Hitler Rides Again

No, the Führer has not been found in Brazil and microwaved  back to life, but the useful Hitler myth lives on as an image to be invoked whenever things are not turning out as they are supposed to.   Leo Strauss called this argument the reductio ad Hitlerum, and  over the decades we have had a series of new Hitlers:  Saddam Hussein, Muamar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, and Bashar al-Assad.  The memes are already flying now that Putin and Trump have come closer to an agreement, one that will inevitably trade land for peace.  The only problem is, how to determine which one is Hitler?  Usually Trump is Hitler but this time around he gets to play Neville Chamberlain.

Let us for just a moment "get real" and quit pretending that the Ukraine War is about preserving democracy or maintaining the sacred borders of the fictive "nation-state" of the borderland known as the Ukraine.  Perhaps there have been wars that were fought for just causes--Greeks defending their cities from the Persians, Rome defending Italy against the child-murdering Carthaginians, the South fighting for sovereign independence, and, if we are to limit ourselves to wars of defense against aggression, one might wish to argue for the just right of Ukrainians to keep the Russians out, though we could sustain that fiction only if Ukraine had any kind of history as a sovereign state, enjoyed anything like a unity of ethnicity, religion, and culture, and, above all, if the peace-loving Catholic Ukrainians had not been pillaging and murdering the Orthodox Russians in Eastern Ukraine.

But neither Ukrainian independence nor the suffering of the Orthodox in Eastern Ukraine is the issue.  Like most modern wars, the Ukrainian War is to determine who will be master of the region, Russia or the United States and her NATO dependents.  Even more importantly, as the Bidens well understood, it will determine who gets the most boodle.

Little countries sandwiched in between great powers are always in danger, and all too often the little powers look into a funhouse mirrors that encourages them to think of themselves as great empires.  The prophets of Israel time after time warned the kings of Judah not to dream of playing a part in the struggles between Egypt and the Assyrians and Babylonians.  After they had been trounced, devastated and reduced to submission, the people of Israel refused to learn their lesson and, as dependents of the Macedonian kingdom of Syria, they sought aid from big brother Rome.  After numerous clashes, insurrections, and two major wars, they were first driven out of Jerusalem and eventually out of Judaea.  But they still have not learned the lesson and turn to big brother Uncle Sam, whose patience is running out.

The Czech after WWI so mistreated the Sudeten Germans.  A retired Czech officer who lived through that period told a good friend of mine, who was in army intelligence, that as terrible as were the crimes of the Nazis and Bolsheviks he had witnessed, the brutality of his own people toward the Germans most appalled him.  Chesterton, who only knew a little of what was going on in Czechoslovakia, refused to accept an invitation from his friend Karl Capek.  The Poles were hardly any better in their treatment of Germans in the territory acquired after the First War.  None of these things justifies what the Germans and later the Soviets did to Czechs and Poles.  On the contrary, but, the advice that Hesiod's hawk gave to the dove it had captured is still true:  Do not struggle against those who are stronger.

Terrible things happened during the war of Yugoslav secessions that I would wish not to have seen or heard about, but it struck me at the time that Croats--a people I respect--were engaged in switching masters.  I spent a night with a family in Zagreb.  The father was watching the news on a German channel, and the daughter was learning German.  They knew something that was not apparently realized by the patriotic Croatian nationalists I met.

The Russians are right to complain that the United States has broken its promise, made by an American president, not to expand NATO to the East,  but they should be blaming the fool Gorbachev for letting himself be gulled.  It was probably in Russia's interest to slack off in the Cold War competition and withdraw from countries outside the historic Russian zone of domination--Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and perhaps even the "captive nations" on the Baltic, but Belarus and Ukraine?  Gorbachev's incompetence, combined with his weakness, invited the encroachment of a country that was already calling itself--hilariously in retrospect--the world's only remaining Superpower.

No one but Trump, Putin, and a few dozen of their advisors knows the details of their tentative arrangements, but I think it is safe to say that Trump did not let the wool get pulled over his eyes in Anchorage.  It is not as if we don't already know how Trump thinks of all politics and all negotiations.  He put his cards on the table in the title of his ghost-written book, The Art of the Deal.  And, in making deals, the object is always the same:  To gain more advantages for you and your people than your rival and his people gain.

The deal must have been worked out in principle before a meeting could have been agreed to.   Of course Putin is going to come out ahead.  Why else would he make a deal?  The Russians have a great deal at stake, including their credibility as a great power and East European hegemony.  We have little to lose and a great deal to gain in saving vast sums of money that have been squandered in propping up what is regarded by many as the most corrupt and inefficient regime in Europe.

The Ukrainian strongman has no seat at the table and nothing to say.  Egomaniacal as he is, he is a dove caught between two hawks.  And political leaders, past and present, of our NATO wards would do well to keep silent.

Boris Johnson, predictably has already opened up on a situation he describes as emetic .  Even when he was PM, it should have been clear to all that Johnson, in the words of Buck Owens, was "the biggest fool who ever hit the big time," and out of power he makes Keith Starmer seem almost presentable.  As proud as I am of my own British ancestry, they have to understand that for the present it is the US that gives the orders in the Anglosphere.  I, along with a Cambridge don, were once having a meeting with the President of Serbia.  The English academic was quite a sensible and amiable man, but he was insisting that Serbia conciliate the UK by one means or another.  The president looked at me inquiringly, and I replied that the UK meant nothing.  It was the United States he had to worry about, because the Brits would do and could do nothing without our approval and assistance.  Put in comprehensible terms, James Bond has been working for Felix Leiter for many years.

I have no crystal ball.  I cannot foretell whether the deal will hold, and it is not at all certain that we shall actually gain by it.  But this one thing I do know:  Americans, if they are going to continue to pretend that they have a democratic government, had better wise up and understand that big power politics has nothing to do with liberating Muslim women, imposing democratic self-deliberation, or preserving the peace of the world.  All politics in this age is simply the means by which one set of ambitious gangsters gain advantages over a rival gang and get a larger share of the loot.  This is true in Rockford, Illinois, the state capital, Washington, D.C., and in all international negotiations.

At the beginning of World War I, the predictably foolish George Bernard Shaw said he took no interest in a battle between two pirate ships.  After a few years, a bit of sunlight penetrated the fog of his delusions, and he observed that it did make  a difference when you happened to be sailing on one of the pirate ships.