Russia, if you’re listening...
Russia, if you’re listening...
On Tuesday, October 18 of this year, the Associated Press reported Kevin Mccarthy had said if Republicans achieve a majority in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections on November 8, the United States “would no longer write a blank check” for the Ukraine to fend off the Russian invasion.
I think I know what he’s after.
Just to make things perfectly clear, Vladimir Putin claimed Russia had to invade Ukraine in order to purge it of the “Nazis” that were in charge. But it was a lie. There are no Nazis, unless you count a few schizophrenic bikers like the ones we have here in our little town. The President, Volodymir Zelensky, is in fact Jewish. Perhaps he’s a member of that obscure sect — “Jews for Hitler?”
Putin didn’t invade Ukraine to destroy the Nazis; he invaded Ukraine so he could claim to be the successor of Peter the Great. So what’s with the Nazi claim? It’s simple: Russians fought the German Nazis in World War II, and they’ll never forget Nazi brutality — and they shouldn’t. That’s why this claim makes sense to them — or rather, to half of them — just like half of Americans claim that Biden stole the election from Trump. It’s a lie, but half of the population — the left side of a bell curve showing the distribution of IQ scores — will believe anything. We have exactly the same problem here with election deniers.
The United States has spent around $16 billion on military aid to Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war crime. The United States is, as the author Sidney Blumenthal said in his 1996 book The Clinton Wars, “the indispensable nation” able to guarantee global security.
All of the European Union, all 30 NATO members, and most of the civilized world acknowledges the illegality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Only Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe, supports Russia’s war — although Saudi Arabia’s recent cut in oil production to placate Russia and damage Biden’s re-election chances, and Turkey has threatened to vote against admitting Finland and Sweden into NATO.
Just in case you didn’t read the Mueller Report, Robert Mueller devoted more than 210 pages to describing the efforts made by Russia to get Donald Trump elected in 2016. On March 23, 2019, the Washington Post reported Trump had claimed there was “no collusion” between him and the Russian government at least 231 times. In fact, the purpose of the report was to determine whether the Russians had tried to help Trump win the election, and more than 10 instances were documented in which they did exactly that. Trump didn’t have to collude with the Russians; there was nothing they wanted more than to put him in the White House. In the opinion of a former Director of the NSA, they were probably the reason he won the electoral vote. Trump didn’t collude; he didn’t have to.
But his voters did. More than 125 million people visited hundreds of web pages built by the Russian FSB, the successors of the KGB, and were told to vote for Trump. 74 million of them did. Was Russian propaganda the tipping point? We’ll never know; but it didn’t hurt.
That’s what Mccarthy is asking for. “Russia, if you’re listening, help Republicans to win in the mid-terms, and we’ll stop sending military aid to Ukraine.”
On May 27, 1939, the M.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees escaping Hitler’s death camps, was refused entry to American ports while awaiting clearance in Havana. They were forced to return, and 254 of them died in Nazi concentration camps. If we abandon Ukraine, we will be accused for the rest of eternity for the same disgraceful abdication of our role. We won’t be indispensable; we’ll be unforgivable.
Will we let occupying Russian soldiers have their way with Ukrainian civilians? Are we willing to let the Republican Party attach this kind of shame to the name of the United States of America? If you’re too cheap to help save these people, will you also be too cheap to pay the taxes necessary to pay for weapons to defend our country when it’s our turn? Or is it just foreigners whose lives don’t matter?
Les Pinter is a contributing columnist and a Springville resident. His column appears weekly in The Recorder. Pinter’s book, HTTPV: How a Grocery Shopping Website Can Save America, is available in both Kindle and hardcopy formats on Amazon.com.contact him at lespinter@earthlink.net.