Excellent piece on Real Clear Politics (a Hugh Hewitt interview of David Sacks) showing the stupidity of the “Putin is Hitler” argument. Let me add a couple of points. Anyone who has done even a cursory examination of the relevant history knows that Hitler always intended to engage in a war of conquest in the East. Hitler said so in his books … that lebensraum thing.
Also we now know that Germany’s economic position in 1941 left it no choice but to attack the Soviet Union. Hitler’s socialist economic policies had wrecked the German economy by the late 1930s … which explains the timing of the invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Add to that the British blockade and Germany was on the brink of economic collapse in 1941. There was no choice but to go East at that point … to the Soviet Union where the oil and the food was.
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland were all stepping-stones to the ultimate objective … the invasion of the Soviet Union. France had to be dealt with before the Soviet Union in order to avoid a repeat of World War One’s two-front war.
The situation in Ukraine today is in no way analogous to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland in the late 1930s. There is zero evidence that the invasion of Ukraine is a stepping-stone to westward expansion. The “evidence” presented by the warmongers is simply shrieking that “Putin is Hitler” and that anyone who does not support war against Russia has fallen for “Russian disinformation” and/or is a Putin supporter … which is NOT evidence in the least. Rather, it is uncontrolled hysteria/rage or LIES to justify their forever-war fetish.
From the interview:
HUGH HEWITT: I think if Winston Churchill could channel in right now, he would say you’re forgetting the Sudetenland, you’re forgetting the Anschluss, you’re forgetting Munich, David. You’re forgetting everything I tried to warn Neville about, and before him, Stanley Baldwin. How would you respond to that ghost?
DAVID SACKS: Well, I mean, this is always the neocon argument, is that it’s always 1938 and our enemy is always Hitler–
HEWITT: I’m not a neocon, I’m a Reagan conservative!
SACKS: Okay, well, let’s just say that this is always the argument that you hear, is that it’s always 1938, that our enemy is always Hitler, and engaging in any diplomacy whatsoever would be akin to appeasement, and you’re Neville Chamberlain. And so this is what I’ve been hearing throughout this war. And what I would just say is that every historical circumstance is different. I think, you know, I’m very familiar with what happened in World War II and what led up to it, and I just think that the situation we have today really bears no resemblance to that.
I don’t think the idea that Putin is Hitler is a serious argument. I don’t think that this is primarily a war of conquest. I think the cause, the causes of this war have been known for decades, which mainly has to do with Russian security concerns which the West continuously ignored. We ignored the advice of George Kennan in the 1990s in bringing NATO right up to Russia’s door. He predicted that would be a tragic mistake that would end in hostilities. We ignored the advice of our own ambassador to Moscow in 2008, Bill Burns, who is now the CIA director, who told us that expanding NATO to Ukraine was a red line for the Russians, not just Putin, but the entire Russian elite. It was absolutely a red line for Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as various liberal reformers inside of Russia. We ignored the advice of Kissinger and Mearsheimer, Professor Mearsheimer in 2014 who warned us we were headed for this war unless we agree to make Ukraine a neutral country.
And instead, we ignored all of this advice for many years, and we persisted in this crusade to bring Ukraine into NATO and basically turn it into a giant military base on Russia’s most vulnerable border. And not surprisingly, Russia reacted quite negatively to this, as was predicted many times over the years by all the experts I mentioned, including many others.
