I spent a whole morning earlier this week arguing on this blog with a podcast by a group of Putin apologists. I know already that some people reading this will skim through it and say: "Why bother? Why waste your breath on a bunch of 'Russian disinformation'"?
But that seems a bit glib. And it occurs to me that this is the reason why pro-Putin propaganda tends to stick, and why it continues to exert a strange allure for parts of the Left—even long after the Russian government has ceased to identify itself in any way with the Left, and even after the global neo-fascist right has embraced Putin's cause as their own.
It just seems too pat to many of us on the Left that Putin really would be a one-dimensional bad guy in this war. And—more to the point—isn't it a little too convenient for the U.S. foreign policy establishment?
Much of the left has spent its whole life learning to second-guess and roll its eyes at the D.C. foreign policy elite consensus ("Georgetown," as the podcast hosts I was talking about tend to short-hand it). And often with good reason. And so, they just apply this lesson to the present situation in Eastern Europe.
"Oh yeah, sure," they say sarcastically—"Putin is Hitler and 2022 is 1938 and Ukraine is Czechoslovakia. Don't you people have anything better to throw at us than just yet another tired analogy to Munich?"
And indeed, the Georgetown elite's way of talking about the Ukraine war over at the Brookings Institution, say, does often seem a bit glib. It annoys me too when they dismiss talk of Ukrainian biolabs or whatever as "disinformation" without explaining to us, the uninitiated and unwashed, how we know that it's disinformation.
And the podcast hosts had a psychological analysis of the Georgetown elite's interest in the "Russiagate" story that rings regrettably true: these types had a nostalgia for the cloak and dagger world of John le Carré novels, they said, when "Ivy League educated gentlemen could fight against a worthy adversary."
And indeed, the standard, semi-serious name for the Russiagate affair that the Brookings Institution's Lawfare podcast always used does rather play into this stereotype: L'affair russe, they dubbed it.
But the fact that it feels just a little too convenient for certain smug Establishment types for Putin to be the straightforward villain here, and therefore the foreign policy elite consensus seems like it must be wrong, is precisely the psychology that made Munich possible in 1938.
After all, the generation of 1938 was an even more war-weary and jaded one than ours. The psychology of appeasement was made possible by the fact that people had become disillusioned with the earlier round of wartime hysteria and "atrocity-mongering" that occurred back during World War I.
The bloodshed of the first world war had been prolonged needlessly by grossly exaggerated reports of German wartime atrocities and caricatured portrayals of the villainy of "the Hun."
And so, when refugees from Hitler's Germany poured across the border in the 1930s, and tried to tell people: "Hitler really is as bad as they say," they sounded like the boy who cried wolf.
And so, even for people on the Left who rejected appeasement, it was a tough pill to swallow to believe that the German state in 1938 now really had become the militaristic monster that wartime propaganda had so misleadingly painted it as in 1914.
Even the Leftists willing to take up the crusade against Hitler after Munich, then, could only do so with a certain regret and discomfort. It seemed a little too glib and pat to them too, that the German government really would be the bad guys this time—and that they would have to align themselves with the self-righteous British foreign office.
And we who have been brought up to think of 'Gallant Belgium'
As so much blague,
Are now preparing again to assay good through evil
For the sake of Prague; as Louis MacNeice summed up the difficulties of their position, in the Autumn Journal.
"The big words and slogans rather embarrass us," as Arthur Koestler likewise summed up the perspective of the generation that fought Hitler. "[W]e don't like to be thought quite so naive as that. This tongue-in-the-cheek patriotism, the attitude of the skeptic knight, the heretic crusader, is as typical of the mental climate of this war as the stoning of dachshunds for the last."
So it is with us today—which is what gives the Putin apologists on the Left their strange power and appeal. They are touching us in a sore spot. They needle a discomfort that really is there. We too are embarrassed with the "slogans"—the "Slava Ukraini" and the blue and yellow flag-waving. It is all a little too "Gallant Belgium."
"We don't like to be thought quite so naive as that." And then, here come these podcast hosts and they say: "ha! You are so naive as that! You believe all this Georgetown foreign policy elite claptrap about Putin being a monster!"
"You're just playing into Cold War tropes!" they tell us.
But was the Cold War itself such an illusion in retrospect?
Koestler published his Yogi and the Commissar in 1945, at the very end of the Second World War—and his most dire warnings about Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe were essentially all fulfilled in the years that followed. He even accurately predicted the methods Stalin would deploy to expand his sphere of influence.
"Most of the intermediate steps will be camouflaged as internal developments within the small nations concerned," he wrote. "The technique of vassalization will be perfected [....] A series of quick, brisk surprise blows may be followed by prolonged lulls of idyllic tranquility [....] Faits accompli will alternate with tokens of goodwill[.]"
Does this not perfectly describe what Stalin proceeded to do in the postwar years?
Even more to the point: does it not describe Putin's own maneuverings in our time, with his "little green men"? The occupation of Crimea or South Ossetia were indeed presented as "faits accompli." His blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine in 2022—was that not a "quick, brisk surprise blow," followed by a period in which Putin sought to portray himself to the U.S. government as a peacemaker just looking to cut a deal?
The fact that there is such Russian imperialism afoot does not mean that we should ignore or forgive our own country's imperialism.
But the same applies in reverse: U.S. misdeeds do not excuse Putin's.
Koestler's warnings about Soviet expansionism were proven right in the event. But he had to face the same skepticism in the early Cold War that people had to confront in 1938 ("Oh, that's just more war-mongering hysteria and 'Gallant Belgium' nonsense; we've had enough of that."). And it's the same skepticism that we have to face now that Putin is invading Ukraine. ("That's just more Cold War hysteria!")
"[T]he Cassandras of to-day," Koestler writes, "are faced with a similar situation but this time the men of Munich are of the Left."
He goes on: "The attitude of the Left and Liberal press in the Russian-Polish conflict was an uncanny replica of the Conservative attitude in the German-Czech conflict of 1939. The same flimsy arguments about ethnic minorities (Sudetan-Germans in the first, Ukrainians and Belorussians in the second case) were invoked to mollify an act of conquest by terror and military might; there was the same impatience with the annoying victim who refuses to be murdered in silence, and the same desire not to antagonize the aggressor; there were the same symptoms of uneasy conscience and the same veiled admissions that small nations and big principles have sometimes to be sacrificed in the interests of peace between the great powers."
Does this not perfectly describe the way our "Red-Brown" Putin apologists on the Left have made excuses for his imperial misadventures? It is a strange and bitter irony of history that the Ukrainian minorities were apparently invoked in the twentieth century as a smokescreen for Stalin's invasion of Poland—and now today we hear the plight of Russian speakers in the Donbas used as a pretext for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Many of my gut instincts, still, are with the Ukraine-skeptical leftists. That is exactly their power. They know that people like me hate to find ourselves on the same side as the smug "Georgetown" elite on anything. They know we have been trained all our lives to doubt the Western foreign policy consensus.
We are "embarrassed by undesirable allies," as Koestler put it. "They were proved right for all the wrong reasons, and in his heart he is with the addict who is wrong for the right reasons."
This indeed is our plight. The Brookings Institution types are right for the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, the leftists forced into the role of Putin apologists are wrong for the right reasons. Many of them really are motivated, in my view, by a justified mistrust of convenient Western foreign policy narratives.
But my point here is that this very same justified mistrust was what motivated a generation to appease Hitler at Munich—and Stalin after the war. They too said to themselves: "I refuse to be taken in by all this 'Gallant Belgium' blague yet again." They said: "I am too smart and jaded to go along with the glib 'Georgetown' consensus."
And each time, in the eyes of history, it was actually those Koestler dubs "the Cassandras"—the "screamers"—who were proven right. They were right about Hitler. They were right about Stalin. And if the events of 2022 proved anything—they proved they were right about Putin too.
This does not mean we should simply turn ourselves into jingoists and paint Russia all-black. We don't need to surrender our faculties, "become uncritical, vindictive [...] A howling radio for our paraclete," as MacNeice put it.
Rather, I think Koestler presents a valid and aspirational model for how we can wage this struggle against Putin: namely, as "skeptic knights" and "heretic crusaders"—carrying in our mouths a "tongue-in-the-cheek patriotism"—supporting Ukraine's right to defend itself, without having to chant Ukrainian nationalist slogans.
"In this war we are fighting against a total lie in the name of a half-truth," Koestler writes. We don't have to ignore the flaws in the "half-truth," he rightly argued—or give up our efforts to improve them—to recognize that they are at least preferable to and worth defending against a "total lie" of the sort Putin's regime represents.
The war, he writes, is a defensive one waged just for the sake of a pause, a little "breathing-room," so that something better can eventually emerge—without being swallowed in one go into the night.
This is what we should be fighting for here. Not the triumph of "Western democracy" over Putin, which we all know has become a rather ragged steed in the era of Trump. But for a temporary respite from the threat of fascist authoritarianism, so that we can get back to improving our own system so that it will actually work for people.
That's all we are doing here, in our roles as "skeptic knights" and "heretic crusaders"—just trying to fight
with a hit-hit here and a hit-hit there,
and a comfortable feeling at night
that you've let in a little air. (D.H. Lawrence.)
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