that matters. Dear reader, make no mistake: All those attitudes were among the bedrock, guiding precepts of the Third Reich.

And this is hardly the first time Putin has echoed some tactic of Hitler who, for example, partly justified invading Poland by claiming German minorities there were being oppressed. Putin said the same of Russian speakers in Ukraine; in each case, even if true, it was/is only used as an excuse for what was/is actually a war of conquest.

But formed by his KGB service, Putin seemingly cannot comprehend acting on bases other than fear, arrogance or naked self-interest. So the Ukrainians’ patriotism and sense of national honor must baffle, as much as it enrages, him. He is willing to commit human sacrifice of Ukrainians and his own military, to achieve his fantasies of military glory and Russian ‘national greatness.’ He has been denied the quick victory he expected, so will lash out and lay waste to that whole land if he must, to appease his demons of spite, pride and megalomania, which he presents – again, laughably – as ‘strong leadership.’

Also, Putin fears (rightly) what the two-legged predators he has surrounded himself with may do to him, now that his catastrophic misjudgment has harmed their own interests so deeply. But whatever his Fate if his blatant power play fails – exile, prison or summary execution – he will absolutely have brought it upon himself. In addition to being hampered by farcical corruption, his military is floundering largely due to a primitive system of rule he created which promotes ambition and brutality, not competence. So now, his own system may devour him.

Putin and leaders like him repeatedly show that they care nothing for any harm they do in order to evade the dread status of ‘loser.’ In their view, a ‘winner’ is one willing to wreck the world if it fails to conform to his purposes. I alluded to all this in a post in March 2022, ‘A Sustaining Folly,’ which said all I felt had to be said (at that time) about Putin, including my concept of ‘Counter-Evolutionaries’: Men of barbaric, rapacious character who do not want Mankind to ‘evolve,’ to get better, wiser and kinder. They benefit from a world in which the vicious like themselves can prey, unhindered or scolded, upon the weak (yet another Hitler parallel). Thus, their actions and attitudes effectively impede improvement for us all.

(Americans should take note: Russian society evidently has no workable legal or cultural guardrails against unlimited abuse of power by those who hold it, no matter how vicious or unjust – and look where that lack has repeatedly gotten them! America, thankfully, does have limitations against anyone willing to do any amount of harm, rather than accept defeat. The rule of law – not just a pretense of it – is a defining feature of Western Civilization in general. Thus, anyone here who ignores these norms is by definition ‘uncivilized’ in every sense that really matters.)

Further, Putin seems not – dares not? – to grasp that every enormity he commits in Ukraine only proves to its citizens, and most of the world, how urgent it is to resist and thwart him. If this is how he acts when they are able to fight back, what revenge will he wreak if he conquers, disarms, and then rules them? In fact, this should be how every person on Earth who doesn’t accept that Might Makes Right judges this shameful assault and the war crimes in its course. Russian atrocities, beyond the basic offense of unprovoked attack, show that Putin feels that if he can’t make Ukrainians capitulate, he can, and will, at least make them suffer (as his ‘starving, freezing’ Leningrader neighbors did). This spectacle should stiffen the world’s resolve: Actions like his, indifferent to international order and contemptuous of peaceful resolution, must Not be allowed to triumph.

For if Putin prevails in Ukraine, what else might he do in his Hitlerian determination to re-assemble the Soviet Empire by coercion and/or brute force? Indeed, what will truculent tyrants around the world do, if they see they will eventually get their way if they are just willing to make enough blood flow? We should all hope, and help, to make the invasion of Ukraine the first, and last, contest of whether cynical autocrats and their Hubris will be allowed to run geopolitics in the 21st Century.

So may the Ukrainians continue to show the courage and resolution that Putin’s erstwhile Leningraders did. More important: May Everyone who rejects the right of the strong to rule the weak without mercy never lose sight of how decency, honor and self-interest compel us to continue to help that victimized nation. Beyond the real possibility of Putin trying to re-absorb the Baltic states (EU/NATO members) if he subjugates Ukraine, on a far deeper scope, the entire bestial mindset he personifies must be foiled if Humanity is ever to be able to advance – to truly ‘Evolve’ – beyond our savage origins.

The success of Ukraine’s valiant opposition has a lot to do with NATO-style military reforms and organization they have adapted since Crimea was snatched in 2014 (in hindsight, an act of appeasement like the sacrifice of Sudetenland, which emboldened an aggressor to believe the West would not seriously resist him). But perhaps even moreso with Ukrainians’ willingness to die fighting Putin, rather than face hellish lives as his conquered subjects, as they endured during their previous occupation by the (actual) Nazis.

The Berlin Wall was long the fault line between the respective power of Russian Totalitarianism and of Western free individualism. The Wall fell toward the West, but that conflict is now being played out again, as Ukraine struggles mightily to complete its ongoing rejection of, and escape from, the Asiatic-style Despotism of the Kremlin.

It gratifies me to muse that the spirits of heroic Leningraders (or at least admiring memories of them) may now be inspiring the Ukrainians to hold out, reassuring them that even the most fiendish warlord doesn’t invariably win. And that they would do so in atonement for Putin, their native son, for having the diabolical effrontery to do, in Ukraine, so much of what the Nazis did to them. The people of Leningrad were largely helpless before their ferocious attackers, yet they often showed gallant defiance. Hitler exacted an unspeakable loss on the city, as Putin is doing on a far wider scale, but Hitler lost and Leningrad was delivered. Perhaps that will happen again, only this time without the survivors being saved from a foreign villain, then falling back into the claws of a domestic one like Stalin. Or in the case of Putin, ‘Stalin-like.’

That’s only my fantasy of course, but it would be an irony wonderful enough to offset the ‘grotesque’ one of Putin claiming that he is fighting the Nazis in Ukraine. As opposed to the implacable reality that he is fighting ‘Like’ the Nazis, in Ukraine.