THE MERRY MINUET
What Nature Doesn't Do To Us Will Be Done By Our Fellow Man...
In another forum, a friend and I have been disagreeing over the war in Ukraine and the underlying motivations and intentions of Vladimir Putin. My friend thinks that Putin must be confronted and stopped in Ukraine whatever the cost, or, in Hitlerian fashion, he’ll sweep on through Ukraine and invade Western Europe. My view is that the conflict is regional and thus far provides no evidence that Putin has grander ambitions. As he told Tucker Carlson, “We want only what is ours” - that having clear reference to the ethnically, culturally and linguistically Russian peoples of eastern Ukraine - peoples, by the way, that have been traditionally mistreated by the Ukrainian government.
Finally, after considerable back and forth, my friend suggested that we might have to agree to disagree on this subject. Here below is my response:
Yes, of course we can agree to disagree. "Who knows what evil lurk in the hearts of men?" The Shadow knew, but he's been dead for a generation. (I remember as a young boy huddling in the dark over my crystal set listening as The Shadow caught the bad guys.)
The best we can do in formulating our opinions, I think, is to inform ourselves about history. Sadly, as history so richly attests, one can never go far wrong in assuming the worst when it comes to unregenerate human nature - the Natural Man (Mosiah 3:19).
Still, I believe considering Vladimir Putin to be Adolf Hiter reincarnate - a man possessed of both a world-conquering ideology and the fanatical will to act in accordance with that ideology as Hitler was - is a stretch and has as yet no credible foundation in reality.
Hitler was clearly and specifically declaring his intentions regarding the Jews and his territorial ambitions very early in his career. A careful observer, taking him at his word, could have predicted everything that ensued once Hitler came to power. He did nothing he hadn't forewarned the world he would do. The world back then had to be either ignorant or careless of his openly declared intentions.
In post-WWI Europe, given the extremely harsh conditions imposed on Germany after the war, everybody understood that there was a certain reasonable logic to Germany's resurgence under Hitler - his intention to rebuild the country, which he did very successfully, and his actions to bring ethnic Germans back into the German state. If Hitler had done nothing more than that - reclaiming previously German lands and ethnically German populations for his Third Reich - there would have been no WWII.
I have often thought that if Hitler had set aside his dreams of "lebensraum" - “living space” for his “master race” in lands to the east of Germany - stopped short of invading Poland, contented himself with the gains he had achieved to that point and proceeded to build up Germany within the limits of his achievements theretofore, Germany would have become a great world power and Hitler would have gone down in history as a truly great leader, the savior of a crushed and defeated country. But his fanatical, Godless master race ideology and unbounded egomania got the better of him, led him to misjudge and underestimate his adversaries, make classic mistakes like invading Russia (if he had refrained from just that one colossal misadventure the war might have had a different outcome) and resulted in Germany being burned to the ground.
It was only when - acting in accordance with his long-declared ambitions and objectives as set forth in his prison memoire "Mein Kamp" - Hitler proved he was a liar, could not be trusted to keep international agreements and was prepared to invade his non-German neighbors that war, of necessity, ensued - "The Good War".
As concerns Putin, though I am not justifying in the least his brutal invasion of eastern Ukraine, in my assessment he has not yet moved outside the rational limits of what could be determined to be - especially from a Russian perspective - "what is ours" - the ethnically, culturally Russian populations of eastern Ukraine.
In order to conclude that Putin does indeed have some grandiose ambition to reconstitute the Soviet Union and roll on into Western Europe, what I would be looking for is for him to step outside those bounds - again, boundaries that, from a Russian point of view, express reasonable - or at least understandable - Russian interests. As both Hitler and the Soviet Union did, Putin would have to seek to subjugate non-Russian populations who have no desire to be under Russian control (that does not describe ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine). Putin thus far has done no such thing.
In sum, as I've previously argued, I do not believe Russia thus far has behaved in a way that would justify the West martialing itself for and risking a nuclear WWIII, pouring billions upon billions of dollars (mostly your money) into a Ukrainian conflict that is strictly regional in nature, within the sphere of traditional Russian influence and could have been resolved early-on by means of negotiations both Russia and Ukraine were willing and preparing to undertake - before neocon elements in the US government put the kibosh on such negations, resulting in the unnecessary and ongoing slaughter of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
In a very real sense, because they have blocked negotiations and continued to fund the war, the continuing river of blood in Ukraine is not only on the hands of Russia but also on the hands of the US government - powerful people who are warmongers, have continued to refuse a negotiated settlement of the conflict and, in the ridiculous delusion that Ukraine can somehow defeat the vastly more populous and resource-rich Russia, intend to continue to blow billions of your dollars in support of that bloody conflict without a second thought for the great loss of life on both sides.
If you asked Putin today if he is willing to negotiate an end to the war, I believe the answer would be an instant yes. Actually, it has always been yes. A whole generation of their youth ground to hamburger in the charnel house of war, the Ukrainians, left to themselves, would also, I think, be happy to negotiate, as they were early in the conflict.
But hey, wuddo I know? As Doris Day sang it, "Que sera, sera! Whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see. Que sera, sera!"
I just hope we don’t find ourselves looking up at a mushroom cloud.
And, in that regard, there's the highly appropriate “Merry Minuet” from the Kingston Trio:
They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain
The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like
Anybody very much
But we can be tranquil
And thankful and proud
For man's been endowed
With a mushroom shaped cloud
And we know for certain
That some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away
They're rioting in Africa
There's strife in Iran
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow man
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, order vs. chaos, law vs. lawlessness, justice vs. injustice, liberty vs. tyranny, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, happiness vs. misery, God vs. the Godless…
Eenee, meenie, minee, mo…
If you can be fooled, you will be.
These are the times that try men’s souls…
Torquemada