Dear Friends,
A week in and the war in Ukraine is not over, much to the frustration of Vladimir Putin and Russia. It is clear that they initially thought a few rapid lightning strikes would give them control of several major cities, whereupon they would simply install a new puppet regime and call it a day. That simply did not happen.
For whatever reason—perhaps they actually believed their own propaganda about being greeted as “liberators”?—the ferocity of the Ukrainian opposition surprised them, as has the tsunami of international outrage. They’ve had to spend days now regrouping and realigning their troops. Meanwhile, they’ve chosen a different strategy from lightning: thunder. Nonstop bombardment of cities, and from what we can tell it seems to be indiscriminate bombardment that includes residential buildings and neighborhoods, and there are as-yet unconfirmed rumors that they are using thermobaric weapons (vacuum bombs that suck the air out of lungs and liquify vital organs) in areas populated by civilians, which is a war crime.
For a quick view of where things stand, here is an update from the UK Ministry of Defence for yesterday, March 3rd:
The main body of the large Russian column advancing on Kyiv remains over 30km from the centre of the city having been delayed by staunch Ukrainian resistance, mechanical breakdown and congestion. The column has made little discernible progress in over three days.
Despite heavy Russian shelling, the cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Mariupol remain in Ukrainian hands. Some Russian forces have entered the city of Kherson but the military situation remains unclear.
The Russian defence ministry has been forced to admit that 498 Russian soldiers have already been killed and 1,597 wounded in Putin’s war. The actual number of those killed and wounded will almost certainly be considerably higher and will continue to rise.
On that last item, if the Kremlin is admitting 500 deaths, you can surmise the real number is higher by several orders of magnitude.
This leads me to this week’s question: how can we be sure of any of this?
So Open Minded Your Brains Fall Out
That’s a classic line attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” And, my friends, I apologize for this mental image: I’ve seen quite a bit of grey matter splattered all over my Facebook floor.
There are people who are affirmatively pro-Putin. They represent a minuscule percentage of the population, but there they are, keyboard warriors, typing away their defenses of Russia’s invasion, parroting everything spoon fed to them by Vladimir Putin. During the early days of the Soviet Union a term was coined for western journalists who naively (or, well, maybe not-so-naively) peddled Soviet propaganda: “useful idiots.” Some things never change, and today there are useful idiots in abundance.
Last week I made mention of the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, who continues to insist that Putin is right: America and NATO are responsible for all this. Her colleague, Matt Walsh, seems to want to live up to his (I had until now thought undeserved) reputation as a misanthrope, tweeting continually about how little he cares what happens to Ukrainians. He does this with a dazzlingly sharp logical mind: Why should I care more about Ukrainian kids than my own? I’m not sure how many fallacies are packed into that sentiment, or many of his other “arguments,” but it is a lot. Non sequitur, false dichotomy, straw man—it’s basically just an ordinary or below-average brain, or what remains of one, falling out. (As an aside, nice little collection of personalities Ben Shapiro has put together over at the Daily Wire. I generally like Ben and all, but sheesh—some of his hires are backfiring.)
Another notable useful idiot is chess grandmaster Sergei Karjakin (currently #18 in world rankings), who wrote an open letter profusely thanking President Putin for his actions in fighting the “Nazis” and liberating the regions of Donbas and Donetsk. When challenged, he doubled down and now faces an inquiry by the international chess federation (FIDE). Well, I’ll hand this to him: at least he’s putting his career on the line for what he believes. I just happen to think what he believes puts the emphasis on “idiot” in “useful idiot.” I’m so glad Magnus Carlsen crushed him in their world championship match a few years back, and I’ll certainly never, ever root for Sergei (yes: I actually watch chess, if you’re new around here).
But there is another demographic: those who aren’t necessarily pro-Putin—or at least they do a better job of disguising it—but couch everything in terms of skepticism. How can we trust the media? How do you know what’s really going on? I believe this is a tell-tale sign of someone deeply mired in toxic political partisanship, because the argument typically boils down to this: “All these people I hate [Biden, Democrats, mainstream media, etc.] are against Putin, so that makes me think maybe I should reconsider Putin’s merits!” Make note of that: support for Putin isn’t the result of facts or analysis, but on the basis of pure tribal affiliation. Politics has poisoned these people.
So, I observe, this cadre of people on the right has spent the last decade celebrating and liberally using their favorite mic-drop motto of all time: Facts don’t care about your feelings! It’s clever and effective. But they went from that to “Facts? What facts? What are facts? Is there such a thing as a fact? Can facts be known?” in approximately one millisecond after the facts showed them something about which they felt uncomfortable. How shameful and pathetic. And why are we suddenly so uncomfortable? Why are we now supposed to be complete epistemic nihilists, denying the ability to know anything? Because our political “enemies” agree with these facts, and therefore they cannot—must not—be conceded as facts. Did I mention this type of person has been politically poisoned? It seems futile to reason with them. I’m not going to allege actual demon possession, but Jesus’ haunting words seem a parallel to dealing with this kind of person: “This kind only comes out by prayer” (Mark 9:29). Engaging on that Facebook thread is not going to do much.
I promise to restrain myself and not respond, tit-for-tat, to all the propaganda they offer. But a few things seem appropriate. I am supposed to believe that Russia invaded Ukraine because it is intolerable (!) to expect Russia to share a border with a NATO country (even though Ukraine isn’t a NATO country)? One sorry fellow put it, “Can you blame them?” Let me answer that softball question and drill it for a 600 foot home run: Yes. Yes, I can blame them. I do blame them. I will never not blame them. It is not at all too much to ask a nation to live peaceably with its neighbors, maybe reach out to them, make some mutually beneficial trade deals with them—you know, be neighborly. But more importantly, do these Putin apologists ever stop to think? (Silly me: their brains have fallen out.) Invading Ukraine and annexing it to Russia has the end result of Russia sharing a border with four NATO nations. Intolerable, is it? I guess that means four more nations to invade? And then, what? Four more? No European alliances allowed, ever? Now that is starting to sound like Vladimir Putin.
How can we know what’s going on? Well, we do live in the 21st century, and there is literally a video camera in the palm of everyone’s hand. And there is an instant, real-time delivery system for that video or report from the ground. Now, even allowing that dishonesty and fraud and propaganda and psychological operations take place at times like these—and I’ve certainly seen a few—it is not particularly difficult to figure out what is going on. CNN reporters on the ground showing you a gaping hole in a residential building from a missile strike are not involved in some grand conspiracy to fool you. On the other hand, you could just accept Putin’s explanation: the “Nazis” who run the Ukrainian government are blowing up their own buildings and killing their own people to frame Russia! If you believe that, I really can’t help you and you should definitely unsubscribe from The Square Inch. Pronto.
But more than that, we can know what is going on because Vladimir Putin has been signaling—no, plainly stating—his aims for years. Almost nothing about what is happening is a mystery.
Twenty years ago Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest catastrophe” of the 20th century. Think of that. Two world wars, the Holocaust, genocide in various places around the globe. No: the collapse of the Soviet Empire is the greatest catastrophe. And his aim is to get the band back together, and he will be the front man.
He’s been meddling in Ukrainian political affairs the whole time he has been in power. In 2004 he poisoned a pro-liberty Presidential candidate. He propped up his own puppet government in Ukraine, and got ticked off when the Ukrainians rose up and toppled it. He has ever since funded and supported Russian separatist groups in eastern Ukraine. And then, in 2014 he invaded the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine and claimed it as Russian territory. And the world just stood by and watched.
And he told us why he did it. He thinks that Russia owns all Russian-speaking people. According to him, the collapse of the Soviet Empire meant that
millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.
Okay, first thing: Doesn’t that mean that prior to that “overnight,” there were people in these “Union republics” who were non-Russian ethnic majorities (!) who were forced to live as minorities in a country dominated by Moscow? That’s just a matter of pure logic. And funny how that doesn’t matter. More importantly, this is what Putin means when he talks about “liberation.” He thinks all Russian-speaking people belong to Russia, that they are yearning for it (his military is currently learning otherwise—some of the heaviest resistance has been in the east, where it is a majority Russian-speaking population). And his annexation of Crimea was, in his telling, delivering that liberation. But it isn’t just Crimea, or Russian-speaking regions within Ukraine. He believes Ukraine belongs to Russia, full stop. In the same speech, he said:
Our concerns are understandable because we are not simply close neighbors but, as I have said many times already, we are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.
If you read the whole of that speech, you will see a number of telling rhetorical devices. The put-upon, persecuted Russians living in Ukraine have begged us for help!
The residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities. Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded.
Yes, naturally. Don’t bother that the “residents” in question were his stooges ginning up all this drama in the first place so that he could be the savior.
The Ukrainian nation is also, of course, to hear him tell it, run by devils (never mind that they were democratically elected):
Those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.… We can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.
History is Repeating, Not Rhyming
You’ve heard the phrase: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”
Where and when have we heard all this before? The world has, in fact, heard all this before. But our collective memories are perhaps getting a bit hazy. One could, in fact, defensibly argue that the fundamental, animating passion of Adolf Hitler was precisely this kind of thinking—even prior to and more basic than his antisemitism. His earliest intellectual struggle, as he explains in Mein Kampf, was trying to understand why Germans in Austria (to whom he belonged) lived in a place called “Austria,” and were not united politically to the German motherland. This was simply not to be tolerated. Germans must belong to a common Reich. The “displacement” of Germans in a neighboring nation was not to be accepted. As he tells it, his very first intellectual commitment was to become a nationalist—there must not be a German diaspora, with Germans living under the rule of non-Germans. All Germans should be under a German political regime. And he laid the blame of this “aberration” on feckless German politicians and the evil rabble running the Austrian government. He saw it as his life’s mission to unite the German people under one Reich. And then, of course, to expand the territory to provide Lebensraum—”living space”—for the triumphant Aryan race.
And in March of 1938, exactly 84 years ago, it all played out precisely as we are seeing on our television screens today (except that the Austrians were not as brave and resolved as the Ukrainians—they just rolled over and gave up. The lightning strike worked). “The German minority in Austria is persecuted and oppressed and killed by their rulers!” “They are begging for help from Germany!” “Austria is run by vicious, murderous radicals!” “We must liberate Austria!” This was literally Adolf Hitler’s sales pitch for the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. And the world let him get away with it, too, to their peril and disgrace.
And it should not have been a surprise. Here is a passage from the very first page of Mein Kampf, written well over a decade earlier:
German-Austria must return to the great German motherland, and not because of economic considerations of any sort. No, no: even if from the economic point of view this union were unimportant, indeed, if it were harmful, it ought nevertheless to be brought about. Common blood belongs in a common Reich. As long as the German nation is unable even to band together its own children in one common State, it has no moral right to think of colonization as one of its political aims. Only when the boundaries of the Reich include even the last German, only when it is no longer possible to assure him of daily bread inside them, does there arise, out of the distress of the nation, the moral right to acquire foreign soil and territory.
Common blood belongs in a common Reich. Vladimir Putin said on March 3rd, 2022 (yesterday): “I will never abandon my conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.” If you go back and re-read that Mein Kampf quote, and substitute Ukraine for Austria and Russia for Germany, you will not find that Putin’s worldview and aims are vague or mysterious in any way. If you read Putin’s speech after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, you will find a religious devotion and zeal for blood, soil, and empire that would impress even Adolf Hitler. Notice that Hitler says that the “reunification,” such as it is, is worth even harmful economic consequences (i.e., dishearteningly, that means that economic sanctions are not a deterrent to this way of thinking). And please notice, above all: for Hitler, even when every “last” German is within Germany’s “boundaries” (by territorial expansion, mind you, not by bringing people home), if there’s “national distress” that deprives them of their “daily bread” (boy, did he have a messianic view of himself!), he has a moral right to invade and acquire more territory. Putin has followed him all this way, and has done so by the book, and it is not unreasonable to think he’d follow him all the way down the path. I mean, Europe—and America, for that matter—has a lot of Russian speaking populations, too. Do they need “liberation” as well? That’s a fair question, given his rhetoric.
It is a happy testament to human progress that “Hitler comparisons” are usually seen as vulgar and grotesque. They always are, with the exception of a few exceptionally evil people. The Kim Dynasty of North Korea comes to mind. But we shouldn’t forget that Adolf Hitler really did exist and he really did cause a worldwide conflagration of unspeakable horror. And it’s worth remembering that he, too, had a cadre of useful idiots in the west who insisted that the Austrians wanted “liberation” and that the Poles really did instigate hostilities a year later in 1939. And now we’ve got a nuclear-armed tyrant “liberating” a neighboring sovereign nation by bombing it to smithereens and dreaming of a new Russian empire. And he does so speaking Hitler’s thoughts and Hitler’s words, and using Hitler’s personal political playbook.
Mr. Putin is right in this one respect: it turns out, after all, that there is a Nazi at the heart of it all. But it isn’t President Zelensky or his cabinet.
May God preserve Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, and put a quick and merciful (to the world) end to Vladimir Putin.
I must be the only guy in the planet who still believes it's rational to both pray for an aggressor to be defeated, while simultaneously adopting a critical stance of US foreign policy.
You are a champion of classical liberalism. If I told you I believed that our foreign policy was very illiberal, would you call me a Putin propagandist?