This is a departure from my usual “grumpy”, or as I prefer to think of them, every day blogs, because from time to time, national and international events bring us up short and remind us just how deeply flawed humans can be.
Vladimir Putin is just such a man. He’s done what we thought he would. Like the invasion of Poland in 1939, he’s begun gobbling up his neighbors with no intention of honoring any previous statements. Bits and pieces won’t satisfy his appetite for conquest. Just as Adolph Hitler told the world he would be happy to acquire the Sudetenland, Mr. Putin wanted the world to accept his annexation of the Crimea. That would be enough, except we now know it isn’t. His expansionist vision won’t stop until he’s reassembled the old Soviet Union and more. The world now sees him for what he is – with a thuggish mindset quite like “Game of Thrones”. He apparently sees brute force as a virtue, truth as something malleable, a manipulative commodity to be used and abused as one sees fit. And he clearly does not hold any concept of governance by the greater population, what we call democracy, as having any value. People are to be controlled, plain and simple.
That mindset has led to turmoil throughout history, and I fear Mr. Putin hasn’t learned those lessons very well. From the time of the Roman Empire, the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Crusades up to the Ottoman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Third Reich, and the USSR, empire-building has proved a remarkably fragile and unsustainable model. Adolph Hitler led a misguided mission, and his lasting legacy is mostly images of brutality and ethnic carnage. The names Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz will be forever linked to the evil of that brutality. Does the Russian regime really think it can turn back the clock to the golden age of Josef Stalin or even Nikita Khruschchev? To an era of suppression, oppression, and yes, more brutality?
The Ukraine has only recently come into its own as a sovereign entity. Going back hundreds of years, it’s been part of the kingdoms of Lithuania and Poland, overrun by the Cossacks, and by the Bolshevik Red Army a hundred years ago. The Ukraine has shared fully in the push and pull of eastern European politics for centuries, finally achieving some measure of sovereignty and recognition in the break-up of the old Soviet Union in 1991. For thirty years, they’ve been governed by more or less democratically elected officials. That’s a taste of citizenship they’re not ready to give up. And the reality is that the vast majority of the forty-one million Ukrainians do not think of themselves as Russian. Some in Eastern Ukraine feel some allegiance to Russia, but even that seems to be more fear than passion, because Mr. Putin is handing them rifles. The general Ukrainian population is rising up in resistance, even as they’re badly under-armed and ill-equipped. They’ve had a taste of democracy and independence, and Mr. Putin, you won’t be able to hang on to your ill-gotten gains for very long. That’s another lesson of history that you are ignoring. Queen Elizabeth II no longer “Empress of India”. In your own homeland, there is no Tsar. In Beijing, the government too is slow understand that dominance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is becoming an unworkable concept. Their assertions of sovereignty over Taiwan have gone nowhere, and Hong Kong is deeply unsettled. The world would not stand by if they attempted what you’re doing in Ukraine. Nor will the West accept, as Neville Chamberlain did, that “peace in our time” can be achieved by breaking off pieces of nations and you will be satisfied. You have proven repeatedly that you specialize in deceit, misdirection, and outright propaganda. The world is now seeing you for what you really are, not as a world leader but as a bully, and somewhere along the way, your own people will come to see you that way too. That will be the breaking point, and it won’t be pleasant for you. You really should have stood pat while you could, because at some point you might take a hard look at pictures of Mussolini hanging upside down in death and disgrace.
Democracy, to quote the final speech from “An American President”, ‘ain’t easy’. It has its own flaws, issues, and controversies. It reflects the people it serves, for better or worse. It’s evolving, crisscrossing, doubling back, and reinventing itself. But over the centuries, it’s the best we have come up with so far. And, if thousands of years of history are anything to go by, civilization can only preserve and borrow bits and snatches of good, but we can never fully go back.
The images coming to us from the Ukraine – terrified citizens fleeing, shelled and destroyed buildings, tanks rolling over cars, and long lines of heavy weapons moving into position, will never be erased, but will enter the history books in all their ugliness. There will be no lasting triumph, Mr. Putin, no heroic pictures like Napoleon on horseback riding into battle. There will be horror, disgust, and outrage firmly attached to your name – that’s already happening in most of the world. Nobody will remember you as the great warrior that united finally and for all time the Russian Empire. Until this time, you have been known as the man that accumulates great personal wealth at the expense of his people, chemically poisons his political rivals. Now, however, you’ll be remembered as someone inflicting deep pain and suffering trying to put back together something not worth putting back together. History will remember you as a last, desperate gasp of a selfish totalitarianism that collapsed, as it did in 1991, under the weight its own evil purpose.
I'm Thinking...No! 