Well worth watching…
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How Putin fooled the Western Left… & influenced some US RepublicansAugust 17th, 2023 |
 17 comments to How Putin fooled the Western Left… & influenced some US Republicans |
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I have been following Vexler for a while. I particularly like his oft-repeated lines about Russians being “de-politicised” and Putin being the sole source of legitimate political authority. I am bit less impressed by his belief that Trump is a threat to democracy. I am particularly impressed that he can produce far more than, say, I can, despite the fact that he suffers from ME.
Having said that I am not entirely happy about this latest video. Firstly, there is the use of music. Music is there to control the listener’s emotions. I don’t want my emotions to be engaged; just my intellect thank you very much. Secondly, although this is a topic that needs addressing on first viewing I don’t think he’s quite nailed it.
You have to love the: “Back my war or you’re Neville Chamberlain” BS they’ve been peddling for 80 years.
I’m done being robbed by these creeps.
I usually find myself agreeing with about half of what Vlad Vexler says. Most of his policy prescriptions seem reasonable, but his analysis lacks rigour, depth and specificity. Interesting viewing, but often too abstract and ungrounded. Mark Galeotti brings a lot more detail.
The left sees Putin as the heir of the Soviet Union. Which is precisely why they’re so tolerant of him and his crap.
You can try to deny it, but look at the way that Obama clearly took Putin’s side, denigrating Romney’s characterization of Russia as America’s number-one security threat. Hilary did the same thing, expediting the sale of Uranium One to the Russians. They’ve clearly been on-side with Russia since forever; even Biden was acting on behalf of the Russian owner of Burisma, a known asset of the Russians. Why he’s now acting for the benefit of Ukraine, with his actual track record? Ya got me; I speculate that there’s a hefty amount of blackmail going on.
The ludicrous idea that Trump was a Russian asset is clearly a case of projection; they always accuse their opponents of being precisely what they are, and doing exactly what they’re doing. Trump got into trouble because he was likely to upset the applecart, and they couldn’t have their phoney-baloney jobs and the laundering of US foreign aid money threatened.
A despotic Russian fooling Western leftists? Whodathunk…
Vis a vis confronting Russian imperialism in Europe, I’d say it’s pretty much correct. Either confront Putin or make the same mistake Chamberlain made. Peace isn’t an option, either Ukraine wins with Western backing, or some half-arsed deal locks in partial Russian success & they try again in 5-10 years.
Did Chamberlain really make a “mistake”, or was he buying time for rearmament? His apologists make the case that he was a realist, trying to cope with an impossible situation.
This is also part of the problem when you try to template current realities off of historic examples; Russia today is not Germany of the late 1930s. They lack the advantages and the professional military that Hitler had going for him, and even seem to have doubled-down on the deficiencies of the Nazi regime in some ways.
I have honestly never seen the Russians as much of a threat, given the demographic, economic, and military realities. Their performance in Ukraine did not surprise me; the things I see them doing are mind-bogglingly unprofessional, even anti-professional. It’s as if they run their military as a sort of social fraud scheme, with the senior participants using it as a means to enrich themselves. Odds are excellent that if Russia somehow managed to provoke a war with even a near-peer competitor, that they’d be erased from the battlefield in fairly short order. That’s how poorly coordinated and equipped they are; their troops are led by completely unprofessional and uncaring officers, there’s no NCO corps, they have abysmal logistics supporting them, and were they dealing with actual Western aviation-centric warfare, they’d have been slaughtered like lemmings. Those stalled convoys back in March of 2022, heading to Kyiv? They’d have looked about like the Highway of Death during Desert Storm.
Modern politicians in Europe aren’t dealing with another Hitler in Putin; he’s not even on the same order, in terms of threat. With the Wehrmacht coming out of von Seeckt’s labors, it was a far more potent force than the corrupt and venal clownshow Putin has. This shifts Putin’s place in history several orders of magnitude closer to “farce” than Hitler’s. It’s as if one of the interwar French leaders decided to take the existing French Army of the times, and then tried to set out on a program of world conquest; it would have ended much the same as Putin’s efforts will in Ukraine.
Bigger problem with Russia and China today is figuring out what the hell to do when they both run out of rope, because that’s precisely what’s going on behind the scenes. Not that we’re much better off; you want to terrify yourself, take a look at the commercial real estate market here in the US, and try to extrapolate out what the hell is going to happen when people finally figure out that the major Democrat-run urban areas are no longer supportable or tolerable for normal life.
I fully expect that there’s going to be a slow-burn, low-grade civil war take place between anyone with any sense and the wokerati currently running those urban areas. When everything in the tax base moves out, and there aren’t any more tax dollars to pay for even basic services? Yikes… Watch out. I’ve friends in Portland, Oregon who recently expressed a clear desire to conduct impromptu trials and likely subsequent executions of the politicians they see as responsible for the ruin of their cities and livelihoods. That’s not a good sign, at all; the point that the wokerati needed to keep in mind was that their little scam could only go on for as long as they kept everything ticking over; the minute it ceased to tick? The closer and more likely their impending meeting with reality. Reality À la lanterne!, I fear.
His apologists make little sense. The entire problem is not “Britain and France needed time to rearm” (true but not actually the issue), it’s that Chamberlain made it clear to Hitler that his actions in Czechoslovakia were consequence-free, that he didn’t give a flying fuck what happened the Czechs (“a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”), so there was simply no downside from Hitler’s perspective. If UK would not fight for Czechoslovakia, why think they would fight for Poland or indeed anywhere that wasn’t a direct & immediate threat to UK?
Chamberlain’s choice of words & actions didn’t just not deter Hitler, they effectively encouraged him.
His service in Churchill’s wartime government and untimely death from bowel cancer somewhat cloud the issue. Given the political realities of the time in both England and France, I’m uncertain that anyone could have done any more than Chamberlain did, historically.
I know that I personally excoriate the leadership in the West of that time, but it’s way more of a collective thing than just the one man. They were all delusional and mostly idiotic; it’s like trying to tease out responsibility for WWI.
WWI – indeed, though some are more responsible than others (put that down, in part, to the Prusso-German experience of three short and ‘successful’ wars a half century previous).
It is the German treatment of Czecho-Slovakia that prompts the guarantee to Poland Alas, much good did it do the Poles). Czecho-Slovakia, with a large proportion of the Germanic populations removed and ditto Poles and Hungarians, might have been a viable polity within a German sphere of influence and could have lasted in that role. That was behaviour that would offend Neville C., an upright man. Floreat Hacha.
Czechoslovakia, the 1918 folly half-baked in the USA by an academic crank and an odious, vengeful little egotist who could not read a map (Dr Benes – and oh how important it was to be Dr), was not viable, especially when functioning as the pretend nation-state of the pretend Czechoslovak nation (reap the whirlwind). In comparison, Poland was a real place (forget the minorities question) run by (proximate) gentlemen.
Kirk
Relative to its neighbours perhaps, but ‘Nukes’.
A Bosnian Serb under Austrian occupation shot an Austrian Prince, so Germany invaded Belgium. It’s perfectly simple.
The American establishment elite, indeed the general Western establishment elite, is evil – not just misguided or mistaken, evil.
So it is natural for people not in that establishment elite, whether they be conservatives, libertarians, or independent leftists (leftists who, mistakenly, think that anti private property economics does not automatically mean an end to such things as Freedom of Speech – which it does) to look for an ally against the evil of the international “Globalist” (really Western with pretensions of ruling the world) establishment elite.
But Mr Putin is NOT an ally – indeed on everything from Covid lockdowns to “gun control” he is also tyrannical. And so is the People’s Republic of China.
I am remined of George Orwell’s “1984” – Oceania is evil, but so is Eurasia and East Asia (the other two great powers).
There is no help for liberty coming from Mr Putin – he is a tyrant.
As recently as the 1980s, although the economic basis of liberty (for example sound money) was already long undermined – there were still patriots in positions of power in the West (even the Director of the CIA, William Casey, was, in spite of his very real faults, a patriot) not perfect (no one is perfect), but people with some belief in liberty – but those days are gone.
Kirk – in the late 1930s Germany was rearming faster than Britain or France, so the “buying time” argument collapses.
The military balance was more favourable to us in 1936 than it was in 1938 and more favourable to us in 1938 than it was in 1939.
As for Western society – although economically depressed, and in the case of Britain the economic depression was not as severe as is often made out, Western (for example British) SOCIETY was still strong in the 1930s. Unlike now when Western society is collapsing.
The far left, not just the Marxists but also the Fabians and the Bloomsbury Set, came to the conclusion that they first had to undermine (destroy) society, the culture, before they could impose their new order on the ruins of the old society.
And from the 1960s onwards they, or rather those that later followed them, have had great success in undermining society. Such things as the family have been undermined – and almost every institution, public and private, has been subverted.
The Britain of 1939 or even 1964 was still worth fighting for – but what remains today? Some things do remain – but for how long?
WRT Chamberlain revisionism, i found this essay quite enlightening. (Spoiler: it is anti-revisionist.)
The argument that i found most impressive:
And who had performed woefully as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929 – one W S Churchill.
James Hargrave is right. When Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer he cut defence spending severely.
Hey, Martin and friends, let us not forget that Hitler did not have any power until 1933. When Churchill read an English translation of ‘Mein kampf”, he recognized that Hitler wanted to start another war, and started to warn people about it. When Chamberlain came back from Munich with ‘Peace in our time’, most people were ecstatic- all except one warmonger, Churchill, who spoke about how Hitler would probably take the rest of Checkoslovakia. Conservatives started talking about having a better member in the seat, until Hitler did take the rest. Come to that, he thought that appeasement was a good idea, at first. Too much of a good thing spoiled it.