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?”
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.
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.
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.
RogerG