Gorby, Putin, and Gaslighting
Mikhail Gorbachev, the current situation in Ukraine, and Tucker Carlson
So I was just intending to write a nice, peaceful column of reminiscences, inspired by my 50th high school reunion (in August) and my mother’s 90th birthday (in September). But the events in Ukraine have messed up my plans for this column.
Gorby’s disputed heroics
On August 30, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union (1985-91), passed away. Gorbachev represented one of the saddest sites of my lifetime: a man of above-average intelligence who was a true believer in the Communist system. Perhaps because of his biases, he believed that he could give Eastern Europe and the other Soviet states freedom from the oppressive military dictatorship run by the Soviet Communist Party yet still retain them as part of the Soviet Empire. Instead, his policies of glasnost (“openness” in Russian) and perestroika (“restructuring”), which he intended as ways to make life in the Soviet Empire less onerous, were two of the three primary tools that led to the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
Instead of reducing unrest, glasnost and perestroika led common citizens to realize just how oppressive Soviet rule was. From the Baltic states to Bulgaria, the last pre-Soviet governments that most of the oppressed Eastern Europeans had remembered was the Nazi terror of 1938-45. And Soviet leaders had made it an obsession to remind their citizens continually that the Soviet Union was all that stood between them and a return of the Nazi terror. That was, of course, stupid, but Eastern Europeans weren’t really in any position to know that, outside of occasional Radio Free Europe broadcasts. But glasnost and perestroika made it clear to a very large subset of Eastern Europeans that the closest thing in the world to the Nazis resided in Moscow, not in Washington and London.
Of course, East Germans and Poles in Silesia and Pomerania (which were part of Germany proper until 1945) generally already knew that, because they generally had some form of contact with the West — which explains why the Polish anti-Communist labor movement Solidarity arose in Gdansk, or, as it was known before 1945, when it was first a key German city and then an “open” city under League of Nations control (despite being 95% ethnically German), Danzig. But the Soviets went to great lengths to hide just how big the gap had grown prior to glasnost.
And yet perestroika was perhaps even more destabilizing to the Soviet bloc. By permitting foreign trade and the creation of non-government businesses, people in the Soviet Bloc began to actually see, not just hear, just how far behind the West they had fallen in the 40 years since the end of WWII. Towns like Wadowice, Poland, had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WWI, just before the birth of Pope John Paul II there in 1920. And yet while Austria had accelerated into a new industrial era since its reunification in 1955, Wadowice had largely remained stuck in the 1940s for 40 years. Gorbachev was smart enough to realize that things had to change, but glasnost and perestroika only emphasized how far behind the Soviet bloc had fallen.
More importantly, when the Eastern Europeans began agitating for more Western freedoms, Gorbachev refused to call out the tanks and troops to suppress them. Consistent with his beliefs, he thought that doing that would be hypocritical and would betray his commitment to a more open system. This was a great act, but even after his death, a number of people whose opinions I respect refused to give him due credit for this, such as Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch:
[Gorbachev] wanted to keep the Soviet Union intact; he just wanted to modernize it. He was more akin to Deng Xiaoping or China’s current ruler, Xi Jinping, than Walesa or Vaclav Havel or Natan Sharansky (whom Gorbachev considered a filthy traitor). The key difference between Gorbachev and his Chinese analogues isn’t that he loved democracy and freedom more, but that he wasn’t as capable as them.
Saying that Gorbachev liberated Eastern Europe is like saying an incompetent warden liberated his prisoners when he failed in his effort to spruce up the prison. We can acknowledge that the warden’s efforts were laudable given the context and we can even credit his refusal to murder the escapees in an effort to cover up his mess. But refusing to commit mass murder deserves an A+ only when the rest of the classroom is full of mass murderers. As [former Solidarity head Lech] Walesa said to [National Review columnist Jay] Nordlinger, “Every male has the instrument of rape. Should we all be awarded Nobel prizes for not raping?”
This is stupid, and Goldberg should know better than this. The class of totalitarian dictators in the 20th and 21st century was indeed filled with mass murderers, from Stalin to Adolf Hitler to Mao Zedong to Castro to Idi Amin to Leonid Brezhnev to Pol Pot to a lot more villains who committed smaller-scale mass murders. How many of these tinhorn dictators refused to commit mass murder to prop up their systems? Exactly one, Gorbachev, and he came from an empire with a longstanding tradition of using armed mass murder to suppress uprisings (from the 1920s and 1930s to 1956 and 1968).
The point that Goldberg is trying to make is that Gorbachev didn’t give the Eastern Europeans their freedom; they took it, with support from the United States under the Reagan and Bush administrations. That may be true, but it still does not happen without Gorbachev, who was indispensable as the leader who allowed this to happen instead of using the Soviet military to crush it (or threaten WWIII).
In the exact same time frame, Chinese dictator Deng Xiaoping was faced with Chinese voices who wanted freedom from the totalitarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party. How did Deng respond? Tiananmen Square. And the U.S. did nothing, because it would have been tantamount to a declaration of war to intervene.
Perhaps, as some believe, Deng only used troops to crush the disturbance because he would have been forced out of power otherwise (I admit to being one of the believers in that theory). But Gorbachev was willing to accept the risk of being forced out — as indeed he was by a failed coup in 1991. For a long time, there was a belief that a Communist revival would lead to Gorbachev’s execution, but that was a risk that he voluntarily assumed. And maybe it would have, if he hadn’t cooperated with Vladimir Putin’s totalitarian regime for the last twenty years . . . but that didn’t overshadow Gorbachev’s real achievements when he had the power to accomplish them.
Perhaps Deng should be remembered as a hero for everything he did to bring China out of the medieval realm and into the 20th century economic world order — but Tiananmen Square more than offsets that. Gorbachev, on the other hand, couldn’t bring Russia into the economic world order, in part due to the corruption of his successors Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, but he allowed the rest of the Soviet bloc to escape that failed empire. Clearly that wasn’t his intent, but he also didn’t prevent it, and he could have done so. Pretending — and stating openly — that such an achievement is meaningless reflects an indifference to — or maybe even an isolation from — reality.
Eight years in Ukraine: a retrospective summary
One of the saddest things about the long-running war in Ukraine (which has been going since 2014) is that it happened at all. After a six-year interruption, Sauron — uh, Vladimir Putin — had just managed to insert his Uruk-Hai chieftain — uh, Viktor Yanukovych — into the top position in Kyiv (or Kiev in Russian) (Ukrainian president), with the objective of re-creating Peter the Great’s Czarist domain of “all Rus’”, made up of Russia (Great Rus’), Ukraine (Little Rus’). and Belarus (White Rus’), except with Putin as the new Czar. Except for the six years after the Orange Revolution in 2004, Ukraine had been ruled by a native Russophone (Russian-speaker) since independence. And now both Ukraine and Belarus were run by Putin puppets (you could even see the attached strings). Now, Yanukovych ran on a platform that pledged to create an alliance for Ukraine with the European Union, not with Russia, but, as Putin might have said, words aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Really, all Putin needed to do was have Yanukovych pretend to still be pursuing an alliance for Ukraine with the European Union (which the majority of the people wanted, because the EU was so much wealthier than Ukraine — or Russia) while continuing to make under-the-table sellouts of Ukrainian independence to his master back in Moscow. After all, the EU had actually offered the alliance, and it would have been no trouble for Yanukovych to agree to it while secretly undermining with and building an argument for an alliance with his boss in the Kremlin. Putin himself had already been doing the same thing with the West for a decade.
But Putin wanted more bang for the buck, and he had Yanukovych give a well-publicized blowoff to the EU and instead agree to an alliance with Russia, so the rest of the world would notice. And it did.
But so did the Ukrainian people. Putin and his pawns had already gone too far to bluff the populace about his desired endgame, and Putin was still feeling the “high” from gaining control over Ukraine and recreating the Russian Empire — but the Ukrainian people overthrew Yanukovych as a result.
And this was the key blunder by Putin. Had Putin just waited, the corruption inherent in all of the post-Soviet Ukrainian governments likely would have produced a quick shift in sentiment among the people and given a Putin puppet a second chance to rule in the near future. Most Ukrainians spoke Russian and had a high opinion of Putin (except for the regions around Kyiv and Lviv). A strategic thinker, as Putin’s toadies believe that Vlad is, would have played the long game and likely won, because new Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko didm’t have a bloc supporting him and was likely to be a one-termer.
But perhaps Putin was influenced by Gorbachev’s attempt — and failure — to play the long game in Eastern Europe, which resulted in the loss of the Soviet Bloc. So NOOO — Putin decided that he had to invade Ukraine, using force to try to quash any desire among the populace to escape Russia’s orbit, despite the fact that Russia had formally pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity twenty years prior. He succeeded in seizing Crimea and the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk, although he had to commit the main Russian army to the invasion to stop the ragtag Ukrainian troops from recapturing Donetsk, thus producing a stalemate.
Despite that stalemate, it was taken for granted in both Moscow and Kyiv that Putin could seize the rest of Ukraine if he wanted, and international political neophytes and know-nothings like Donnie from Queens thought that Putin already had struck a killer blow to Ukraine, telling CPAC 2014 (beginning at the 8-minute mark) that Putin had taken all the wealth (and the ‘heart and soul”) of Ukraine by taking Crimea — and the rest of Ukraine would collapse from within. Perhaps Putin believed that too. However, it was false, like most of Donnie from Queens’ rantings.
As Liz Cheney said: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor [for following him] will remain.”
But the war produced a marked shift in relations between Russia and Ukraine. Speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian now became a patriotic gesture within Ukraine — and a sign of defiance toward Russia. As a result, the relationship between the two countries underwent a huge shift, as Ukrainians who had always looked upon Russians as brother Slavs began to accept that Russians (or, at least, Russian leaders) did not reciprocate the feeling and saw them as an inferior group that deserved only to be conquered, crushed, and subjugated.
As a result, the new Kyiv government placed a priority on acquiring defensive weapons, and the primary place to obtain them was the United States. Despite many attempts by Putin pals to stall weapon shipments from the U.S., the shipments went on. And even though a new Ukrainian government was elected in 2019, led by an apolitical Russophone actor and comic (Volodymyr Zelenskyy), it proved no more willing to “bend the knee” and acknowledge Russia’s paramount authority over Ukraine than its predecessor — a direct result of the political shifts in Ukraine since 2014.
Russia invaded Ukraine from Russia, Belarus, and Crimea over six months ago, intending for a blitzkrieg victory over the Kyiv government and the creation of a new puppet state. When the invasion began on 24 February 2022, Russian propagandists had already written the narrative for the quick subjugation, proclaiming Russia’s re-emergence as a dominant world power opposed to Pax Americana, and they published it in the main Russian propaganda paper on 26 February, apparently expecting that Ukraine would fold like Poland did in September 1939, when it was simultaneously attacked by both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Yet Zelenskyy refused to flee when the U.S. offered to evacuate him after the invasion, responding with the classic line, “I need ammunition, not a ride”, and after six weeks, the blitz ended in stalemate.
Sinking the Moskva may have been an early highlight for Ukraine, but soon Russia ended up pulling its war-criminal troops out of the area around Kyiv and moving them to the eastern front in the Luhansk and Donbas regions. Russia then refocused its activities on an artillery and rocket war of attrition there, which proved to be very slow (costing Putin his goal of significant success by 9 May) but largely successful, symbolized by the fall of Mariupol and fall of Izium . . . but the longer the war dragged on, the more military weaponry and support came to Ukraine from its Western allies. Ukraine was able to use that weaponry and aid to pull off attacks on Russian troops and bases in Crimea.
Ukraine then very publicly announced its plans to liberate Kherson, the largest town that had been captured by the Russians (out of Crimea) in the current series of attacks — and one that Russia had planned to annex to Crimea in another fake annexation “vote” so popular with international criminals like Putin. A series of attacks had moved the front closer to Kherson, consistent with the announced plans. As a result, Russia moved troops from the Donbas and Luhansk regions to the Kherson area to defend against this attack.
And that leads to the present situation: the biggest shock in the war so far. While all of the Russian (and world) attention was focused on the Kherson area in Ukraine’s south central region, Ukraine launched a huge counterattack in the Kharkiv regions, close to the Russian border in Ukraine’s northeast last week. Initial reports said that Ukraine’s aim was to “increase pressure on Izium”, but just a couple of days later, Ukraine had completely liberated the city of Izium AND the cities of Balakliya and Kupiansk from Russian control, were on the verge of pushing Russia out of the Kharkiv region entirely . . . and many of the defending Russian troops either fled or surrendered.
The current battlefront centers around the town of Lyman in the Donetsk region, which Russia captured in late May and has held for about four months, as well as the neighboring areas of Luhansk, from which the Russians have reportedly already fled. Ukrainian success is far from guaranteed, but the success of this advance so far has reopened questions about the possibility of a complete collapse of the Russian army.
In going back through old columns on Salida, it appears that I basically stopped writing about Ukraine around the three-month anniversary, and much of the world took a similar approach, perhaps believing that Russia’s new emphasis on destroying Ukrainian infrastructure and creating an enormous rebuilding cost for Ukraine would ultimately work in the long term. I know I was worried about that, as well other Ukraine-sympathetic columnists such as David French of The Dispatch.
In a column on May 31 titled “The Tide Is Turning Toward Russia”, French notes that Russia’s infrastructure destruction is:
a deeply demoralizing form of warfare. It’s hell to endure, and if you don’t have the equivalent capacity to strike back, resistance can begin to feel futile. Ukraine’s challenge can be described with three simple statements.
Russia is playing by its rules now. This is the most obvious point, but it’s worth repeating how much the current fight matches Russian strengths while the initial fight amplified its weaknesses. . . .
Russia can fight like this for a long time. Russia may have hoped for a quick victory, but it can blockade the Ukrainian coast and shell Ukrainian troops for a very long time. Russia has massive ammunition stocks, and manufacturing more artillery pieces and producing more shells is likely well within Russian industrial capacity. . . .
Ukraine has no clear path forward. At this point, American military assistance is critical to keeping Ukraine in the fight, but it’s unclear that we’ll be able to equip (much less train) the Ukrainian military with the weapons that can win the war and drive Russia from Ukrainian soil.
The current change in the war has disproved these points. First, Russia is no longer playing by its rules and slowly grinding up Ukrainian opposition. The Russians, of course, claimed that they were “regrouping”, and they most likely were, because they lost over 3,000 square miles of previously occupied Ukrainian territory in less than two weeks — which is forcing the Ukrainian advance to slow down in order to deal with any “booby traps” left behind by the fleeing would-be conquerors and to round up Ukrainian quislings who collaborated with the Russians. Retired U.S. Army general Mark Hertling summarized this slowdown thusly:
Don't go too far, too fast, without thinking about everyone that's trying to keep up (artillery, intelligence, fuel, ammo, supplies).
But the Russian flight also left behind large quantities of heavy equipment and ammunition, which wouldn’t have happened in a “regrouping”.
Second, Russia may not be able to fight like this for a long time, contrary to expectations. According to U.S. intelligence, Russia now is purchasing “millions” of artillery shells, rockets, and ammunition from North Korea, as well as drones from Iran, leading to the very real possibility that Russia’s supply chains have broken and it has been forced to fall back on the help provided by the rest of the “Axis of Evil”, as so dubbed by George W. Bush.
And third, Ukraine does seem to have a path forward. As this offensive has shown so far, it may actually be possible to wipe the invaders from Russian soil. Yes, it has cost a huge amount in Ukrainian blood and buildings, but it now appears that the heavy losses from the conflict have brought the Russian military closer to the breaking point than the Ukrainian military.
And more importantly, the quisling Ukrainians in the currently-occupied areas of Ukraine, who have been helping the Russian oppressors in return for their individual advancement, now have to worry about saving their own necks if the Ukrainian advance continues. If Ukraine recaptures their territory, the possibility exists that anyone whose life was ruined or even just disrupted will seek revenge; formal prosecution by the Ukrainian government likely would be preferable to the street justice handed out to such quislings (including to any local women who may have become involved with Russian occupying troops).
Of course, even though the U.S. reports that aerial surveillance has noted large-scale flight of Russian troops from these areas back into Russia, there are likely at least hundreds if not thousands of Russian prisoners of war, who require guarding and food, which presents a new logistical challenge to the Ukrainians. But that challenge should not prove insurmountable to Ukraine.
In light of the new development, French, a Harvard Law grad who is also a former Army major and served in Iraq, has written two recent columns about the turn of events. The first remained pessimistic about the Ukrainian path forward. The second notes that Ukraine has overcome that barrier — but focuses on both the new isolationist Trumpist strain in the “RINO American Party” (the GOP, which still carries the name “Republican” but actually advocates the religious, populist, and xenophobic policies that previously distinguished the American Party (also called the “Know-Nothings”)) that opposes continuing to help Ukraine, as well as the gaslighting taking place in the pro-”RINO American Party” media, which seems to be centered around Tucker Carlson and his usual gang of idiots.
Gaslighting for Fun and Profit
“Gaslighting” is a term derived from the 1940 British and especially the 1944 American movie adaptations (both titled Gaslight) of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light. In the story, the male lead is committed to driving his wife insane in order to locate and steal hidden jewelry from her, and so he repeatedly engages in both verbal abuse and physical trickery to increase her anxiety and undermine her confidence. In common parlance, according to Wikipedia, the term is “used to describe a person (a ‘gaslighter’) who presents a false narrative to another group or person, thereby leading them to doubt their perceptions and become misled, disoriented or distressed.”
I have no idea what other possible term could be used to describe a person who presents this report two weeks ago
. . . and then follows it up with this report last week . . .
But of course. . . .
I have no idea if this is deliberate gaslighting to boost Russian support among the mental midgets and quislings who believe anything Tucker says . . . or whether Tucker is just spewing the garbage that The Former Guy wants to hear. But this is simply indefensible to any sane person, which (of course) leaves out most of Tucker’s viewers.
Russia has been launching indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks into Ukrainian residential neighborhoods in its own revenge for the battlefield setbacks. We can be hope that Russia loses, and the rest of the world forces Russia to pay reparations for all of the destruction it has caused in Ukraine. But there is no sense in hoping that Tucker Carlson gets cancelled, because, as the paraphrase of H.L. Mencken’s old saying goes, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Tucker’s private jet is safe for now.
Be seeing you.