On Tuesday I was walking toward Capitol Hill in Seattle to pick up my mail when suddenly a full-scale invasion of SPD vehicles arrived to occupy the block around the Starbucks Reserve Roastery, a popular spot for yuppies because it is “cool” place to be seen in. A bystander claimed to have counted 25 police vehicles:
A mass shooting in progress? The SPD’s twitter page mentioned a reported stabbing and a car crash near this location in the same tweet, but later it was admitted that the alleged stabbing incident occurred about 10 blocks distance away; the alleged crash (I didn’t see one) was near this location, after a Lyft car was reported hijacked. The half-dressed possible perpetrator is seen on the ground here, while the Starbucks’ customers were said to be safely ensconced in some bunker:
So you ask yourself if there is such a shortage of police officers in Seattle, those that are on duty sure don’t seem to have a lot to do, or should be somewhere else addressing the crime wave that is said to be inflicting the city, which one suspects has a strong relationship with the homeless situation.
Why this show of force was necessary when three or four police officers would have been sufficient brings to mind Vladimir Putin’s disproportionate actions on a neighboring country that is only a “threat” to Russia because the delusional Putin sees it as “necessary to insure his “legacy” in forcing the Ukraine into being a mere client state of his Russian “empire.” Unfortunately for Putin and his “legacy,” his unjustified war and apparent war crimes-level actions against Ukrainian civilians that is all out of proportion with reality makes his name mud for all the non-Russian history books could care.
I'm not giving a "pass" to ordinary Russians like most people seem to be doing. Although you hear tales about ordinary Russians not supporting the invasion, they admit they can't, or won't, try to stop Putin, save for a few brave anti-war protesters. Doing nothing is no different than being indifferent to, or aiding in, the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians inflicted upon them by their psychopathic Fuehrer; some who have the favor of Putin, like soprano Anna Netrebko, even chose to back out of her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera rather than walk back her praises of Putin. Why is it a “loss” to make a statement against a supporter of a fascist regime that is inflicting horrors on innocent people, as the Met’s general manager seems to have suggested?
Ordinary Russians apparently fear democracy and support an authoritarian regime that engages in the suppression of freedom of speech and a free media, and has even engaged in the murder of opponents and dissidents to keep itself propped up. Ordinary Russians have sanctioned a rubberstamping Putin Reichstag that essentially made a mockery—after “tweaking” the Russian “constitution”—of free elections in the manner of your typical third-world dictatorship. Ordinary Russians need someone to make decisions for them, and one must face the fact that what they have chosen is morally repugnant—not that we don’t have morally repugnant people in this country, like Tucker Carlson (who Kremlin media uses for anti-American propaganda), and Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose attendance at a recent neo-Nazi conference was “punctuated” by chants of “Putin! Putin! Putin!.”
Ordinary Russians have permitted this to happen because they, like Germans during the Weimar years, felt that their superior people and nation were “unjustly” suppressed, and because ordinary Russians have proved incapable of governing themselves and making their own decisions, they have latched onto the extreme nationalism of Putin, who has promised them they will be a “super power” again through bullying and violence against peaceful neighbors. They would prefer to feel “great” again in this way, even at the price of devastating economic consequences.
And now, as reported by NBC News, because of Ukrainian resistance to an “easy” victory, “Putin is confused, frustrated, and directing bursts of anger at people in his inner circle,” and is becoming increasingly “isolated” and divorced from reality like Hitler was in his Berlin bunker—making this demented man even more dangerous and insensitive to the cost in lives on both sides. And yet save for a few protesters, ordinary Russians are seemingly unmoved by it, if not outright supportive of the violence perpetrated on Ukrainians who have done them no harm.
One suspects that ordinary Germans know that Putin’s actions in the Ukraine bear an uncomfortable resemblance to what Hitler (and Stalin, for that matter) did in Poland in 1939. Although unlike Hitler, Putin has no political acumen, what he does have is the incomprehensibly paranoid behavior that attests to the fact of his “training” is as a former KGB agent and head of the FSB, and thus he would be expected to have little regard for, or use of, civilized norms of behavior.
It would seem that most Germans, after learning the lessons of World War II, have found that peacefully coexisting with its neighbors has its benefits, such as having (according to a UN report in 2019) the fourth best quality of life in the world (the U.S. is 15th, and Russia is 49th). Why mess with a good thing by engaging in costly, pointless war? Of course that also allowed German governments to ask why spend money on defense when you have NATO countries to pitch-in for the defense of all.
I spent four years of my Army career in West Germany, and to be honest the country and its urban areas always seemed to look neat and tidy, and it was pleasant to just go out and about for no reason to do so at all, besides just getting away from the barracks. The Germans who deigned to interact with me did so because maybe they realized that most of us still preferred to be somewhere else—like Fort Lewis, where I spent just nine months at before I was shipped back to Germany for another tour of duty 27 months long, to be another number that ordinary Germans didn’t have to be. I didn’t understand it, because German Army fatigues looked so much more “stylish” than what us American soldiers were wearing at the time.
Not all my experiences with “ordinary” Germans was pleasant; one day I had to drive one of those flimsy ¼-ton jeeps to another kaserne to pick up some scavenged parts from other wrecked jeeps for motor pool use, and on my way back I encountered a German driving his car so fast on the autobahn (there apparently were no speed limits back then) that centrifugal force around the curve sent him right into my lane, and having no time to think I turned the wheel to avoid hitting the car, and what I remembered after the windshield cracking as jeep tumbled over was waking up in a German ambulance which took me to the Army hospital in Nuremberg, where I spent a month recovering from numerous broken bones—including the right clavicle; my right shoulder still appears “shorter” than the left because the doctors decided it didn’t need straightening out (because I was just an enlisted soldier), and a left pelvic bone, from which I still feel an occasional discomfort. On discharge I was given a medical card stating that I had "10 percent disability."
This kind of thing wasn’t uncommon in Germany; I remember during one field exercise, a company commander in the battalion I was assigned to was outside his stalled jeep checking it out when he was struck and killed by another speeding German driver, and a few days later the whole battalion was gathered together to attend a service for him. Since my injury was in the “line of duty” and caused by a foreign national, I was visited at the hospital by the three-star corps commander, probably because it was an excuse to get out of the office. A few months later I received notification to testify in a German courtroom; I didn’t know where it was, but a polizei officer who looked like a kid with his longish hair was very nice about taking me there, and I was told that the two guys sitting on the bench smiling at me were witnesses who testified against the other driver. I was told later that the German driver had his license suspended for a month and fined 2,000 marks.
Anyways, after the fall of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, the first Bush decided (before the Gulf War was a thing, and I was finishing up college after my discharge) to start downsizing the military. Russia in the 1990s wasn’t much of a threat to the West, and Boris Yeltsin seemed to be just a guy more interesting in boozing and having a good time than making enemies. However, he did make one big mistake that Russia and the world is paying for now: when he decided to leave the presidency, he named Putin his successor, and in historical context that was like Hindenburg handing over the reins of power to Hitler.
In the meantime, Germany just did its pacifist thing, which as mentioned Germans found more rewarding than puffing their chests and inviting fear. However, Germany’s history of cooperation with Russia when it suited their economic and military needs was revived by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who became even better friends with Putin than Trump could ever hope to be, and this inter-national “friendship” continued with Angela Merkel with the completion of the first Nord Stream pipeline which was mostly for Russia’s benefit, and then beginning construction of the second pipeline, which put Germany in a position of energy dependency on Russia, and would hurt the country if it needed to take a strong stand against Putin, which it was forced to do now.
Of course being “friendly” with Russia meant that Germany frankly didn’t feel it needed a very strong military anymore and was loath to use what it had. Of course Germany has set an example for how a country can change its ways—but Russia hasn’t, and now Germany is finding out that being a successful democratic state and the most powerful (at least economically) in the EU means it also has a responsibility to uphold the “values” of a democratic state, and that means not being too friendly with a country that does not share those values—like, say, Putin’s Russia.
It appears that Germany has learned a few lessons of late: one is that “friendship” with Putin is like being “friends” with someone who pushes around some guy you don’t know and you don’t think it concerns you, but it isn’t amusing anymore when your “friend” starts beating on the guy and you wonder why you were ever friendly with him in the first place.
Another lesson is that Germany—after decades of not paying its “fair share” of its budget for military expenditures—doesn’t have much credibility militarily in opposing Putin’s gangsterism. Ross Clark in the British journal The Spectator called Germany’s military “a complete joke,” and more recently the top general in the Bundeswehr, Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, called it ill-equipped to fight after decades of “neglect.”
That may be changing. There are “bad” wars, but there are also “good” wars, or at least where one side can claim to have moral “superiority”—and Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine makes that plain enough. Last week German Chancellor Olaf Scholz put out a statement in which he declared that Germany stands on the side of democracy everywhere, and that means switching course and supplying the Ukraine with weapons instead of just words and helmets. While he probably underestimates the complicity of ordinary Russians in aiding and abetting Putin (just as Germans did the Nazis), Scholz announced a more proactive stance in supporting NATO countries bordering Russia and the Ukraine. He also promised a significant rise in defense spending, since
We must therefore ask ourselves: What capabilities does Putin’s Russia possess? And what capabilities do we need in order to counter this threat – today and in the future? It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country. In order to protect our freedom and our democracy. This is a major national undertaking. The goal is a powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr that can be relied upon to protect us. At the Munich Security Conference a week ago I said that we need aeroplanes that fly, ships that can set out to sea and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions.
Scholz focused on Europe’s defense commitments, which seemed to suggest that he sees Germany—not the U.S.—as NATO’s primary “leader.” It should be pointed out, however, that the U.S. was the leader (that is, post-Trump) in the push to oppose and sanction Putin’s actions, and Germany quite frankly was pulling up the rear until a few weeks ago,
In any case, what we see here is that Putin’s flagrant actions, which mirror Germany’s own so many years ago, have reminded Germans what happens when peaceful countries are confronted with a military threat from a psychopath, and being ill-equipped to offer a credible counter to it militarily. NATO and the U.S. military in particular allowed Germany to prosper without bearing its cost, but now it’s embarrassing “friendship” with an aggressor nation whose "ordinary" people willingly allowed themselves to be governed by an authoritarian psychopath who promised them that they could again feel the "pride" of being a “superpower" by being the bully on the block threatening smaller countries that posed no threat to it (in that regard one is also reminded of Mussolini’s invasions of Ethiopia and Albania).
Again, there are many links between what Germany once was and what Putin’s Russia is today, and perhaps Germany is starting to realize that now, even if many are loath to admit it. But as Clark noted, for now in Germany “there is little sign that it has the organization and competence to fulfill its role as a NATO member, let alone form the heart of a European defense force.” Scholz’s tough talk in the defense of democracy is a welcome change, but Germany has a long, long way to go, not even close to where even its post-war treaty limitations allowed it to go.
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