Is Putin the new Hitler?

Some similarly dangerous chain of events seems to me to be unfolding in the Ukraine, where Russia’s Vladimir Putin — threatened by a democratic revolt on his doorstep — has seized control of the Crimea and seems intent on biting off more territory. Perusing the arts sections of the New York Times and the Inquirer these past few months — not to mention BSR — I can’t help wondering: If Hitler came back, would we aesthetes recognize him? Or would we confine ourselves to our cultural cocoons until a real war started, inspiring us to create new anti-war classics to rival All Quiet On the Western Front or Guernica or The Naked and the Dead? Why are artists and writers so eloquent about the horrors of war after the fact, and so unwilling to foresee it beforehand?

Yes, I know. Putin may not be the second coming of Hitler. But he sure seems to be following Hitler’s playbook.

Legitimate complaints

• Hitler took Germany’s defeat in World War I as a personal humiliation; Putin took the downfall of the Soviet Union as a personal humiliation.
• Hitler seized on a legitimate German complaint: the unduly harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. Putin has seized on a legitimate Russian complaint: the West’s tendency to treat Russia as a defeated enemy after Russians courageously overthrew their own Soviet masters in 1991.
• Hitler claimed to protect persecuted Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland; Putin claims to protect persecuted Russians in Ukraine.
• In 1936 Hitler violated the Treaty of Locarno, which 11 years earlier had demilitarized the German lands west of the Rhine in exchange for the withdrawal of Allied troops; Putin violated the Budapest Memorandum, which 20 years earlier guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity (including the Crimea) in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear weapons.

Soldiers in disguise

• Hitler scapegoated Jews for political purposes; Putin’s government in Moscow is whipping up anti-Semitism for political purposes (falsely claiming, for example, that Ukrainian leaders are Jewish) while simultaneously denouncing the Ukrainian government as “neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites.”
• Hitler disguised German soldiers as Polish soldiers attacking a German radio station as his pretext for invading Poland in 1939; Putin has dispatched undercover Russian operatives, posing as “pro-Russian activists,” to take over the Crimea as well as public buildings in eastern Ukraine.
• Hitler utilized an aggressive disinformation campaign to stir hatred and fear against his country’s perceived enemies; Putin has done much the same thing. (Among my favorites: The Russian government has faked stories of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Russia, using footage of a border crossing between Ukraine and Poland.)
• Hitler demonized and silenced his critics; so has Putin. When a Russian historian, Andrei Zubov, cited a speech by Hitler that was strikingly similar to Putin’s rhetoric when he addressed the nation after annexing Crimea, Zubov was fired from his teaching position for writing articles that “contradict Russia’s foreign policy and inflict careless, irresponsible criticism on the actions of the state.”

Hitler’s bluff

Of course, Hitler himself might not have become Hitler if the free world had stood up to him sooner. When Hitler sent a token military force into the Rhineland in 1936, in violation of the Locarno Treaty, his defense minister, General Werner von Blomberg, gave orders for the troops to withdraw should the French oppose them. “That almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler,” William Shirer remarked in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — a judgment with which Hitler himself concurred.

“A retreat on our part,” Hitler conceded later, as reported by his interpreter Paul Schmidt, “would have spelled collapse. . . .The 48 hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-wracking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”

But the French never made the slightest move. French diplomats did fly to London to seek Britain’s support for a joint military action. But Britain’s Lord Lathian refused. “The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden,” he explained, sounding much like today’s Western observers who accept Putin’s claim that Crimea and even eastern Ukraine have really been Russian lands all along.

Lord Lathian changed his mind after the Munich Pact granted Hitler entrée to Czechoslovakia in 1938. But by then Hitler was not so easily squelched. Hitler’s Rhineland gamble, Shirer observes, “fortified Hitler’s popularity and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed.” Shirer might have said the same about Putin’s gambit in Crimea. Plus ça change…

I’m not advocating a military response to Putin’s stealth aggression in Ukraine. As George W. Bush most recently demonstrated, war invariably creates more problems than it solves. I am suggesting that the creative classes look beyond “their own back garden” and utilize their imaginations to come up with some effective nonmilitary response to aggression. Otherwise the problem will pop up in our own gardens soon enough.

To read a follow-up by Dan Rottenberg, click here.