Putin's Big Lie

[Uncle Joe]

Yesterday vladimir putin went to Stalingrad. It was the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the city once named after the Soviet dictator. The current Russian dictator solemnly bowed his head and knelt before a wreath laid to honor the heroes of the battle that turned the tide of World War II. The day before the ceremony, a bronze bust of Joseph Stalin had been unveiled in the city, whose name was changed to Volgograd in 1961. By then Stalin, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest mass murderer, was out of favor. But for Putin, the city is still Stalingrad, the year is still 1943, Nazis are still waging a scorched-earth war, and the heroic Russian people are still fighting a far stronger enemy in defense of the motherland. Only it’s 2023, and the enemy is the independent, democratic, much smaller nation of Ukraine, led by a Jewish president and armed by Western democracies—including Germany.

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To grasp the enormity of this lie—the foundational lie of Russia’s war against Ukraine—it helps to know something about the history of World War II. During Putin’s visit to Stalingrad, I was rereading the classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, a CBS radio correspondent who had been based in Berlin in the 1930s. So it was fresh in my mind how Adolf Hitler, in his first move of conquest, annexed Austria in March 1938, claiming it as a historical part of the German Reich, and then held a plebiscite in which 99.75 percent of Austrians officially voted to join Germany. Putin’s first move in this war was to annex Crimea in March 2014, claiming it as a historical part of the Russian Empire, and then hold a plebiscite in which 97 percent of Crimeans officially voted to join Russia.

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It isn’t all that hard to replace the German Weltanshauung with Ruskiy Mir, or “Russian world”; Hitler the protector of oppressed German speakers with Putin the liberator of oppressed Russian speakers; Edvard Benes with Volodymyr Zelensky; the Sudetenland with the Donbas; Berlin-backed Sudeten Nazis with Moscow-backed Ukrainian separatists. In both cases, incidents in the breakaway regions were ginned up on orders from the neighboring empire, giving it an excuse to invade. In the Reich Chancellery then, as in the Kremlin now, every gesture toward peace negotiations was a sham to buy more time for war. Within six months of the September 1938 Munich Conference where the Sudetenland was surrendered to Germany, Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia—and he was just beginning. Eight years after starting a war in Crimea and the Donbas, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing destruction, murder, rape, occupation, annexation, deportation, threats of annihilation, and many more lies.

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Putin raises the Nazi ghost as a way not just to discredit his enemies with a false charge, but to immunize himself from having a far more plausible charge flung at him. This is propaganda as projection—a common technique of demagogues. Hitler accused the Czechs and Poles of aggression against Germany as he prepared to invade; Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden of corrupting American justice as he turned the executive branch into an instrument of his personal interests. “No puppet!” Trump retorted in a debate after Clinton suggested how Putin regarded him. “You’re the puppet!”

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/putin-stalingrad-russia-ukraine-war-nazi-germany-propaganda/672934/