In the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus of the first century AD, zealots were the fourth and final of the Jewish religious sects in the Roman province of Palestine of his time. Today, we know the word to mean firebrands. They are understood to be absolutely committed, blinded to alternative knowledge, and can be monomaniacal to such an extent that the restraints of compassion and reason are stunted.
Firebrands are frequently blinkered and susceptible to committing atrocities and stumbling into big blunders. A class of fanatic, newly enthused by the late 19th century’s initial and facile discoveries in the science of heredity, appeared as devotees of eugenics: breed a better human as you would a hunting dog. Enthusiasts were everywhere in the period from the US Supreme Court (Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”, Buck v. Bell, 1927) to Germany’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) of the 1920’s and 30’s (see below).
In 1940, the fate of the wife of the journalist and writer Joseph Roth, Friedl Reichler, would be swallowed in the mania for the pseudoscience. Suffering from schizophrenia, she was institutionalized, and there she was in an asylum waiting to be rounded up in the Nazi euthanasia campaign of that year. She and fellow patients were gathered, transported to a camp, stripped naked, and marched into a gas chamber.
What makes a person an active participant in abject brutality? Mark Twain may have gotten it right when he wrote:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
In my mind, it’s incomprehensible, but incomprehensibility is a common feature of our politics. A version has settled on the outskirts of the right in this moment. It has infected even normally sensible people. I admired Victor Davis Hanson until he exhibited signs of the disability. Since the case for the support of Ukraine is so strong, I’ve often wondered why he is a Ukraine skeptic till I listened to his podcast interview with Iddo Netanyahu, the brother of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (see below). Hanson and Iddo are simpatico on Ukraine.
Iddo and Hanson believe the war is unwinnable for Ukraine. So, they’re eager to advise cutting a deal. What kind of deal? They don’t say, nor how to get there without Putin’s concurrence. While they both reach the same conclusion, they probably unknowingly arrive at it from different angles. Iddo is an Israeli patriot with Israel’s precarious national security concerns in a very dangerous neighborhood at the forefront of his mind. Understandable. I would like to think that Hanson is an American patriot with an equal understanding of our unique responsibilities and interests as a global superpower. Last I checked, Israel isn’t part of NATO; we are, and should be. The interests of a superpower and a nation facing local existential threats often diverge because the circumstances of the two nations are so different. Hanson shows no sign of recognizing the distinction.
The Russians in Syria to prop up Assad illustrate our divergent interests. Israel needs Russian acquiescence to strike Hezbollah targets in the country. Iddo’s desire not to say anything to threaten the delicate relationship would make him circumspect on Ukraine. The US isn’t shackled by the need to cater to Putin’s sensibilities and whims. In fact, we didn’t worry about it when a large force of Russian mercenaries and Syrian fighters assaulted a small American post in northern Syria in 2018 resulting in 200 Wagner Group Russians dead from American firepower. A superpower must behave differently from a regional power.
By circumstance, our stance on Ukraine needs to be different from Israel’s. Hanson doesn’t get it, and neither does some of the other unhinged elements on the right. Hugh Hewitt got a full blast of the fringe-right’s kookiness during his radio talk show earlier this week (see below). He may have filtered callers to concentrate on critics of his pro-Ukraine position. Many sounded awfully similar to Rush Limbaugh’s seminar callers, but from the right. Rush noticed that they would lie about their affiliations and rigidly recite from a uniform set of talking points. Hewitt’s callers were monotonous with some variation of the same bullet points in opposition to support for Ukraine: (1) we’re ignoring our problems; (2) we should be spending the money on ourselves; (3) we’re depleting our stock of munitions and weaponry; (4) we can’t afford it; (5) Biden is a bad man; (6) the war is made endless with our involvement; (7) we have no interest there; and (8) the Russians have nukes so we ought to be afraid.
One person or group doesn’t have to be orchestrating the callers. More feasibly, the monotony shows a slavish devotion to a narrow cast of sources. Suspect influencers include the self-styled “populists” on Fox News primetime, the Gaetz/Boebert/MTG wing of the Republican caucus, and a selected chorus of online sources feeding their biases.
Among the guiding lights on the right is Molly Hemingway, a guest on the same Hewitt episode and exhibiting no more coherence than the callers. Stock Hemingway complaints were our prolonging of the war (another WWI) and the exhaustion of our stockpile of weapons and munitions. Neither holds water. A hamstrung military industrial supply chain is a call to unshackle it, not an excuse to leave Ukraine dangling. Increasing our industrial capacity is something we have to do anyway if we are to follow Molly’s advice to take on the CCP.
Her fear of another WWI is actually a call for the appeasement of Putin since our only real leverage is with Ukraine. We can force them to the bargaining table because they are dependent on us. The idiosyncrasies of the Kremlin’s rule and the marketability of Putin’s fossil fuels diminish our clout on the boss. Besides, sanctions and near-uniform international condemnation did nothing to dissuade the invasion or prevent his inhuman conduct of the war.
The loopy right is guilelessly borrowing the Left’s playbook from the Vietnam War era. At the time, peace, peace, peace, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate was the drumbeat without much thought of a balanced settlement or how to get there. Really, the Peace Movement just wanted us out of South Vietnam which left the South Vietnamese in the same situation as the shortsighted right would leave Ukraine. War-game it. Its practical effect is appeasement. When will we finally show signs of learning that the actual consequence of appeasing aggressive dictators is a shattering of deterrence for other blustery assailants on the world’s stage? The world becoming the equivalent of South Chicago will only increase Prozac sales.
All the other arguments are equally specious. We can’t afford something that is less than a rounding error in the bloating federal debt? We could spend it on ourselves, but on what, and with what effect? More money for the folks that gave us the War on Poverty and our inner-city war zones? Yes, we could spend it on other things, maybe even efficaciously, rather than give the Ukrainians the wherewithal to resist on the front lines in the battle against the Axis of Evil so we won’t have to in Poland or the Fulda Gap.
You know, we could do both – help distressed Americans and Ukraine – by actually showing some guts in reforming our bankrupting entitlements. Don’t talk of selective spending restraint while avoiding the big elephant in the room – entitlements! The talk is risible.
The Ukraine skeptics often complain of the lack of an “end game” in Ukraine. Really? Do they have one in their gung-ho pivot to confront the CCP? If it is to stop and corral the CCP, why wouldn’t that be good enough in regard to Putin? Putin being forced to withdraw from the Ukraine, with Putin in caged retirement at some dacha as icing on the cake, are indeed pleasant thoughts.
The incoherence is astounding, about as muddled as the thinking of the peaceniks in the revolving door between the 1960’s Anti-War and 1980’s Nuclear Freeze Movements. Move over Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and David Dellinger (of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), Trump barges in and co-opts the rhetoric. Trump has his nose in the air, like any demagogue, and gets a whiff of anti-Ukraine fever on the right as anti-South Vietnam dementia was all over the New Left of the 1960’s. “Warmongers” and “teetering on the brink of World War Three” could have just as easily dripped from the mouth of Abbie Hoffman in one of his rants on the Berkely campus as it did Trump on Tuesday (February 21, see below).
Trump tries to not completely turn off his audience on the right by magically trying to square his circle of bombast. Out of the other side of his mouth he blurts “peace through strength”, not explaining how “strength” is not the language of a “warmonger”. He leaves us with the hollow “right kind of leadership” – meaning his – to lather over the discrepancy. His silver tongue will magically transform Putin into a monk. He, the Great Trump, will talk Putin into niceness. Doesn’t this sound a bit delusional?
Even more flummoxing to a sane person is an honest accounting of Trump’s past, which shows him to be a “warmonger” yesterday as he condemns the “warmonger” of today, all the while trumpeting the warmonger’s “peace through strength” line. Got that? It’s rhetorical hash to stake out an identity among an element of the party blinded by fury. To be blunt, the gambit is Trump’s usual performance art as politics.
The caterwauling will only embolden Putin and cut Ukraine off at the knees. Don’t ever complain about Biden’s Afghanistan debacle when you are prepared to create one in Ukraine.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Nazi euthanasia campaign: “Aktion T4, The Nazi Program That Slaughtered 300,000 Disabled People”, Richard Stockton, ATI, 6/3/2021, at https://allthatsinteresting.com/aktion-t4-program
* Victor Davis Hanson’s interview with Iddo Netanyahu: https://victorhanson.com/from-the-sea-of-galilee-iddo-netanyahu-on-israeli-politics/
* The unhinged right was on abundant display in High Hewitt’s show on Tuesday (2/21): https://hughhewitt.com/todays-podcast-325/
* Donald’s latest video comment on Ukraine from 2/21/23: “Trump: In My Next Term, The Warmongers, Failures, And Frauds In Our National Security Establishment Will Be Gone”, Tim Haines, Real Clear Politics, 2/21/23, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/02/21/trump_in_my_next_term_the_warmongers_failures_and_frauds_in_our_national_security_establishment_will_be_gone.html