When I first read that Joe Manchin was sitting with the Republicans…
…during Biden’s SOTU speech last night, I assumed it was a metaphor.
Turns out he actually was sitting with them:
Mr. Manchin, a moderate West Virginia Democrat, opted to sit on the side of the House chamber traditionally reserved for Republicans rather than with members of his party.
Mr. Manchin was seen sitting next to GOP Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Roger Wicker of Mississippi. He was the only Senate Democrat to sit with Republicans.
Of course, Romney was sitting with the Democrats (that’s my attempt at a joke).
I don’t see Manchin as having any plans to actually change parties, however. I see his seating choice as a way to emphasize his rift with his own party as well as his power to change parties if he decided to do so.
Biden’s SOTU
Commenter “AesopFan” managed to watch the speech and has this summary.
I haven’t watched the speech, have only read a few excerpts, and find I’m not even interested in commentary about it. That’s a new low point of interest for me. Why should I care what Biden’s script du jour says? Why should I care how well or poorly he reads it? Everything he’s actually done so far, and most of what he’s said as well, has been awful. His decline is obvious, physically and cognitively, and I would add “morally” if I thought he’d ever had much moral sense to begin with.
There was a conversation last night in the comments of this blog that also mentioned the German word “Fremdschamen”:
That’s the German word for feeling embarrassment for someone else. That’s what I feel when I listen to Biden speak. I hate that feeling so I will not watch.
A wonderful word, and apropos. As much as I detest Biden, and as much as I think his own naked ambition was responsible for this presidential run and no one had to twist his arm, I also feel considerable Fremdschamen when I watch him. It’s a gut thing.
And speaking of speeches – here’s a closer look at Putin’s speech of February 24
We’ve been talking a lot about what Putin thinks and what he intends. But he gave a speech right before the invasion of Ukraine that purportedly explained his motives and aims. Although of course he might have been lying – politicians are certainly known to do that – I think his words may indeed reflect his worldview and are at the very least some form of the truth.
So let’s take a look at some excerpts from that speech that Putin delivered on 2/24/22, right before the invasion. This is a translation, of course, and the entire speech can be found here.
Towards the beginning he sets the main theme, which is that Russia wants peace but is threatened and it can’t wait till it’s too late to defend itself against Nazis. Yes, Nazis. You may be a bit surprised – as I was – to see the frequency and centrality of the Nazi references Putin makes:
If history is any guide, we know that in 1940 and early 1941 the Soviet Union went to great lengths to prevent war or at least delay its outbreak. To this end, the USSR sought not to provoke the potential aggressor until the very end by refraining or postponing the most urgent and obvious preparations it had to make to defend itself from an imminent attack. When it finally acted, it was too late.
He’s leaving out a few details, however [emphasis mine]:
On September 17, 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov declares that the Polish government has ceased to exist, as the U.S.S.R. exercises the “fine print” of the Hitler-Stalin Non-aggression pact—the invasion and occupation of eastern Poland.
Hitler’s troops were already wreaking havoc in Poland, having invaded on the first of the month. The Polish army began retreating and regrouping east, near Lvov, in eastern Galicia, attempting to escape relentless German land and air offensives. But Polish troops had jumped from the frying pan into the fire—as Soviet troops began occupying eastern Poland. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-aggression Pact, signed in August, had eliminated any hope Poland had of a Russian ally in a war against Germany. Little did Poles know that a secret clause of that pact, the details of which would not become public until 1990, gave the U.S.S.R. the right to mark off for itself a chunk of Poland’s eastern region. The “reason” given was that Russia had to come to the aid of its “blood brothers,” the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who were trapped in territory that had been illegally annexed by Poland. Now Poland was squeezed from West and East—trapped between two behemoths.
So the USSR was there at the very start of the war as an ally of the Nazis, invading another country in order to get back some of Russia’s lost empire and supposedly to save its countrymen “trapped” there. Russia sure has a funny way of trying to delay the outbreak of war. And it sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?
While there, the peace-loving Soviets decided it would be a great time to massacre the cream of Polish military leadership and culture. You can read all about it here.
But getting back to Putin’s February 24 speech, he was already alluding to nuclear weapons and the fact that he’s willing to use them if attacked:
Those who aspire to global dominance have publicly designated Russia as their enemy…
As for military affairs, even after the dissolution of the USSR and losing a considerable part of its capabilities, today’s Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states. Moreover, it has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.
More from Putin [emphasis mine]:
The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile “anti-Russia” is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons.
Let’s pause to reflect on what he’s saying there, because I think it’s important. Russia is surrounded by lands that are Russian. If the people in those lands hate Russia and want little to nothing to do with it, it’s only because they are fully controlled from the outside. According to Putin, their not wanting to be part of Russia has nothing whatsoever to do with their own ethnicity or feelings of being a separate nation, or with atrocities Russia has committed against them in the past (Holomodor, anyone?), or with the attractiveness of the west either economically or culturally compared with Russia, or with simply wanting autonomy to decide their own destinies.
No, no, of course not. It’s all the fault of big bad NATO, putting these countries behind a new Iron Curtain and keeping them from their obvious love for Mother Russia and their hidden but sincere and ancient desire to merge with it once again.
After talking about the purported Ukrainian “genocide of the millions of people” who live in Dombass, he said [emphasis mine]:
…[W]e will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.
That’s why he started with the USSR’s fight against the Nazis in WWII. He is claiming that the large majority in Ukraine who don’t want to be part of Russia are Nazis committing genocide (instead of Ukrainians who are part of a back-and-forth conflict), and therefore the whole of Ukraine must be taken over and disarmed, de-Nazified, and that people affiliated with the regime must be tried by the Russians (or a new government the Russians install) and punished.
This “denazify” reference is to some neo-Nazis in western Ukraine who have a small following . It’s similar to what the left says in the US vis a vis Trump and the January 6ers, or what Trudeau said about the truckers – that they are all neo-Nazis or predominantly neo-Nazis. There are such movements in Ukraine (relevant information here and here), but their power and size are way exaggerated by Putin for his own purposes. The people actually in power and vast majority of the people who support them are not Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.
Putin continues:
We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force.
This was said right before the invasion. Subsequent events have certainly proven that that was a lie – an invasion is certainly “by force.”
And here’s a truly creative piece of Orwellian sophistry from Putin:
The current events have nothing to do with a desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. They are connected with…defending Russia from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people.
See, says Putin, there’s the real Ukrainian people who are in solidarity with Russia, and then there are the fake usurpers who “have taken Ukraine hostage.” The latter group are all Nazis, and we need to fight WWII over again and liberate Ukraine from the Nazis.
Later Putin expands on this theme by appealing to the Ukrainian military with the same argument:
Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.
By the way, a little historical aside is that a lot of those Ukrainian fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers in WWII initially welcomed the Nazi occupiers because they saw the Germans as liberators from the hated Russians who had exacerbated the famine and helped to starve them during the 1930s.
Then Putin repeats his implied nuclear threats towards anyone who would stop him:
No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken.
In addition, Putin has been asserting for years that Ukraine is not a real country, it is a Russian creation and part of Russia. So although in that February 24 speech he talks about wanting countries to preserve their autonomy (which I believe is something he does not actually support, certainly not for much of Eastern Europe, except of course for Russia itself), he has also said many times that Ukraine is not a real country. See where we’re going here?
Putin also made a recent speech on Ukraine’s history, explaining why it’s not a country [emphasis mine]:
He started by saying that modern Ukraine was a creation of Vladimir Lenin, who carved a Soviet Republic out of what Putin said was Russian land. Putin said that Joseph Stalin supplemented Ukrainian lands with lands from other eastern European countries following the Second World War, and that his successor Nikita Khrushchev “took Crimea away from Russia for some reason and gave it to Ukraine” in 1954. Putin said that these decisions were “worse than a mistake,”…
…Ukrainians have been quick to point out that Kyiv was founded hundreds of years earlier than Moscow, and that Ukraine has its own distinct language and customs.
“Part of the reason that Ukraine has never had stable statehood is because of Russia,” says David Patrikarakos, an author of two books about foreign affairs and non-resident fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He says that Putin deliberately ignored the long history of Ukrainian nationalism, including the country’s war of independence against the Soviets that began in 1917, and its resistance to Soviet rule after World War II. “There has been a strong impulse of Ukrainian nationalism for at least the last century, and [of] the Russians just slapping them down militarily,” Patrikarakos says. “And that’s continuing today.”
…“What he’s saying is something far wider: Ukraine is not a legitimate state. Ukraine is Russia. It should never have existed as anything else,” Patrikarakos says. It could also be an ominous bellwether for future military action, he suggests. “If you do not accept the idea of Ukraine, then you clearly by implication do not accept the idea of Georgia, the Baltic States, Moldova and everything else.”
I see no reason to doubt that these are his true and basic beliefs, and that he sees this as the perfect time to act on them.
Open thread 3/2/22
Play the guessing game:
Putin the Slavophile
I was plowing through some of Putin’s speeches and it occurred to me suddenly that he might be described as a Slavophile. It’s a term I remember from a class I took in college called “Russian Intellectual History.” But I realized that trying to write a post expanding on that thought about Putin would require a lot of brushing up on the concept on my part.
And then tonight by chance I happened across this article that speaks of the subject with more knowledge than I could have mustered in a crash course:
It’s not that [Putin] doesn’t want prosperity for Russia. His early popularity was based on stabilizing the ruble. But the economy must rightfully take a distant second place to restoring Russia’s national pride and dignity after what he views as the “catastrophe” of the Soviet empire’s humiliating defeat in the Cold War. Our foreign policy experts too often forget that dictators like Putin don’t have to worry about public opinion and economic performance the same way that democratically elected leaders do. Rulers for life, they can put these to one side for prolonged periods of time in service of the greater goal of national honor.
Although Putin’s ambition is to restore Russian control over its former Warsaw Pact captive states, he in no way wishes to restore the Soviet regime itself. Russian history has long been riven by a cultural conflict between those who look to Europe, the West, and the Enlightenment as the path that Russia should follow and those who are loyal to Slavic nationalism, which is deeply religious and not interested in economic prosperity. In literature, this divide was typified by the different outlooks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, which Tolstoy crystallized as the difference between St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the era of anti-Soviet dissidence, this split was typified by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin is in the Slavophile camp. A devotee of Berdyaev, a Slavophile critic of Marxism-Leninism, Putin believes that Soviet communism was an import of European rationalism that poisoned the authentic Russian soul, which has nourished the country’s national and artistic greatness.
Does the Russian soul really matter to Putin? As I wrote in Tyrants, modern tyrants and conquerors since Robespierre have been bolstered by an ideology. Slavophile thought is crucial to Putin’s worldview, including both Berdyaev and also the modern writer Aleksandr Dugin’s ideology of “Eurasianist National Bolshevism.” Dugin, an academic and popular pundit, tried to rescue what he saw as the authentically Russian agrarian populist impulse behind the original Bolshevik Revolution from its betrayal by Lenin’s “scientific” socialism imported from European thought, calling instead for a “revolution of archaic values” based on the blood and soil traditions of family, rural life, and religious faith. Putin commissioned Dugin to overhaul the Russian education system to remove all traces of Gorbachev-era glasnost and perestroika, which both believed were signs of creeping Enlightenment rationalism and materialism corrupting the Motherland.
I am fairly certain that the obvious decline of Western pride in its own accomplishments, of abandonment of many traditional values connected with family and faith and a host of other things, and its adherence to wokeness have only solidified Putin’s rejection of the West as a decadent and weak bunch. It’s a disdain and contempt that Islamists share, and China has its own version.
More:
Dugin gave Putin the ideology he needed to reject the tainted European strain of Soviet communism while rehabilitating it as a great patriotic people’s movement, including the rehabilitation of Stalin in his role as wartime champion against Hitler. This ideology also enabled Putin to make what is to him a coherent argument that, while the Soviet communist regime will never be restored, the Slavophilic populism that was its true lifeblood can be—a national tribalism extending to all Slavic peoples including Ukraine, Poland, and the Balkans, who must be gathered back into the Russian fold.
Excerpts from a few other speeches that were given today
I’m ignoring Biden’s speech for now, although you’re welcome to talk about it. Here are excerpts from some speeches that interest me more.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN:
The Kenyan ambassador:
Zelensky addresses the European Parliament:
Having a busy day today
I’m having an unusually busy day today and I’m getting a late start at blogging. I probably will be posting this evening.
Meanwhile, I think this is an interesting video:
Are you going to watch Biden’s State of the Union speech tonight?
Open thread 3/1/22
Let’s escape together:
Switzerland has frozen Russian assets
Switzerland will adopt all the sanctions that the European Union has imposed on Russian people and companies and freeze their assets to punish the invasion of Ukraine, the government said in a sharp deviation from the country’s traditional neutrality.
“We are in an extraordinary situation where extraordinary measures could be decided,” President and Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis told a news conference in Bern on Monday, flanked by the finance, defence and justice ministers.
Only history would tell if such a move could happen again, he said. Swiss neutrality remained intact but “of course we stand on the side of Western values,” he added…
Switzerland also adopted financial sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, effective immediately, and closed its airspace to most Russian aircraft…
It added that [Switzerland] had also banned five oligarchs close to Putin from entering the country, without naming them.
I repeat: really really unusual.
See this for some background about Switzerland and the Nazis during WWII.
Isn’t the Russian pipeline still flowing in Europe, though?
Putin’s goals
Angelo M. Codevilla wrote this piece in 2014. That’s quite a while ago, but it gave me some insight on the question of why Putin has decided to attack the entirety of Ukraine.
I already felt I knew the “why now?” of the attack; Putin is well aware of the current weakness of the west, as I’ve said before. But I had thought he would be more incremental in his approach, as he’s been before, and just try to peel off this section and then that section with the most inhabitants of Russian ethnicity, and the world would keep on sleeping just as it did with Crimea and portions of Georgia.
I didn’t doubt that he wanted all of Ukraine and more. I just thought he’d go about it differently.
Here’s Codelvilla in 2014:
Vladimir Putin is playing for the highest geopolitical stakes. Can the U.S. government afford to do less?…[T]here is no doubt at all about his long term objective: to recapture trouble-making power over Ukraine, to use that trouble-making power to restore Ukraine as the crown jewel of the Russian Empire, then to squeeze the rest of the former Soviet empire back into Moscow’s fold, and then to overawe Europe.
Well, yes.
Codevilla goes on to recommend a harder line by the US in terms of powerful sanctions:
…[The US should regard] the struggle over Ukraine as a wake up call to treat the Putin regime for what it is, an enemy of the United States.
Treating the Putin regime as an enemy would involve cutting its sources of foreign exchange by the U.S. initiating its own antitrust prosecution of his regime’s cash-cow, Gazprom, freezing all Russian accounts in U.S. banks (thereby forcing the world’s banks to choose between dealing with Russians or with the U.S. financial system), as well as forcing foreign countries to choose between allowing Russia’s liquefied gas ships to their ports, and doing business with the U.S.
Serious economic sanctions against the Putin regime would include a full-court press against its mainstays: the network of self-interested oligarchs who are Putin’s only real constituents.
…There is really one and only one way to achieve that: namely for the United States, after consultation with major allies, to announce secondary sanctions on this new Nomenklatura’s travel and finances.
That’s how sanctions are supposed to work to starve the regime of the means to do damage. We know that for a variety of reasons, the squeeze was not put on Putin when it might have mattered.
Here’s Codevilla on why he thought Putin wasn’t going for just the eastern, Russia-dominated sections of Ukraine:
Nor is Putin trying to unite the Eastern Ukraine to Russia, because doing so would preclude achieving his long-term objective of taking back all of that country politically. The departure of the East would leave a people composed almost exclusively of Ukrainian-speaking Catholics, unshakably oriented to the West, united, wholly foreign to Russia. In such a country, Russia would have no levers to pull.
After all, it was precisely to forestall the emergence of such a unit within the Soviet Union that Stalin originally drew Ukraine’s borders to include lots of Russians.
That answer makes a lot of sense to me.
Canada’s trucker convoy may be over, but the problems are hardly over for the truckers – and for the rest of us
From David Solway of Canada:
The partial triumph of the truckers turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory, for it is the truckers who have suffered most.
Our blue-collar benefactors now face the consequences of the scorched-earth policies adopted by the anointed class. Many have lost their rigs. Operating licenses have been revoked. Criminal charges have been laid. Bans on trucker commerce have proliferated. Bankruptcy looms for many. Livelihoods have been demolished. Families have been obliterated. Marriages are bound to collapse. And I suspect that suicides will mount as desperation sees no escape from ruination. In effect, Justin Trudeau declared war on those who kept the goods and services flowing through the ersatz pandemic and who enabled the populace to weather the government-induced travesty…
The truckers who protested the draconian and useless vaccine mandates have been crushed and their lives ruined. And the majority of Canadians do not care. Some believe the truckers got what they deserved, gloating over the misfortune of their betters. Others do not give them a second thought. The feeble-minded claim to be suffering from “phantom honking.” Some hover over the top like a helicopter pilot surveying rush hour traffic and move on: nothing very significant to see here. Their sympathies go out to the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression. The victims of government oppression in their own country are an afterthought.
My sympathies go out to both. The domestic tyranny in Canada and in this country has been a focus of mine for years and continues to be an enormous concern. What’s happening in Ukraine is also a concern. But the two are actually related in a strange way – or maybe not so strange – because I believe that the timing and scope of Putin’s attack is a direct result of his evaluation of the fallen nature of the west, including its moral weakness and its abandonment of its own bedrock principles.