The good, the Vlad... and the ugly
RJUDY writes fascinatingly here about the nature of evil. But who, even a few weeks ago, would have predicted the utterly repellent, Nazi-like behaviour by Russian soldiers in Ukraine? Or the ruthless orders handed down by their oberführer, President Putin? And yet, and yet... we’ve been here before, haven’t we?
My parents’ and grandparents’ generations never really got over their shock at the return of world war to the heart of Europe in 1939. Everyone was blithely confident that the 1914-18 conflict had been “the war to end all wars” – in their lifetimes, at least – how quick, initially, to dismiss Herr Hitler as a posturing joke, with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, ridiculous, flapping Nazi salute, and almost pantomime villain speeches.
Weren’t we exactly the same about Putin until last month? Laughing at his vainglorious, stripped-to-the-waist publicity snapshots; deriding his deluded, half-baked reading of Russian history; telling ourselves the collapse of the Soviet empire had, just like the implosion of Germany’s global ambitions in 1918, spelt the end of not just the ColdWar but any possibility of a hot one too.
After all, Muscovites could now swing by McDonald’s for a Happy Meal, couldn’t they? Back in 1996, that inspired columnist Thomas Friedman to advance the so-called “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”; the belief that no two countries with McDonald’s franchises would ever go to war with each other. People living in McDonald territory, he concluded, “don’t like to fight wars.They like to wait in line for burgers.” It was a flip metaphor for a serious point. Friedman believed that countries with a middle-class large enough to sustain the US burger chain had reached a level of global integration and prosperity that “makes warmongering risky and downright unpalatable to its people.”
He reckoned without a psychotic dictator like Putin, the bruiser with an all-powerful disinformation machine that would have been the envy of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels (whose motto: If you’re going to tell a lie, make it a big one, must be engraved on Putin’s heart.)
Even now, with the Russian president somehow managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Ukraine and committing the worst war crimes in Europe since the Nazis, the broad mass of Russian people have faith in him.
They’re prepared to forgo their McNuggets, watch the rouble collapse, and see their young men return in body bags, all in the cause of proud nationalism.
So much for the Golden Arches theory, eh?
But Friedman also reckoned without someone likeVolodymyr Zelensky.The Ukrainian president’s cool, civilised defiance in the face of the worst the snarling monster next door can throw at his people has conferred on him the status of a 21st-century Churchill.
As in 1940, good is confronting evil.And, rather wonderfully, it is good that seems to be winning.