Wayne O'Leary

Good, Bad and Ugly in Ukraine

The fast-evolving Ukraine situation is rife with crosscurrents and ironies. At its most obvious, Russia’s war with its neighbor is a pure case, in the starkest terms, of good versus evil, and we can never lose sight of that fundamental fact. Nevertheless, it’s more complicated than that, with both positive and negative ramifications.

First, consider some unexpectedly positive aspects. Militarily, the Ukrainians’ heroic stand is an object lesson of what people can do in desperate circumstances — a reminder of the outnumbered Spartans at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., sacrificially holding off the Persian hordes attempting to conquer Greece; or of tiny Finland standing up to Stalin’s invading army in the in the Winter War of 1939, fighting the numerically superior Soviets to a standstill. Then, as now, the resistance to a larger foreign aggressor was inspirational and revealed reserves of human fortitude and endurance seldom seen in our own time.

There is also the rejuvenated leadership of Joe Biden, whose performance up to the eve of war had been anything but inspirational; lackluster is the word that best describes it. Yet, in the Ukraine emergency, Biden has apparently gotten his second wind, aided by the fact that geopolitics, not domestic politics, is really his strong suit. It’s worth remembering that Biden was one of the few public officials who understood years ago the tripartite nature of Iraq and the futility of undertaking unified nation-building there. In the present circumstances, he’s done a superb job of forming and holding together the NATO coalition in support of military aid for Ukraine and economic sanctions against Putin, the best steps to deter Russian aggression short of nuclear confrontation.

One last positive coming out of the Ukraine invasion has been the emergence of Volodymyr Zelensky as the heroic role model the world has needed. Among the political “suits” dominating the international stage, he’s been a breath of fresh air, a reminder that democratic politics can still produce leaders who are not phony, not bought, and ready to lay it all on the line. At a time when the likes of Elon Musk is named Time magazine’s person of the year, Zelensky provides the perfect antidote.

So much for the “good” aspects of the crisis; now, the “bad.” The worst of the bad is that we could be headed for World War III and nuclear Armageddon, if a miscalculation takes place on either side. Kennedy and Khrushchev bought us a 60-year reprieve in 1962 by working their way out of the Cuban missile crisis without a shooting war, which America’s generals and Russia’s hawks both wanted at the time.

The difference today is that Vladimir Putin is no Khrushchev, the rational head of a party government unwilling to end civilization in the name of ideology or his own ego and willing to step back from the brink. There’s no guarantee the same is true of Putin, a lone despot wrapped in his own vision of personal and national glory. Even assuming Armageddon is averted, the world could be headed for a conventional world war of sorts — part of the widespread conflict between democracy and resurgent fascism resulting from the West’s 20-year focus on economic globalization and its avoidance of political problems festering beneath the surface.

Vladimir Putin is in some ways the monster we created, first by encouraging the hypercapitalist “shock therapy” that cratered post-Communist Russia and subsequently by celebrating the fact in the form of George H. W. Bush’s triumphalist declaration of a New World Order led by the US. In the irony of ironies, we backed Boris Yeltsin to make the new Russia safe for American corporations, and then Yeltsin installed Putin.

But while Americans held a Cold War victory dance, there was Vladimir Putin quietly stewing in his juices and plotting revenge, as Hitler did following Versailles. Successive American presidents underestimated him and misunderstood his character and intentions, looking the other way as Russia steadily abandoned its nascent democracy in favor of autocracy, followed by outright totalitarianism.

In 2001, George W. Bush established a new standard for cluelessness by announcing he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul, which he judged exemplary. How he saw anything in those cold, blank orbs and the nothingness behind them is a mystery in itself. This is the same Putin knowledgeable Russian-Amercian journalist Masha Gessen christened “the man with no face.”

More obviously, how could American officialdom have calmly dismissed the fact that Putin was a former KGB officer? It would be as if Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler had taken over in Germany. The unavoidable pre-World War II analogies are endless. The unprovoked seizures of Georgia and Crimea, ignored by the West, can stand in for Austria and the Sudetenland. Similarly, the destroyed city of Mariupol is the modern equivalent of Guernica, whose 1937 levelling by Hitler’s Luftwaffe in the Spanish Civil War was immortalized by Picasso.

Finally, there’s the “ugly” side of the present conflict, primarily domestic. Here, I’m speaking of Putin’s American fellow travelers, the far rightists of the Republican Party, who have long regarded him sympathetically as an ally in the international struggle between liberal democracy and neofascist autocracy, the latter being their governing preference. Nowhere else in the civilized world has there been such bald-faced admiration for the Russian dictator (though some GOP Putin fans, running scared politically, have begun to peel away).

Donald Trump, who would have withdrawn from NATO had he been reelected, recently called Putin “smart,” his blood-soaked invasion “genius.” Mike Pompeo hailed him as “shrewd,” “savvy” and “talented.” Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R, NC) judges him far superior to Ukraine’s Zelensky, whom he dismisses as corrupt and “a thug.”

If anything, the Putin lovefest is worst in the realm of right-wing media, which constitutes a journalistic fifth column for Russia. Led by preppy fascist Tucker Carlson, Fox News talk-show hosts spew out huge quantities of useful misinformation for Putin’s propagandists, with the imprimatur of their boss Rupert Murdock.

Sadly, there exists a historical precedent for this reprehensible behavior. In the 1930s, American fascist sympathizers, from establishment figures like Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst to fringe activists like William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts, gave aid and comfort to Hitler. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “but it often rhymes.”

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2022

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