Hegseth the Pétainiste

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy over the weekend to deliver a D-Day speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he used the occasion—ostensibly commemorating the time U.S. troops liberated Europe from fascism—to pointedly amplify the talking points of European fascists. 

Specifically, he implied that non-white immigrants to the continent are "invaders." Today, he said, "different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

What fascinates me about this is what a clumsy and inept metaphor it really is. On D-Day, after all, it was the U.S. military that was landing boats on the European shore. So, we were like the migrants, in this metaphor? What "dangerous ideologies" were we bringing? Democracy? Anti-fascism? 

Perhaps this was no slip. Perhaps the way Hegseth sees it ,the fascists who had taken control of the continent were the real indigenous Europeans, and we—seeking to liberate Europe and restore democracy—were indeed the "invaders." 

But whatever. No surprises here. Hegseth is a white nationalist who sees non-white Europeans as a threat to civilization and appears to agree with the European neo-Nazis who urge "remigration" a.k.a. ethnic cleansing for all non-white people on the continent.  

Instead of being refugees displaced by wars and persecution—much of which Hegseth's own government has helped contribute to or exacerbate—they are to be cast as subhuman "invaders" and monsters. What else is new? It's not like we've never heard this from Hegseth or this administration before.

Hegseth's speech was striking, though, for what it left out, as much as for what it implied. 

You'd never guess from Hegseth's ranting about migrant "invaders," after all, that there is an actual great power that recently invaded a democratic country on Europe's doorstep, setting off the largest land war in the continent's 21st century history. 

I'm talking about Putin of course. Remember him? And how he's currently, as we speak, still bombing and attacking Ukraine? 

If we were going to talk about "invaders" of European democracy, might we not have spared a word for Russia's full-scale invasion of a democratic European country, which is ongoing? 

But no, of course not. Trump and his goons have a not-so-subtle admiration for Putin, seeing him as a white nationalist avatar. The real enemy, as they see it, comes from democracy and liberalism, which has permitted the "mass migration" of non-white people to the continent. 

This is of course precisely the ideology of the Vichy regime from which American troops strove to liberate France in the Normandy landing. Ironic, perhaps, to hear it from a representative of the U.S. government in a D-Day speech... 

The Vichy collaborationists too, after all—as Arthur Koestler shows in Scum of the Earth—sought to deflect blame from Hitler (the actual "invader" of France) by blaming the country's defeat on "dirty foreigners"—the sales métèques who served as an all-purpose scapegoat, in Koestler's telling, and among whom all refugees were lumped. 

And so, like Marshal Pétain, Pete Hegseth is doing the real invader's propaganda work for him—diverting outrage from the actual fascist invading army to an imagined patchwork bogeyman of outsiders and immigrants. 

This puts him squarely on the side of Putin—even as he attacks a U.S. ally. 

Rep. Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, was more circumspect yesterday but made a similar point. He argued the Trump administration needs to stop trying to referee the war in Ukraine, as if it were fought between two bickering spouses with equally valid claims, and recognize that Putin is the actual invader here of European sovereign territory. 

"There’s a good versus evil here and America should be unabashedly for the right side here," as Bacon put it yesterday. 

It's uncomfortable for anyone in the anti-militarist, anti-interventionist camp, like me, to side with Bacon here. I grew up during the Iraq war, and surely anyone who lived through that experience has learned to distrust such simplistic Manichean dualism as applied to global conflicts. 

For this reason, I long resisted seeing the Ukraine conflict is such simple black-and-white terms as Bacon paints it. 

And yet, there was an actual invader in this war, and an actual victim. There was an aggressor, and one whose territory was violated. You don't need to regard the Ukrainian government as morally pure or a model democracy to realize that they are the injured party here and deserve our aid. 

As Koestler put it in the book above-cited: "repeatedly in history men have had to fight a merely defensive battle, to preserve a state of affairs which was bad against a menace which was worse." 

The situation indeed is very reminiscent of the one that confronted Europeans on the eve of that great war that Hegseth was supposedly in France this weekend to commemorate. 

In Europe in 1938, too, people had grown wary and cynical about Manichean rhetoric—talk of "good versus evil," as Bacon put it. Such language had been too much abused during the previous world war. 

And yet, this same cynicism led them to make a coward's peace with Hitler at Munich and thereby invite further aggression. 

And we who have been brought up to think of 'Gallant Belgium'

As so much blague, writes Louis MacNeice, in his Autumn Journal (an indelible record of the year before the second world war)

Are now preparing again to assay good through evil 

For the sake of Prague; 

And must, we suppose, become uncritical, vindictive, 

And must, in order to beat

The enemy, model ourselves on the enemy,

A howling radio for our paraclete.

This is indeed the problem. It goes against my nature to declare a rival great power "evil" and start crying "by jingo!" 

And to be sure, Russia is a great country, with its millions of people; not some "evil" or demonic bogeyman. Indeed, how many Russians put themselves on the line—at infinitely greater personal cost—to protest Putin's illegal war, ending up beaten and jailed for conscience's sake? 

But we also can't pretend that Putin's and Ukraine's claims in this war are equally valid. We can't just play referee or "umpire," in Bacon's words, from a position of ostensible neutrality that is really objectively pro-Putin (as the Trump administration appears to be currently trying to do). 

We cannot just play the game that MacNeice called Save my skin and damn my conscience, which the Allies played at Munich. 

And negotiation wins, he wrote of that conference. 

If you can call it winning,

[...] And stocks go up and wrecks

Are salved and politicians' reputations

Go up like Jack-on-the-Beanstalk; only the Czechs

Go down and without fighting. 

And again, later in the poem: 

Come over, they said, into Macedonia and help us

But the chance is gone; 

Now we must help ourselves, we can leave the vulture 

To pick the corpses clean in Macedon.

No wonder many would renounce their birthright, 

The responsibility of moral choice, 

And sit with a mess of pottage taking orders

Out of a square box from a mad voice. 

We must not renounce that same birthright. We must accept the responsibility to choose between imperfect options. 

Maybe it's not "good versus evil," as Bacon puts it. Would that it were so simple! But "good through evil," as MacNeice writes.

Yes, Ukraine has its various ongoing corruption scandals. It has its scandal to the conscience of its Azov battalion and what-not.

Koestler heard the same arguments against aiding Poland, when the Nazis invaded it. And Koestler's response is still valid today: "repeatedly in history men have had to fight a merely defensive battle, to preserve a state of affairs which was bad against a menace which was worse."

We have to recognize that, flawed as Ukraine might be, it at least has the right to defend itself from attack! And we should be at its side.

Otherwise we will just be leaving the vulture to pick the corpses clean in Ukraine, to paraphrase MacNeice—and no one will be there to help us when the invader turns his attentions to the West. 

That is the true "invader" of Europe—the one who is actually attacking a democratic nation across borders with tanks and guns and drones and missiles. 

But Hegseth the Pétainiste—Hegseth the collaborationist—actually rather likes all of this. It represents "strength." It represents the crusader spirit against the weak will of liberal democracy and mere parliamentarianism. 

He would rather see the invader win—and so he deflects blame by inventing the false specter of an imagined "invader"—the bedraggled refugees washing up on Europe's shores. They, Hegseth insist, are the real menace, the real monster.

The collaborationists in Koestler's era made the same rhetorical move—casting destitute anti-fascist refugees escaping the Spanish war and Hitler's persecution as a "dragon" that menaced the future of France.

"Who looked close enough to find what a poor, tired beast this dragon was," Koestler wrote —"[...] and that it looked more like a half-drowned cat than a stately dragon?"

Meanwhile the real dragon was huffing and fuming on France's doorstep. Soon enough, he would invade. Yet he went unchallenged because the collaborationists had succeeded in their act of misdirection. 

And so too, this today may be precisely Hegseth's goal.