Political Horseshoe, Part 2: Appeasement Birds of Right & Left Flock Together

Chomsky, Greenwald, Melenchon Fly on Left Wing With…..

Putin Buddies Trump, Tiki-torched Tucker, J.D. Vance, Salvini, Orban, LePen Flying on Right Wing

The horseshoe midwifes Baby Z:

With Chomsky headlining a Tea Party site with ads for gun rights swag.

How paradoxical is this horseshoe? If you had told me in 1977 that in 40 years there would be a plutopopulist Republican Russian asset in the White House and that the American left was supporting the CIA and the FBI, I would have asked “what are you smoking, and can I have some?”. Only the horseshoe explains this topsy-turvy world.

Here we’ll dig into how the whataboutism of lefty moral purity and far right Putin fanboys converge in:

• Ukraine and the West can’t win.
• Ukraine doesn’t deserve to win (or exist) and the West is no better.
• And where we’ve seen this old movie before.

Moral Purity Delusions At The Horseshoe’s Left End….

The lefty anti-interventionists led by Chomsky, Gabbard and Greenwald deploy the whataboutist language of moral purity to make the perfect the enemy of the TINA (there is no alternative) less bad. This yields the Ukraine and the West don’t deserve to win version:

“I know that for many, the go-to defense is that I am practicing Whataboutism. I do not care….western values are a myth….They only practice them, when the political cost is near zero. The moment it touches our interests the slightest bit, we abandon them. That is why we jail whistleblowers who expose war crimes. That is why we supply the weapons for Saudi Arabia to conduct their genocide. That is also why we applaud the Ukrainian government for banning opposition parties. While we call Zelenskyy a beacon of democracy.” — Alexander Benesch, Medium

Meet America First At The Right End

The less torturous J.D. Vance and Tiki-torched Tucker versions of this whataboutism deploy no moral fig leaves: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine” or “rootin’ for Russia” that “never cancelled me.”

The only thing you need to do to understand the Tucker end of the Putin useful idiot horseshoe: ask the Russians how they like it:

“Russian state media has used clips from Carlson’s show on several occasions to justify the invasion of Ukraine, which, by law, must be referred to as a “special military operation.” A leaked memo published by Mother Jones showed Kremlin talking points telling state media outlets to use the primetime host’s material “as much as possible.” “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” the March 2021 memo advised.”

Just like Hitler loved Lindbergh.

From Putin Won’t Invade to Appeasers’ Ukraine Can’t Win Argument

From Medium’s Munir Kazmir, we see the West Can’t Win version that clones the two ends of the horseshoe Lindbergh and CPUSA agreed on in 1939–41:

“Russia Grows Stronger by the Day, Europe Grows Weaker: Sanctions and embargoes backfired; the global market saved Vladimir Putin. Who will save the West?…E.U. nations like Germany should perhaps, instead of useless sanctions, be hoping, fervently, that Ukraine is the extent of Vladimir Putin’s plans to extend the Russian empire in Europe. Putin doesn’t have the German government over a barrel yet, but when winter comes, he will. When the cold weather hits, and an energy crisis means more than high prices at the pump, Putin will in short shrift be holding all the cards….Embargoes and sanctions haven’t hurt Russia, the Russian economy or Vladimir Putin much; but they have severely diminished the U.S. and E.U. nations. European leaders- or better yet, U.S. President Joe Biden- must end this conflict using diplomatic means….

Vladimir Putin, is winning his war of attrition in Ukraine….The impact the conflict in Ukraine is having on the U.S. is as nothing compared to the hold Russia enjoys over the economies and energy needs of EU nations. If Europe gives, the United States will have to either follow suit or be left behind, marginalized.”

The Greenwald version of Kazmir’s Ukraine can’t win appeasement thesis said that the war would not happen. Here the MAGA monster of Trump’s “savvy genius” Putin met the anti-interventionist left in Greenwald’s:

Invasion Intelligence a “Fraud”:

Greenwald retweeted a claim that the definition of the word invasion would be “muddled” in order to retroactively justify U.S. intelligence warnings. “The problem is that the CIA told the US media to tell everyone that they knew exactly what Putin was saying and deciding, and that he had decided on a full invasion of Ukraine,” Greenwald wrote in addition, “so they have to call it an ‘invasion’ otherwise this whole media/government act will seem like a fraud.” (Update, March 16, 2022: Greenwald, contacted via direct message for another story, argues that his “invasion” claim was not in error because the tweet was sent Feb. 23, before Russia actually invaded on Feb. 24.

And the left of the horseshoe in anti-interventionist Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, recipient of a Russian agent’s campaign donation:

Surprising Fact: Elena Branson, charged Tuesday by American authorities for allegedly acting as a Russian agent, made donations to only one American politician, according to election filings by the Daily Beast: Gabbard.

Tangent: Aside from former President Donald Trump, Carlson and Gabbard have emerged as perhaps the two most prominent Russian sympathizers in the U.S. — Forbes, March 13, 2022

What the horseshoe says: none of the above is not on the menu

With tea party sites citing Chomsky next to pro-gun t-shirt ads and Greenwald on Fox, you know what the politics horseshoe is telling you: we’re in1941 redux. The dishes now available on the geopolitics restaurant’s menu were summed up best by Winston Churchill after the German invasion of the USSR:

This Faustian alliance was based on Churchill’s view that contradicted all his advisors’ forecasts, whose view of the Soviet military resembled Greenwald’s, Chomsky’s, the foreign policy establishment’s and Kazmir’s pre-war conventional wisdom about Ukraine’s prospects in a war with Russia:

“Churchill’s advisors were united in believing that the Soviet Union’s battle would be a short one. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir John Dill said it would collapse in six weeks. Gen. Alan Brooke, who would later that year succeed Dill as CIGS, said four months — the most optimistic prediction. But Churchill was having none of it. Using horse race betting parlance and giving 500:1 odds, he said, “I will bet you a Monkey to a Mousetrap that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting victoriously, two years from now.” (A Monkey being a £500 bet, and Mousetrap being a gold sovereign with the nominal value of £1.)

They were all as wrong then as was the conventional wisdom on February 23.

Putin and TINA to the American Empire

Heed the Churchill lesson from June 23, 1941: TINA, There Is No Alternative, to the only power capable of resisting the Russian mafia kleptocracy — unconvincingly cross-dressed as a state. There are just two dishes on the menu: Vlad the Aimless Bomber’s artillery or HIMARS. Abstention is a decision. It’s a vote for Vlad the Bomber, soon to be Vlad the Retreater.

This is what the squirming, reality-denying discomfort at the two far ends of the political horseshoe are telling you. This is what the paradox of Tea Partiers quoting Chomsky and Breitbart quoting Italian communists is telling you.

It’s a rare enemy that comes along to make the imperial covert ops interventionist Uncle Sam look good after his malign intervention history of Mexico, 1846, 1916, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Brazil 1964, Dominican Republic 1965, Vietnam of 1964–75, Chile 1973, Central America’s civil wars of 1979–90, Iraq 2003, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama….well, let’s stop here before I incur a readers’ revolt.

The alternative to the American led liberal international order with its global alliance network isn’t a Chomskian dream of UN run justice with an end to empire or a kumbaya Russia-EU slow dance romance with Rosneft and Gerhard Schroder’s Gazprom.

The alternative to American indispensability is a return to an 18th century or an Athenian style geopolitical Darwinism that Thucydides described: the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must. This is what the far left and right are telling you when they converge in horseshoe shaped delusional appeasement.

On the left Medium’s Benesch and Dunn proclaim inevitable Russian victory with whataboutist resignation that the US led order is no better. Or they invoke a utopian fantasy: consequence free ejection of US influence from Europe.

Neither have seen the Soviet pillboxes in the beachfront forest where I live in Jurmala, Latvia or met my former student at Riga Business School who’s in the Latvian army reserves and trains home guard soldiers. People here have NO illusions about the big bear next door and absolutely love having Finland and Sweden in NATO. They know there is no European defense force capable of resisting Russia scratching its revanchist imperial itch without the US.

The left half of the horseshoe dreams of a woulda, shoulda, coulda Eurasian or German-Russian axis, a policy Merkel pursued by Wende durch Handel (Change through Commerce). In the blame NATO and America war provocation thesis Chomsky, Mearsheimer and Greenwald converge with Trumpster and Tucker’s Russia never cancelled me AFPACKKKers led by neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes chanting Putin! Putin! Putin! * (AFPAC, America First Political Action Conference).

Useful idiots’ whataboutist naiveté begs not to see genocidal neo Stalinist Russification’s filtration camps, mass deportations and mass graves of war crime victims and global Holodomor 2.0 grain theft. They earnestly invoke “Russia’s security concerns” about NATO expansion, though Russia expressed no such concerns when the Baltic states’ joined, putting NATO’s Narva, Estonia border far closer to St. Petersburg than Kharkhiv is to Moscow.

This diversionary whataboutism is just cover for Russia’s openly proclaimed intention to genocidally erase Ukraine and its language and culture forever. Putin openly told you this in his 2015 beatification of reactionary Russification fanatic, Tsar Alexander III, who banned the Ukrainian language and Ukrainians from baptizing their children with Ukrainian names. This was the regime the grandfather of 1972 my Georgetown University Russian history prof, David Goldfrank, escaped from.

Genocidal Russification, mass deportations and the Groznification of conquered peoples’ cities is a feature, not a bug of Russia’s empire-building model. Ask the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, the three million ethnic Ukrainians living in the Russian far east and the Baltics. I pass this railcar at the Tornakalns station deportation departure point every time I bike from Jurmala to Riga:

Understand one simple concept: this war has only one viable ending, the collapse of the Russian “federation”, the most misnamed political entity on our planet. Said collapse will continue the shrinkage of the Russian empire begun in 1917, interrupted by the USSR in 1921 and continued in 1989–92.

This breakup will likely begin in Chechnya, where the word and practice of Groznification began, and continued in Ukraine. Don’t expect tik-tok mafioso warrior Kadyrov and his buddies to die in their beds. Expect a similar end for their Godfather, Tsar Putin.