What is happening in Ukraine? Before diving into the events unfolding on the borderlands of Europe, let’s jump past some basic concerns I have about even writing this article. If you were to speak with a man who existed in hypocrisy like a fish exists in water, how often would you care to bring up the Golden Rule? At what point, after witnessing so many sociopathic forays, would you accept the futility of once again voicing calls for fairness?
The United States, in its current state, is the material embodiment of paranoia. Since World War 2, as if driven to madness by the nuclear waste infused blood on our hands, no stone is too small to risk remaining upturned. When September 11th happened, as is often true of the relationship between trauma and comorbidities, our already severe pathology became a terminal illness.
Paid for with our very future, this once revolutionary republic has dragged itself through every mud-drenched, sun scarred hellscape under the stars, all in a fear-drunk hope of catching a glance at the incoming punch we believe to be promised by karma.
And when every dollar was spent and ever pebble inspected, non-aggressive countries wary of external powers dictating their scientific or militaristic developments would be vilified so the role of enemy never remain unfilled.
Was the Monroe Doctrine just a Joke?
In 1923, the Monroe Doctrine warned European colonizers that the United States would not tolerate further colonization of the Western Hemisphere. Just 60 years ago, when the Soviet Union began the building of missile-launching sites in Cuba, it was the Monroe Doctrine John Kennedy would symbolically invoke.
Since that time, the United States and its allies in NATO have spent countless billions of dollars nearly encircling Russia with military bases.
For no other reason than military superiority, which is hardly an ethical justification, what would be imaginable for an America – an enemy within striking range – became the global expectation.
Obama’s Messaging Failure
Consider the reaction in America if Vladimir Putin came into office advocating for a military alliance between Russia and the government in Mexico. The brash, globalist minded Obama burst into the White House doors with just that sentiment.
Obama said it was important to “send a clear signal throughout Europe that we are going to continue to abide by the central belief … that countries who seek and aspire to join NATO are able to join NATO.” Biden has continues with this exact same rhetoric.
To understand why such messaging is disastrous to Ukraine, you need to understand the under-reported demographic makeup of the state once affectionately known as “little Russia.” As revealed by the Orange Revolution, the country is badly divided between the west and the Russian speaking east.
The Ukrainian Civil War
In America’s haste to bring Ukraine into its military fold, as is so common in stories such as this, weapons and support were delivered to some particularly unsavory characters during the Ukrainian Civil War. For a country that so freely invokes Nazi imagery in its domestic, internal conflicts, our standards abroad are more forgiving.
Pictured along with John McCain, Oleh Tyahnybok is leader of Svoboda, a Ukrainian political party that received over 40 percent of the 2012 vote in many parts of western Ukraine. To briefly explain the Nazi roots of this political party, it’s important to note that some 800,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine during the German occupation, many of them by a Ukrainian auxiliary known as the Galicia Division. When Western Ukrainian citizens organized a ceremony honoring the unit, it was Oleg Pankevich, a Svovoda parliamentarian, who did the honors of being front and center.
“I was horrified to see photographs…of young Ukrainians wearing the dreaded SS uniform with swastikas clearly visible on their helmets as they carried caskets of members of this Nazi unit, lowered them into the ground, and fired gun salutes in their honor,” World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder wrote in a letter at the time.
Picture how the United States would feel if Russia provided financial and militaristic aid to literal Nazi organizations in Canada.
Conclusion
In history, those surrounded by enemies promising continuation to conflict have not been seen as the aggressor. However, Russia taking offense to Western funding of horrible elements in bordering countries has created this irrational outrage, when no country on our planet would condone such a flagrant attempt at encroachment.
The American economy is in free-fall, and the vast majority of Americans are lacking any faith in its leadership. Regarding both Russia and America, choosing deescalation and seeking mutual collaboration could be the only way to appropriately respond to the true threat posed by China.
The flip side is that Russia has always wanted to dominate Europe, and that they are quite paranoid (based on invasions by Napoleon and Hitler, not to mention seeing others as if others behaved with motivations like their own, only dumber), although today’s and foreseeable future Europe has nobody with interest or inclination to invade Russia; certainly the US doesn’t want to (although I doubt anyone would mourn an unfortunate end for any totalitarian, which includes Putin). To be sure, the US would be glad to have an end to Russia’s share (not that we don’t do our own, but it is NOT particularly well focused on opposing Russia or even China) of meddling in the world (generally on behalf of countries that would win no awards for liberty either), whether by containment or by more cooperative means. And despite Washington’s advice about avoiding foreign entanglements, we DO have worldwide interests – some fraction of which is our own fault for selling off resources and outsourcing manufacturing; but we’d need access to some resources scarce here (rare earths and titanium, for example) and want unobstructed access to customers worldwide, regardless.
I think the real reasons that the Democrats hate Russia is (a) it makes them look tougher than they are, and (b) Russia is not the USSR, and Putin is not a communist anymore, nor advancing communism, but merely supporting whoever might help keep the US off balance. The more vocal Democrats (those furthest from the center) all love communism, loved Castro and folks like murderer Che Guevara, and for example Bernie Sanders even said nice things about mass murderer Stalin. They aspire themselves to that sort of absolute power, to be able to purge anyone who opposes them. Putin is a totalitarian but an EX-communist, that’d be a total betrayal in their view, far worse than any question of how bad a totalitarian is regardless of ideology.
I think Putin’s long-term mistake is cozying up to China in any way more than cosmetically, and supposing that Russia can dominate Europe to obtain the economic, manpower, and technological means to oppose China when China no longer needs Russia as an ally. If Putin hadn’t cornered himself with pride, he’d quietly try to get along with the west, to set the ground for a cooperative rather than Russia-dominated counterbalance to China.