Joe Biden is Having His Neville Chamberlain Moment
For those of you not up to date on Hitler’s early years, he had supporters in Europe as well as America. Charles Lindbergh was one, Henry Ford another and der Führer was a master of radical dialog and stagecraft. His rise in German politics was the direct effect of the 1918 peace treaty ending the First World War, which was so deliberately punitive that Germans lost all hope of a future. Hitler gave them hope and a measure of forgiveness.
As Hitler weaponized Germany and threatened Czechoslovakia, Great Britain’s then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich, met with Hitler and agreed to his occupation of Czechoslovakia as an end to his further threats in Europe. Chamberlain called the outcome "peace for our time", following which Hitler was selected Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1938.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine doesn’t so much repeat history, but it rhymes
Opening the Guardian Newspaper here in Prague, eighty-four years after Time’s Man of the Year and a week before my eighty-seventh birthday, I see that rhyme in print: What happened in the Russia-Ukraine war this week? Catch up with the must-read news and analysis. Further down the page, Sexy vegetables, banana-eating wolves and Meghan Markle’s hair.
Today It's 1938 in Europe, and Ukraine is Biden’s Czechoslovakia
My heart sank when I heard American secretaries of State and Defense at a news conference following their Ukraine visit.
"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," Defense Secretary Austin said at the news conference. "So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability."
And what is America willing to pay for that ‘weakened capability?’
Ukranian blood is the answer.
According to the UN, a total of 3,381 killed (1,227 men, 787 women, 75 girls, and 91 boys, as well as 69 children and 1,132 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
a total of 3,680 injured (521 men, 396 women, 83 girls, and 93 boys, as well as 170 children and 2,417 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
In Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 3,694 casualties (1,810 killed and 1,884 injured)
On Government-controlled territory: 3,140 casualties (1,699 killed and 1,441 injured)
On territory controlled by Russian affiliated armed groups: 554 casualties (111 killed and 443 injured)
In other regions of Ukraine (the city of Kyiv, and Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Rivne, Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr regions), which were under Government control when casualties occurred: 3,367 casualties (1,571 killed and 1,796 injured)
Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.
But no one really knows, as mass graves continue to be unearthed and the atrocities aimed specifically at a civilian population are beyond comprehension.
Meanwhile, Biden announces new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine
Good on ya, Joe. That ought to last at least three or four days. The modern equivalent to ‘peace for our time’ is ‘weakening Russia at Ukraine’s cost. Sleep well
Almost four million refugees, nearly all women and children have found some sort of refuge in Europe, 370,000 of whom are here where I live in the Czech Republic. Amazingly, a half-million women are returning, one of whom said “If I lose my family and my husband, what do I have to live for?”
Any of you members of Congress have an answer for that, or are the mid-term elections too close to worry about a nation facing death every single day in school basements and theaters? Remember those famous words of Stalin: “A single death is a catastrophe, a hundred-thousand dead is a news event.”
Every week, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy begs the world for weapons. And each week America and the NATO nations give him just enough to survive. It’s warm and spring-like in Washington today and there are multiple swanky parties to attend. Someone else’s war is a long way away.
But Vladimir Putin has nuclear weapons and may use them
Indeed he may, but a failure to face that issue will enable him to do as he wants, across any now-sovereign nations that were once the USSR. We face a similar threat in North Korea, where another desperate dictator rattles his nuclear sword. Technological progress and weaponry is only in the hands of the rich and powerful within relatively short time-frames. We are exceptionally good at killing our own species—as long as it can be done by remote-control and the visuals laundered before public viewing. No one likes to see the bloated body of a murdered child, which is why wars are begun by those who stay a goodly distance from the terror and pain.
We appeased Hitler and are on our way to either appeasing Putin or allowing a very proud and determined nation to bleed him dry
But don’t lose faith as you struggle with $5 gasoline, inflation at the grocery store and too much month at the end of the money. Somewhere you’ve never been, that you probably can’t find on a map, a family is huddled with their arms around each other, hoping to make it through another day. If you have the courage, read this article about the 2,000 Ukraine fighters, holding off the enemy at Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks. The story is a historic rhyme to Davy Crockett and the Alamo siege of 1836.
No one came to the rescue there either.