The destruction caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine has generated images that have often been compared to those from World War II battles. Pictures of destroyed towns and villages cause cognitive dissonance as we ask ourselves how this could be happening today. Hasn’t the world made progress nearly a century after that previous carnage? If one considers the geopolitical state of the world in the late 1930s and now, there are disturbing similarities. Europe is threatened by a fascist state believing it has the right to expand its borders. Asia is troubled by a rising power with the will and the resources to dominate the area economically, politically, and militarily. A comparison between current China and twentieth-century Japan is a bit of a stretch at the moment, but a comparison between Putin and Hitler seems spot on. If one can consider China to have most of the characteristics of a fascist state, then once again it is the western democracies against fascists. Timothy Snyder considers these issues in an article for Foreign Affairs: Ukraine Holds the Future.
As Tony Judt lay dying from ALS, he participated with Timothy Snyder in a long series of conversations about the history of the twentieth century and what we of this century should have learned from that era. Judt feared that we of this era had forgotten that past prematurely and could suffer as a result. Snyder turned those conversations into the book Thinking the Twentieth Century with Judt as main author. Snyder agrees that now we have not been living as though a democratic society was a precious thing that could be taken away from us. We had forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt was receiving advice from well-known political experts suggesting that the only way our democracy could compete with the likes of Germany and Japan was if he assumed dictatorial powers. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to them. The ultimate lesson of World War II was that if you were not willing to fight and die for your way of life, you could lose it.
Our great mistake was assuming that the fall of the Soviet Union indicated the final victory of representative democracy over all other forms of government. It had been proved, we thought, that democracy was inevitable if we just gave other countries a chance to observe how well it was working.
“At that point, as Russia and Ukraine emerged as independent states, a perverse faith was lodged in ‘the end of history,’ the lack of alternatives to democracy, and the nature of capitalism. Many Americans had lost the natural fear of oligarchy and empire (their own or others’) and forgotten the organic connection of democracy to ethical commitment and physical courage. Late twentieth-century talk of democracy conflated the correct moral claim that the people should rule with the incorrect factual claim that democracy is the natural state of affairs or the inevitable condition of a favored nation. This misunderstanding made democracies vulnerable, whether old or new.”
“The current Russian regime is one consequence of the mistaken belief that democracy happens naturally and that all opinions are equally valid. If this were true, then Russia would indeed be a democracy, as Putin claims. The war in Ukraine is a test of whether a tyranny that claims to be a democracy can triumph and thereby spread its logical and ethical vacuum.”
The history of the last century made it clear that democracy could be overtaken by oligarchs and autocrats. It must be guarded continually with valor and ethical principles.
“Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny. The Ukrainian resistance is the wake-up call.”
“The history of twentieth-century democracy offers a reminder of what happens when this challenge is not met. Like the period after 1991, the period after 1918 saw the rise and fall of democracy. Today, the turning point (one way or the other) is likely Ukraine; in interwar Europe, it was Czechoslovakia. Like Ukraine in 2022, Czechoslovakia in 1938 was an imperfect multilingual republic in a tough neighborhood. In 1938 and 1939, after European powers chose to appease Nazi Germany at Munich, Hitler’s regime suppressed Czechoslovak democracy through intimidation, unresisted invasion, partition, and annexation. What actually happened in Czechoslovakia was similar to what Russia seems to have planned for Ukraine. Putin’s rhetoric resembles Hitler’s to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical, both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade, both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.”
“In 1938, Czechoslovakia had decent armed forces, the best arms industry in Europe, and natural defenses improved by fortifications. Nazi Germany might not have bested Czechoslovakia in an open war and certainly would not have done so quickly and easily. Yet Czechoslovakia’s allies abandoned it, and its leaders fatefully chose exile over resistance. The defeat was, in a crucial sense, a moral one. And it enabled the physical transformation of a continent by war, creating some of the preconditions for the Holocaust of European Jews.”
Thus far Ukraine’s allies have not deserted it, and its leaders have stood fast and encouraged its people to fight back. It has fought Putin’s army to at least a standstill. But continued and intense support must continue for the indefinite future. Putin, as did Hitler, made it clear that the country being invaded would be the first of a series of invasions. Allies chose to appease Hitler and convinced him they were weak. World War II immediately followed. Ukraine’s allies must see Putin defeated. Autocrats in Russia and across the globe are watching closely for signs of weakness and lack of resolve. A Ukraine loss could begin the unraveling of the international order, starting with a discredited NATO and a feckless European Union.
Snyder provides this summary of what is at stake.
“A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete. Should Russia continue its illegal blockade of the Black Sea, it could starve Africans and Asians, who depend on Ukrainian grain, precipitating a durable international crisis that will make it all but impossible to deal with common threats such as climate change. A Russian victory would strengthen fascists and other tyrants, as well as nihilists who see politics as nothing more than a spectacle designed by oligarchs to distract ordinary citizens from the destruction of the world. This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.”
Putin is this century’s Hitler. We must get this right!
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