Germany and Russia and Poland and Ukraine: some history and some speculation

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been thinking about 20th Century history lately. At the beginning of WWII, not only did Hitler invade Poland, but Stalin did as well in the days when they were buddy-buddy for a while. And it was Stalin who took the elite of Poland into Katyn forest and murdered them:

The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (“People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs”, the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940.

…Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be “intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests”. The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg.

Then of course after the war Poland was controlled by the USSR for a long long time. It has no interest in now becoming part of Putin’s Russia, or coming under Russia’s aegis again.

Ukraine is east of Poland and shares a border with it. During WWII some Ukrainians initially (accent on that “initially”) greeted the Germans as liberators, because millions of them had died because of Stalin’s Holodomor – the famine that was made much worse by USSR policy. Then after the war they came under the thumb of Russia again as did so many of the small countries in that area (Belarus seems to still be under its thumb, perhaps from choice?).

The Ukrainians weren’t angels either. They kept massacring their Jews between the two world wars, so much so that enormous numbers of Jewish survivors of those massacres left during that time. The Einsatzgruppen found a home there, too, with many willing executioners among the Ukrainians. But that’s not the Ukrainian population of today (eighty years later), who elected Zelenskyy – a Jew whose grandfather fought for the Red Army during WWII and who lost three brothers in the Holocaust.

Today’s Russians aren’t the Russians of the Soviet Union, either, and Putin isn’t Stalin. But he’s a strongman who wants to recreate Stalin’s empire, and he’s stated that rather clearly for many years. Europe is shocked and stunned at the eruption of a hot war in its territory, as a result of Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Did Putin think people there would just shrug when he invaded Ukraine? He could be forgiven for thinking so, because the west has shown so little spine in recent years.

Putin’s actions regarding the large scope of the attack on Ukraine, however, are somewhat puzzling. If he had kept his attack to the eastern parts of Ukraine where there are a lot of people of Russian ethnicity, I doubt he’s be getting the same amount of pushback and I doubt that Ukraine would be getting as much sympathy as now.

Is this report true?:

“I wish I could share more,” Rubio tweeted. “But for now I can say it’s pretty obvious to many that something is off with #Putin. He has always been a killer, but his problem now is different & significant. It would be a mistake to assume this Putin would react the same way he would have 5 years ago.”

Do we have more than one world leader of an enormous country who’s getting befuddled and having trouble with impulse control? It’s not all that farfetched a notion. Putin is now 69, a spring chicken compared to Biden. But still…it’s possible.

How’s Putin’s war going?

The New Neo Posted on by

First, a general caveat: we have the fog of war, so there’s no reason to trust any reports. But still, there’s a general drift, and it may be correct.

The general drift is that Putin is surprised that the Ukrainians are putting up quite a battle. My personal opinion – based on little more than what I’ve observed of Putin and what I read in the newspaper – is that he expected one of two things: either the Ukrainians really would welcome Russia with open arms, or that the leaders of Ukraine would flee and general panic would ensue among the public, leading to widespread surrenders on the part of the Ukrainian military. He probably pegged Zelenskyy for a coward and a fool, and it never occurred to him that Zelenskyy would demonstrate personal courage.

Putin thinks he’s the only man in the room.

There are so many news articles about the Ukraine invasion that I’m sure you can find your own, but here are some to read with excerpts from a few. First we have a reported strike on a Russian airbase. Then we have this brilliant diplomatic move by the Biden administration in the lead-up to the war – appealing to China for help, with China promptly betraying the extremely misplaced trust.

Now that Ukraine has shown some resolve to fight, and the reality of the situation has set in for Europe, other countries who feel threatened by Putin are deciding they’d rather fight him now in Ukraine than on their own soil some day. And so some help in terms of armaments are going to be coming Ukraine’s way:

Former Soviet Union satellite state Slovakia — as part of now-defunct Czechoslovakia — is urgently sending millions of dollars worth of aircraft fuel and artillery ammunition to embattled Ukraine…

…The initial shipment includes 12,000 rounds of 120-millimeter caliber ammunition, 10 million liters (2.64 million US gallons) of diesel fuel, and 2.4 million liters of aircraft fuel.

In addition:

Germany on Saturday reversed a historic policy of never sending weapons to conflict zones, saying the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an epochal moment that imperiled the entire post-World War II order across Europe…

From its own stockpile, the German government will send 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine. The government has also authorized the Netherlands to send Ukraine 400 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and told Estonia it ship over send nine howitzers.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a turning point,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a statement. “It threatens our entire post-war order…

Germany’s shift comes as numerous Western allies are mobilizing to send Ukraine more guns, ammunition and even anti-aircraft defense systems as Russian forces bear down on major Ukrainian cities.

The reversal could mean a rapid increase in European military assistance for Ukraine…

Estonia, in particular, had said it wanted to send old howitzers but was prevented from doing so because Germany was withholding its approval. Estonia bought the weapons from Finland, which gave its sign-off, but Germany also has to OK the transfer because it originally sold the howitzers to Finland…

Poland has started sending ammunition by land, while Estonia and Latvia on Friday said they were beginning to truck fuel, Javelin anti-armor weapons and medical supplies to the Ukraine border for hand-off to Ukrainian forces. Elsewhere, the Czech Republic said it would send guns and ammunition, and Slovakia said it would send ammunition, diesel and kerosene.

On Saturday, more countries started chipping in.

The Netherlands said it will send 200 Stinger anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine — often the top-requested type of military aid among Ukrainian soldiers and officials (apart from Western powers sending their own planes and forces to fight with Ukraine). And Belgium announced it would supply Ukraine with 2,000 machine guns and 3,800 tonnes of fuel.

Across the Atlantic, the United States on Saturday also upped its ongoing military assistance to Ukraine, authorizing up to $350 million to help bolster Ukraine’s defenses, funding that will include “further lethal defensive assistance.”

In addition to its stance on weapons shipments, Germany has also taken flack from some allies for its opposition to barring Russia from the SWIFT international payment system, which European countries notably use to buy energy from Russia. While there was some initial resistance across the EU to such a ban, the opposition has rapidly dwindled following the invasion and amid pressure from Ukraine. EU countries like Poland are now publicly leaning on Germany to follow suit.

All of that represents a real sea-change, and must be giving the Ukrainians a boost of anticipatory energy, as well as angering Putin (and making him even more paranoid about Europe and NATO than he already is, which is a lot).

Zelenskyy recently issued this appeal to Europe, describing the war as one in which Europe itself is threatened. They have memories of the Cold War, which wasn’t that long ago:

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

News stories that are not about Russia or Ukraine:

(1) Was the reason Trudeau pulled back from the Emergencies Act that there was a run on banks? That’s my leading theory, anyway.

(2) Biden names Ketanji Brown-Jackson as his SCOTUS pick:

I think that anyone Biden would have nominated would be a reliable vote for the left, however. Brown-Jackson might be the most leftist of all the possibilities, but does that really matter when any such nominee would very likely be voting the same way as she? Also, perhaps – and it’s a big “perhaps” – her extreme leftism may mean that she won’t get the votes of the usual GOP suspects (Collins, Graham, Murkowski, Romney, etc.). My guess is that she probably will get their votes, though.

(3) The CDC continues its retreat from mask recommendations.

(4) Another George Floyd case verdict has come down, and I believe that it’s a terrible miscarriage of justice. Here’s a piece at Legal Insurrection about it. An excerpt:

Three former Minneapolis police officers were convicted Thursday of violating George Floyd’s civil rights, as a federal jury rejected their arguments that inexperience, improper training or the distraction of shouting bystanders excused them from failing to prevent Floyd’s killing.

Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane were convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as the 46-year-old Black man was pinned under fellow Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee for 9 1/2 minutes while handcuffed, facedown on the street on May 25, 2020. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back, Lane held his legs and Thao kept bystanders back.

Thao and Kueng were also convicted of failing to intervene to stop Chauvin in the videotaped killing that sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the globe as part of a reckoning over racial injustice.

I know that legally, because Chauvin was found guilty, the word “killing” would be considered appropriate. But I think that grave doubt remains as to whether it was a killing or not.

Also:

I’m in agreement with that tweet.

Putin’s worldview

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of people figured that Putin’s stated intentions weren’t really his stated intentions, and are belatedly realizing that apparently he meant what he said.

So it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with what he’s been saying for quite some time. Here’s a very simplified and incomplete summary: Ukraine belongs to Russia, and it doesn’t matter what the Ukrainians might think.

Here’s a transcript of his invasion-announcing speech from February 22. And here are two analyses of his aims and his justification for those aims: this and this. And yes, they’re from Vox, which sometimes does does have good analyses. I happen to agree with the basic analysis in those two essays (although the speculation in them about whether the invasion will occur and what its scope will be is moot).

Both essays, and many people, think what’s described there represent Putin’s sincere beliefs. I agree with that as well. It’s a window into his thinking and a possible help in anticipating his moves and perhaps even preventing a worse result than already seems in the works. But I wouldn’t swear to his complete sincerity about these beliefs, either.

Dialogue

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment, and while I was sitting in the waiting room I was reading on my cellphone. An elderly man (more elderly than I am, anyway) was sitting across from me. He had a walker and seemed frail, and his wife was sitting near him.

Suddenly he looked straight at me and said in a surprisingly booming voice, “A whole lotta bullshit going on in the world today.”

I had to say I agreed.

Random thoughts on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) For sanctions to work, they should not necessarily be considered a deterrence or a punishment. I suppose they would be a deterrence if the leader or leaders involved could be deterred that easily, but that sort of leader isn’t usually involved in the kind of aggression we’re talking about. What are sanctions, then? They are a predominantly economic tool most effectively used not only before overt aggression begins but before the country involved has assembled all the tools for that aggression. In other words, sanctions are meant to deny the country’s leaders the wherewithal to implement their plans. There’s also a second goal, which is to make the country’s population blame those leaders for the hardship of sanctions and perhaps unseat them, but that is rarely possible for the very same reason that sanctions don’t deter those leaders: their powerful determination to accomplish their desired ends. It also can, paradoxically, rally the population behind the leaders in shared sympathy.

(2) Putin got a goodly portion of his funds from providing Europe with energy, and Biden’s energy policy increased the price of the fuel Putin provided, thus enriching him even more. That’s in addition to the obviously Putin-encouraging element of Biden’s cluelessness, incompetence, and weakness – and that of the US in general lately.

(3) Europe could have embraced nuclear power as an alternative – and they may yet turn to it more – but in recent years it’s been closing plants rather than opening them:

As of 2016, countries including Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal and Serbia have no nuclear power stations and remain opposed to nuclear power. Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland plan nuclear phase-outs by 2030. Globally, more nuclear power reactors have closed than opened in recent years[when?] but overall capacity has increased…

As of 2022, Italy is the only country that has permanently closed all of its formerly functioning nuclear plants, with Germany phasing out the remaining 3 plants by the end of the year. Lithuania and Kazakhstan have shut down their only nuclear plants, but plan to build new ones to replace them, while Armenia shut down its only nuclear plant but subsequently restarted it. Austria never used its first nuclear plant that was completely built.

More here:

Chancellor (1998-2005) Gerhard Schroeder negotiated the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, increasing European dependence on Russian gas. His successor Angela Merkel (2005-21) increased it much further, abruptly decreeing a phaseout of Germany’s nuclear power, scheduled to be completed later this year, and promoting Nord Stream 2.

(4) Putin seems to believe that Ukraine isn’t a real country, so it’s fine for Russia to take it over. Again. And Ukraine’s not the only country Putin feels that way about.

(5) It’s my impression that the people of Europe are shell-shocked (metaphorically speaking) to see an invasion and hot war breaking out in what is considered to be part of Europe.

(6) As a result of this action by Russia, smaller or moderate-sized countries – especially ones that are not members of a defensive alliance such as NATO – will almost certainly feel an increased need to have nuclear arms in order to deter an invasion such as the one that’s occurring now in Ukraine. The threat of serious retaliation of that type against Russia – as opposed to sanctions – is a more effective threat. This could lead to more nuclear weapons in the hands of smaller powers – in other words, nuclear proliferation. Ukraine has neither nuclear weapons nor a NATO alliance, so what chance does it have against Russia if Russia is determined to take it over?

(7)A quote:

If there’s anything that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has taught us, it’s that he is serious about his hatreds and is contemptuous of the rationalist tolerance that undergirds how we see the world.

(8) One of the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine is that it’s a corrupt state. That seems absurd because there are plenty of other corrupt states as well as plenty of corruption in Russia, and also because Russia has encouraged and participated in corruption in Ukraine. Also, who was an obvious part of the corruption there, and profited from it? Why, Hunter Biden and other family members (perhaps Joe as well), that’s who. See this from Austin Bay.

Recall, also, that Trump was impeached the first time for asking that such corruption in the Biden family be investigated. Zelenskyy was elected specifically as an anti-corruption president and outsider.

(9) “Putin is not Hitler” is quite obvious. However, he does share a desire to acquire more territory through war. But so far the Nazi analogies I’ve seen are to Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland, a region that was given to him by Chamberlain et al at the Munich conference. But saying that Putin’s using a similar tactic doesn’t mean that he’s similar in all ways or even most ways to Hitler. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all dictators are somewhat different.

(10) Russia has been doing this in stages:

The George W. Bush administration rolled out the idea of NATO membership for the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia [Germany blocked this, citing Ukraine’s corruption – link] But Bush was unable to stop Putin from seizing two breakaway provinces of Georgia in 2008.

Similarly, former President Barack Obama, despite his ridicule of Mitt Romney’s anti-Russia statements, was unable to stop Putin from annexing Crimea and effectively seizing Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014. Interestingly, the only president this century during whose term Putin hasn’t seized territory was Donald Trump, a Putin pawn according to the Russian collusion hoax.

(11) Putin has said several times that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a great disaster. You may dislike Bolton – I’m not a fan either – but in 2014 he correctly described the situation regarding Putin:

“I think Putin knows that he has the high cards, militarily, economically and politically, and he’s prepared to use them,” Bolton said. “He gave us notice of his strategy seven or eight years ago when he said, in what is now one of the most frequently repeated quotes from his leadership in Russia, when he said, ‘The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.’

“It’s clear he wants to re-establish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine is the biggest prize, that’s what he’s after. The occupation of the Crimea is a step in that direction.”

Putin had made the comments in a state of the union speech in 2005, and several times later, including his speech on February 22 justifying the Ukraine invasion (see this).

(12) Putin resents NATO and declares it a threat to him. It’s certainly true that it is more dangerous for him to invade a NATO country than one that is not a member, so in that sense NATO does have a chilling effect on his ambitions to reassemble glorious Greater Russia. He doesn’t think many countries that were part of the old Soviet Union have a right to be independent from Mother (Father?) Russia. In that way, NATO’s a threat to his territory-grabbing ambitions, not to Russia proper.

(13) The UN continues to be a joke, but not a funny one. For example, as all of this was going on, Russia was chairing the Security Council in a meeting to try to head it off. Ha ha! Good one, Putin. A real knee-slapper.

(14) Ukrainians with long memories might recall the Holodomor of the 1930s, when its good friends in the USSR instituted policies that helped to starve millions of Ukrainians:

The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made and allegedly intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.

Virtuals vs. Physicals; Imagology vs. Reality

The New Neo Posted on by

This article is worth reading:

Many have slotted this drama [in Canada] into a familiar framework of right-wing populists versus left-wing elites. But a different way of looking at it may be more helpful in explaining not only what has happened in Canada but also why the political divide now looks so strikingly similar across the developed world, from Ottawa to Wellington…

Consider instead two main classes of people in society, who tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways. The first are those people who work primarily in the real, physical world…This class necessarily works in a physical location or owns or operates physical assets central to its trade.

The second class of people is different. They are, relatively speaking, a civilizational innovation. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases, the information exists at a level of abstraction from the real world…[T]hese people build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role have any direct relationship with or effect on the physical world.This class can therefore often do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting…

For simplicity’s sake, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively. This division maps closely onto another much-discussed political wedge: the geographic split between cities, where most of the Virtuals are concentrated, and the outlying exurbs and rural hinterlands, where the Physicals remain predominant…

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals today is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class.

It’s a generalization that seems correct to me. The author goes on to point out that, nevertheless, the Virtuals do exist in the physical world and therefore need goods and services provided by the Physicals, and that what happened with Canada’s Freedom Convoy is that the Physicals scared the Virtuals into remembering that. That’s why the Physicals were put down so harshly. This clash will continue because the Physicals will resist and the Virtuals will insist on control.

The dichotomy reminds me of one of my favorite passages by Czech expat author Milan Kundera. It was written over thirty years ago, when things were very different or maybe not all that different, because the split was already happening. The following is a quote from Kundera’s 1990 work Immortality:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

The invasion of Ukraine: who’s Putin’s puppet now?

The New Neo Posted on by

When Obama was elected I suspected that I knew what we were in for concerning foreign policy: withdrawing from Iraq, empowering Iran, weakening our military, and general movement towards the leftist position.

When Trump was elected, I was worried that he was in way over his head and would do something foolhardy. He had no experience, he was a braggart and a blowhard, and the world stage was not the world of real estate development. My nervousness lasted a while, but by the end of the first year of his administration I started to relax. None of the predicted catastrophes had occurred, and he seemed to actually be able to make good on his promises about what an effective dealmaker he was and how he would act in America’s interests.

On Biden’s election, it was easy to predict what he would do, at least in the general sense. He’d continue Obama’s policies and add huge extra doses of stupidity, incompetence, and undeserving bravado. Every wannabee aggressor on earth would get the picture: this might just be a good time to make a move.

Thus, Ukraine. What better time could there be? The US struggling with inflation, Europe more dependent on Russian oil thanks to Biden’s energy policies, the US unable to exercise any kind of effective international leadership, and Putin’s knowledge of Biden’s traditionally poor judgment and more recent cognitive difficulties.

Some people didn’t expect the large scale and scope of the invasion last night, although the numbers massing on the border did make some people predict it. It seems Putin wants to take over the whole country, although he might just want to strike a series of blows to weaken its defenses and then take over just Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern portion of the country. There are many reports from the area, and it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s false (fog of war), and certainly hard to know what’s next.

I happen to think that Putin wants to take over Ukraine itself, or at least to install a puppet or satellite government there. As this analyst said a short time before the invasion actually occurred:

The main reason for Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is to reinforce Russia’s security importance in Europe, according to Edmonds.

He wants to ensure that Moscow is deeply involved in “any kind of decisions or the overall structure in Europe,” he said. It’s about “restoring Russia to the place, it believes it leads in Europe.”

And I don’t think sanctions will have much effect on his plans.

Nor do I think Putin’s designs are only limited to Ukraine. Those of us who remember the Cold War recall the extent of the Soviet empire. Much of eastern Europe was part of the USSR, and although it may not be the case that Putin would like to recreate that – and certainly not in that exact form – I believe that he may want to have a greater hand in the governance of several of what used to be known as “the captive nations.”

Do I know this for certain? Absolutely not. But that’s what my gut is telling me.

One more thing: many people say that Biden isn’t in charge of our policy. I think it depends on what is meant by “in charge.” Of course there are others who influence him. But I thought he was mostly in charge of our disastrous Afghanistan pullout, and I think the same is true of Ukraine. Remember, Ukraine was his special field of interest as vice president. Remember also that Biden fancies himself a highly experienced, highly knowledgeable, highly effective foreign policy expert in general. Even in his younger days he was a blustering fool, but he never had to answer for his decisions back then because he wasn’t president. Of course, with his friends in the press he may not even have to answer for them now.