Putin Is to BlameAlthough we might deplore disastrous mistakes made by U.S. administrations, it is Putin, not Americans or the Ukrainians, who in the end is responsible for this horrific invasion.
By Paul Gottfried
March 2, 2022
A recently published article in The Atlantic tells us that Vladimir Putin, by invading Ukraine, has “revitalized the liberal world order”: “Although we in the West sometimes lose faith that our values are universal, Putin certainly believes they are. Otherwise, why attempt to conquer a country to prevent it from succeeding? And why threaten prison sentences for Russians giving aid to Ukraine?”
John Zmirak at The Stream presents a very different view. He suggests the Western political establishment may end up putting George Soros, not Putin, in control of a liberated Ukraine and the world order writ large. We who are siding with the Ukrainians should avoid bringing about a “Soros win.”
Although Zmirak’s rhetoric is deliberately provocative, he may be closer to the truth than the far-left Atlantic. Onetime constitutionally limited governments will remain in the hands of woke elites throughout the West no matter what happens in Kyiv. Our onetime constitutionally guaranteed liberties will still be endangered in Canada, the United States, Germany, and other Western countries, even if we can force Russian armies out of Ukraine.
Moreover, many of those who are supporting the Ukrainian side (John Zmirak and I are among them) have no interest in buttressing the Western woke status quo. We would be delighted to see it fall and be replaced by the older liberal constitutional order that it supplanted. We are genuinely appalled by how LGBTQ+ and antiwhite racist groups have taken power and are suppressing open debate. We are profoundly bothered by how the COVID epidemic has been used by those in power to take authority away from parents and restrict our movements as once free citizens.
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Although we might deplore disastrous mistakes made by American administrations in playing off the Ukrainians against Putin’s Russia, it is Putin, not the United States or the Ukrainians, who in the end is responsible for this horrific invasion. And since Putin has not hidden his intention to bring back what he can of the Russian empire, we have every right to suspect that he is citing American indiscretions (such as helping engineer the February 2014 blue revolution in Kyiv) to justify his geopolitical ambitions. Also, far from insignificant was the decision of the Russian government in the Budapest Memorandum in December 1994 to cede Donetsk, Luhansk, and part of the Crimea to an independent Ukraine. In return for these border arrangements, Ukraine disastrously, as it turned out, gave up its nuclear weapons.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/02/putin-is-to-blame/
