Prior to last week, the month of February was notable for the continuing attempts of our once and future Viceroy, Donald Trump, to stay relevant, although some of those were actually more like embarrassing revelations. For one thing, in their attempts to recover presidential artifacts, the National Archives (allegedly) discovered that Trump was flushing government documents and plugging up the White House toilet. I’m pretty sure that Trump has been plugging up toilets for most of his life, but not for that reason. But then after weeks of military buildup, Trump’s Thunder Buddy For Life, Vladimir Putin, directly attacked Ukraine on February 24, allegedly to “de-Nazify” an anti-Russian country. “De-Nazification” of course, is code for liquidating a Jewish head of state and imposing a hard-right government that beats and kills ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Prior to this, most people other than the Biden Administration had assumed that all of Putin’s maneuvers, including the recognition of “independent” Russian republics inside Ukraine, were just a game of chicken. But that assumes that Putin had any cause to back off.
Be advised that one can only take a Hitler comparison so far. But: Hitler was born in Austria, a German-speaking country that had never been under the Berlin government. As a racist and pan-nationalist, Hitler believed that all Germans should be united under the same government. And he finally achieved that goal with Austria when he united it with Germany in 1938. And because this was actually fairly popular in Austria itself, this didn’t cause too much of a backlash. But then Hitler decided to go after the Sudetenland, border territory formerly run by the Austrians and now part of the Czech Republic, and the rest of the world realized that would be a much greater disruption of world peace, especially since the move was not universally popular in Czechoslovakia. Various attempts were made to pacify Hitler short of the Munich conference, and later various attempts were made to negotiate when he mobilized against Poland, but nothing worked because Hitler didn’t want peaceful relations. He wanted those German speaking territories and was willing to sacrifice any economic convenience and ultimately go to war.
Same here. I had mentioned that the Crimean peninsula always had a Russian population and was only shifted to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under Soviet Russia’s internal bureaucracy, partially because there was no expectation that Ukraine would ever be independent of Moscow. So when that did happen, there were a whole bunch of people in the borders of Ukraine who were really more loyal to Mother Russia. So when Putin pulled his little fait accompli to seize Crimea during the second term of the Obama Administration, not only did America not do much about it, there might not have been much cause to do so. The move was fairly popular, at least in Russia itself. However Russian emigration during the Soviet period also meant a lot of Russians had settled the eastern provinces that always had been considered Ukraine proper, and thus Putin’s none-too-subtle sponsorship of “independence” movements in the Donetsk region was harder for Ukraine, and the West, to tolerate.
Of course there’s the real reason any comparison between Hitler and a Russian leader can only go so far- Russia has nukes. No matter how much we protest, we’re not going to go to war with a fellow nuclear power. Period. Just like we didn’t when Putin’s heroes stomped on East Germany in 1953, when they stomped on Hungary in 1956 and when they stomped on Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, it doesn’t seem to have reached that point yet with Ukraine. That’s partially because on those occasions, Soviet troops were already in the borders as occupiers and here the Russians have to fight just to get in. It may be partially because Ukrainian defense forces are tougher than anyone (including the West) gave them credit for, or that Russian conventional forces are not as tough as most people (including Putin) thought they were. In any case, outside analysis indicates that Putin hasn’t concentrated all the force that he could have, even towards Kyiv, which is only a few dozen miles south of Putin’s ally Belarus. And that may because he’s bought into his own hype that the Ukrainian government is illegitimate and even non-Russian Ukrainians would greet him as a liberator. And that means he hasn’t contemplated exactly the level of force that would be needed to conquer territory, let alone hold it against resistance.
I also think there’s a psychological dimension here that isn’t being elaborated on. Russia, like America, has a certain romantic relationship with war. We used to say “we don’t start wars, we finish them.” Of course that was before the Bush Administration. But generally we believe it is neither moral nor practical to have wars of choice. Russia is marked by an extremely defensive posture. They were first invaded ages ago from Central Asia, then by Napoleon, and twice in one century by Germany. When the Nazis invaded Stalin’s Russia, they called it “the Great Patriotic War.” This is a war of choice. Putin can’t even justify it the way the Soviets could justify attacking their satellites, cause they were under occupation at the time. And if he wants Russians to think of Ukraine as part of the same country, he doesn’t seem to realize the effect it has on Russians to attack fellow Slavs in the same way that Hitler did.
Indeed, while America’s Dipshit Duce Donald Trump has always looked up to Putin in a “when I gwow up, I wanna be JUST WIKE YEW!” way, Putin had always seemed to be the rational adult in the relationship. Now, not so much. Trump’s defenders will frequently point out that Trump has never invaded anybody, unless you count Washington DC. Putin is the one who’s lashing out and being emotional. I think that’s also causing new feelings in the Russian domestic audience. “Wait, OUR guy isn’t the violent racist dumbfuck! He’s the guy who exploits violent racist dumbfucks! Right…?”
It got to the point where this weekend Putin announced he was putting his nuclear forces on alert. Which is kind of rhetorical in itself because strategic forces always have to be on call. But this is what happens when a tyrant or abuser doesn’t get his way all the time. The mask of civilization slips and he makes clear what he really is. Putin is quite literally trying to hold the world hostage to get Ukraine, cause apparently he wants the whole territory to be as radioactive as Chernobyl. And again, that just reveals the weakness of his position, because if this were the “golden days” of the Soviet empire, he would be winning by now. As it is, observers like Rachel Maddow have been pointing out that the Russian Federation doesn’t even have the domestic product of Italy, and if it wasn’t for his petro-chemical syndicate, he’d have no non-combat influence at all. And the best example of how things were going last week is that Russia, the biggest fuel exporter in Europe, is having stalled vehicles during the invasion cause they’ve run out of gas.
But the very fact that Putin went this far means that even if things work out for Ukraine, we have clearly come to the end of the post-Cold War era in which the great powers were no longer in an ideological death struggle. In fact that’s been the case for quite some time, it’s just now a lot more obvious.
Russia and China decided to abandon orthodox Marxism for capitalism (because you can’t rule a population when they’ve all starved to death) but that doesn’t mean they embraced nice Western liberal concepts of a world order. Having abandoned leftist internationalism, they embraced more primal and regressive ideas of human nature, rejecting concepts of universal human rights in favor of nationalism or a government with “Chinese characteristics.” Naturally, the Chinese model of totalitarianism is a little difficult to export to white Western countries, but the Russian model is another story.
Not just here, but with the Le Pen family in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary (who has coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’) you have a whole bunch of people whose model of government not only smells of fascism in its reaction to social-democrat liberalism, it is a reaction to the classical liberalism of Jefferson, Monroe, Locke and Voltaire. This general movement is often called “the Dark Enlightenment” or is associated with Catholic integralism and other philosophies that hold that classical liberalism and its alienating pursuit of individual fulfillment is spiritually exhausted and therefore the solution is to hearken back to the traditional, collectivist, authority-based models that liberalism replaced because they were spiritually exhausted (not to mention, counterproductively bloody).
As Rod Dreher says, this is part of why Putin, having abandoned Leninism in ends if not means, publicly embraced the Russian Orthodox Church: “he knew that he needed some kind of legitimating authority, so he began to rehabilitate the Orthodox Church in public life. It was a wise thing for him to do, strictly speaking from a political perspective.” This veneer of Christianity creates a role model for other anti-liberals, at least those who actually care about philosophy or theology more than bashing liberals. Dreher thinks that while such a fusion of Church and State would work in Russia or a Catholic nation like France, the US is too Protestant for that, and “We are far more likely to get a nationalist-conservative government like Hungary’s, a Christian democracy that provides something that a majority can potentially affirm. That’s what I hope for, anyway”. Of course that assumes that Hungary is either a democracy or Christian, let alone whether years of jiggering the elections and legal system have resulted in a country where we can fairly confirm that the majority is on board with Orban. But apparently that’s what guys like Dreher hope for.
Hungary is also the role model of much more public figures like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who took his show to Hungary and spent some time there expounding on the virtues of Orban’s system over America’s. While America’s liberals were sleeping, thinking that each election would go like the one before, Republican thinking evolved. Well, changed at least. It went from Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to Steve Bannon and now to guys like Carlson. The former disputes between the two ruling factions over taxes and the like degraded to what lots of people are referring to as a Cold Civil War, where the two parties cannot agree to co-exist and are ultimately trying to destroy each other, but cannot do so openly for practical reasons (namely, the risk of killing the gravy train they are each trying to control).
Even that was too much balance of power for a party that takes its emotional lead from Donald Trump and grievance media and its intellectual lead – to the extent that it has one – from outspoken anti-liberals like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, who make no secret of their distaste for liberal artifacts like “civilian control of the military” and who have also not been ashamed of their associations with Putin.
The problem, as always, is when the wishes of this crowd smack up against complex reality.
Even Dreher, who is a lot more sympathetic to Orban than I would be, pointed out in his Monday morning post that Orban, despite getting 80 percent of Hungary’s natural gas from Russia, is totally on board with European Union measures against Putin. (Maybe because of that little misunderstanding in 1956? That’s the other thing with reactionaries, they know how to hold a grudge.) But nevertheless, Orban’s willing protege and advocate in America, Tucker Carlson didn’t seem to get the memo that Putin is a bad guy and beating up on innocent countries is not cool. He said that Ukraine wasn’t really a democracy, which apparently justifies threats from a country even less democratic. He said, in his usual bad-faith, just-askin’-questions way, “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?” Is he turning our children into transsexuals who are going to have abortions and then raise the abortions as gay? No, but apparently Biden is.
But suddenly once Tuck heard that the invasion was actually happening, that it was unpopular, AND it was not going well, he suddenly opined: “Vladimir Putin started this war. He is to blame tonight for what we’re seeing tonight in the Ukraine.” Well yes. When you start a war of choice against another country that’s not attacking you, that’s your fault, not the fault of some politician you hate. This is what’s known as a logical chain of causality. A concept Tucker might not have been aware of.
And then of course there’s our own Mini-Vlad. Leading up to the shebang, Trump continued to praise Putin and even after the invasion started, said, “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine… Putin declares it as independent,” Trump said. “Oh, that’s wonderful. …He continued of Putin: “Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. I know him very well. Very, very well.” Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told an audience, “I mean, (Putin)’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” This last quote was from a Daily Beast article headlined “Trump Pals Beg Him to Stop Kissing Putin’s Ass During Ukraine Invasion“.
I mean really, if Trump doesn’t stop sucking up to Putin, his handlers are gonna have to move him from Fox News Channel to Pornhub.
But this weekend they were having the CPAP convention, even as the cool kids of the Republican Party seemed to be going elsewhere. And of course the man of the hour Saturday was Trump. He basically said that none of this would have happened if his election hadn’t been “stolen.” One suspects that if Trump ever went to church, he’d tell the congregation that Jesus wouldn’t have been crucified if the Democrats hadn’t cheated in 2020. But he also praised the Ukrainian people for their bravery, including President Zelenskyy. You know, the guy he tried to blackmail in hopes of conjuring dirt on Joe Biden.
Which just goes to show that Trump has always been a little kiss-up yes-man. What Ayn Rand would call a “second hander.” Or as Bob Dylan would say, “you just want to be on the side that’s winning.”
And maybe even Trump is starting to grasp that his personal role model is no longer winning, or at least is not invincible. I had said a while back that if the Trump Organization had been running Nazi Germany in 1939, and they had invaded Poland on September 1, the Polish Army would be reaching Berlin by September 4. Well, now you’ve got the Soviet Union’s successor state under Putin trying to invade a former satellite, and clearly it’s not THAT bad, but it ain’t good.
It’s still too early to tell, especially with all the other things that could go wrong, but this might be a turning point. If nothing else, the “conservatives” who pretend to intellect might realize that Putin is just as emotional and irrational as Trump, maybe even more so, just with less opposition. And maybe the rest of this country might start to snap out of it. Not the Party of Trump of course, which is more clearly than ever the Party of Putin. After all, at that CPAC con, he still got an overwhelming preference in the people polled for the next Republican presidential nominee. It doesn’t matter if Mitt Romney looks at Trump and calls his actions “borderline treasonous” or says that Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are “morons.” After all, Mitt is a Mormon, and Mormons are heretics. As in, they think that Jesus Christ is someone other than Donald Trump.
But this country was already run by these guys for four years and as long as some people thought the economy was good, they didn’t care what Trump was doing to certain demographics or to the law. But then Trump Virus hit, largely because the Leader, like Putin, was a thin-skinned little tyrant who didn’t want to hear anything that made him look bad or feel bad. And a clear (though not big enough) majority of the country decided that whatever benefits they were getting out of the Trump Administration having our government in its financial portfolio, they weren’t going to matter if you were intubated. Nevertheless, these guys have been winning the culture war after Trump’s de-thronement, since it’s always easier to bitch about something than to do things yourself. Now that the international Party of Putin is exposed in its moral rot, people might quit taking their cues, if only because their aggression against the innocent and actual attacks on freedom might cause people to grow a sense of perspective. Or as one internet post this weekend put it, “As I’m watching husbands and fathers say goodbye to their loved ones, their children, not knowing if they will ever see them again, I just cannot believe that for two years we’ve been watching people cry and protest over having to wear a fucking mask.”
Cause just as people these days can’t seem to remember the politics of the Cold War, they also wouldn’t know that this is not America’s first experience with fascist sympathizers. It may not even be our worst one. Back in the 1920’s and 30’s, it seemed like fascism was the “new way.” They said “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” Winston Churchill said, “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. But in England we have not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form.’ As for the Nazis, they were obviously a big inspiration to a lot of people in the US, where institutional racism was still fashionable.
Aviation hero Charles Lindbergh pursued closer ties with Nazi Germany, at first because of their aviation research, but he still refused to return a medal the Nazis had given him after Kristallnacht. He ended up being one of the founders of the isolationist “America First” Committee. This movement culminated in a German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden, February 1939, where the head of the organization went on about “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal.”
What changed? Well, after Pearl Harbor, Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, so it’s not like we had a choice to be on the sidelines anymore. But even before that, the increasing aggression of the people who claimed to be fighting against liberalism and Bolshevism included the peoples of France and Britain, countries we actually like. By 1941, it was clear that there was a global conflict with a moral dimension, no matter how much we wished to avoid it, and that if it were forced on us, that would be no fault of ours. As with World War I, Germany’s submarine warfare in the Atlantic was affecting American ships. Roosevelt got to pass the Lend Lease programs and by late 1941 72% of Americans agreed that “the biggest job facing this country today is to help defeat the Nazi Government”.
And the average American decided that however much they hated FDR’s heavy-handed, top-down socialism, they hated lickspittles and bullies even more. And largely as a result, Republicans didn’t have the White House for a full 20 years.
And it’s on the verge of happening all over again.
I am not sure Trump realizes this, except maybe in the sense that a dim shock comic realizes he’s losing his audience. But I’m pretty sure Mitch McConnell does.