Ecologism & Victimhood: The Religion Of Climate Change On Campus

By Stanley Kurtz

Campus egalitarians doth protest too much. They seek not equality but the superiority conferred by victimhood. They yearn to be oppressed—or rather, to be perceived as sufferers—so as to take command of the university, the state, and through them, of you. Radical campus egalitarians are the new elect, the chosen, the saved. They are, in short, the new religious, however much, in conventional terms, they may appear to be unchurched. 

This applies not simply to victimization’s usual suspects—certain approved minorities—but also to campus climate crusaders, who may at first seem remote from the victim-group model. From the wretched of the earth to Wretched Earth, the planet itself is now the downtrodden. And beneath this delicious descent into climate chaos lurks the urge to dominate—to cleanse the globe, not of carbon dioxide, but of heretics, of deniers, of the new unchurched. Faith, salvation, and superiority, not equality, are at play on campuses today.

The notion that ecology crusaders are faithful followers of a novel secular religion may not be new, yet rarely has it been deployed with such penetration and gusto as in Pascal Bruckner’s newly translated 2011 book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings.[1] Bruckner is a French intellectual who, while no conservative, is a dedicated critic of leftist excess. What Fanaticism lacks in systematicness and sociological grounding it more than makes up for in insight and suggestiveness. Bruckner helps take us where we ought to want to go, toward a religious theory of the secular leftist present. Unpacking Bruckner’s gift of a book and building on what it has to teach us repays the effort. 

What is our carbon footprint, asks Bruckner, but “the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin”? (2). Raised in Jesuit schools, where spiritual exercises and persistent self-scrutiny under priestly supervision were the order of the day, Bruckner knows whereof he speaks. Modern secularism disparages traditional moral disciplines, yet Bruckner understands their nobility and appeal. That is how he has glimpsed the exertions of his pious Catholic boyhood incarnated anew in green neo-asceticism.

Thanks to this new green faith, our smallest acts have incalculable repercussions. The world seems literally to hang on whether we leave the water running as we brush our teeth, take the subway rather than drive, or flick off the switch as we exit a room. The humblest objects are alive with meaning. Bruckner calls it “post-technological animism” (33). Environmentalist discourse, he suggests, is a variation on the Fall of Genesis: eating of the fruit of the tree of scientific knowledge has driven us from God-given Paradise. “At the same time that Europe denies its Christian roots,” writes Bruckner, “it manifests them in its slightest references” (41). 

The slyly Christian character of the new environmentalism emerges most clearly in climate apocalypticism, says Bruckner. I would correct Bruckner here—the new environmentalism is more like a deformed imitation of Christianity than a faithful reproduction. Thus, the “Doomsday Clock” that has famously graced the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947 once calculated our alleged proximity to nuclear holocaust. Bruckner points out that propinquity to a world-ending climate catastrophe has now been added to the magazine’s reckoning, reviving “the Christian terrors of the Last Days” (17).

Bruckner calls our yearning to insert ourselves into a historical narrative of ultimate significance “the seductive attraction of disaster” (title, chap. 5). He compares environmentalism’s apocalyptic narrative to the technique of a fire-and-brimstone sermon, with horrors of sin and punishment accumulating until congregants grasp desperately for the slim hope of salvation held out at the close. Since the end is near, we must drop all we’re doing to prepare. For fanatical climate activists, writes Bruckner, earth has become a veritable “mineral and vegetable Christ” (16). 

Not only has the West’s disavowed Christianity returned in a new green guise, argues Bruckner, so has a despised and disowned capitalism. Waste nothing. Calculate everything. “The commercial spirit,” says Bruckner, “has contaminated even its most bitter enemies, who speak its language even as they seek to demolish it” (151). Although Bruckner doesn’t invoke it by name, green neo-asceticism is obviously a mutant offspring of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Bruckner dubs it the “rehabilitation of meanness and stinginess” (151).

The religious character of modern ecological activism drives the movement’s fanaticism. Religions need not be fanatical, of course. Yet a belief system that supplies an otherwise absent purpose in life to young secular activists—while masquerading as “settled science”—seems particularly liable to zealotry. Climate activism has had neither the time nor the self-awareness to negotiate the sort of settlement with civil society long ago struck by older faiths. Surely this is part of its charm for adherents. 

Bruckner never directly engages with the details of climate science. Implicitly, he accepts the notion that human beings have made some significant contribution to global warming. Yet he is also clearly skeptical of the most apocalyptic climate forecasts, while far more open than hardline climate activists to deploying geo-engineering and capitalism to address whatever challenges the world may face from warming. For Bruckner, in any case, such truth as inheres in ecological warnings does little to explain the rise of the movement itself: “We always choose the misfortune against which we want to protect ourselves” (25).

At a moment when Western young people face peril from a burgeoning social welfare state balanced treacherously on ever-fewer shoulders, Bruckner’s point hits home. Millennials could just as well be demanding federal spending cutbacks, or rushing to marry and have children as a way of saving the world. That they have embraced a competing apocalypse requires explanation. 

Bruckner aims to distinguish prudent measures designed to mitigate clearly defined and proximate environmental risks, from sweeping transformations wrought in fear of an alleged climate apocalypse generations hence. This, he writes, is the difference between “reasonable warning and sterile panic” (62). It is also meant to unmask catastrophism as an “infantile disease” eroding and discrediting environmentalism (3). Bruckner, in other words, hopes to save the movement from itself by distinguishing between reasonable environmentalism and the fanatical religion-in-disguise he names “ecologism” (2).

The germ of tyranny lies in religious ecologism. Bruckner reminds us that political absolutism and ideological fanaticism are seldom more than a few steps apart. Given the extent to which energy use is now implicated in the details of our lives, the potential for green activism to devolve into dictatorship is nearly limitless. The great lesson of the twentieth century, Bruckner recalls, is that, “in the wrong hands, the best of causes can degenerate into an abomination” (159). 

The specter of a new green tyranny points us back to the Marxist precedent. Ecologism, for Bruckner, descends directly from Marxist as well as Christian roots. For the past fifty years, he observes, we’ve been sliding from scapegoat to scapegoat. Socialism identified capitalism as the author of human misery. Third Worldism held the West responsible for mankind’s pain. Now ecologism fingers humanity itself as the villain, while including and encompassing those earlier formulations.

The globe, says Bruckner, has become the climactic capstone to a long list of emblematic victims: Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples. The planet itself is now “the paragon of all the wretched” (16). The planet, so to speak, is the new proletariat. Thus is all the foolishness of bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism recapitulated in an ecological frame. The greens, warns Bruckner, are a ruling elect in waiting, believing that they alone “have emerged from the cave of ignorance,” while the rest of us languish, blind (19). 

The strength of Fanaticism lies in Bruckner’s arresting formulations and penetrating analogies. Yet here lies a weakness as well. Bruckner elevates style over systematic analysis. In precisely what measure and manner have a transformed Christianity and Marxism been yoked together and reborn in ecologism? What drives the process? What makes it change? Bruckner devotes relatively little systematic effort to answering such questions. In fairness, such inquiries may be, at least in part, beside the point. Perhaps ecologism is intrinsically fragmentary, drawing haphazardly from the grab bag of Western ideological history. French literary panache may at points be better suited than Weber’s magisterial sociology to sifting through a pseudo-religious postmodern stew.

Yet surely the social origins of ecologism are worth probing. Bruckner himself addresses the question at points, if less rigorously then one might like. So let us begin with his reflections. 

Bruckner roots the triumph of ecologism in the collapse of the Cold War. “Give Me Back My Enemy” is the title of his first chapter. In other words: find me a world-threatening substitute for the Soviet menace. Although Bruckner doesn’t explicitly cite Freudian social thought, he seems to have it in mind here. For Bruckner, all societies accumulate a certain quantum of collective aggression that needs to be directed onto something. The post-Cold War West lacks an external enemy, while prosperity has rendered us soft. Collective psychic relief under such circumstances requires a trumped-up enemy as well as lurid and violent spectacles.

In the absence of the Soviet opponent, the enemy is us, or rather, a disavowed and hated aspect of ourselves: an allegedly globe-destroying capitalism, of course. “Left alone on the field,” says Bruckner, “capitalism now weighs on the planet’s fate like a fatum: it is not credited with any good deed, but is held responsible for all harms” (9). 

Those harms, in turn, are lovingly imagined via ecological disaster scenarios that function like horror movies. Perhaps Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is best understood as an updated 1950s horror film for adults, with undertones of quasi-religious seriousness. As with all horror films, fear is tamed and kept at a distance (the future) for purposes of amusement. In the placid and prosperous world-at-the-end-of-history, climate horror stories are all that remain to thrill us. Climate catastrophism, says Bruckner, is little more than “the contented sigh of big cats purring in comfort” (51).

It’s striking that Bruckner’s brief historical sociology begins with the collapse of communism in 1989, nearly two decades after the first Earth Day in 1970. One can argue that the end of the Cold War accelerated an ideological movement that theretofore lacked significance. Yet that is to underplay the impact of environmentalism’s early decades, while omitting a central part of the social puzzle. Ecologism is unquestionably a creature of the sixties, one of the distinctive cultural movements launched in that era. A satisfying account of it must connect the conditions of the 1960s, when the modern movement emerged, to its current world-spanning incarnation. Let us therefore supplement and extend Bruckner’s account with our own historical sociology of ecologism. 

The 1960s was a time of heightened individualism. Post-World War II America had seen a decline in small towns and tight-knit urban ethnic neighborhoods, and a corresponding growth in the suburbs. The automobiles that came with our new prosperity spirited us away from nosy neighbors and relatives to homes with a yard and privacy. Gone were the days of neighborhood gatherings on front stoops. Now families assembled indoors around the television. Increasingly, we chose our friends, driving past neighbors to meet them. Autonomy replaced community. And with the invention of the pill and the subsequent sexual revolution, the process accelerated.  Not only were families more autonomous within neighborhoods, but individual independence was both highlighted and enabled, while the family itself entered its steep decline.

Religion, the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued, is largely a reflection and extension of community and family. Weaken those institutions, and religion itself declines. The heightened individualism of postwar America undercut traditional faiths, while introducing a substitute secular religion in the form of new political and cultural movements available to the children of the suburbs then pouring into colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers. 

Insofar as the movements of the sixties answered big questions about how the world was constructed, while providing a template for moral action, they functioned as religions of a sort. Yet they were also secular, not simply for want of a discourse about God or spiritual beings, but because the ethical templates they offered differed in fundamental ways from traditional religious morality. To understand how, consider Bruckner’s list of emblematic modern victim groups. It begins with the Jews. Here lies a lesson.

The image of the Holocaust stands at the center of our modern secular religion. Bruckner cites the use of Holocaust imagery by eco-activists, as when they compare skeptics of catastrophic global warming scenarios with Holocaust deniers. Trains carrying coal have been likened to trains carrying victims to Hitler’s death camps, while critics of eco-overreach like Bjørn Lomborg have been directly equated to Hitler. While Bruckner rightly takes these comparisons as evidence of the movement’s fanaticism, there is something deeper at work. 

Traditional religious morality dignifies and elevates self-restraint and sacrifice in the service of community and God. Our modern secular faiths, in contrast, sanctify “liberation” from such restraints. Now we are “free,” although how we make use of that freedom is less clear. Without a larger community or cause for which to sacrifice, meaning dissipates. Yet there is a way for anomic modern individuals to recapture a higher purpose. A crusade to safeguard the liberty of others and ourselves is the pathway to meaning in an otherwise isolating individualist world. A great crusade requires a sweeping threat to liberty, and nothing surpasses the threat of mass death.

There is something thin and unsatisfying about preoccupation with “mere life,” when religion in the fullest sense provides a template for life well lived. Yet if the task at hand is the defense of mere life on a massive scale, this failing of liberationist secularism would be lost in the urgency of the moment. Durkheim argued that periods of war and revolution confer collective meaning on otherwise alienating modern life.  Oddly, then, recapturing a sense of crisis in ordinary times becomes the path to a salvation of sorts. 

To avert a Holocaust is inarguably good. So long as we face such emergencies, the existential deficits of liberationist individualism can be safely held at bay. What greater moral emergency could there be than a global warming apocalypse? It’s a permanent Holocaust, a permanent simulacrum of religion, and an ultimate collectivist crusade for the individualist life.

Thus was the image of the Jewish Holocaust appropriated and adapted by the modern secular Left to serve as the centerpiece of a new political religion. In a world bereft of moral certainty, the Holocaust is an argument-ender. Maneuver your opponent into the position of appearing to accept or facilitate a holocaust, and you’ve won. The last moral leg left to stand on has become, by default, the font of meaning in our cold, individualist world. 

In the decades before the emergence of global warming as a cause, there were plenty of ecological holocausts to go around. Back then, eco-activists would release penned-up minks being farmed for their pelts, or fight to save entire species from extinction, each an imagined genocide. The Holocaust metaphor was avidly deployed, yet something was missing.

The advantage of early eco-activism was that its crusades were fought on behalf of plants or animals who were utterly unencumbered by our political quarrels. If the messy moral calculus of movements for affirmative action, feminism, or a Palestinian state seemed off-putting, innocent plants and animals represented pure metaphorical instantiations of the Holocaust. Here was perfect evil to be forestalled, perfect innocence to be defended, a perfect crusade for life and liberty. Every man could be a Schindler, free from doubt. 

The price paid was in the stakes—not human lives, but dumb animals and unconscious plants. What was gained in innocence was lost in consequence. Preventing a human holocaust is the ultimate modern moral crusade. To raise the stakes still higher, prevent a holocaust in which you yourself are a potential victim. This is what global warming accomplishes. As the planet fries and the oceans rise, everyone dies. A perfect human holocaust, green-activists included.

As the crusade against fossil fuels swept across America’s college campuses this past year, a fascinating change has taken place. The early stages of the climate movement were focused on preventing harm to tiny island nations threatened by sea-level rise, or impoverished Third World countries subject to agricultural disruptions from rising temperatures. Increasingly, however, young climate activists now argue that they themselves are under threat. Harvard students calling on their university endowment to divest its holdings in fossil-fuel companies, for example, have warned that Harvard, hard by the Charles River and coast, may someday be engulfed by the sea. Leading climate activists now voice fears that they too may die of climate change. 

This is heady stuff, placing otherwise prosperous and successful young people poised to inherit the world in the position of a persecuted minority about to be slaughtered by uncaring forces beyond their control.

Perfect. 

Last academic year, the National Association of Scholars released a widely-discussed report, What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students.[2]  The first truly in-depth study of the curriculum at a prestigious liberal arts college, the report revealed the reach of the so-called “studies” programs (women’s studies, African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, environmental studies, etc.). Founded as home bases for the quasi-religious cultural movements of the 1960s, these programs analyze social life as a succession of battles between oppressors and victim groups. The Bowdoin study showed the victim-oppressor template spreading well beyond the studies programs proper, colonizing traditional departments as well.

On such a campus, membership in an approved victim group confers power and prestige. What is an impeccably middle-class, nonminority student to do? The answer is playing out at schools nationwide. College students—relatively few of them minorities, since these have their own activist centers of gravity on campus—imagine themselves as members of a generation at risk of a holocaust. Global warming, they stress, puts their lives at risk, not their elders. Climate change is their generational crusade, their personal encounter with the tragedy (or opportunity?) of victimhood. 

We are now in a position to supplement and comment upon some of Bruckner’s formulations.

The fragmentary and contradictory character of ecologism stems from the fact that a broadly Christian moral architecture has been grafted onto a fundamentally incompatible moral foundation. The Holocaust metaphor at the center of modern secular religion is about survival—mere life—rather than a life well-lived. Tiny gestures of sacrifice—minimizations of the carbon footprint—may symbolically enroll the devotee in a political crusade, with all the fellow-feeling and high moral purpose that implies. Yet nothing in this challenges our radically individualist mores, and thus the gestures never quite satisfy or cohere as a guide to the daily challenges of a life in family or society. 

The craving for an enemy is real. And surely the end of the Cold War has removed an important option on that score. By the same token, as Bruckner maintains, a fat and happy West requires large-scale dangers to combat (if only imaginary), for the sake of meaning and amusement. The phenomenon of otherwise happy and prosperous nonminority young people reimagining themselves as a generation of Holocaust victims doesn’t contradict Bruckner’s argument. It completes it, while deepening our understanding of the distinction between the pseudo-religion of ecologism and the richer traditions that preceded it.

In a campus cultural setting where victimhood yields superior power, the global warming apocalypse is a way for frustratingly “privileged” students to cash in on academia’s upside-down market in prestige. To say, as Bruckner does, that the planet is the new proletariat, is to argue, on further reflection, that the upper-middle class is the new proletariat. With the world about to end, everyone can be a victim, everyone lower-class. Thus the old Marxist model is surpassed and preserved all at once. 

As much as the end of the Cold War, the advent of global warming has made this transition possible. (Interestingly, global warming first entered public debate under the name “the greenhouse effect” in 1989, the year of communism’s fall.) Prior to that, the symbolic stakes of the ecology movement had limited reach. With empathy and imagination, little holocausts in the nonhuman world could be identified and opposed easily enough. It took the prospect of a full-on world-destroying apocalypse (however distant or exaggerated) to energize a new generation. Global warming turned what had up to then been a consequential yet limited cultural movement into a general solution (however partial and unsatisfactory) to the hollowness of modern secular life.

The potential cost to the rest of us of so questionable a crusade is substantial, as Bruckner has explained. America’s prosperity, liberty, and equality are all at risk from a faithful flock whose victimhood may be imaginary, but whose thirst to rule is not.

---

 

[1]Pascal Bruckner, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013). Originally published as La fanaticisme de l’Apocalypse (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fascelle, 2011). Further references to the translation of this work are cited parenthetically within the text. 

[2]Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students (New York: National Association of Scholars, 2013).

 Related Reading:

Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims

The Glorious Guru of Gloom, the Ghastly Goreacle of Gaia, the Glitterati Geo-Ecocrats and Their Gullible Gulpers of Gaiaraideoganda  

The Creator of The Gaia Theory: The Science Is Not Settled

Growing Number of Africans Tell Climate Change Imperialists To Go Pound Their Eco-Friendly, Carbon-Neutral Sand

Global Warming is Dead! Long Live The Next Little Ice Age! God Save The Queen Gaia!

Gaian Cultists: Ike Calling

1975 : Tornado Outbreaks Blamed On Global Cooling

 

 

'Toons of the Day: WTF, One SCoaMF At A Time

* WTF = Winning The Future

http://tinyurl.com/pd2785x

Return of the Anti-Chinese League

Dems want California’s universities to resurrect an ugly institution.

 

By Kevin D. Williamson

Are our boys and girls wrong
In expecting you who make your living
Exclusively off the white race
To stop patronizing Jap laundries.
And thereby assist your fellow men and women
In maintaining the white man’s standard in a white man’s country?

— Placards belonging to the Anti-Jap Laundry League, Calif., 1908

California has a long and ugly history of discriminating against Asian Americans. From the Anti-Jap Laundry League, the Anti-Chinese League, the Asiatic Exclusion League, the alien land laws, the Anti-Coolie Act . . . the list is long. Much of that discrimination had its origins on the left, with the Ant-Jap Laundry Act, the Asiatic Exclusion Act, and the Anti-Coolie Law being in the main projects of organized labor, which did not like the idea of being made to compete against Asians for work. 

And now another group of left-leaning Californians is chafing at the idea of being made to compete with Asian Americans.

The California state legislature was on the verge of approving a referendum to restore the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions to state universities. The referendum originally had the support of three state senators who have since had a change of heart: Leland Yee of San Francisco, Ted Lieu of Torrance, and Carol Liu of La Cañada, Democrats all. They changed their minds when they were overwhelmed with telephone calls and e-mails — thousands of them — from angry constituents who know exactly what such affirmative-action programs mean in the context of elite universities: Asian quotas. A petition to cancel the referendum has already been endorsed by 100,000 signatories. Subsequently, the senators sent a letter to the speaker, John Pérez (do I need to note that he’s a Democrat?) seeking to have the measure tabled. The letter reads in part: “As lifelong advocates for the Asian American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children.” 

If they mean that, all three of them belong to the wrong political party.

 

Asian immigration into the United States is a complex social phenomenon; in fact, the phrase “Asian immigration” hardly means anything, implying as it does a unitary phenomenon involving the radically different cultures of China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. But one thing that is true of Asian immigrant groups as different as the Chinese and the Indians is that they tend to be “bimodal,” meaning that the immigrants come from two distinct socio-economic groups. We get the Asian elites — doctors, scientists, academics, business executives — and we also get less educated, less skilled, less well-off Asian immigrants. As one observer of South Asian stereotypes notes, the impression is that Indian immigrants come in two varieties and two varieties only: doctors and clerks at 7-Eleven. Nothing in the middle. That isn’t true, but there is a wide disparity, just as there is between the Chinese Americans in Stanford, Calif., and the Chinese Americans in Sunnyside, Queens, who tend to be relatively downscale.

What both sides of the bimodal Asian immigration population have in common is that their children do uncommonly well in school. They are represented in California’s much-admired universities in far larger numbers than their share of the population would suggest: Asians compose 14 percent of California’s population but 37 percent of the undergraduates at its state universities. They make up about 40 percent of the students at UCLA, 43 percent of the students at Berkeley, half the students at UC San Diego, and more than half of the students at UC Irvine. A relatively small minority, they compose the largest single ethnic group on California university campuses (at least as California defines “ethnic group”).

Asians have the grades and the test scores — but, at 14 percent of the population, they don’t have the votes. Who has the votes? In California, it’s an almost even split between Latinos and non-Hispanic whites, representing 38.2 and 39.4 percent of the population, respectively. But as the woeful careers of Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi should have made obvious by now, who really has the votes in California is liberals. Less than 30 percent of Californians identify as Republicans, while 44 percent are Democrats and 21 percent are formally unaffiliated, which in California is shorthand for “too liberal for Diane Feinstein’s party” as often as not.

Liberals talk a great deal of mindless rot about what they like to call “privilege,” the supposedly omnipresent advantages that accrue to the white, the male, the heterosexual, those whose sense of self is more or less congruent with their biological genitals, etc. But it is worth keeping in mind that progressive social-engineering programs such as the use of racial criteria in university admissions do not hurt only hurt well-off white people sporting penises. (Not that we should shortchange the interests of well-off white penis-sporters.) They also hurt poor people and immigrants, in this case a group of immigrants that we as a country should count ourselves lucky to have. It is important to remember why race-based admissions are such an important issue for progressives: The Left lives in the public schools, which do a terrible job of teaching black, Hispanic, and poor students, who consequently show up in embarrassingly small proportions at elite institutions. Asian students, on the other hand, do a tremendous amount of work outside of school, spending ten times as much time as non-Asian students do on organized non-school activities ranging from music lessons to tutoring to test-preparation courses. That is true across the economic spectrum: Working-class Asian immigrant families in Queens send their children to tutoring sessions and piano lessons at a much higher rate than does the non-Asian population, even though the relative financial sacrifices necessary for them to do so are heavy.

For that, California’s professional race hustlers, and their allies across the country, would see them punished.

In an earlier day, California’s union-goon-powered politics meant using the law to “maintain the white man’s standard in a white man’s country,” today the same apparatus is used to maintain the Democrats’ standard in the Democrats’ country — or at least what the Democrats’ country would look like if they had one. In either case, it’s still at the expense of Asian immigrants. New rhetoric, same old bigotry.

Putin: The Mask Comes Off, But Will Anybody Care?

Russia appears to be deliberately fomenting more violence in Ukraine, possibly in advance of an invasion. Putin is no Hitler, but Hitler would recognize his moves.

By Walter Russell Mead

Violence is spreading throughout Ukraine on a course that looks exactly like conscious and deliberate Russian preparation for a wider war. Without telepathic powers it is impossible to know what is going on in the mind of the one man who can control developments in Ukraine, but overnight the chances of additional Russian military action against its helpless neighbor appeared to grow. On Friday in Donetsk conflict between pro-and anti-Russia groups left one man dead and 26 injured. Now in Kharkiv two more are dead in a similar way as clashes spread through the city. Pro-Russian groups, including it is said ‘rent-a-mob’ demonstrators bussed in from Russia, seem to be behind the violence. 

Moreover, there were scattered signs today that the next step is already upon us. Unconfirmed reports from local sources claim Russian troops landed in the Kherson region today—and were repelled. The story is starting to get picked up by news agencies, but rumors run rife at times like this. If true, it would mark the first direct military action by Russia outside Crimea and would be a major escalation of the most serious European international crisis since the Yugoslav wars. Here’s how the FT is reporting it:

Ukraine’s foreign ministry described the events as a “military invasion by Russia” and called on Russia to “immediately withdraw its military forces from the territory of Ukraine”. 

“Ukraine reserves the right to use all necessary measures to stop the military invasion by Russia,” the ministry added in a statement. 

If that is what is happening, and the preponderance of evidence suggests that it is, Putin appears to be following the Adolf Hitler strategy manual pretty much to the letter. 

Putin is no Hitler, and from the standpoint of power he isn’t even a Brezhnev.  Still, his actions in Ukraine have been following Adolf’s playbook pretty closely. Adolf wanted to tear up the Treaty of Versailles. Putin is attempting to rip up the post-Cold War settlement in Europe and Central Asia. Like Hitler’s Germany, Putin’s Russia is much weaker than its opponents, so it can’t achieve its goal through a direct military challenge against its primary enemies. Like Hitler’s Germany, Putin’s Russia must be clever until it grows strong, and it must play on its enemies’ hesitations, divisions and weaknesses until and unless it is ready to take them on head to head.

“Keep them guessing” is rule number one. Nobody was better than Hitler at playing with his enemies’ minds. For every warlike speech, there was an invitation to a peace conference. For every uncompromising demand, there was a promise of lasting tranquillity once that last little troublesome problem had been negotiated safely away. He was so successful at it (and Stalin, too was good at this game) in part because his opponents so desperately wanted peace. French politicians like Leon Blum and British leaders like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were as hungry for peace (it was the Depression after all, and both countries had suffered immensely in World War One) as Barack Obama and Francois Hollande are today. Commendably and properly, they wanted to fix their domestic economies, create a more just society at home, repair their infrastructure and cut their defense budgets. They were not in the mood for trouble overseas, and so a cold blooded con man found them to be easy marks. 

Putin has played on western illusions very successfully for a very long time. Remember all those ‘experts’ (many, alas, in government service) who thought that the Medvedev presidency represented a real shift in Russian politics? How shocked and disappointed people were when Putin stepped smoothly back into the top job? It is the oldest trick in the book: bait and switch. Humiliate John Kerry by making him cool his heels for three hours in the Kremlin, and then dangle hope of a cooperative relationship. Hold out a ‘helping hand’ when the Obama administration has gotten itself into an embarrassing predicament over its Syria red line, then kick Uncle Sam in the teeth at Geneva.

There was never a good reason to believe any of Putin’s talk of peace and cooperation. After the Cold War, America and its allies jammed NATO expansion down Russia’s throat. The European Union worked to expand right up to Russia’s frontiers while making it crystal clear that Russia could never be a member. Putin is no Hitler, but neither is he a Konrad Adenauer, determined to accept defeat and to cooperate wholeheartedly in building his country’s future within the lines drawn by the victors. And the US made Adenauer’s Germany a much better offer than it made Putin’s Russia. You would have to be living in what the Germans call das Wolkenkuckkucksheim, cloud-cuckoo-land, to believe that a man like Putin would passively accept the post-Cold War order. 

But cloud-cuckoo-land is exactly where many westerners live, in a resolutely post-historical world where foreign policy is about development, human rights, non-proliferation and trade. If Putin tells us he lives there too, we are hungry to believe him. We don’t want to live in a difficult world. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were having a fabulous time in cloud-cuckoo-land back in the 1930s and many of them clung to their illusions until the last possible moment. We want to live in a stable and secure world order but we don’t want to make the sacrifices world order requires—and so we will gaze deeply into the eyes of anybody who is willing to tell us what we most want to hear.

Hitler’s situation was like Putin’s in another way. Like Russia now, Germany in the 1930s was weaker than its western opponents, but its leader had much more power to change course. Hitler’s Germany was an opportunistic predator; it could move quickly, change direction on a dime, and lay plans in secret. His western opponents ran democratic governments where everything moved very slowly, secrets were regularly published in the press and big foreign policy moves were telegraphed well in advance. Hitler used what he had, and took advantage of his supreme personal power and control of the press to make Germany a much more aggressive and dynamic international actor than his lazy, contented and slow-moving opponents. Hitler could move at speed that made his rivals’ heads spin and frequently left them gaping in flat footed amazement at his quick strikes and rapid changes of course. He knew that surprise was one of his chief advantages and he used it to the hilt. 

President Putin is not a stupid man. He knows that Russia faces stronger but slower moving opponents. He knows that deception, misdirection and surprise are among his most effective tools. We must expect him to use them often and to use them well. The west ended up looking utterly flatfooted and clueless as Putin moved into Crimea just as it did in 2008 when he moved into Georgia. That is the way Russia wants it.

This use of surprise, by the way, can be very far reaching. Hitler stunned the west by signing his famous non-aggression pact with Stalin, dividing eastern Europe between them. He then surprised Stalin again by attacking him in June of 1941. For people like Hitler and, in his very different way, Putin, blitzkrieg is a tactic for diplomacy and not just for war. We would be total fools not to suppose that Putin and his closest associates are looking for game changing diplomatic moves that would spoil America’s day. 

Putin is using another one of Hitler’s favorite methods in Ukraine: turn your ethnic minorities in other countries into a Trojan horse— whether or not that is what those people actually want. Hitler did this with the Sudeten Germans in what is now the Czech Republic. The FT again:

Russia said on Saturday it was looking at requests for help from civilians in Ukraine, a statement which appeared to resemble those made two weeks ago in justification of its military incursion into Crimea. 

“Russia is receiving numerous requests for protecting civilians. These requests will be given consideration,” the foreign ministry said. It added a string of claims that Ukrainian militants and mercenaries were threatening civilians, which could not immediately be verified. 

There is nothing here that couldn’t have been taken directly out of Adolf’s Guide for Aspiring Hegemons.

Using another instrument that Putin shares with the German, a well tuned, centrally controlled and well funded state propaganda machine with international outlets, you then elevate the ‘mistreatment’ of that minority into a major issue. You scream and rant and rave, demand redress, and fill the airwaves with your warnings and your laments. You can always organize at least some of them to march and wave flags. When the other country’s police (or, better yet, angry counter-mobs) respond, you raise the temperature. Oppression! Murder! Genocide! 

It worked for Hitler in the Munich crisis, and it is exactly the card Putin has played in Crimea and perhaps will play in other parts of the ex-Soviet space. After using the German minority in Czechoslovakia as a tool, Hitler gave the west a brief respite (more soft talk about peace) before turning to his next target: Poland. Once again, it was the German minority that gave him his opening. Polish thugs were trampling on their rights. Their protests were being crushed by heartless barbarians. Babies were being ripped from their mothers’ wombs by bloodthirsty Polish mobs. Whatever.

Again, it was Hitler’s propagandist Goebbels who taught the world an important lesson: when you lie, go big. This has been exactly what Russian propaganda over Ukraine has done. And if it works here, we can expect to see the same kind of thing tried elsewhere: in Central Asia, perhaps, when Putin decides the time has come to reunite the Russian motherland with the gas and oil wealth of countries like Kazakhstan. The Baltic republics, already familiar with Putin’s play of the Russian minority card, are braced for more trouble, and well they should be. 

This is why the latest news from eastern Ukraine is so ominous: in the Adolf Hitler playbook, stirring up ethnic strife is something you do when the time has come to intervene. If Putin’s plan was to send troops into eastern Ukraine, we’d see Russian speakers in the streets protesting, sometimes with violence, and demanding ‘protection’.  “Defending Russian nationals from fascist mobs when the Ukrainian government is unwilling or unable to do so” is just the kind of fig leaf Putin needs; as of today, he’s got it.

But when dealing with a calculating player who has read people like Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, studied under the grandmasters of the old KGB and knows how Adolf did it, we shouldn’t be too confident that we know what’s coming next. Deception, disinformation and disguise are vital to Putin’s kind of foreign policy, and it is very much in his interest to keep us off-base and baffled as much as he can. With that caveat, it’s worth noting what the three likeliest alternatives are. 

First, the violence could be a preparation for an invasion that has already been decided in the Kremlin. This is unlikely to happen before the referendum in Crimea — Russia won’t want to upstage its own propaganda spectacle. Let a thumping majority (however acquired) vote for annexation, and then more violence takes place in eastern Ukraine… then boom. More riots, more incursions, more referendums.

Second, it could be that no invasion is intended or wanted at this time. Instead, Russia wants both to demonstrate its power to create crises inside Ukraine and to make the country as ungovernable as possible. A number of western commentators have been consoling themselves with the ‘Putin is trapped’ approach to Ukraine, but looking at the west’s situation the trap may be on our end. We are the ones who now have some kind of obligation to keep Ukraine’s corrupt and incompetent government alive and to keep its chronically lame, oligarch-dominated economy from withering away. We are also the ones who will be blamed if (when) economic miracles fail to occur. 

We can also be blackmailed. Are we going to pay Gazprom’s outrageous gas bill for Ukraine, or are we going to let the country freeze in the dark next winter? If the West has taken on the role of paymaster and protector of the Ukrainian state, do we expect Putin to make this any cheaper or easier for us?

 Meanwhile, unrest in the east can make Ukraine a much, much more expensive and difficult client for the west — and also increases the nervousness in the Baltic republics and former Warsaw Pact countries. Putin may think that a destabilized Ukraine where he can stir the pot at will is a pretty good thing for Russia — and he can quietly wait to see what develops as he plans his next steps. If nothing else, Ukraine’s is going to make people in places like Kazakhstan pay a lot more attention to Russia’s wishes than before. Let Ukraine simmer and flip your Soviet reconstruction focus to the east. The west didn’t lift a finger to protect Ukraine; the Kazhaks and others will feel very much left alone in a small room with a large bear.

Third, it’s also possible that Moscow is moving opportunistically. It may not have a long term plan, but sees the advantages of stirring things up in eastern Ukraine. Scaring Ukraine and the west is a good thing in itself. And who knows— it may turn out that further opportunities develop. 

Any one of these scenarios is plausible, and any one of them offers Putin the prospect of a clear, prestige-enhancing win. The second two look like the smartest plays from the Kremlin’s point of view, but the west would be foolish to assume that Putin calculates the odds in the same ways we do.

We must hope that western leaders finally wake up to the nature of the opponent they face. Putin, I say again, is no Hitler. He isn’t as powerful as Hitler and he isn’t as evil as Hitler. Compared to Stalin, he’s a choirboy. But he’s a smart and able adversary of the west who believes that world politics is a zero sum game. He believes that Russia can only survive and thrive by reconstitution a great power between China and Germany, and that this can only be done by rolling back the post-Cold War expansion of western power across the old Warsaw Pact and the former Soviet Union. 

Dealing effectively with Putin doesn’t require a new Cold War. American foreign policy doesn’t have to become, and shouldn’t become Russo-centric. But unless we take counsel with our allies and put the kind of intellectual and political energy into blocking Russian moves that Russia puts into thinking them through and making them, the world will become a significantly uglier place and it will be much harder to get some important things done.

The biggest cost to Putin of his Crimean adventure may not be the western sanctions, but rather the way that his Ukraine policy makes it harder for him to go back to gulling a complacent west. Not that he won’t try. Once he’s taken as much of Ukraine as he thinks he can get at this point, he is likely to launch a peace offensive, aiming to separate the Germans and the other Europeans from the Americans and let time weaken the outrage that now rolls through the west. Unfortunately, there will be people who are ready to be gulled yet again, but the quick vision the world has seen of the real nature of Putin’s policy and his ruthlessness will make at least some of the people harder to fool once more.

Drop Dead, Insane McVain!

'I will say to my friends who were objecting to this – and there are a number of them on my side – you can call yourself Republicans; that’s fine because that’s your voter registration. Don’t call yourself Reagan Republicans. Ronald Reagan would never – would never – let this kind of aggression go responded to by the American people.'

- Senator John McCain, Senate floor, 14 March 2014

Fuck off and die already, Insane McVain. It is the IMF ‘fix’ that is irrelevant to the Ukrainian aid package, which has already been passed by the House. It was the White House that insisted on the IMF ‘fix’ being attached. Obama has been trying to get it through since 2010 to no avail. He figured that he would attach it to the Ukraine package because no way people like you would say no and, right on cue, you stand up and condemn your own party. He plays you like a Stradivarius. 

You are a disgrace and I truly wish that you would either retire or die. You are vile and make me physically ill. I am absolutely disgusted every time I hear your name or see your face.

You are not content only to be a nasty piece of work either.  You have to be a dead wrong one, too.

A history lesson courtesy of Dan Drezner:

Daniel W. Drezner @dandrezner 

It's true, kids.  When Poland cracked down on Solidarity, Reagan immediately dispatched the 82nd Airborne to Warsaw.  Wait... #ReaganFP

Daniel W. Drezner @dandrezner

It's true, kids.  When the Soviets shot down KAL 007, Reagan immediately tightened CoCom sanctions against the USSR.  Wait... #ReaganFP

Daniel W. Drezner @dandrezner

 

It's true, kids.  When terrorists seized TWA flight 847, Reagan absolutely refused to negotiate the release of hostages.  Wait... #ReaganFP

Daniel W. Drezner @dandrezner

 

It's true, kids.  When Hezbollah took U.S. citizens hostage and then suicide-bombed Marines, Reagan stood firm in Beirut.   Wait... #ReaganFP

Daniel W. Drezner @dandrezner

 

It's true, kids.   My point with the #ReaganFP tweets is not to bash Reagan.  My point is that Reagan would've bashed Russia on Crimea and then... tolerated it.

Can anyone envision Ronald Reagan arm-in-arm with al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists?

 

Me neither.

'The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime.  And eventually, Russians will come for Mr. Putin in the same way and for the same reasons that Ukrainians came for Viktor F. Yanukovych.'

- Senator John McCain, Obama Has Made America Look Weak, The New York Times, 14 March 2014

Well, then, that settles it. ‘President’ Putin will die an old man and receive a state funeral on a scale approaching that given to Kim Jong-il. McCain is becoming as good a prognosticator as Biden.  Unfortunately, McCain doesn't even have Biden's 'Aw shucks and malarkey' charm.  He's just an angry, spiteful, resentful, vain, and hateful person, who reserves his most vicious venom for those that are, obstensibly, on his 'side.'

It's unbelievable that he was the presidential nominee of any major American political party only 6 years ago.

Sir, you are no Ronald Reagan.