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Dear Friends,
In Herman Wouk’s celebrated World War II novel The Winds of War Captain Victor Henry, U.S. Naval Attaché stationed in Berlin, finds himself acting as a translator in an impromptu private meeting between an American banker—a “non-official” emissary from Roosevelt—and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Wouk’s depictions of Hitler are superb. If you’ll indulge me:
Hitler now began reminiscing garrulously about the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. He spoke at length and seemed to be enjoying himself, slowing waving his hands and using relaxed tones. The justifications were familiar stuff. He grew briefly loud and acid only over the British guarantee to Poland, which, he said, had encouraged a cruel reactionary regime to engage in atrocious measures against its German minority, in the illusion that it had become safe to do so. That was how the war had started. Since then England and France had over and over spurned his offers of a peace settlement and disarmament. What more could he do, as a responsible head of state, than arm his country to defend itself against these two great military empires, who between them controlled three-fifths of the habitable surface of the earth and almost half its population?
German political aims were simple, open, moderate, and unchanging, he went on. Five centuries before Columbus discovered America, there had been a German empire at the heart of Europe, its boundaries roughly fixed by geography and the reproductive vigor of the people. War had come over and over to the European heartland through the attempts of many powers to fragment the German folk. These attempts had often had temporary success. But the German nation, with its strong instinct for survival and growth, had time and again rallied and thrown off foreign encirclements and yokes. In this part of his talk Hitler made references to Bismarck, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Thirty Years’ War, which were beyond Victor Henry. He translated them word for word as best he could.
This passage came immediately to my mind, of course, when I started seeing reports of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin. Putin went on and on for two hours—apparently impressing MAGA world—rehearsing in lecture mode his romantic, idealist, and therefore revisionist history as far back as the 8th century. At one point, Tucker had his Victor Henry moment where something was “beyond him.” He glanced at the camera and made a puzzled face.
The funny thing is, you could swap out “Hitler” and “Germany” in Wouk’s fictional account above for “Putin” and “Russia,” and you would have to change nothing else. Do you know why? Because Vladimir Putin’s worldview is Adolf Hitler’s worldview.
You cringe, I know, because “Hitler” comparisons are very taboo for obvious reasons. But exactly 101 weeks ago today, two years ago, I published a newsletter (No. 97) entitled, “History Doesn’t Only Rhyme” (Read: sometimes it repeats). The first part was sort of a “current events” roundup about how the war was going in those initial stages. The second part was my assessment of the various pro-Putin stooges on the Right. Two years later I can confidently say that I got pretty much all of that exactly right, and the same cast of characters is still at it, with some very sad additions.
But then I did a bit of a deeper dive into Putin’s actual stated rationale for his invasion of Ukraine and found it virtually indistinguishable from Hitler’s rationale for the Anschluss and his invasion of Poland. And, amazingly, in Tucker’s interview Putin literally repeats Hitler’s lies about Poland. Poland “made him do it,” you see. They were persecuting the poor German minority population. Hmm. Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes. When Putin explained—and really, go read that Wouk passage above again, particularly about the British guarantee to Poland—that NATO openness with Ukraine emboldened them to persecute the poor Russian-speaking minorities. What was he to do? He had to “liberate” them, of course.
I recommend that you revisit Square Inch No. 97. Just click here. I’d like you to do that because I don’t want to have to reproduce the whole thing right here.
Alright, alright, I will give you one quote. This is from the very first page of Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
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.
There. Just swap out “German-Austria” and insert “Ukraine,” and swap out “German motherland” for “Russian motherland,” and I’ve basically just summarized for you Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin. He is every bit the blowhard as the Hitler Victor Henry had to sit and listen to. The difference is that Tucker Carlson was impressed and “Pug” Henry wasn’t.
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