In the struggle between left and right, one of the right’s greatest failings has been ceding language “command and control” to the other side. Among its other weaknesses this regrettable retreat, perfectly outlined by Jeff Goldstein at Hot Air in 2009, diminishes the right’s ability to place current and historical events in context. John Donne was right to point out that no historical event is an isolated man. For branches to grow, they must have roots that support them.
This is reflected in current cries about Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, as unworthy of support for the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. They claim that Ukraine, which was openly supportive of Germany in World War Two, makes it a bastion of Nazism. This occasionally hides beneath a thin veneer of not wishing to send American military personnel into harm’s way, a widely shared sentiment among even Ukraine’s most fervent supporters.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there, instead going on into full-fledged rage against Ukraine and Zelensky — each being a disingenuous, duplicitous, and every other -ous dirty cuss. Refer to the frenetic hysteria that broke out when Matt Walsh asked why Zelensky was so strongly opposed. He attacks Zelensky with far more passion than he does calling for Russian war atrocities.
Walsh’s Daily Wire cohort Candace Owens has been equally strident, so much so that Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel publicly commented on how past actions do not somehow minimize today’s war:
“In fact, Ukraine also doesn’t want to be involved in this war,” Mendel said in response to Owens’ latest comments. “This is only the Russia — the Russian leadership and Russia who attacks the countries. We don’t want to be involved, but it doesn’t matter what we want. Russia just comes to the territory of different country, kills its people, taking the territory.”
Here’s a hint to help you remember: The bad guy is any country that invades another country and targets civilians. However, I must go on; let me get back to the language retreat.
A main theme both spoken and unspoken among those on the right more intent on bashing Zelensky and Ukraine than decrying Putin and Russia’s war crimes is Ukrainian support for Germany in the Second World War. While not denying this took place, ignoring historical context renders drive-by opinion snatchers’ hot takes on the matter moot. Helen Dale (author), who spent many decades studying Russian culture at multiple levels, has recently written in Law & LibertyThe fact that the surface appearances and reasoning behind past actions are not sufficient to condemn them.
My novel is clear both on the extent to which bits of the Final Solution simply would not have been possible without Ukrainian assistance, but also that some of those perpetrators blamed Jews for communism’s depredations in their country. This was not in the “Marx and Trotsky were both Jews” sense, an argument one still encounters on the loopier reaches of the far right. The bulk of Ukrainian ire was directed at Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s Commissar during the Ukrainian Famine.
Dale then notes:
During my research for the book, as well as long after its publication, Ukrainians told me that they supported Hitler, because only Fascists were fighting Communism. Jews, on the other hand, said they had supported Stalin, because only Communists were fighting Fascism. As if Winston Churchill or the United Kingdom didn’t exist.
In one place, I explained that Vladimir Putin’s invasion has roots in the widespread Russian belief that Ukraine has always been part of Russia; in that sense, there are parallels with China and its claims over Taiwan and Tibet. Elsewhere, I pointed out that one can have a desire for imperial grandeur—as Putin clearly does—without being a rug-biting nutter. Was Julius Caesar delusional? Clive of India Catherine the Great Another place, again. I noticed that the election of a Jewish president in Ukraine is much more historic than Americans choosing a black president.
Putin is using this terrible history in a disingenuous way to feed his obsession with “Ukrainian Nazis.” This even though the far right won only two percent of the vote in Ukraine’s 2019 elections and hold but a single seat in the country’s Rada. The fact that there is a Babi Yar memorial in Kyiv, which was bombed, has been well documented by locals. Putin believes that Ukrainians have always been the most evil version of themselves.
The word “Nazi” is thrown about so freely by both sides, it is in danger of becoming this year’s RINO. This word is worthy of being applied to the actual Nazis from 1930s and 1940s. Even Putin, despite his directed ongoing atrocities against Ukrainian citizens, has yet to reach Holocaust level, not that he hasn’t tried.
Instead of reading bumper stickers and ranting about Ukraine, Zelensky Rothschilds, World Economic Forum or any other combination thereof, open a book. If you are more intent on bashing a country, which despite Owens’ claims didn’t suddenly spring out of the earth a handful of decades ago, and its leader than condemning Putin, while blasting Zelensky and Ukraine by throwing the other N-word around, you’re doing it wrong.
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