Ukraine – Page 2 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 10, 2023February 14, 2023

Victor Davis Hanson, What Happened to You?

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I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast. I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country. But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine. It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right. Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress? Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine? It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations. It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.

Video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene 'didn't applaud' Zelensky's speech to Congress | indy100 — Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.

The behavior boggles the mind. Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this. Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv. Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO. Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well. The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so. Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?” More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.

I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below). It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland. The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one. Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide. From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one. Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable? Once again, it boggles the mind.

Ancient Greece timeline | Timetoast timelines — Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.

Mujahideen Waiting for Soviet Army | Afghan-Soviet war 1979-… | Flickr — Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing. The question then will be: who got worn down? One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.

Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons. That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them. But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done. Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin. Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps. Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960. Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights. Don’t you think that he knows this? Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?

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But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics. A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump. A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter. Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky. Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them. Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.

Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.

Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge. See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe. Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.

Impeachment witness Alexander Vindman says in op-ed 'doing what's right matters' — Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.

So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene. VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.

VDH, I’ve got your complaints. Now, what do we do? If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe? Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by? Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.? It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem. It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.

It still comes down to one question: what do we do? Do nothing? If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes. I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan. Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.

Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words. If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield. Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that. Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out. Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.

Ukraine destroy Russian tank with drone in 'extraordinary' footage | World | News | Express.co.uk — Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).

Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi. The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime. Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine. It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.

My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess. Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world. That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.

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RogerG

See and read more here:

* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE

* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html

* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/

November 25, 2022November 25, 2022

The Brain-Dead Left, Meet the Brain-Dead Right

Marjorie Taylor Greene at press conference announcing a privileged resolution to audit aid to Ukraine, Nov. 17, 2022.

For Immanuel Kant, the “crooked timber of humanity” is a universal. He wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Yes, we do have a flawed nature and philosophies and ideologies can’t cleanse us of it. We aren’t saved by diversity trainings or renewing our commitment to Trump’s “stop the steal” crusade. “Gender therapy” – medical interventions such as synthetic hormones and surgeries – to straighten us out is an invitation to disaster. Simpletons, kooks, and charlatans are legion throughout the political spectrum and even the professions, and though they might agree with us on many matters, that doesn’t turn them into founts of wisdom. A prime example on the right can be found in the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene. At times, she dispenses sheer nuttery. She isn’t the only one.

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Occasionally, the nuttery awakens as a consequence of a certain issue. The Ukraine War comes to mind. For anyone in their right mind (as in sober seriousness), befuddlement is the proper response to calls for appeasement in the face of thuggery and butchery. What else would you call it but appeasement? Marjorie Taylor Greene is consumed with it.

There’s an element on the Right intent on reviving the America First Committee of 1940. Aid to Britain was in the crosshairs at that time. The Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry was as overjoyed as Putin’s Foreign Ministry kleptocrats must be at this latest edition. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with all the confidence of a half-witted zealot, and with her coterie of the like-minded in tow, announced a “privileged resolution” to place aid to Ukraine under a cloud of suspicion. This thing isn’t about a prudent audit of a government spending program. Who opposes that, along with one for all the other federal spending monstrosities that are bankrupting our children’s future? But this one targets the Ukraine.

I smell a rat. The biblical injunction, “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16 KJV), applies. These people have a track record of their illicit intentions. It goes far beyond prudence. She shares Trump’s weakness for Twitter bombast when she texted in March 2022, “We should not spend billions of American’s hard earned tax dollars on lethal aid to be given to possible Nazi militias that are torturing innocent people, especially children and women.” Additionally, “The US must demand Zelensky stop his military from torturing his own people.” Notice Putin’s “Nazi militias” propaganda line? This could have easily (and did) come out of his press spokesman. This gang isn’t a collection of original thinkers.

Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), that other blowhard, has been pounding the drum for not doing anything on the international stage till we solve all our problems, or so it seems. In February 2022 at CPAC, Gaetz thundered, “Why should Americans have to pay the costs for freedom elsewhere when our own leaders won’t stand up for our freedom here?” Gaetz is correct to lambast Biden and his administration for their derelictions and disastrous policies but to say that our country’s foreign policy is tied to getting everything right here at home before we can do anything abroad is utter folly.

Our nation’s vital interests and security are of greater importance than Gaetz’s or Greene’s policy peccadillos. Yet, here they are advancing the ludicrous. They have a train of telegenic fellow travelers in the Right’s media. Candice Owens is similarly loose in her logic, tongue, and keypad when she tweeted, “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.” In the wake of Putin’s claim that Russia created Ukraine, Owens in a fit of balderdash proclaimed, “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians…They speak Russian.” Whew, what do with that logic-chopping? Many people in the U.S. speak Spanish, but does that mean that Spain created the United States?

See the source image — Candice Owens on her podcast show

As for the assertion that Russia created the Ukraine, it ignores one salient fact: Russia is an empire, a polyglot. Meaning, it’s a collection of separate peoples that have one thing in common: these regions came under Russian imperial rule over the course of centuries. So separate is Ukraine’s identity that Stalin tried to wipe it out in the 1930’s, going so far as to try to starve it to death in the Holodomor. Russian was imposed over the native Ukrainian language. Yes, Candice, the languages are different with divergent alphabets, “vocabulary, pronunciation of words, and so on [see below].” Language is a marker for so many other distinctions.

Candice, reliance on Putin as a scholarly source for an opinion is a junior-high level term paper mistake.

And, by the way, this discussion by us is superfluous since the Russians know it. Once given the chance, this polyglot empire flew apart with the collapse of the iron fist of the Soviet CCP. The Ukraine gained its independence along with Kazakhstan, etc. The Ukraine was so distinct that General Secretary Khrushchev drew its boundaries decades before. Agreed, he outbounded them a bit, but he obviously knew the Ukrainians to be a distinct enough people to recognize the fact with borders. Besides, the Politburo and the Soviet CCP agreed to the lines. It’s disingenuous for them to “speak with forked tongue” later and use a spurious argument to first lop off parts of the country and then invade and try to extinguish it. Poland was similarly imperiled in September 1939. Let’s face it, it’s a rhetorical gambit for empire-building thugs.

With every disclosure of Russian brutalities (see below), this troupe on the Right seems intent on shoving their foot further down their throats. It’s a cast of clowns. Is this element on the Right the appeasement caucus? Are they in the grip of fear of Russian nuclear weapons? If so, I can’t think of a stronger endorsement for every tyrant to get some for themselves. Where’s their argument to defend the rest of Asia from a nuclear Red China or the oil-rich Middle East from a jihadi-riddled and nuclear Iran? The fear of an aggressor hurting us is a poor basis for conducting foreign policy.

erhii Lahovskyi, 26, mourns over the body of his friend Ihor Lytvynenko, in Bucha, Ukraine, April 5, 2022. (Zohra Bensemra / Reuters)

Today’s America First dimwits have much in common with the 1980’s nuclear freeze movement. Back then, the anti-war movement of the abandonment of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia found another cause near and dear to their hearts in stopping Reagan’s effort to balance the Soviet Union’s intermediate missile threat to our western European allies. The placement of American intermediate missiles to counter the unopposed Soviet threat was declared by peaceniks to be provocative. Sound familiar? Greene earlier this year blamed our efforts to assist Ukraine for “Poking the bear”. You see, if only we hadn’t expanded NATO and recognized the alliance with military facilities amongst out allies, everything would have been hunky-dory with Putin. If only we had granted Putin a veto for NATO expansion, all would be goodness and light. It’s a version of the old blame-America-first tactic of the 60’s New Left. It took awhile but the brain-dead Left managed to find common ground with the brain-dead Right. Like seeks the company of like, brain-dead that is.

With cranks like these on the Right, we on the Right don’t need any enemies. The Left has The Squad to live down, and the Right has Marjorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz and company. Don’t expect the public to trust the Republicans with power with dunderheads like these becoming the face of the GOP. They just end up running interference for the socialistic Democrats.

The brain-dead Left, meet the brain-dead Right.

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RogerG

Ukraine and the Bursting of Bubbles

Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent. I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right. There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”. Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America. It’s incoherent, but there it is. Bubble #1.

That’s not all. Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites. The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life. This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.

Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles. In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out. One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors. In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not. Sorry Tulsi and Tucker. One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders. Is this carte blanche for intervention? No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned. When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th. Weakness invites horrors.

Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth. A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light. As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity. The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.

Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep. For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya. The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR. Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour. Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign. Done deal. Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass. After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.

In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps. And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves. But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades? I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country. Odd. It’s perplexing. Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?

Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined. Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR. Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.

No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail. The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance. Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Not even diplomacy works without it. That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit. The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety. Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind. State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out. Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.

The formula applies to us as well. To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it. The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits. Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too? Say goodbye to Taiwan. Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license. No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.

Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2. Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia. Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio. The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures. The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following. Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.

Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine. Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal. Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.

Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels. But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover. And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks. When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed). Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.

In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland. For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters. Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right. Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear. Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place. At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.

This resembles a mid-winter scene after the second day of snow in Chisinau, Moldova — Late spring freeze in Europe, 2017. This scene is from Chisinau, Moldova. Try heating your home or getting to work with no nuclear power and Putin reducing your fossil fuel supply by a third to a half. Don’t expect much help from “sustainables”.

RogerG

August 12, 2022

The Error of Following a Person and Not What They Say: A Lesson that the Right Needs to Relearn

We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.

The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.

Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.

Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.

Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

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Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:

“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”

In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.

Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.

RogerG

Sources:

*”Jordan Peterson claims Russia attacked Ukraine to stop the spread of ‘degenerate’ US culture wars. . .”, Daily Mail, July 12, 2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11005863/Jordan-Peterson-says-Russia-attacked-Ukraine-culture-wars-left-degenerate.html
*Transcripts of Jean Kirkpatrick’s speech to the 1984 Republican Convention at https://speakola.com/political/jeane-kirkpatrick-blame-america-first-gop-1984

April 7, 2022

Flacking for Putin and a Little History of Flacking

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We’ve seen it before. Aspiring opinion leaders in America read into prominent foreign leaders qualities that are actually a product of their own domestically produced biases and probably aren’t reflective of the foreign ruler’s true character. These political carnival barkers end up flacking for some pretty disreputable troublemakers. Or when disgraced by facts, they retreat to a stance of neutrality. It’s de ja vu all over again with much of Fox News’s primetime lineup, a myopic segment of the Right, and Vladimir Putin playing starring roles in a revived rendition of the tired play.

And I say this as a longstanding member of the Right and nationalist, albeit of the Reagan variety.

At work is naiveté and a warmed-over and coarse nationalism that previously arose in the 1940’s America First Committee (AFC). Celebrities, some in the well-published commentariat, and business eminences of the time signed up. Charles Lindbergh, R. Douglas Stuart (son of the co-founder of Quaker Oats), business titan William H. Regnery, General Robert E. Wood (chairman of Sears and Roebuck), eminent newspaper publishers in New York (Daily News) and Chicago (Tribune), future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and future political players Gerald R. Ford and Sargent Shriver found a home in the group.

Lindbergh understandably was the focus of much attention as an unofficial spokesman of the AFC. Comments such as these in opposition to sending aid to threatened countries in the wake of Hitler’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland could have easily dribbled from the mouth of Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham:

“I do not believe that repealing the arms embargo would assist democracy in Europe….” Or, “If we repeal the arms embargo with the idea of assisting one of the warring sides to overcome the other, then why mislead ourselves by talk of neutrality?”

Charles Lindbergh speaks at a rally of the America First Committee at Madison Square Garden in New York, on May 23, 1941. Lindbergh was a leading voice of opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (AP) — Charles Lindbergh speaks at a rally of the America First Committee at Madison Square Garden in New York, on May 23, 1941. (AP)

Like Tucker, he levelled the now-overwrought charge of war profiteering if we send aid to countries under and next in line for conquest. Is it really shocking in a country with a still-vibrant private sector, a Second Amendment, and a military (as per Article 1 §8.13 of the Constitution) that private companies catering to this market would profit from selling their wares to our friends and allies? Would Lindbergh and his modern descendants prefer aid only if it bankrupts the companies? Or maybe they’d be satisfied with a Lenin-style commissariat to dictate profitability? The argument is preposterous.

Today’s cable channel superstars get the most exposure in this latest version of the new isolationism and vulgar nationalism. Though, others revel in the same limelight. Steve Bannon, Trumpkin par excellence, bellowed on Feb. 24, “Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept.” Candice Owens proclaimed in March,

“There is no difference, ethnically, between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously. Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians.”

Fascists of the 1930s played the same trick, the gambit of denying the legitimacy of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Abyssinia before they attempted to subjugate these lands. Frankly, the charge is irrelevant, then and today. Ukraine’s existence was recognized by Russia, post breakup of the evil empire, Europe, the UN, and the USSR: Khrushchev drew its current boundaries, and Stalin knew it well enough to isolate it for starvation (the Holodomor). We don’t need to parse cultural and historical differences; this is a done deal.

Starving Mother And Child — A starving mother holds her child at the height of Holodomor. USSR. Circa 1933.

And by the way, when are powerful caudillos the lone arbiters of another country’s legitimacy? Who gave them the power to play God?

Something more insidious might be lurking in our celebrities’ heads. Our modern pundits see a little of themselves in Putin. He’s a professed Christian, nationalist, and defender of the culture. So are they . . . at least as they see themselves. So, how does that wash over into standing on the sidelines as invasion and war crimes are committed? Do we really want to relive prior horrors on a continent that has experienced the long dark shadow of aggressors who were rewarded by the compliance and appeasement of their adversaries? A nuclear-armed Putin who successfully mutilated Ukraine is an emboldened Putin . . . and Red China. Pacifistic inaction by those on the side of the angels at this juncture is an invitation for costlier abominations later.

May be an image of text that says 'REATORS.COM This is ALL UKRAINE'S FAULT... UKRAINE RAINE @Ramireztoons RUSSIA michaelpramirez.com'

The only practical advice in situations such as these comes to us from the Roman general Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. In Latin, he wrote, “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.” Rough translation: If you want peace, prepare for war. If we, for good reasons, don’t want to do the fighting, we could certainly arm others to do it. Tucker, Bannon, Owens, and the rest of the gang of apologists need a new script other than the one written by Lindbergh and company and practiced by Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

May be an illustration

RogerG

March 20, 2022March 20, 2022

What Is the National Interest in Ukraine?

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The normally sensible Brit Hume on Bret Baier’s Special Report on Wednesday (3/16/22) asked the salient question on Ukraine: What is our national interest in Ukraine? It’s the same question every government has to ask when facing an international dilemma such as this one. For Hume, his inflection and posture inferred skepticism about a major US national interest in support of Ukraine. Take a tour around much of the Fox News primetime lineup and you’ll get commentary heavily dowsed in doubt with some bordering on complete rejection of any. Are they right? No, a hundred times “No”.

In addressing the query, one factor corrupts the popular media that influences much public opinion. A competent answer rarely lends itself to cable show compression – i.e., soundbites. The setting favors the cynic and hampers proponents. It’s much easier for a detractor to ask the question and force proponents to contrive a response to fit 10 seconds. Is that how we want overriding issues to be treated? Hardly.

Any intelligent consideration of the national interest in Ukraine begs particular questions. What would Europe and the world be like after a Russian conquest of Ukraine? Would it be a friendlier world for the US? An additional and related question: What would Russia under a reenergized Putin be like after a Ukraine conquest? Is a cooperative, agreeable, and contented Putin a likelihood? Oh, what will the CCP be left to think?

We study history for its clues on human nature.

As such, one could be excused for having a dim view of our prospects in this return to a world of contending hyper-powers. History is not encouraging. It’s rhyming in the cadences of the 1930’s. Once again, we have revanchist powers in Europe and Asia, and they have the additional liability of having nuclear arsenals. Their actions should focus the mind in a sterner way than a border dispute between two small satraps. A bear leaves more evidence of its passage than a mouse. Watch for the bear, not the mouse.

Trundling to the way-back machine, fascist Germany and Italy weren’t satisfied with the Rhineland and Abyssinia. Japan wasn’t made sanguine with Manchuria. League of Nations protests and sanctions didn’t halt Imperial Japan’s behavior and the Munich appeasement of forcing Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland didn’t whet Hitler’s appetite. The West had dug itself into such a deep hole by 1939 that it took six years and 75-80 million deaths, 3% of the world’s population, to bring the malefactors to heel.

A new axis has taken shape reminding us of that old one. The 1930’s edition began in 1936 with treaties of cooperation among the serial aggressors and ended with the full-blown military Tripartite Pact in 1940. Acting in historical lockstep, Putin and Xi met on February 4 to announced a bipartite pact with world-hogging spheres of influence. The joint statement reads as follows:

“The new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation . . . . Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour [sic] revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”

They are angling for a resuscitated Soviet Empire for Putin and Xi’s rendition of Japan’s old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – “Asia for the Asians”, er CCP, so to speak.

And, simultaneously, as in that bygone era, we have a recurrence of an anti-war Right. We are quite familiar with the Left’s aversion for anything nationally muscular. They have a habitual zeal for opposition to the military and for the peddling of facile “peace” – of the better-red-than-dead variety – and the accompanying disparagement of any nation deserving of our sympathies. Such was evident on the 1930’s Right – Lindbergh’s America First Committee and leading congressional figures like Sen. Robert Taft (R, Ohio) – and increasingly appears to be true today. Scan the Right’s media offerings (Fox News primetime, Newsmax, and a host of other digital offerings) and you’ll see the smearing of Ukraine, fears of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of spilt American blood on foreign soil, and the hyperbole of a new World War III at every turn. At the end of the day, it’s a repackaged 1930’s playbook that calls for unilateral abandonment of a national interest if a foreign thug threatens.

The now-worn playbook shows in a diminished military capacity, both then and now. Today’s defense doctrine went from simultaneously fighting two wars to one. In order to fulfill the “pivot to Asia”, we had relegated ourselves to abandoning Afghanistan. Defense spending as a share of GDP gradually declined from 9% in the 1960s to under 4% today. We are doing our best to recreate the circumstances that led to Pearl Harbor. This time, we may not have the time to build up. As Congress begins the debate of a new draft law, the nukes had already left their silos and advanced divisions of the People’s Liberation Army have landed on the shores of Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands.

So, how will a disquisition like this one be shoehorned into a Laura Ingraham or Joy Reid segment? Hmmm.

Something lurks behind the paralyzing alarms of our celebrities on the Right (and maybe the Left). One thing might be the hankering for the type of international dealings of the sailing-ship era. It was a time when oceans blocked anyone but the most capable and determined assailant. The 21 miles of the English Channel’s Dover Strait proved to be insurmountable even for Napoleon at his height of power. Today, an airborne division can be dropped on Albany in a matter of hours; 30 minutes is the time from an ICBM launch from its Aleysk silo to Chicago (faster for sub-launched and hyper-sonics); WMD can come in a suitcase; and cyber invasions to bollix our grid are nearly instantaneous from Beijing keystroke to PG&E. Someone tell Tucker Carlson.

Secondly, in a display of obeisance to simple-minded Trump-talk, they have a 1950’s template for America. It was a time when the U.S. was riding high, alone in the world, as Europe and much of Asia were in rubble. In a way, they are right to admire the time because those were the halcyon days before environmentalist triumphalism and the regnant belief that federal spending can cure deep-seated personal problems, alongside its attendant and economy-dragging trillion-dollar deficits. But, by clinging to Trump’s rhetorical apron strings, they take it much further in bashing a trade deficit that neither he nor they understand. In a clear example of foot-shooting, their targets include trading relationships with our allies and the ones that we’ll need to counter China’s latest edition of Asia for the Asians. It’s as if they chucked Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Statecraft for Dummies out the window and are winging it.

It won’t end well after the rampages and the torching of 12% of US GDP (US exports’ contribution to GDP). Gazing back into the history, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression share the same womb.

Remembering the Mothball Fleet — Mothballed US Navy ships in Suisun Bay, Ca.

The doom of repeating history, in Descartes famous words, looms large. Don’t expect expansionistic predators-with-nukes to be impressed by an economic and military retreat to fortress America. We will quickly learn that the world as a playground for powerful rogues will not be to our liking. We’ve seen it before, déjà vu all over again. Thus, we have a national interest in keeping Putin and the CCP at bay, if for no other reason than to avoid the accusation of flunking high school History. The sooner we discredit the anti-war Right and Left and its incipient isolationism, the sooner our national interest will come into focus.

Let’s hope at this momentous hour that we don’t shrug our shoulders and say under our breath, c’est la vie. We will live to regret it if we do.

Putin & Russia

RogerG

March 10, 2022March 14, 2022

Ukraine and Hidden Agendas

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While ruminating on the latest thought-fad emanating from the Left, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I was reminded of the tendency of people to hide their real intentions behind a flurry of academic jargon. Thus, the convoluted and incoherent MMT. Economists – left, right and center – have dubbed it “Calvinball” (Paul Krugman), “not ready for primetime” (Scott Summer), “sounded like lunacy” (Michael Strain), and “a political [not economic] manifesto” (report for France’s central bank). Frankly, MMT boils down to this: if the government wants to do something, go ahead and print the money and do it. No problem, the MMT priesthood would sing in chorus. Everything will be hunky-dory.

But what are they really after? Pure and simple, they want a humongous government with the power to tax, regulate, and spend at will; no restraints; socialism. MMT is just another tangled oratorical path to get there. Please, fans of socialism, cut the crap.

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The same mental gymnastics are at work on the right. Events in Ukraine have exposed a segment of the right’s own rhetorical curtain. Tucker Carlson babbles on about “just asking questions”, “neocons”, “Ukrainian corruption”, “World War III”, “Americans dying”, and “America first”. Laura Ingraham joins the chorus. What are they really after?

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The normally sensible Mollie Hemingway also seems to practice this form of mental subterfuge when talking about Ukraine. In a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, she incessantly rambled about “knowing the risks” of US support for Ukraine, as if the thought was original to her; nobody but her is aware of it. But everybody intuitively does it when doing simple things like deciding to go to an ATM in crime-ridden LA under DA Gascon or proposing to prick the nose of the CCP with tariffs (they’ve got nukes too).

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What’s up? Two motivations lie buried in the verbiage: they are paralyzed in fear of Russia and have a hankering for a “fortress America” national defense strategy. Goatherders with boxcutters (9/11) proved the latter to be foolish. On the former, I fail to understand the gripping dread of Putin’s nukes over, say, those of Chairman Xi. Tucker, Laura, and Mollie are gung-ho in respect to China and have said so ad nauseam, but can’t bring themselves to support actions to forestall a mauling by a power wishing to resuscitate the Soviet empire on a continent historically beset by world-shattering aggressors. Speaking of spent blood and treasure to put thugs back in the box, recall WWI and WWII?

Hardly does an episode go by without two straw-man choices to bolster the cognitive inanity. Tucker presents the choices as either staying out, completely out, or body bags/nuked American cities. What happened to simply arming our friends? Putin and Xi do it regularly, and American soldiers have paid the price in such disparate places as Syria, Fellujah, and the Hindu-Kush. The Tucker-to-Laura axis’s response would be “no more forever-wars” or run and hide after, as Mollie would have it, tortuously “assessing the risks”.

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The thinking boggles the mind. They are quick to “assess the risks” of a bungled Afghan bugout but have no desire to “assess the risks” of a bludgeoned Ukraine, and possible defeat, as we sit idly by, safe in our “fortress America”.

Which brings to mind another hidden motive: pure cult-of-personality politics. Trump-love could be clouding their eyesight and mind. Biden, who defeated their master, did the Afghan bugout and is at the helm when Putin unleashed his doddering Wehrmacht on the Ukraine. They’re quick to blame Biden’s Afghanistan-appeasement for Putin’s invasion – and they’d be right – while at the same time they hawk appeasement in regards to Ukraine. Putin saw Kabul airport and Xi is watching Ukraine. A failure to stop Putin at the borders of the Ukraine could lead to a failure to stop Xi at the shores of Taiwan. If so, we’ll be really forced into “fortress America”. A self-fulfilled prophecy anyone, one not likely to be satisfying to most Americans?

I wish that they’d get their appeasement angles straight before they blather to us.

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The modern punditry class is a disgrace. Previously, most of the sensible among us had no recourse in legacy media. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP are mostly lefty propaganda organs. Now, it turns out, the primetime lineup on Fox News can’t be trusted. All of them prove that human fallibility is evident everywhere and academic degrees, party registration, ideology, race, gender, age, and telegenic qualities accord no fix. Fact.

Really, Tucker, Laura, and Mollie, tell us what actually lurks behind your wordiness. If it’s abject fear of Putin, say it. If it’s a sincere belief in the veracity of Russian propaganda, say it. If it’s a derivative of knee-jerk Trump-love, say it. If it’s an undying faith in oceans as our best defense, say it. If it’s a secret admiration of Putin as a fellow nationalist-populist, say it. If it’s the fright of “forever wars” trumping all other thoughts, say it. And, by all means, cut the crap.

RogerG