I usually reserve updates for my books, but in light of the unusual amount of feedback/concern my original commentary generated, I’ve decided to make an exception.
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
(Winston Churchill, House of Commons, May 2, 1935, Courtesy of the National Churchill Museum)
This was Churchill’s take on the famous truism George Santayana coined in The Life of Reason, namely, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But never before in the history of mankind has this truism been truer (and more foreboding) than it is with respect to the latest development unfolding in Ukraine:
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered massive exercises involving most military units in western Russia amid tensions in Ukraine.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said … that the maneuvers involve some 150,000 troops, 880 tanks, 90 aircraft and 80 navy ships…
A senior Russian lawmaker on Tuesday told pro-Russia activists in Crimea that Moscow will protect them if their lives are in danger.
(The Associated Press, February 26, 2014)
Anyone who knows anything about the causes of World War II will appreciate my casting Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler testing the will of his European adversaries. And, just to be perfectly clear, I’m analogizing here to Hitler the bullying military adventurer, not the butchering genocidal maniac.
Never mind that Muslim Tatars could be forgiven fears that Putin might purge them from Crimea the way his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, purged them from Russia; or, perhaps more to the point, that Tatars have faced subjugation, displacement, and even extermination throughout history much as Jews did until they settled in Israel.
But, like Hitler, who wanted to dominate Europe, Putin wants to dominate the former republics of the former Soviet Union. And like Hitler, who appointed himself father protector of Germans living in the Sudeten region of Austria, Putin has appointed himself the father protector of Russians living in the Crimea region of Ukraine (just as he did with those living in the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions of Georgia).
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by delineating the obvious symmetries/analogies any further.
I’m merely imploring Western leaders — who might eventually have to play Churchill and FDR to Putin’s Hitler — to show that they’ve learned from history by standing up to this bully if he even attempts to take Crimea. (The president of China might have to play Stalin….) I pray they don’t stand by and let him take it, as their respective predecessors did when Hitler took Sudetenland; and the rest, as we say, is history.
That said, I shudder to think what concessions Putin could extract — given the myriad concessions successive presidents of North Korea have extracted from Western leaders by merely threatening to continue developing/testing nuclear weapons. After all, insofar as the capability to intentionally inflict existential distress over nuclear weapons is concerned, Russia makes North Korea look like Switzerland. Still, the sooner Obama calls Putin’s bluff, the further the world will remain away from the brink of nuclear war.
NOTE: After floating Soviet-style propaganda about the CIA harboring the fugitive Yanukovych, Moscow just confirmed that he’s enjoying refuge in the bosom of Mother Russia.
Related commentaries:
Ukraine…