May You Live In Interesting Times

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken over six million lives – one million in the United States alone. Since its outset, there have been an estimated 448 million cases of Covid-19 since late 2019. Fully 17% of those cases and deaths have been in the U.S. This is unfortunate, since the United States has only about 4.25% of the world’s population. We have overperformed in terms of death, misery, and illness.

The global pandemic has wrought havoc upon societies and economies throughout the world. Similarly situated advanced western democracies have all handled the pandemic in different ways, with varying results. As things began to re-open, economies heated back up again. As things began to re-open, some people did not feel comfortable or eager to return to their pre-pandemic jobs.

That post-emergency economic re-invigoration led to inflation not seen since the 80s. Putin’s criminal war to obliterate and subjugate Ukraine is only going to exacerbate everything, although energy prices seem to have stabilized, for now.

Three million refugees have fled Ukraine, most of them to Poland, and in lesser volume to Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova. All of these countries (except Moldova) are in the European Union and are our NATO allies.

Putin thought that he and his active measures over the past 7 years had adequately fractured and weakened western countries, their politics, their economies, their societies, and their alliances. NATO, he thought was weak. The EU, he thought, was feckless. But just as he miscalculated the Ukrainian people’s will to fight and avoid colonization and absorption, he similarly stumbled into awakening a sleepy west. The bickering EU is now united about Ukraine in an unexpected and perhaps unprecedented way. Not even during the Yugoslav conflagration and genocides did the EU act so forcefully and with such unity of purpose.

It was just a few years ago that Donald Trump was stating that NATO was extinct – an anachronism. Certainly, this vocalized doubt played right into the hands of Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin, but like a lot of things of Trump’s, that hasn’t aged well. Putin managed to do in a couple of weeks what Trump could not do in four years – spur some recalcitrant NATO allies into spending a recommended 2% of GDP on defense. Even Germany sent weapons. Even Orban came on board.

The United Kingdom is doing its bit militarily. Its humanitarian response and willingness to accept Ukrainian refugees, however, is another story altogether. Having imposed sanctions upon itself through its disastrously idiotic, short-sighted, and Russian-spurred, racism-fueled Brexit, Blighty stands alone as a humanitarian afterthought in Europe. The Republic of Ireland, which is further west, smaller, and poorer, is doing more. The United States is completely absent on the Ukrainian refugee issue, to its shame.

This brings us to another issue – for years the same right-wing AM radio agitators have spewed vitriol at refugees fleeing failed Central American mafia states as an “invasion” of unwanted illegal aliens. I challenge anyone to explain to me the difference between a Honduran fleeing for his life from gang warfare, a Syrian fleeing for her life from ISIS or from Russian bombing, and a Ukrainian fleeing for her life from Russian bombing. I challenge these mentally deranged wretches to explain how a young family escaping a failed state in this hemisphere is an “invasion” while we see an actual invasion play out on TV every night in Ukraine.

Where are the Honduran children’s tanks?

Which apartment blocks in El Paso have the Guatemalan women shelled?

These same talk radio and neo-fascist cable news buffoons who equate refugees in the Western Hemisphere as “illegal invaders” almost uniformly express support for Putin. This is a topic briefly covered in this piece.

Let’s be honest – pluralist democracy is out of fashion with a solid third of the country. The Trump personality cult continues on, expressed by the types of people who are seemingly on the march right now in many corners of suburbia – the “freedom truckers” and anti-CRT/LGBTQ+ school board disruptors and OG Covid Deniers / Let’s Go Brandon / FJB / Trump desperados. They are united by a few key tenets, not the least of which include a desire to live under a one-party dictatorship with Donald Trump as president-for-life, and the rest of it amounting to “owning the libs.” While under Trump the “cruelty was the point” now they lazily defend the January 6th insurrection and abandon the principles upon which our government was founded, pledging fealty not to America but to the supreme leader.

To the Trumpists, the supreme leader is the country and the country is the supreme leader. Anyone else is a traitor shitlib communist who must be silenced or owned. This is not hyperbole: I am essentially paraphrasing what I hear from not a few current members of Congress.

On the other side we have the glib leftists who go out of their way to avoid condemnation of Putin and Russia and twist themselves like a pretzel to make it all about how NATO is bad. Literally a week or so ago there was a notice of a communist-led anti-NATO protest here in Buffalo that could not even be bothered to pay lip service to solidarity with Ukrainians – most of them working class people – who are being displaced or killed at the hands of a lunatic dictator. “No war” it said, demanding that NATO cut it out right this minute.

So, we have Putin’s useful idiots on the right, who would re-make America in Russia’s image. Nothing would own the libs more than a domestic version of OMON special police banning free speech or a megalomaniacal President-for-life having his mildest critics murdered, tortured, or exiled. And we have Putin’s useful idiots on the left, who do his bidding by blaming America for Putin’s invasion and demanding the weakening of the western democracies’ defensive alliance.

If the last few weeks have taught Europe any lessons, it is just how valuable NATO membership can be to avoid being bombed into the stone age by Russian bombs, missiles, and artillery.

We also have a unique phenomenon, mainly in nominally leftist journalistic cliques – I’m looking at you, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, and Buffalo’s own Matt Taibbi – that is the “anti-anti-Putin”. This hilariously transparent pro-Putinist, right-wing ethos plays itself out in podcasts and videos and Substack posts that do not directly demean the US or NATO or Ukraine, but instead attempt to be clever by demeaning shitlib opposition to Putin and his war. It is Elon Musk mocking the western world’s shock and horror at Russian war crimes. It is clumsy Assadist Tulsi Gabbard giving oxygen to Kremlin propaganda about biological labs. It is the jokes about Greenwald’s “whom I do not support” as echoed by the brilliant Times Pitchbot. The sane western world has no use for this sort of obvious nonsense. At least Trump has the self-awareness to be honest about his love of Putin.

Suffice it to say that it is not the same thing for Google to deplatform RT as it is for Putin to prosecute an anti-war protester for a felony.

One does not have to look too far in the past to remember what Russian oppression feels like to a Romanian, a Hungarian, a Czech or Slovak, or a Pole. Russian tanks rolled through Budapest and Warsaw and Prague all in the last 60 years. Ceausescu was as much a ruthless megalomaniacal madman as Putin. It is Ceausescu’s fate that Putin fears most.

In the few years starting in the summer of 1989, the peoples of Eastern Europe rose up to smash the relentlessly oppressive, illiberal regimes that imprisoned them. How did that start? Hungary – which was ironically then among the more liberal of the Warsaw Pact countries – threw open its border with Austria. This open door in the Iron Curtain resulted in Czechoslovaks and East Germans – who could travel within the Pact countries with relative ease – pouring through Hungary looking to end up in the west. By September it was reality, and within weeks this led to the fall of every communist regime in Europe, in their own time. In the intervening 30 years, Hungary, the DDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria all switched from secret police and command economies to the EU and free markets. Even Hoxha’s hermit Albania is free. Yugoslavia paid for its freedom in blood, and there remains a lot of unfinished business there.

The Soviet Union went away in 1991, and its results have been mixed. Ukraine has yo-yoed between emulating Poland or Belarus in terms of its connections with Russia. Like Croatia in the 90s, Ukraine’s future freedom and democracy is now being paid for in blood. It is no accident that the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – all three of which shared SSR status with Ukraine in the old days – rushed to join the EU and NATO as quickly as possible. It is because these countries know that to be aligned with Russia is a mistake. These countries understand that Russia’s constant tug-of-war between what were once called the Westernizers and the Slavophiles remains unresolved, and as long as the latter has a shot at power, they remain under threat.

Stated roughly, Yeltsin was not really much of a Westernizer and Putin isn’t really much of a Slavophile, but each played one on TV. In reality, Russia simply traded one mafia state – based on allegiance to the Communist Party – to another based on fealty to the supreme leader. The USSR’s oligarchs didn’t have billions of dollars to spend on London townhomes and megayachts, but the Party’s apparatchiks and “nomenklatura,” enjoyed all of that era’s power, prestige, and perks, (save the occasional purge). The trappings of democracy were mere window-dressing. Russia’s current oligarchs have money and prestige linked directly to their relationship with Putin, and their willingness to serve the state’s needs when called. Never has political or economic power devolved from the Russian elite to the Russian people. Not after 1917, 1924, 1953, or 1991.

Perhaps now is the time for that to happen. Maybe this cataclysm in Ukraine will eventually lead to liberty and democratic change in Russia and her vassal states. Wishful thinking, but maybe Russia will someday decide that building up its own economy and infrastructure is preferable to conquering neighboring states that are minding their own business. Ukraine was never a threat to Russia, but the opposite is true, as we know from 2014 until today.

One hopes that Ukraine will come out on the other side of this war with its territory intact, its government free, and its ability to choose its associations and alliances unfettered by the preferences of malign exterior forces. There is no reason why Ukraine could not be like its western neighbors, but for Russian interference. Russia does not liberate, it subjugates.

When the history is written on this crisis, you’ll be grateful to look back and know that you were on the side of freedom and pluralist democracy and not on the side of neofascist imperialist personality cults. And to those who back the latter, the rest of us will remember.