(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Twelfth episode on Palestine and Israel—history as well as the current violence—with Palestinian Journalist, Analyst, & Author Rula Jebreal (follow her on Twitter and Instagram and check out her Muck Rack profile here)

Even before October 7, Palestinians and Gazans in particular had been suffering from 3/4s of a century of displacement and oppression. Then, Hamas carried out the most most lethal attack against Jews since the Holocaust, killing some 1,200 Israelis who were mostly civilians and captured some 240 Israelis who Hamas took as hostages into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s reaction was to cut off nearly all supplies to the Gaza Strip, the enclave blocked and partly controlled by Israel that Hamas partly governs, and to launch the most intense military assault anywhere in decades. That history and the current assault are among the topics we discuss.

Rula is uniquely qualified to talk about this history: she has lived it. Born to an African Imam father who worked the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City and a Palestinian mother, Rula lost her mother at 5 and her father gave her to an orphanage in East Jerusalem, and the remarkable woman who founded and ran the orphanage became a mother to Rula, who raised her as a Palestinian. Rula’s novel Miral tells the story of several generations of these women living through the tumultuous history of Israel and Palestine and was turned into a movie starring Freida Pinto, Willem Dafoe, and Vanessa Redgrave, the screenplay of which Rula wrote. She holds Israeli citizenship as well as Italian citizenship, as Italy was where lived and worked as a journalist for many years. Her journalism and analysis has taken her around the world, into war zones and the studios of some of the major news networks around the world. On top of all these achievements, she is also a college professor in Miami. The following is my discussion with her.

Notes:

Rula’s novel Miral and the movie based on it

Since I mentioned her unique Vogue profile and photoshoot shot by the legendary Annie Leibovitz:

Some of Rula’s coverage of the current situation:

CNN interview

Washington Post interview also featuring major Israeli opposition politician and former Foreign Minister and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni

France24 interview

Rula on the issues prior to Oct 7:

The awesome video of Ben Shapiro being trounced by Rula

Her New York Times op-ed on being a minority in Israel

Yahoo News profile of Rula

New York Times profile of Rula

Rula on the rise of global fascism on MSNBC

and my take on the same

My article on Israeli vs. American COIN (counterinsurgency)

My take on Israel’s apartheid system in the West Bank

My deep-dive on the 2014 Gaza war and the history of the conflict

The HBO and Israeli Channel 12 miniseries Our Boys I mentioned that highlights the Jewish anti-Palestinian incitement in Israeli society and based on true events from 2014 is discussed here in Time and in The New York Times in the context of Netanyahu accusing it of being “anti-Semitic;” more coverage of the miniseries in The New Yorker and The New York Times; reviews from Variety and CNN

DONATE TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

Palestine Red Crescent Society is basically the Red Cross in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.

IsraAID is Israel’s largest humanitarian organization.

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a deeply experienced organization, has provided emergency medical services for people in Gaza for many years.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the UN agency specifically tasked with helping Palestinians.  Several of its aid workers have already been killed in the current round of violence.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is one of the largest Jewish-focused philanthropic organizations in the world and is helping Israelis on the ground.

Save the Children is one of the premier international aid organizations and has long-operated in Gaza.

© 2023-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) November 7, 2023, excerpted from The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations, Chapter 10 in the 2018 textbook, Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding, itself adapted and updated from my 2011 graduate school paper The How Behind Roman Pax: Selected Roman Operations Aimed at Establishing Peace and their Lessons for Modern Peace Operations –  PDF here); because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

The Concept of Roman Peace

Contrary to popular and Hollywood-style views of Rome, Romans were not all warmongering imperialist murderers, rather, peace was highly valued and praised in Roman society and many Romans had sophisticated views of peace (Goldsworthy 2016b, pp. 10, 12-13).  Inevitably, any view of peace is tied to views of war; without one, a definition of the other is meaningless.  Just as right and wrong, rich and poor are terms that can exist only relative to each other, war and peace will always be related to each other.  Today, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) includes “Freedom from civil unrest or disorder; public order and security” as the first definition, and another definition is “Freedom from, absence of, or cessation of war or hostilities; the condition or state of a nation or community in which it is not at war with another; peacetime” (OED Online).  Other OED definitions include “a state of friendliness; amity, concord” and “stillness, quiet.”  It notes the origin of the word is from the Latin word pax, also meaning peace.  Though the modern Western “notion of peace [is] the child of Roman pax,” it is important to note that there are significant differences between how the Romans conceptualized peace and how the modern world does the same (Barton 2007, p. 245).  The Latin word pax, like other important Latin words, has two opposite elements that form the range of the potential use of the word, these two meanings “poised…on the two opposite poles of a balance beam” in a figurative sense, as “[p]ax (peace) for the Romans could be a form of justice or a form of mercy; it might be a type of covenant or it might signal the absence of any contractual relationship” (p. 245).  Thus the same word might give or take, bestow or impose. It can have a “light” or “dark” meaning, yet the “[m]odern English [word ‘peace’] suppresses the ‘darker’ meaning of Roman pax, or subsumes the ‘darker’ meaning in the ‘lighter,’” so that “the non-contractual aspects have been assimilated into the contractual” (p. 245).  Words like “peace” and “mercy” today only give off a “gentle” vibe (p. 245).  During the final, long period of civil wars that led to the collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the Imperial Roman state, the Roman definition of peace came much closer to the non-threatening, magnanimous, and forgiving meaning it holds for modern audiences, but for much of Roman history there was the aforementioned duality to its meaning.  The duality existed, in part, because it took forceful, violent action on the part of Roman officials and armies, and the threat of such action, in order for anything approaching peace to exist.  Retribution was a key element in peace and order, and domestic politics as well as international relations was a balancing act between opposing forces in the Roman world.  Pax could also refer to social contracts; ultimately, much of Roman international relations (and domestic politics) can be seen as a series of social contracts, both formal and informal.  Finally, one of the common uses of pax was in the context of pax deorum—peace with the gods—referring to the Romans’ relationship with the divine forces that governed the world (pp. 245-247).

For Romans, “war in official ideology was the restoration of order against those who had disrupted that order (Eckstein 2006b, p. 216);” in fact, it was “[t]he Romans [who] were the first to regard war as a form of legal self-help if another state had committed wrong by denial of justice” (Ziegler 2010, p. 972).  It was something the Romans took very seriously, and it was, for much of republican Roman history, a matter of sacred religion.  The beginnings of war involved special priests called fetiales who would approach the border of a foreign state that the Romans felt had done them wrong and would engage in a ritual called the rerum repitio, formally stating Rome’s grievances with the offending party or parties and giving that party or those parties a chance to make amends (even when the system changed as the Republic became larger and political envoys were used to declare war instead of priests, the envoys still regularly went through the motions of presenting Roman grievances and giving a chance and, importantly, time for atonement for them). This was how the Romans would show the gods and other nations that that their war, should the enemy not redress the wrongs committed against Rome, was a “just war” (bellum iustum) and that the Romans were not the ones disturbing the natural order. In fact, the war would be undertaken to restore the proper order of things.  This was markedly different from other cultures of the time, cultures for which aggressive war for its own sake, for territory or plunder or glory, was almost never argued against, cultures which had no official mechanism to restrain their aggressiveness, let alone a sacred, religious one. And for the Romans, bellum iustum had to be defensive in nature, or it was not a bellum iustum. Cicero emphasized this when he wrote that

…wars are unjust when they are undertaken without proper cause.  No war can be waged except for the sake of punishing or repelling an enemy…no war is deemed to be just if it has not been declared and proclaimed, and if redress has not been previously sought…

(The Republic 35, trans. 1998)

He also wrote that “…wars should be undertaken for the one purpose of living peaceably without suffering injustice” (On Obligations 1.35, trans. 2000).  This comment in particular captures the civil order/social justice peace operations conception of a just peace, as in the absence of structural as well as physical violence. Cicero is the best extant articulation of the strain of Roman Stoic principles as applied to government and war and peace; the same principles are amplified by the poet Virgil in The Aeneid, articulating belief in Rome’s divine mission to bring civilization and peace to the world (though this is written after the case studies in question, after the Republic has given way to Augustus and the principate, an emperor-system dressed in the trappings of the Republic and honoring its traditions as the first phase of the Imperial government of the Roman Empire):

“Others, I have no doubt,

will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines,

draw from the block of marble features quick with life,

plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars

that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power

the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts:

to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,

to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

(6.980, trans. 2006)

The strain of Stoicism in Late Republican conceptions of peace always had undercurrents of universal brotherhood, promoted by wise, elected officials governing a free society through laws and wisdom that uphold the universal dignity and brotherhood all men share, and that to go against such principles and treat people unjustly is to violate the basic foundation of society and this universal law, is even to violate the gods themselves. Of course, this was the ideal; as in any ideal, practice would differ while still being constrained by the ideal.[1]

Though “the Romans measured war and peace against a very different yardstick of values than do contemporary Americans or Europeans” (Rosenstein 2007, p. 228), the Roman ideas of war and peace should be regarded as important for students and practitioners of peace/stability operations, in particular, because “[m]odern notions of ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’ are two keys to understanding ancient Roman notions of peace” (Barton 2007, p. 245).

At the heart of the concepts of both “peace” and “justice” for Rome was reciprocity (Barton 2007, 246). As Nathan Rosenstein (2007) points out, there was no United Nations or general concept of international law as exists today in the modern world (p. 228).  Eckstein (2006b) will be heavily cited throughout this chapter partly to make the point that the ancient Mediterranean was a fiercely competitive political environment between states; all large states and medium were very aggressive and even many smaller ones, too.  Much of this atmosphere comes from centuries of the Greek interstate political culture which dominated much of the Mediterranean.  Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian today generally considered to be the founder of the “Realist” school of international relations, writing of his own era used what has become a famous phrase from a dialogue between Athenian and Melian representatives that “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (History of the Peloponnesian War 5.89, trans. 1874/1996).  The issue in question is not loot or glory, but simply survival.  In a brutal “militarized interstate anarchy” such as that of the ancient Mediterranean, “fear dominates the decision making of most states” (Eckstein 2006b, pp. 49-50).  Even when a state needs to behave defensively, “such defensive actions often take the aggressive form;” it was a world where if one state did not exploit another weaker one, that first state’s rival would exploit that other weaker state and then use its increased power to dominate the first state that hesitated (p. 51).  Even the mere appearance of being weak invited trouble and aggression from other states.  The “system,” and it probably should not even be granted that sophisticated a word to describe it, “works” whereby any weaker state must be severely punished by the larger state it challenges, for any positive result for the weaker state could encourage other weaker states to follow suit, or even join together against the larger state, or, in a worst-case scenario, the stronger state’s own subjects may conclude it is too weak to punish them and may rebel or even seek to overthrow said state.  In such an environment, mercy encourages further challenges, so the “system” “works” when the strong state brutalizes and possibly annihilates the smaller state that challenges it, keeping other states in line and following the “rules.”  In the case of the Athenians and the Melians, the Melians, after reaching out to allies of Sparta, Athens’ chief rival, did not submit to Athenian rule and were totally destroyed by Athens.  Athens may not have even wanted to behave so brutally, but it felt it had no choice under the conditions of “the system.” Thus, the “system” encourages brutality as a necessary means of survival and pushes peoples and states that would prefer mercy to act against such inclinations.  It was common for “state expansion…[to be] caused primarily by fear generated by pressing circumstances” (p. 56).[2]

NOTES

[1] For more on these themes, see Eckstein 2006b, pp. 216-229; Rosenstein 2007, p. 229; Clark 2011, pp. 3-4; Pangle and Ahrensdorf 1999, pp. 51-72; Adler 2007, pp. 310-312; Yakobson 2009; and Burton 2011, pp. 121-122, 333-334.

[2] For further detail on these themes, see Barton 2007, p. 246; Rosenstein 2007, p. 228; Eckstein 2006b, pp. 48-57; Goldsworthy 2016b, p. 59.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Adler, E. (2007, February-March). [Review of the book Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words, by A M. Riggsby]. The Classical Journal, 102(3), 310–312.

Barton, C. A. (2007). “The price of peace in ancient Rome.” In K. A. Raalflaub (Ed.), War and peace in the ancient world (pp. 245–257). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. doi:10.1002/9780470774083.ch14

Burton, P. L. (2011). Friendship and empire: Roman diplomacy and imperialism in the Middle Republic 335-146 BC. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139035590

Clark, G. (2011). Late Antiquity: A very short introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199546206.001.0001

Eckstein, A. M. (2006b). Mediterranean anarchy, interstate war, and the rise of Rome. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Goldsworthy, A. (2016b). Pax, Romana: War, peace and conquest in the Roman world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Pangle, T. L., & Ahrensdorf, P. J. (1999). Justice among nations: On the moral basis of power and peace. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Rosenstein, N. (2007). “War and peace, fear and reconciliation at Rome.” In K. A. Raaflaub (Ed.), War and peace in the ancient world (pp. 226–244). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Yakobson, A. (2009). “Public opinion, foreign policy and just war in the late republic.”In C. Eilers (Ed.), Diplomats and diplomacy in the Roman world (pp. 45–72). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Ziegler, K. H. (2010). “War, just.” In A. Grafton, G. W. Most, & S. Settis (Eds.), The classical tradition,972-973. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 13, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; updated March 7, 2023 to include new 6-month map of Russia’s Bakhmut-area “progress;” because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request. See related January 14 article, THE TWO MAPS SHOWING WHY RUSSIA’S BAKHMUT CAMPAIGN IS UNDENIABLY A MISERABLE FAILURE (including Soledar); my initial Twitter thread that inspired this article was shared and praised by none other than Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe (so much appreciation to him and he and his analysis are definitely worth following):

Update January 13: THE man to follow on logistics and equipment in the Ukraine war—Trent Telenko, one of my top 5 accounts to follow on the war—just generously plugged my initial thread…

SILVER SPRING—The eyes of the world are currently on the small town of Soledar, a suburb of the small city of Bakhmut, “every inch of which,” to quote Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s in-person address to the U.S. Congress in late December, “is soaked in blood.”  Russian advances in Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, come in the context of Bakhmut for months being the focus of Russia’s main ground offensives in Ukraine (Russia being reduced, in most other cases with its offensive activity, to primarily lobbing missiles and drones against civilian, non-military targets—civilians themselves and their water and power infrastructure—since Russia’s military remains largely ineffective against Ukraine’s actual military).  Yet the massive Russian effort to take Bakhmut over these recent months has very, very little to show for it, for, as the increasingly famous meme proclaims daily, “Bakhmut Holds” for Ukraine.

Neither Bakhmut nor Soledar are significant in and of themselves; there are multiple far larger, far more strategically important cities a few hours’ drive or not even an hour’s drive away from them, but they have been made important because Russia keeps desperately attacking there and Ukraine is able to keep defending while inflicting terribly high casualties on the attackers, the Ukrainians themselves having to fight fiercely—and, even the Russians admit, bravely—as Soledar and Bakhmut are both reduced to WWII-like landscapes of rubble amidst brutal fighting that is testing the limits of both sides.

While Russia will mostly have to bring in raw conscripts from within Russia to reinforce its positions here—unless it wants to weaken other positions and invite other Ukrainian counteroffensives—Ukraine is fighting on home turf and is not reinforcing with barely-trained, barely-equipped mobilized like the Russians but with well-motivated soldiers who have been training for some time or even veterans, often equipped with newer Western weapons and equipment far superior to what their Russian counterparts field, which I have repeatedly noted before and has been the case for most of the war.  Reinforcing and resupplying Bakhmut and Soledar positions, then, is a far easier proposition for Ukraine than for Russia, and the better-equipped, better-organized, better-supplied, better-trained, better-cared-for Ukrainian soldiers are also suffering far less from things like trench foot along with hypothermia and the other harsh effects of winter, additional losses that are hard to track but are certainly being sustained.

Throughout its Bakhmut campaign, Russia has been throwing hastily-mobilized, often poorly-equipped troops in what seem sometimes to be human-wave style attacks against Ukraine in Bakhmut and its small suburbs, hoping to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders with quantity over quality, and not only has it not worked well, the Russian casualties have been staggering.

Earlier, there were more of the “normal” newly-mobilized going into the actual Russian Army and the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist militias involved, but more recently, the private Wagner Group has taken the lead in the Bakhmut area.  Wagner acts as an extension of the Russian military and is led by close Putin ally Yevgeniy Prigozhin—known as “Putin’s chef”—who for many years has been a point man for Russian President Vladimir Putin on everything from pro-Trump anti-Clinton election interference against the U.S., a Russian mercenary attack against U.S. and local-American-allied forces in Syria, and, today, Russia’s “grand” campaign for the tiny city of Bakhmut.

While the 2016 election interference succeeded wildly beyond what could have been expected, on the military side of things, the attack on American and local-U.S.-allied forces in Syria ended in disaster, which is the same result, thus far, for Prigozhin’s military efforts in Bakhmut.  Within the Wager forces, there are some 10,000 “regular” Wagner mercenaries leading some 40,000 recruits from the Russian prison system, prisoners convicted of all sorts of (sometimes horrible) crimes being used in quite cruel and inhumane ways that result in horrific casualties on the Russian side while achieving very little.  Out of this Wagnerian/convict force, recently there have been over 14,000 casualties: over 10,000 wounded, over 4,100 killed, with over 1,000 killed in the very short time “between late November and early December,” an overall casualty percentage approaching (now probably in excess of) thirty-percent

Stupidly yet predictably for Russia, even specially-trained Russian Army forces—like these artillerists begging not to be used as mere cannon fodder—are being used as mere cannon fodder.  As of today, Ukraine estimates that over 113,000 Russian military personnel have been killed and wounded* in the war since February 24, an official estimate I have long argued is worth taking seriously.

On Pyrrhus and “Pyrrhic Victory”

With these attacks by Russia and the level of their costs for Russia, the word “Pyrrhic” comes to mind, which you often hear in the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a victory that is not worth winning because the winner has suffered or lost so much in winning it”—but I will not use that term because assigning the word “victory” to Russia’s madness in Soledar is premature; we can settle for “Pyrrhic advances” here, but the word “Pyrrhic” and common phrase “Pyrrhic victory” deserve some discussion.

The term is actually from a person’s name, a famous general from antiquity, Pyrrhus of Epirus (319-272 BCE), who, according to Plutarch, was held by Rome’s later great foe Hannibal Barca of Carthage (247-c. 183-181 BCE) to be the greatest general in history.  Already in his time, Pyrrhus was an incredibly famous Greek general at a time when famous generals were sometimes found to be taking up wars upon request from other parties, and Pyrrhus was in intense demand in his day.  One of these requests for aid he accepted involved the Greek state of Tarentum in southern Italy in 281 (the Greeks had colonized southern Italy centuries ago).  Tarentum had found its supremacy in Southern Italy challenged by a rising power from central Italy: the Roman Republic, and the Tarentines requested aid from their fellow Greek, King Pyrrhus, just a short sail from Epirus (western Greece) across to Italy’s boot, on which Tarentum lay.

In the first clash between Rome against a mainland Greek power from the Mediterranean’s east, Pyrrhus fought two major battles against the Romans in 280 at Heraclea (Rome’s first, and disastrous, encounter with elephants in battle) and 279 at Asculum, and both seem to have been devastating Roman defeats, with Pyrrhus coming to “within two days’ march of Rome itself” (admittedly with formidable walls for defense, but still…).  Yet Pyrrhus was distraught, in particular, after his second victory:

The two sides disengaged, and Pyrrhus is said to have remarked to someone who was congratulating him:  “One more victory like that over the Romans and we shall be completely undone.”  For by then he had lost a large part of the army he came with, and almost all his Friends and generals, who were irreplaceable.  He could also see that, while the enthusiasm of his allies in Italy was waning, the Roman army was quickly and easily brought back up to strength—it was as though there were a spring that flowed straight from their home into their camp—and so far from being demoralized by their defeats, the resentment they felt towards the enemy gave them extra strength and determination (Plutarch, Parallel Lives,The Life of Pyrrhus 21).

Rome was saved at that moment by a combination of its own dogged determination but also by Pyrrhus being enticed to go to Sicily to fight on behalf of Greek cities there against Carthage (saved not likely existentially—even if that may not have been obvious at the time for the Romans—but from winning, at that time, supremacy in southern Italy, but that, in turn, could have substantially altered the trajectory of Roman and world history, especially with the Punic Wars against Carthage on the horizon, which would begin in 264 BCE over in Sicily).

Russia’s Pointless, Pyrrhic Bakhmut Campaign

But that above long quote from the ancient Greek historian Plutarch is quite relevant to the current situation in Ukraine: Pyrrhus, sustaining heavy losses even in his victories (exactly where we get the term “Pyrrhic victory”), could not easily replace the high-quality veterans and leaders he knew well and had brought over the sea with him from Greece, while Rome, fighting in Italy on its home turf, could replace its losses and reinforce far faster with men highly motivated to defend their homes, their losses only motivating them further.  This dynamic is very much true for Russia fighting its imperialist war against Ukrainians in Ukraine, and it is more than fair to apply the adjective “Pyrrhic” to anything resembling a Russian victory (Mariupol) or advance (now in Soledar) after the earliest days of this current Russian escalation in Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022 (I say escalation because Putin actually started the war in 2014).

In the age of mechanized war and in light of Ukraine’s sweeping, historic counteroffensives breaking through Russian lines throughout 2022, the issue that should most concern analysts and journalists is not whether Russia has or has not or to what extent has taken Soledar, but to what degree Russian forces have destroyed themselves and thinned themselves out during these offensives and to what extent that has opened up Russia to a new Ukrainian counteroffensive.  Given the incredible and sustained nature of Russian losses in the Bakhmut region, it would seem very likely that Russia is leaving itself very vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack, if not right at Soledar or Bakhmut or nearby, then somewhere else on the front lines neglected by Russia with all the disproportionate attention it has been giving the Bakhmut sector (remember, the major Kharkiv and Izyum/Kupiansk/Lyman counteroffensives occurred when Russia was focused mainly on Kherson in addition to Bakhmut—the irrational Russian focus on Bakhmut has been going on for months—with the main Kherson counteroffensive coming after the shock of Russia’s catastrophic territorial losses of thousands of square kilometers on the Kharkiv and Izyum/Kupiansk/Lyman fronts). As I noted in my last major Ukraine piece, the war has settled into two main phases: 1.) major Ukrainian counteroffensives and 2.) in between those counteroffensives, while Ukraine bides its time and prepares for its new counterattacks as it keeps inflicting major casualties on Russia while Russia keeps engaging in mostly ineffective and unproductive yet costly assaults. Guess where Bakhmut and Soledar fit in there…

In the end, it is pathetic if it took this much effort and dead Russians for the Russians to take Soledar.  And, if the Russians have not taken it, well, that is even more pathetic.  Almost as pathetic of months of not being able to take Bakhmut.  Almost as pathetic, in turn, as almost ten months of Russia losing.

And even if the Russians somehow took Bakhmut it would not be any major accomplishment; that the Russians have lost thousands of troops failing, thus far, to take it—again, regardless of if they take it and however briefly hold it in the future—is truly emblematic of the wretched capabilities and leadership of the Russian military.  Maybe that that is why Putin has, yet again (it is easy to lose track), shuffled the general running the war, Sergey Surovikin, to be under a new overall commander: Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Genera Staff, two men who seem only able to achieve the casualty levels of Pyrrhus without his cunning or victories…

Pyrrhus As a Warming to Putin and Prigozhin

And to return to Pyrrhus, he would end up losing in both Sicily and in his return to Italy in 275 BCE, at the Battle of Beneventum (Maleventum then, but later renamed in part to honor Rome’s victory), losing the war overall.  Just a few years later, in 272, he found himself drawn into a civil war in the mainland-Greek city-state of Argos inside the city of Argos itself, the combat devolving into messy fighting in narrow streets.  With one of his elephants wounded and blocking his and his forces’ exit from the city, Pyrrhus met with this inglorious end:

Seeing the storm and surge raging around him, Pyrrhus took off the diadem which distinguished his helmet, handed it to one of his Companions, and then gave his horse its head and charged at his pursuers. As he engaged them, he took a spear in the chest. The wound was not fatal or even serious, though it pierced his breastplate, but Pyrrhus turned against the man who had struck him. Now, this man was an Argive of no social standing, the son of a poor old woman, who was watching the affray from the rooftops along with all the other women. When she saw that her son was fighting Pyrrhus, she was terrified for him, and she picked up a roof-tile with both hands and threw it at Pyrrhus. It struck him on the back of the head, just below the helmet, and crushed the vertebrae at the base of his neck. His vision blurred, his hands dropped the reins, and he slid from his horse and fell to the ground by the tomb of Licymnius. (Plutarch, Parallel Lives,Pyrrhus 34).

Pyrrhus sought to expand the influence and size of his realm, often using his military more like a private military company (PMC) than a national army.   Thus, both Putin and Prigozhin could learn from Pyrrhus’s Pyrrhic victories that even the great may fall, and not only fall suddenly, but quite pathetically (they may also yet learn to fear the wrath of soldiers’ mothers…).

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 6, 2023; see related articles from July 11, 2021, Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth and November 15, 2021, A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—It is time to acknowledge the historic greatness of the Biden Administration for what it is, and the performance the Democrats under Biden in the 2022 midterm elections is one of several strong examples of this greatness.

With the final seat of Congress decided by the Great State of Georgia after the December runoff victory of Rev. Raphael Warnock, who beat a walking public service announcement for football-related traumatic brain injury in the form of Herschel Walker (and far more emphatically than in November, by a percentage margin over three times greater), we can truly take stock of the historic overperformance of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party under his leadership.

Of course, a lot of this was about individual candidates.  And Biden has had an excellent partner in Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate (he doesn’t get enough credit) and has had an incredible ally in the House with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, certainly one of the best—one of the most effective and accomplished—speakers in U.S. history, perhaps the best.

Still, in our presidential system, midterm election performance has always been one of the major measures of how presidents are judged during their term and throughout American history: no matter what happens, it is always to a large extent a metric tied to the president’s performance and leadership as leader of his party (with only the exception of John Tyler simply not having a party by his only midterm in 1842-1843 after he inherited the presidency upon the death of Whig President William Henry Harrison, whose people did not vet Tyler enough to realize he was, well, not really a Whig).  Of course, the degree to which a midterm should reflect and does in the popular consciousness and amongst pundits and scholars can and does wax and wane due to a variety of factors and circumstances at the time, but it is there, an inescapable part of the equation of evaluating presidents.

I have already discussed in detail how legislatively and in terms of party unity in Congress, the Biden Administration in its first two years and the Democratic Party under Biden in the 117^th Congress are the most impressive since LBJ in the 1960s and, well, ever in U.S. history, respectively (in terms of party unity with the possible only exception of one Federalist Senate at the dawn of our republic).  And I have further explained how these very accomplishments are even more impressive in that they came in an era of far more division (the most divided in modern American history and with the smallest governing majorities), but here, after these midterms, we have even more hard data that places Biden’s and his party’s midterm election performance in proper historical perspective, confirming this performance is among the highest in American history, especially in the modern era.

How do I know this?  I have literally (to use a Bidenism) put together data on every president’s first midterm since the dawn of the republic, available in a full set of Excel spreadsheets I created, but I will cut and paste images of some of that data here, images you can zoom in on by clicking on them.  You can see the full data in a close-up image by clicking on images or on the link in this paragraph for the Excel version.  And if I may toot my own horn, I am pretty sure this is by far the most comprehensive presentation of data in table form of American presidents’ first midterm performances you can find anywhere (if you find a more detailed presentation do please let me know; it took me way longer that I had hoped to put this together).

Here, first, are all the first midterms for presidents from 1914 onward, as the House had the same number of seats—435—since then and also as 1914 was first midterm when every regular U.S. Senate election was determined by popular vote (as opposed to being selected by the state legislatures) with the implementation of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution; we shall call these midterms the midterm elections of the “modern era.”  Elections from this era, then, will be the most useful for comparison as the losses and gain are all from a House of the same size and the Senate’s size did not change very much, with all its races actually decided by popular elections.

This dataset includes presidents who came to power after a death (Truman in 1945 after FDR died), assassination (Teddy Roosevelt, or TR, in 1901 after McKinley was killed), or resignation (Ford after Nixon’s 1974 resignation) and had their first midterm without being elected; if applicable, in addition to the midterms for their first partial terms, I have also included when applicable their first midterms after being actually elected president as well as after their inherited midterms (Roosevelt in 1906 after 1902, Truman in 1950 after 1946; Ford never won a presidential election as he was defeated by Carter in 1976), as comparisons can be difficult and a midterm after inheriting the presidency and a midterm after actually being elected are not exactly apples and oranges (inherited term data is in italics in the tables).

This data is even more telling if we arrange these modern-era presidents in a ranking based on seats won or lost in Congress, starting with the House.

Among modern presidencies spanning more than a century, Joe Biden is tied for 5^th in terms of the best absolute performance for his party in the House of Representatives (a loss of 9 seats): only 4 modern presidents over 4 midterms—FDR and his Democrats gaining 9 seats in 1934, George W. Bush and his Republicans gaining 8 seats in 2002, JFK and his Democrats losing 4 in 1962, and George H. W. Bush and his Republicans losing 8 in 1990—did better.

It is also quite telling that in the entirety of the modern era, only 2 presidents have actually gained seats at all in the House during their first midterms: presidents almost always have their party lose seats.

Biden ties with Calvin Coolidge’s and his Republicans’ performance from 1926, only losing 9 seats (though in Biden’s case, this meant Democrats lost control of the House, while Coolidge kept control of the House for his Republicans, so I put ol’ Calvin above Joe on the tie order).  This puts Biden over 13 other presidents and 14 first midterms (per my explanation above, Truman gets 2 in our accounting) in terms their first post-elected and/or post-inherited midterms.

But not all elections are equal, and I account for some extraordinary circumstances in the notes section.  In this spirit, if we consider the conditions of each election, Biden’s specific ranking is unique and far more impressive: FDR got to have his first midterm not far from the nadir of the Great Depression; George W. Bush was riding a high-level of unity and support after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and during the early phase of the war in Afghanistan; Kennedy had literally just days earlier resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis, averting nuclear war and ending a major standoff with the Soviet Union, saving the world (partnering with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev) from destruction; and George H. W. Bush had his midterm while he was presiding over a Cold War victory (Germany was reunified just a month before the election) and during the Gulf War, Bush’s handling of which enjoyed widespread support.

But while each of those four presidents enjoyed considerable winds at their backs, Biden in 2022 had been dealing with decades-high inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the worst levels of partisanship since the Civil War and Reconstruction that are tied to an ongoing Trumpist insurrection seeking to destroy American democracy.

In other words, while those “scoring” “better” by having their parties fare better in the House than Biden saw massive levels of broad, historic support in the face of various domestic and geopolitical consensus moments—with history on their side in historic ways—Biden had the wind blowing in his face and was able still to perform as well as he did and close enough to those with far better circumstances.  In that light, Biden and his Democrats’ performance is perhaps the most remarkable performance considering the difficulties they faced and those other four presidents and their parties did not.

The biggest winner in the modern era was FDR in 1934 with a gain of 9 seats and the biggest loser Warren Harding in 1922 losing a massive 77 seats!

Biden’s modern House first midterm ranking: 5^th (4 presidents and midterms ahead, 13 presidents and 14 midterms behind, tied with 1) out of 19 presidents and 20 first midterms

Let’s also look at the Senate-side of things.

In the Senate, too, Biden is also 5^th in the modern era, tied with Richard Nixon with a gain of 1 seat each, ahead of 12 other presidents over 13 relevant midterms (Truman, again, is counted twice).  With the exception of Reagan, who oversaw Senate Republicans hold steady, the rest of those presidents all had their parties lose seats.  Only 5 other presidents also gained seats:  FDR and his Democrats (+9), JFK and his Democrats (+4), Woodrow Wilson and his Democrats (+3), and George W. Bush and Donald Trump each with their Republicans (+2; not in line with House results for Trump as he and his Republicans lost 42 House seats that same year in 2018, as the Senate can easily be out of sync with the House, especially considering all 435 House seats are up for election every two years while only a third of Senate seats are at stake in any given election).  Keeping in mind the challenging circumstances in which Biden is governing, remember also that 3 of the 5 “scoring” ahead of Biden faced very favorable circumstances, as discussed, also leading to relatively quite strong House results for them, as discussed.  Thus, Biden and Democrats’ performance Senate-side is also quite remarkable.  In fact, their performance in 2022 is the first time since 1934 a president’s party successfully defended every Senate seat up for election that they held before the election, a real history-making series of victories, indeed.

The champ is FDR with +9 seats in 1934, the biggest loser Truman with -11 in 1946 (sorry, Harry).

Biden’s modern Senate first midterm ranking: 5^th (5 presidents ahead, 12 presidents and 13 midterms behind, tied with 1) out of 19 presidents and 20 first midterms

If you want to get really meta, you can go all the way back to George Washington’s first midterm.

Which I did.

Here we are using “premodern” to refer to all midterms from Washington’s first in 1790/1791 and up through the last elections in the early twentieth century (1910) before all Senate midterm elections were conducted as popular votes, à la the Seventeenth Amendment.

And if we rank everyone from 1790 to 2022, first with the House?

Here, Biden still stands out, tied for 10^th with premodern John Quincy Adams in addition to the modern Coolidge.  Included among those surpassing him are some of greats from a much earlier period in American history where there was, relatively speaking, a lot more unity during particular midterm years: Jefferson comes in 1^st well into his “Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800”, with James Monroe and James Madison tied for 2^nd (all with their Democratic-Republican Party and the era of the latter two ending up being so unified their time in part was referred to as the “Era of Good Feelings” and was essentially one-party ruling with an overwhelming majority).  You also have giants like Teddy Roosevelt and his Republicans in 1902 after his first midterm (5^th place) after he took over after the assassination of William McKinley, and you have our first two presidents—George Washington in 1790 and John Adams in 1798 with their Federalists—tied for 6^th.

Only 12 presidents and 12 first midterms rank higher than Biden out of 45 individuals to hold the office (yes, Biden is the 46^th president, but Grover Cleveland was both the 22^nd and 24^th president since he singularly won non-consecutive terms—and let’s hope Trump does not repeat this feat—so there are only 45 people in question, and less because of exclusions and deaths, which I will discuss below), but of those 12, 1 is Teddy Roosevelt and he ranks above Biden with his non-elected, inherited midterm after McKinley’s assassination but below him with his first midterm after he was actually elected to the presidency, so take that that for what you will.  Biden ranks ahead of 25 other presidents and 26 midterms.  Except, since we have Teddy Roosevelt as 2 “others” here, 1 election ahead and 1 election behind, I suppose we could say Biden is loosely-tied as a president with Teddy and more closely tied with Coolidge and Quincy Adams—tied with 3 presidents and 2 two midterms—with only 11 presidents ahead of Biden (subtracting TR) and 12 midterms ahead of Biden’s (keeping 1 of TR’s) and 24 presidents and 26 midterms behind Biden (since he beat both of Truman’s midterms and we are including the other TR midterm).

And for some real perspective?  Even Lincoln, our greatest president, lost 23 seats (and his party’s majority in the House, but it would govern through a plurality coalition) in his first midterm in 1862-1863 during the Civil War.

The all-time winner is Thomas Jefferson gaining 35 House seats for his Democratic-Republicans in 1802 and Benjamin Harrison losing the most—a whopping 93 Republican seats—in 1890.

Biden’s all-time House first midterm ranking: 10^th (11 presidents and 12 midterms ahead, 24 presidents and 26 midterms below, 2-way tie with 1 more “tie”: tied with 3 presidents and 2 midterms) out of 39 eligible presidents and 41 eligible first midterms (see the discussion of which 6 presidents were removed from consideration in the final section)

Now, for the full Senate history:

These should not be weighted as heavily as House results because most of the premodern Senators were chosen by state legislatures and not the people directly, but, still, as the state legislators were mostly chosen by the people, it still involves some degree of (indirect) popular selection and is something of a representative choice.  The Senate also has much smaller margins and swings, so the results are all a lot closer and therefore harder to differentiate and chance plays a much wider role in variations.  So, out of our four major measures, we can confidently say that this one has the least value. 

In any case, Biden still comes out pretty well, with some of the same crowd that has outperformed him—along with some others—coming in ahead, and some surprising ties, while still being ahead of most of the competition in the end.

Biden comes in at 7^th but in a five-way tie; they all come in with a gain of 1 Senate seat (behind a five-way tie for 6^th with 2+ Senate-seat gains).  His fellow 7^th-placers are George Washington from 1790, Andrew Jackson in 1830, Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and Richard Nixon in 1970 (wow to all of that).  12 midterms from 11 presidents are ahead of Biden (including both of Teddy Roosevelt’s) and 24 midterms behind him from 23 presidents (including both of Truman’s terms).

Same champ and biggest loser from the modern era, but factoring out the modern era, among the premoderns McKinley fares the best at +8 in 1898 (but then he was assassinated, so, small consolation for his fans) and William Taft the worst in 1910 at -9 (trimming a lot of fat, relatively; sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Biden’s all-time Senate first midterm ranking: 10^th (11 presidents and 12 midterms ahead, 23 presidents and 24 midterms below, 5-way tie with 5) out of 39 eligible presidents and 41 eligible midterms

There you have all the data (remember, available in a full Excel file), with quirks and nuances explained by a key and accompanying notes in the file and the images.

I’d say that the House results are much more meaningful because, again, they reflect the mood of the whole nation and have always been chosen directly by the people, while Senate elections only reflect one-third of the country and were not always popularly elected.  And, again, perhaps the most important context to consider is that most of the people doing better than Biden in these rankings had history and some big unifying advantages on their side right at the time of the elections or at the very least did not usually have terribly divisive issues plaguing the country, while Biden had some major issues dividing the nation much more intensely during his first midterm as a time, again, of historic division.  That does not mean there were not crises those other leaders faced, but some crises—the Great Depression and WWII, for example, or 9/11 and the early days in Afghanistan, or the Gulf War or the Cuban Missile Crisis—unify the nation while others—slavery in the mid-1800s or inflation and COVID-19 for Biden—divide the nation.  This, for the most part, places Biden in his own special category, objectively speaking, especially in the modern era.

This historic 2022 midterms performance is, of course, tied to the historic legislative accomplishments of the Biden Administration, the historic and (near-?)unprecedented party discipline of the Democrats of the 117^th Congress, and the historic and unprecedented support Biden and that Congress offered Ukraine on the front line of the war for democracy and freedom against fascism and tyranny.

Contrast Biden and his Democrats with the current House Republicans, who are more than flirting with fascism (I do not use that term lightly and took some pains to define it) and showing the most dysfunction of an incoming House majority or plurality party since the 1850s, still unable to elect a House Speaker after an incredible fourteen ballots (last few of these ballots happening on the second anniversary of Trump’s Capitol insurrection in the very chamber assaulted by Trump’s insurrectionists!), much to the embarrassment of invertebrate Kevin McCarthy.

Yes, this whole first midterm thing is just one metric of several major metrics by which a president can be evaluated, some of which are qualitative and hard to measure, and, yes, even this one can be tricky to really properly measure, but the data is still clear: Biden and his Democrats stood out in league with some very good company ahead of most presidents and most of their parties, and were able to do so facing national divisions those outperforming him did not.  History has already been written here, and credit is due where credit is due.

The media should more and more be explaining all this to voters, avoiding false equivalence, and properly contrasting the options for voters, which it is, simply put, not very good at (as I have noted repeatedly before).  Yet voters need to realize these stark truths as they consider their choices in the crucial elections ahead, as the survival of both our very democracy and Western democracy itself may depend on that realization.

On My Imperfect Ranking System, Its Methodology and Data

Compared to just the modern presidents’ midterms, ranking the comprehensive set is trickier.  Again, quick summary of the combined House data: 11 ahead of Biden + 1 Biden himself + 2 tied +1 “tied” (TR) +24 behind Biden + 3 excluded + 3 who died before any midterms and you account for all 45 presidents (11+1+2+1+24+3+3=45) with 44 midterms, 2 midterms being considered each for TR and Truman, just so you see from where I got my numbers.  Depending on what you want to count, you have options your own options.

Out of 45 presidents, 3 were dead before their first midterm would have happened.  In terms of the number of midterms, there were 44 first midterms (including 2 each by my parameters for Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, as they are the only 2 presidents to inherit a presidency, have a first midterm not after being elected, and then actually win a presidential election and have another midterm, the first after being elected), but 3 of these midterms and presidents were excluded from the rankings to make a total 6 ineligible presidents, all in the premodern era: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor died (in 1841 and 1850, respectively) before any midterm could happen and James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 before any midterm for him; as for the 1842-3 midterms of William Harrison’s successor John Tyler, Tyler had no party affiliation and this cannot be evaluated; during Reconstruction (1863-1877), Andrew Johnson and his Democrats in 1866-7 and Ulysses Grant and his Republicans in 1870-1 are excluded from rankings for very specific reason, explained in the next paragraph.

During the Civil War and after (an era known as Reconstruction), most of the Southern proslavery states that had attempted to secede were not seated for some time in the Congress, but were readmitted during a period of varying degrees of U.S. military government operating in those states in the face of white supremacist terrorist insurgencies that would eventually succeed and establish Jim Crow apartheid (let’s just be honest here) until the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s.  Therefore, the Reconstruction results of Johnson and Grant’s first midterms are not included in the rankings due to the complications of military government during major insurgencies and states being readmitted under such conditions.

Even pulling three midterm results out, there are other complications. When you include the premodern data, these rankings are a lot more complicated considering both the House and the Senate grew dramatically in size in the premodern period.  Some examples from the House of this and how tough it is to properly rank in this era and rank against presidents in much later periods within the premodern era and after it: Washington gained three House seats in 1790/1 at a time when the entire House was just 67 seats and is ranked below both FDR in 1934 (3^rd, +9) and George W. Bush in 2002 (4^th, +8) at a time when the House had 435 members to Washington’s 67 or Adams’s 106 (who with his 1798/9 +3 is tied with Washington even with significantly more House seats).

So, in the end, that means 39 of 45 different individuals who were president are considered across 41 ranked out of 44 first midterms, allowing for the flukes and deviations.  No system would be perfect and, without getting into advanced weighting and statistics (for example, calculating what a 3-seat gain for Washington in a House with 67 seats would be proportionally adjusted for a modern 435-seat House), I challenge anyone to come up with a better yet-relatively-simple system and welcome anyone who will answer that challenge.

A lot of the data initially came from Wikipedia gateways but with easily verifiable official records from Congress just a link away and with often easy-(but sometimes not-so-easy)to-access data confirming and/or clarifying what was presented in Wikipedia.  You can check my numbers against whatever you are able to find, but I did spend a lot of time reviewing and confirming the data and am highly confident in the numbers I posted, which you are free to double-check for yourselves.

And, since a lot of this involved rankings, I used numerals for single and double-digits and for rankings to stay consistent for your eyes.

Finally, if you would like the premodern data separately, well, here’s that too:

And don’t forget: all that data is available in my multiple-spreadsheet Excel file! See related articles from July 11, 2021, Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth and November 15, 2021 A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), September 19, 2022

SILVER SPRING—I must admit from the outset that I never planned on writing an essay about this admittedly grand historical event.  Yet the passing of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom the magnificent state ceremonies commemorating her passing pulled me in quite unexpectedly and, in spite of myself, I found I was filled with some rather profound (at least to me) thoughts on the whole symbolism of this moment, and the importance, at least, of that symbolism of perhaps not so much the institution of the British Monarchy here and now but of what it once was: one of the grand monarchies in world history, one that ruled over a vast empire, at times the largest and most powerful in the world for its time, even though for much of that time, the monarchy was constrained, and increasingly so over time as the British Parliament exercised more and more power over time at the expense of the monarchy.

Today, the day of the Queen’s funeral and interment, it seems so much more preferable to quote J.R.R. Tolkien—who himself was named by Queen Elizabeth II in 1972 (a year and then some before his death in 1973) a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and suffered so much in the trenches as a soldier in World War I, surviving when many of his friends did not—than Churchill, who was an ardent acolyte of British imperialism and near-gleefully described shooting Sudanese from the days of his military service in the 1898 Battle of Omdurman in the era preceding World War I.  In the Appendices of Tolkien’s magisterial The Lord of the Rings (spoilers to follow), after Aragorn becomes Aragorn II Elessar Telcontar, the king not only of Gondor but also of Arnor and thus the High King of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, it is noted that he rises to heights for a human not seen in Middle Earth in literally thousands of years and not ever seen again after his reign of well over a century, with Tolkien beautifully describing him in his eventual passing as “an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

That line has been popping up in my head ever since the Queen’s passing.

I am not sure how many people realize this, but Elizabeth II was the last major living historical figure linked to a bygone era that was itself after the twilight, indeed, during the dusk, of the era of great kings and empires and their accompanying trappings.

The degree of global interest, attendance (of both “commoners” and world leaders), and splendour (to use the British spelling) of these ceremonies surrounding the Queen’s passing have not seen anything to rival it in a generous generation’s full lifespan: very few people are currently alive to be able to claim to have witnessed anything similar, from afar on television and let alone in person.  The sights, sounds, and solemnity of the occasion is not like anything I have ever seen and I am forty-years-old.  This must seem even more fantastical in the eyes of the younger rising generations.

The only other comparable institution to the British Monarchy today is the Roman Catholic Papacy, but as Francis has only been pope since 2013, Elizabeth as a figure of stature over time dwarfs him, as the Queen has reigned since 1952, longer than any monarch in British or English history.  That says a lot for a kingdom that has existed for over one thousand years, since the 920s (and even longer if you go back to Wessex).  With the pope, there are no marriages or balls even if there is ceremony and ostentation.

In many ways—though hardly all—Elizabeth’s institution and her carrying out of her royal role was looking backwards in time, emulating and carrying on the literal symbols of the monarchy—titles, crowns, scepters, etc.—that came from generations past, when such things were far more common, the way of the world.  In many ways, she and the monarchy itself lived in the past and was the living past presented to us in the present: to quote Tolkien again, “an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

To be clear, it is truly a blessing that the age of great monarchies wedding the state and religion together to terrorize the masses, ruling from inherited privilege over vast swath of unconsenting populations, some conquered by seats of power continents away, is no more.  To quote the late great Englishman and British citizen turned American, Christopher Hitchens, the World War I era was “the greatest fall of monarchies in history,” and even Princess Elizabeth (before she was queen) was born just after this era (and a few years after the peak of the British Empire’s power and extent, today just a shell of that), but, again, to be clear, in many ways she and her institution sought to represent much from that era, ever gazing back upon it to present an image of its legacy to the present.

Charles III will never equal the stature of his mother for numerous reasons, and, I am certain that—not wanting to even attempt to outshine his mother—he will not have his own passing commemorated with nearly as much fuss as that of this mother.  Perhaps the bloated Saudi monarchy, as contrived and “new money” as it is, may try to match the expense when the current king passes, but that would certainly not match Elizabeth’s passing’s ceremonies in gravitas, nor in the degree of awe and respect felt by much of the rest of the world.  For a sad comparison to the current royal sendoff, consider the comparative whimper with which former Soviet Premier and President Mikhail Gorbachev—once a giant on the world stage and a revolutionary leader of the second most powerful nation then on earth—was laid to rest in Russia exactly one week before Elizabeth’s death.

As for Elizabeth herself, in her lifetime, we shall not see her like again.  And though numerous other members of the British royal family brough much scandal upon themselves, throughout it all, Elizabeth never sullied herself within these scandals, managing to stay above them.  As for her being a symbol of the aggression, conquests, and rule all soaked in blood of an aggressive empire, of the rule of royals instead of people ruling through democratically-elected representatives, and of the problems with the modern British monarchy, more than any of her predecessors, she bears the least responsibility for the sins of empire and autocracy.  As this Irish-American author is happy to admit, the Queen is the first and only British or English monarch to offer anything even close to an apology for the evils the English and British have inflicted upon the Irish people, perhaps the first people to be colonized in a modern sense (if one doesn’t count the Crusades) and certainly the longest-suffering people under colonialism, a colonialism that began in 1169 and still persists to this day.  As a result, even leaders of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein—the longtime Irish political party that was in the past the political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army that conducted insurgencies against British rule in Ireland—offered appreciative remarks (Michelle O’Neill: “Personally, I am grateful for Queen Elizabeth’s significant contribution and determined efforts to advancing peace and reconciliation between our two islands.”) and urged supporters to be respectful in the wake of her death.  Even Sinn Fein and Irish Republic officials, as well as Catholic clergy, attended her state funeral today; this would have been unthinkable after the death of (nearly) every past British or English monarch.

So though she was a largely symbolic leader, she made real achievements of substance.

Is monarchy in its historical sense an evil?  Undoubtedly, yes, a backwards horror from a time when humans were regarded largely as property and blood flowed as easily as torture and theocracy.  And yet, in our far more democratic era, where in many places the masses have rightfully risen and formal aristocracy is thankfully no more, democratization of politics has led to a dressing down of ceremony, architecture, dress, art, music, literature… pretty much everything.  Gone are the days of royal balls and weddings, we will have to settle for the fake ones in Game of Thrones or Bridgerton or historical shows like The Tudors, Versailles, The Great, and other king-and-queen focused shows and movies (my favorite scene of such is Aragorn’s coronation as Elessar in The Return of the King, for what it’s worth).

There is something we as humanity are collectively are losing knowing the grandeur, regality, and ornateness of the great kings and queens and emperors and pharaohs of history, their courts and lives and events—are, simply, more or less gone.  The ancient ruling institutions that are either gone or diminished have often been responsible, however problematic the costs or means of production, for creating some of the greatest artistic achievements in arts, architecture, and fashion that are now forever a thing of past creation or fantasy.  The type of formality and levels of etiquette and politeness they embody are essentially gone, too: we are ruder and more familiar culturally than any time in recent centuries. 

Today, there are no more new pyramids, no new Roman Colosseum, no new imperial palaces, no new larger-than-life statues like the relics we see still standing today or remnants of which we see in museums (and that is not even getting into the many more that were destroyed and exist only in the history books), no new grand cathedrals or temples.  These were all monumental achievements in human history, their modern successors far simpler and blander, and there is a sadness in knowing that part of part of our history is now relegated to history’s dustbin, but I wouldn’t have it any other way: better the oppression, massive concentrations of power and wealth, titanic scale of war and death, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism, and slavery that produced them are gone.

But that doesn’t mean we cannot separate the art from the artist and mourn the loss of the ability to produce such things, for what society would rightfully spend so much public money on such ornate but unnecessary things with all the problems we now face and with governments finally existing in an era where they must respond to the needs of the people or get voted out of office or overthrown, at a time when people feel loyalty not to monarchs appointed by “god,” but to their own sense of worth as individuals?  The answer is none, no society would choose to fund a Versailles or Pharaonic- or Mayan-style pyramids today and for good reason.

Has, and is, the coverage (at least in English-speaking media) been wildly overblown?  Yes.  To channel the spirit of Hitchens (who once remarked: “It’s always struck me as rather bizarre that there’s this cult in the United States of English royalism—just the sort of thing that I left England to get away from.”), I could do without 95% of the coverage I’ve seen of the British royals in my lifetime: the absurdities of endless coverage of Diana in life and death, the royal babies and marriages and silly scandals, the endless television specials and magazine covers (every time I am at a supermarket or drug store, they are there), and even much of the near non-stop coverage in between her death and her funeral (when major developments in Russia’s brutal colonialist imperialist war in Ukraine occurred and should have been covered with a higher priority).

Having said all that, I appreciate the coverage of her death the day of, the day after, and during the funeral.  I appreciate the person who was Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and how she carried out her duties.  I appreciate the grandeur of an era that is hard to comprehend even for me as a historian, and even more the horrors inflicted upon us by the rule and fiats of theocratic autocrats draped in fine robes with bejeweled crowns, but, at this moment, when the last true link to that era passes, I choose to reflect on the unique if costly beauty of that era that has, with Elizabeth II’s passing, now mostly been consigned to memory.  Her funeral and the related proceedings are truly “an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world,” and we should all reflect on that splendour (I’ll again keep the British spelling here) and its problematic beauty in all its glory, presented here one last time for all the world to see.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22 and 600,000 on 9/8/22!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 23, 2022; adapted for and published by Small Wars Journal as Russia’s Limits Meet Ukraine’s Discretion to Slow the War Down to Ukraine’s Advantage on August 25; see related articles: July 30’s Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think and August 3’s How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia and September 7’s Why Is Russia Losing on 3 Fronts? Math (the Short Answer)

SILVER SPRING—We are at an interesting time in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a moment where we are seeing two grand overall trends unite to heavily propel things in Ukraine’s favor.  These two overarching trends are that Ukraine is contributing prudence and Russia is contributing its deteriorating capabilities to the conflict in ways that are dictating the pacing and nature of much of the conflict at the moment, especially as most of the energy is now being directed towards the southern theater of action.

First, an introduction to the situation is in order.  I have gone into detail with many sources over both much of the why behind the way the war is unfolding and how the war is very likely going to play out as a result, so herein will mostly be a discussion of certain previously stressed features of this conflict and how they are now progressing, but with some new points that build upon my previous work.  I strongly encourage anyone wanting to know more or where I have obtained my information to check out these two pieces especially, but also some of my other previous work (especially two articles from April regarding Crimea’s vulnerability and why the Russian Navy would be mostly sidelined or destroyed; on both counts, recent events have proven me quite prescient).

All Eyes on Kherson

Anyway, the context of the past month and then some has been that Ukraine has been loudly advertising its intention to conduct a massive counteroffensive in its southern territories occupied by Russia.  Using advanced weapons system mainly supplied by the West, Ukraine began a series of impressive, pinpoint attacks on targets in Kherson Oblast (province), home to the only regional capital city Russia has taken since its major escalation began on February 24: Kherson, the oblast’s namesake.  These targets included at first ammunition depots and command centers—replicating its success on the Donbas front—and branched out to include major bridges in the river-crossed Kherson Oblast that also borders the waters on the northern side of the Crimean Peninsula.

We shall skip an extensive geography lesson here, but simply state that, the way Kherson’s geography goes, if you destroy the right bridges, you can effectively cut off any troops in certain parts of the area from effective resupply and reinforcement, isolating large pockets that can then be weakened—cut off from ammunition, unable to be effectively reinforced without exposing reinforcements to great risk, and unable to retreat without similar risk, nor with their heavy weapons and vehicles—and maybe even destroyed or compelled to surrender.  Even in the first month of conflict, it was clear Russia was bad at supplying food and water to its troops, so that those basic necessities may also be an issue in such a situation.

If even the best troops in the world are under such conditions over time, they can still be destroyed or forced to surrender relatively easily.  And we have to keep in mind we are talking about far from the best: the Russian Army, which has demonstrated an appallingly low-quality logistics operation even without bridges being blown and having its troops cut off from supplies and reinforcements.

That is the situation with apparently some 20,000 or so Russian troops on the west/north bank of the Dnipro River, on which the oblast’s main city—Kherson (and Kherson will from now on refer to this city unless it is specified that we are talking about the oblast)—lies, and they have already been in this situation for some time as Ukraine has damaged bridge after bridge in the oblast until more recently hitting the last one, though the other bridges closer to the city of Kherson had been damaged for some time and, thus, it was already a challenge for Russia to resupply and reinforce its now isolated troops and it has only become more difficult to do so every day the war continues as Ukraine keeps striking at Russia’s logistical lifelines in the region (indeed, a recent Ukrainian attack hit Russian trucks carrying supplies of ammunition as they were on the key Antonovsky Bridge, not only destroying the much-needed ammunition but further seriously damaging the bridge, which the Russians were repairing at the time).

Russia’s Response: Playing into Ukraine’s Hands

Furthermore, after this process started, Russia took a large number of troops from the slugfest on the Donbas front, where Russia has for months concentrated most of its troops and effort with relatively little to show for it—and moved them to the south, including Zaporizhzhia Oblast and Crimea, though reports on the latter were of Crimea being more of a staging area since it is a big hub for Russian military logistics.

Russian troops in the Donbas were on more elevated, hillier terrain with longer-established, more heavily fortified lines, and also fairly close to Russia, so supply lines were also shorter (though still problematic and coming under precise and devastating Ukrainian attacks time and time again).  Russia’s current main war aim is to secure the entirety of the Donbas region—the entire oblasts of Luhansk (more or less accomplished—for now) and Donetsk (definitely not accomplished), but here Russia is actually weakening its main effort to adjust to an announced counterattack by Ukraine.

An even more important takeaway from Russia’s redeployment is that Ukraine is dictating to Russia the way the war is now going, never a position you want to be in when your side is the one invading a country, a telltale sign of Russia’s weakening position as now it must compromise its plans and aims and be reactionary when it is supposed to be dominating the dynamics and flow of the war.

It should have been clear to Russia that its troops in Kherson—city and oblast—were in a weak and vulnerable position, especially after it learned the hard way of the amazing capabilities of Ukraine’s new Western weapons in action in the east on the Donbas front, which had more or less halted Russia’s offensive there or, at best for Russia, reduced it to a snail’s pace.

But what does Russia do?  Put more troops it can ill afford to lose, taken from its main-priority theater, into that more vulnerable situation, more troops into areas that can easily be cut off and isolated.

The limits of Russia’s capabilities not only see it stall in the east, not only have its navy mostly too afraid to do much more than lob cruise missiles from far away on account of Ukraine’s effective anti-ship missiles (many supplies by the West), but now mean both that it will likely fail with any major attempt to keep its Kherson troops supplied/connected to other Russian forces and that any new troops moved there will be facing the same problems that Russia is generally incapable of addressing effectively to begin with.

In short, Russia has essentially just gifted Ukraine more Russian troops that can be easily trapped.  And that is what is happening now.

As I quoted Forrest Gump in one of my recent pieces on all this: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Crimea Is Also a Trap Waiting to Happen

I am also still surprised few people are realizing how the same treatment Russian soldiers are getting in terms of being isolated on the north/west bank of the Dnipro can easily be replicated in Crimea, a relatively isolated peninsula with only two land routes out of its northern border into the rest of Ukraine through Kherson Oblast and one long bridge—the Kerch Strait Bridge, also known as the Crimean Bridge—connecting its eastern tip to Russia, a bridge that Putin had opened only in 2018 (its construction began, illegally, in 2016 after Russia had already been occupying, and had illegally annexed, Crimea from back in 2014).

Now, a series of Ukrainian strikes throughout Crimea are erupting, involving targets from the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol to multiple military bases to Kerch, the Crimean entry point to the aforementioned Kerch Strait Bridge.  These attacks are causing panic among Russian colonists, collaborators, and sympathizers in Ukraine—causing many thousands of them (helpfully for Ukraine) to flee to Russia, undoing some of the demographic engineering Russia has long been undertaking there—and are wreaking havoc not only on Crimea itself but on its ability to offer logistical support to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts.  Eventually, after Ukraine retakes Kherson city, just some sixty miles from the northern Crimean border, Ukraine should be able to seal off the two routes out of Crimea and into Kherson.  And Ukraine already has demonstrated that it can hit the Kerch area, so it is likely just waiting for the right time to strike the bridge there to Russia and render it inoperable for Russia’s military.  And, at that point, Crimea would be cut off by land and, with Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and air defenses supplied by the West, it would be quite risky for Russia to supply or reinforce Crimea by sea or air.

On Slicing and Sieging

Simply put, Ukraine is in the process of slicing and dicing a big chunk of Russian-held territory into three sectors that will soon be isolated from and unable to support each other: 1.) Kherson Oblast (including the city of Kherson) west/north of the Dnipro River; 2.) Crimea; and 3.) the rest of Kherson Oblast along with Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where Ukrainian strikes against key Russian targets have also been succeeding and repeatedly so.  Isolated from each other more and more, soon, it will be likely that eventually only Zaporizhzhia can receive supplies and reinforcements from the Donbas or Russia itself after the Kerch Strait Bridge is damaged significantly by Ukrainian strikes-to-come.  This process has been, thus far, slow and creeping but this pace is allowing Russia to stretch out its men and resources more and more over time and expose its forces more and more over time to being cut off or give their anxious commanders time and inclination to order generally fruitless assaults that simply weaken Russian forces in the sector and fail to push Ukraine back or would do so only than temporarily.

Taken to its extreme end point, the concept of siege warfare is to surround and starve an enemy into submission without fighting, to achieve victory without placing your own side’s troops at risk from actual battle.  You may be able to take a city faster with a direct assault but this would be at a much higher cost in lives lost for the attacking side; if time is not a particularly important factor, siege or tactics approaching a siege are a way to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy while sustaining minimum casualties for your own forces.

Sieges and attrition-focused tactics and strategies are generally not as sexy for journalists and analysts as battles (though some can involve battles as one side or another tries to break the lines of the opposing force throughout), but Ukraine using these tactics and strategy means it is happy, for now, to keep using its longer-range precision weapons to devastating effect, killing Russian troops, destroying Russian vehicles and supplies, ruining Russian logistical arteries and supply missions, and bleeding Russia’s overall positions out to make them weaker and weaker over time, so that when an assault does come (if the Russians do not withdraw or surrender), the Russians will not be able to put up much effective resistance and will crumble all the more easily in the face of any attacks.  And, to be sure, as the situation for Russian forces deteriorates, opportunities for some low-risk, high-reward infantry-led strikes will also present themselves.

If this type of progress is being consistently made by Ukraine (and it is), hollowing out the core of Russian positions in entire sectors, why would Ukraine risk high casualties in a costly wider infantry assault while there are still targets that HIMARS, M777s, drones, and other longer-range weapons can take out at little to no risk, all while the enemy’s morale, numbers, and supply situation weaken?  Many of these targets are far behind the front lines, meaning there is now nowhere Russian forces in the region can feel safe, a situation disastrous for morale.  Weakening the positions behind the front lines also means that if the main line collapses, much more than just that main line will collapse and it is more likely the whole sector could fall quickly.  Instead of weakness or any inability, this methodical, deliberative targeting by Ukraine signals confidence in its ability to continue to damage Russia at times and pacing of its choosing, a mature patience on the part of Ukraine that will yield significant results over time at relatively low cost.

Yet plenty of experts and reporters seem puzzled, as massive formations of Ukrainian forces not pouring into Kherson city and forcefully pushing the Russian lines back mean, from their perspective, there must not be any real Ukrainian counteroffensive or that it is stalled.  But Ukraine is not basing the timing of its operations to satisfy the impatience of itchy Twitter fingers of reporters and analysts who find it easier to tweet, write, and comment about heavy “action,” and it seems many takes on the war in the south are missing the bigger picture.

Contrary to such views, the offensive is very much underway, with Ukraine simply taking a prudent, risk-averse strategy while it can still easily hit Russian targets far behind the front lines.  Unlike Russia, Ukraine actually highly values the lives of its soldiers, a major factor in morale, as Ukrainian soldiers can count on their commanders to not throw their lives away carelessly or needlessly, unlike the clear, callous indifference that permeates Russian command (which I have detailed before).  And the very nature of the conflict is now defined by Russia’s inability to produce anything but marginally successful advances (if any progress at all) and Ukraine’s purposeful approach to strike Russian targets one-by-one with precision, distance weapons while keeping its own forces as much out of harm’s way as it can where it can.

And Ukraine can do all this knowing it is and will be getting more and better weapons and equipment from the West as we well as more well-trained Ukrainian troops from an increasing Western series of training missions.

Cutting off a larger enemy force from supplies and reinforcements, and cutting that force into smaller pockets that can be defeated militarily, is an approach that can have spectacular success.  Such tactics worked incredibly well for a far smaller Finnish force against two whole Soviet divisions at the battles of Suomussalmi and Raate Road from late November 1939 to early January 1940 during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War within World War II, a conflict I have noted at some length is rife with parallels and lessons for the current Russo-Ukrainian war.  In this conjoined pair of battles, nimble Finnish ski troops were able to slice into the columns of Soviet forces that, because of the deep snow and thick woods in the remote wilderness of Finland, were forced to stay near the only roads in the area.  The Finns would use the first waves of ski troops to cut the long, road-bound formations into pockets and would then immediately heavily fortify and reinforce where they penetrated the Soviet lines.  Cut off from supplies and reinforcements, running out of ammunition and weakened from starvation in these pockets (mottis), two whole Soviet divisions comprising about 50,000 men were destroyed, suffering massive casualties, by just a few thousand Finns, who incurred just a tiny fraction of their foe’s casualties. 

While the weather elements are not nearly as extreme for Russian forces in Kherson Oblast and Crimea today, nevertheless, they are still significant formations that can still be relatively easily cut off and, thus, brought to their knees or worse by Ukrainian troops.

Conclusion

We have seen here how Russia’s weakening capabilities on the battlefield are meeting Ukraine’s patient risk-averse tactics and strategy to slow down the pace and intensity of this war, at least for the time being.  But while some analysts have seen this as weakness or inability on the part of Ukraine, it seems more likely that Ukraine knows it has a big comparative advantage with its ability to strike precisely at a distance with superior Western technology and that it is content to keep weakening Russia’s positions and logistics—keep baiting it to send more resources into bad satiation for Russia—as long as Russia keeps presenting juicy targets, targets that, if taken out methodically and patiently by Ukraine before any general infantry-led assault, will mean less resistance from Russia and fewer casualties for Ukraine.  Ukraine is biding its time while increasing its capabilities and all while continuing to degrade Russia’s capabilities.  This is what is called “good generalship” in a war, and it can easily lead to both a large part of Kherson west/north of the Dnipro River and, eventually, Crimea being cut off from other Russian-controlled sectors and from each other.  The fall of both to Ukrainian forces could follow and also open Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas to come under this Ukrainian counteroffensive in a way that could more or less end the war, as I have argued before.

Ukraine’s prudence is meeting Russia’s limitations, and this prudence will carry the day with more Ukrainian soldiers alive at the end than without it, than with a more rushed general assault that would occur with still more Russian targets Ukraine could have taken out before that assault.  Contrary to what some think, Ukraine knows what it’s doing and is still in the driver’s seat of this war thar Russia started and is now clearly losing.

See related articles: July 30’s Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think and August 3’s How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia; and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook), July 11, 2022 (**updated July 13 with an excellent exposure on the part of The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on how the mainstream press distorts their narratives on Biden; *updated July 12 with new polling data proving my point)

SILVER SPRING—I’m a big Star Wars fan (spoilers for Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in this paragraph), and this past month was a big one for Star Wars fans with the (somewhat, but not entirely, disappointing) Obi-Wan Kenobi series, with key scenes bringing us back to Order 66, when clones with chips implanted in their brains were forced against their will by the chips to turn on their Jedi leaders.

I feel that the members of the “respectable” (as opposed to fascist propaganda/disinformation) media might even have some sort of chip in their brains when they cover Democrats: from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from CNN to MSNBC and many, many other outlets, it seems there is a near-constant need to push a “Democrats in DISARRAY!” narrative regardless of the facts.  These hot takes or seemingly analytical pieces almost invariably take one of a few approaches:

• “I, Smarty McSmart-Pants, awesome journalist that I am, am going to call out Democrats/President Joe Biden for not accomplishing X, Y, and/or Z!”—but with little to no regard for the actual balance of power or even proper procedure, let alone historical precedent, how Congress or the presidency actually work and what each can and cannot do or what it would actually take to actually do said thing(s).
• Interviewing and quoting a selective selection of activists, voters, or party folks (“some” or “dozens” out of WAY, WAY MORE—literally out of hundreds, thousands or, when it comes to voters, millions), nearly all of whom are obscure and folks 99% of readers have never heard of before and who will all complain (“whispers”!?) about Democrats’ leadership/direction; this will be presented without noting that their collective complaining is not representative but while offering some token pushback from a couple of people who are far more representative without noting they are, in fact, more representative; aggregate polling data (as opposed to citing one or two polls, if any) showing how most relevant people feel is usually ignored because of either laziness or “the narrative.”
• This or that outlier or outliers within the Democratic Party or its caucus (usually the Squad, Bernie Sanders, or other far lefties—wonderful clickbait for click-hungry websites—but sometimes the defiant two-headed albatross of relatively conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) complain/tweet and/or their criticisms of the Party as a whole are presented as major stories in and of themselves and as examples of overall Party “dysfunction.”
• Sensationalizing the clickbaity thoughts of anonymous staffers, usually in the White House (and the White House has a lot of staff) or a campaign but sometimes in Congress, griping about this or that, which upon review are usually just the result of banal office politics, generational conflict also typical in today’s newsrooms, devoted acolytes wanting “MORE” for their masters or stans wanting “MORE” for the object of their stanning, and personal egos blown way out of proportion; even if you read between the lines, it’s more about individual staff clashes/competition or their projected desires for this thing or that person than anything originating from the big-name figures with whom they are associated.  Typical red-flag sentence emblematic of these articles: “This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers, congressional aides and other Democrats close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the president’s private conversations.”

Sometimes, yes, these types of articles are on to something.  Most of the time, it’s just hot air, unrepresentative whining, or simply “whispers,” as in, articles that resemble more tabloid gossip columns than news articles that should actually be written.

In Data We Trust: The Current Congress in Historical Context

The problem is, almost none of this—and I mean absolutely none except for the best-of-the-best of such takes—is based on any serious data-oriented research.  The data is there, it just isn’t properly engaged with, but let’s set the record straight with some mind-blowing facts for those of you being inundated by the “Dems in Disarray” narrative:

1. No party has ever been as unified in its Congressional voting (“party unity vote” average) in both the House and Senate as today’s Democratic Party, with the possible exception in the Senate of just one year of Federalist Party Senate voting in the first few years of the 1800s
2. Specifically, the Democratic Party has never been more unified in terms of its Congressional voting records than it has in recent years, including a record high for all of-American history in 2021 in both the House (98% average) and Senate (97% average)
3. In recent years (last decade), party unity has been close between the two parties in the House, but in the most recent years the Democrats have been more unified, while the parties have alternated in recent years in the Senate, Republicans beating Democrats for all of Trump’s term but Democrats winning for all of Obama’s two terms and with Democrats setting a new record for unity in 2021

Reread that if you need to, but let’s be clear: this current Democratic Party in recent years overall and especially in 2021 was the most unified major party in history where it counts the most: in its votes in Congress.

It’s even more impressive when you realize that the Democrats have only a narrow edge in the House and are essentially tied in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.

I came across a telling, wonderfully-data-driven article by that guided me to this understanding by Niels Lesniewski and Ryan Kelly for Roll Call from March 1 of this year, covering the years of the half-century from 1972 to 2021, and have used its chart above and table below:

Being the data- and history-oriented researcher that I am, I wanted to know the full record, and while I plan to continue finding more presentations of this data, so far the below chart from this other study is the best (and only) full account I have come across thus far in chart, table, or graph form (plenty for recent decades but not going all the way back the Founding of our republic):

In that all-encompassing chart, “Democrats” and “Republicans” include their antecedent parties from early American history, thus, the Federalists would account for that “Republican” spike in the Senate that comes close to 100% in the very early 1800s; the graphs are small and it’s hard to tell the exact year or numerical value, so I laid that out as the only possible exception to the numbers the 2021 Democrats put up the in Senate and clearly no one has beaten them in the House (where average party unity has only increased since the end of the chart).

The other chart below the comprehensive one shows the level of majority strength in each Congress since Republicans were first seated there in 1855.  As anyone can see, a tie “majority” in terms of party balance in the Senate is exceedingly rare, and since the Senate seated Alaska’s and Hawaii’s first senators in 1959, bringing the Senate’s total to 100 senators when fully seated, the only other time there was a 50-50 Senate at all was during the 107^th Congress, from January 20, 2001, until May 24 of that year, when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to caucus as an independent with the Democrats, giving the Democrats an effective 51-49 majority for the remainder of that Congress until January, 2003.  For those few months before Jeffords’ defection, the situation was the same as now just in reverse in that the Republicans had a 50-seat “majority” with a tie-breaker vote able to come from their Vice President, then Dick Cheney, as Democrats have with Harris today.

Other than that, there are the odd the exceptions during the 83^rd Congress, from early 1953 to early 1955, when throughout its term the deaths of nine senators and resignation of one caused a number of leadership changes in a close Senate, some of which led to shorter-term ties but with one situation leaving a tie for more than two-thirds of a year.

Before that, you have to go all the way back to a crazy situation from the 47^th Congress in 1881, which began with a tied Senate that lost its tie-breaking ability when President James Garfield was assassinated late that year and replaced by Vice President Chester Arthur, as there was no constitutional provision for replacing a vice president and, therefore, no person to cast a tie-breaking vote after Arthur was sworn in, a situation that thus lasted until the beginning of the next Congress in 1883; before that, a Senate balance-of-power tie had never happened in all the years of the Senate’s existence going back to 1789.

Biden’s and Democrats’ Accomplishments in Context: A Bipartisan Past vs. Our Partisan Present

In all these instances, like the situation today, there was only a small lead for the same party with the tie-breaking vice president in the other half of Congress, the House of Representatives.  But as the graphics I have provided above show, partisanship was significantly less intense, bipartisanship significantly more common, in these other eras than today.  This allowed some major accomplishments to actually happen easily even in 50-50 Senates.

In 1883, President Arthur was able to get the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, which formed the basis of the modern civil service.  The next time there was a split Senate in the 1950s, there was also a spirit of bipartisanship on a broad variety of issues, leading to legislation passing that established both the Small Business Administration and what would eventually become the Department of Health and Human Services; President Dwight Eisenhower’s major legislation concerning tax reform, along with major bills regarding nuclear regulation and expansion of both unemployment and Social Seucrity benefits, were all enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support, among other bills passed in a similar spirit.

In the next period when there was an effective tie in the Senate, no major legislation was passed, but just days after Jeffords’ late May defection, President George W. Bush saw his massive tax cut bill’s final Senate passage by a significant bipartisan margin.  Yet the massive reorganization of the government’s security apparatuses (including the Patriot Act and the bill creating of the Department of Homeland Security) and major reforms to education and prescription drug benefits for Medicare during the 107^th Congress all occurred only after the 9/11 attacks of September 11, 2001, when there was a period of historic bipartisanship, if only temporarily (these big wins came from Republicans even when the Democrats had a 51-49 Senate majority with Jeffords).

Of course, today’s situation is quite different from these: not only are most congressional Republicans in a long–extremist and increasingly-fascist Republican Party openly shielding former president Trump and other plotters of his 2020-2021 attempted coup (a term I used at the time) and perpetuating the lies that the 2020 election was stolen by phantom “fraud” while preparing to be able to carry out another coup attempt if Republicans lose the 2024 presidential election, on legislative issues, they are engaging in extreme obstructionism and partisanship.  Their primary method for this is in utilizing the 60-out-of-100-vote-threshold filibuster for just about everything they can to block about as much as they can of the Democrats’ agenda from passing.  As both parties have 50 votes, in most cases, Democrats need 10 Republicans senators to advance legislation and overcome a filibuster, so even when there is bipartisan support, inaction can reign unless at least a full one-fifth of Republican senators are on board.  In recent decades, filibuster use (and abuse) has become unprecedented, particularly so by the Republican Party and especially—even exponentially—so since Mitch McConnell became the leader of Senate Republicans in 2007, a role he still holds today.

In the face of these key differences, looking at all that Biden and Democrats in Congress have been able to accomplish so far—including numerous large votes through one of the only ways to circumvent a filibuster in what is known as budget reconciliation (among them a massive COVID relief bill) as well as a once-in-a-generation historic infrastructure bill, historic aid for Ukraine in the face of rampant Russian imperialism, and the first federal gun legislation in roughly three decades (the last being hammered out by Biden himself in 1994, when he was still a senator), and with time still left in this Congress for passing further major legislation—this much is clear: no majority has accomplished more with such low margins in the Senate in American history in the face of such extreme partisanship and organized obstructionism from the opposition party.  The few major accomplishments of the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress that were bipartisan were the exception, not the norm, a departure from the entire modern era and the last few times there was a Senate evenly divided as today’s is.

I am not suggesting there are not other factors or that this tells 100% of the picture: falling just short of enough votes on Biden’s would-be-signature Build Back Better legislation surely counts more than most typical legislation, and there are things that are sometimes not brought up for votes because of awareness of existing problems within a caucus or opposition from Republicans wielding a filibuster.

Yet the main point made above still stands: of all the different individual metrics out there, the average party unity not only counts a lot, but it is hard to think of a metric that counts more.  In this current record heights of party unity on display from Democrats with Speaker Nancy Pelosi leading Democrats in the House, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leading Democrats in the Senate, and Joe Biden leading the Party overall from the White House, the Democratic Party in 2021 and in recent years collectively, then, has been the most disciplined and unified major national political party in U.S. history when it comes to actual legislative votes.

Another Inexcusable Media Fail

Churchill once famously remarked: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”  With Joe Biden, we can honestly say: “Never in the field of American presidential politics was so much expected by one man with a narrower political ‘majority’” (really a 50-50 tie with a tie-breaker in one-half of Congress and a very slim majority in the other.  And despite major, entrenched opposition to most of the Democrats’ efforts, they have still accomplished much and improved the situation where they are actually capable of effective change quite dramatically compared to the situation they inherited: an America reeling from COVID and its accompanying economic meltdown as well as reeling from Trump’s treasonous coup attempt.  Obviously, the elephant in the room today is inflation, which presidents and congresses generally have little ability to mitigate well in the short-term even if people don’t want to acknowledge this simple Economics-101 truth (with their record profits, why are we not questioning oil companies more??).  And apart from inflation, the metrics for the economy for Biden for most of his presidency thus far have been strong (admittedly less so the past few months).

Yet there is a huge gap in the public perception of Biden and Democrats and their actual popular accomplishments.

The relentlessly negative coverage of Biden and the Democrats—the media’s pursuit of the whole “Democrats in Disarray” narrative in the face of historic data that thoroughly discredits this narrative—is a big part of the reason for this.  Just as was the case during the Democratic primaries, the media is also relentlessly portraying Biden as just-about-to-collapse in terms of his Democratic support, based on no serious larger empirical analysis, with near-mindless, pointless speculation about who might be the Democratic nominee in 2024 other than Biden more than two years out from that year’s presidential election (and even before this year’s midterms!) despite Biden’s and his vice president’s repeated, clear statements on running together again in 2024 as a ticket.

**Update July 13: Perhaps the most exemplary recent example of the mainstream press’s gross distortions has been adroitly addressed by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a Never Trump conservative who is one of the most incisive of the major newspaper columnists on the media’s failures in the current era. She notes that in a recent New York Times article trumpeting its latest poll with Siena College, the framing is almost entirely anti-Biden, beginning with the headline (and, again, this is just one poll): “Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows” and how key findings from the poll that Biden would still beat Trump and that 92% of Democrats would stick with Biden vs. Trump in 2024 are buried after 15 paragraphs of negativity and after multiple graphics. In this Biden hit-job, Times clearly chooses to emphasize what will damage Biden (CNN and others discussed the headline all day) while making the reader really put in effort to find the positives mentioned so deep into its story. Behold, the Times, exposed and noted. And this is the default tone most reporters and editors in the mainstream media resort to when it comes to Biden and Democrats in general, because… “narrative.” Their preferred narrative.**

But just as much to blame is the childishness of the American people, who clearly expected Biden to fix, well, pretty much everything within a year and now blame him for the country not being back to a total normal after a once-in-century pandemic, after four years of fascist-leaning insanity under Trump, and now during a twice-in-a-century large-scale European war.  Americans currently clearly do not understand the unique gravity of historic problems faced—and well-mitigated—by Biden and that none have easy solutions, especially with a country and a Congress as divided as they are.

No president could have righted all the wrongs plaguing the U.S. on January 20, 2021 in one, let alone two, years—certainly not the criminal coup plotter Trump or his Republican Party focused more on overthrowing the constitutional order and preventing the legitimate peaceful transfer of power than on actually governing or dealing with real problems affecting actual Americans—so for the media and the public to hold Biden to such a standard is not just down-right myopic, but threatens to undo so much of the progress that has been made by returning incompetent would-be-fascist demagogues to power.

Yet even with one of the worst polls for Biden from a major, respectable pollster to date (the June 25-28, 2022 Economist/YouGov poll), he still has the approval of over three-quarters of Democrats (76%: 34% strong, 42% somewhat) while only 18% expressed disapproval (only 9% strongly).  On top of that, the Democratic Party was still seen in that poll as more favorable (if just slightly and within the margin of error) than the Republican Party.  And, again, I abhor highlighting single polls to discuss a president’s approval rating—all too common an article headline or framing in the press these days (a general weighted average should always be included in those, but rarely is)—but I did this just to show how high his approval rating is among Democrats in, again, one of his worst polls among respectable polls begun no earlier than June 22 up through the first respectable poll conducted and released in July (since I wrote most of this, polling from early July is not much different, but Democrats’ approval of Biden went slightly up in a newer Economist/YouGov poll [77%] poll while being significantly lower in a different pollster’s most recent data [69%, from Reuters/Ipsos from July 5–6, their lowest yet, down from 72% in their previous poll]; new polls are coming out even as I am about to post this, too, but, to quote the great Jedi Master Yoda: “Difficult to see.  Always in motion is the future;” they may be up or down in a week or a month, and we will only see what happens in time; *update July 12: as if to make my point for me, the next Reuters/Ipsos poll, from July 11-12, has Biden’s overall approval up up 3 points, his overall approval down 4 points, and his approval among Democrats up 5 points, to 74%*).

Those numbers would still mean crushing defeats for anyone challenging Biden in a primary (although, again, that hypothetical would be happening a year-and-a-half from now, a different world).  Still, the overall numbers with voters are not good, though it should be noted that, especially in today’s overcharged media cycles, the overcoverage both of such polling data and especially inflation (relative to other major aspects of the economy like low unemployment and growth in both jobs and wages) creates something of a negative feedback loop for Biden, helping to drag or keep those polling numbers down.  In contrast, polling for Democrats has just improved in the wake of the radical judicial activism of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, with now just under four months to go before the midterm elections.  And if Democrats surprise many and hold on to Congress or even gain seats in the midterms (and, at least in the Senate, polling is indicating they may very well increase their number of seats there), there is a good chance Biden’s approval will increase, too.  And all of this in the context of the myopic coverage that inexcusably misses the data proving the Democrats’ historic discipline and organization, which will be key in they succeed in the midterms, even if the media does not acknowledge this reality.

Conclusion: A Need for Professional Journalism

So, to recap, 1.) not only is Biden’s job performance as president still eliciting approval from an overwhelming majority of Democrats, who are still overall united behind Biden—making all the “who will replace Biden?” news stories irresponsible, premature speculation—but 2.) Democrats’ performance in Congress is the empirically provably best of not only any major political party in the modern era, but in all of American history (with one possible exception of the Federalist Party in the early 1800s in just one half of Congress), higher now than the supposedly better organized Republicans 3.) and Biden and Democrats’ accomplishments are the greatest of any party with such a narrow “lead” (tie) in the Senate when facing such intense partisan opposition and obstruction.

These are not my opinions: these are simply the facts, fully supported by data, history, and context, as I have proven here.  It’s far, far overdue for coverage in the media to reflect these empirical realities, for journalists, editors, and producers to stop ignoring this irrefutable empirical data in favor of their own biased, selective, and inaccurate “narratives.”

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 7, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022

SILVER SPRING—Apart from the main themes I have already discussed in this series (hubris and delusions about “fascists”), there are a number of other noteworthy similarities between the two conflicts apparent from Trotter’s early chapters.

One major parallel involves command and control, combined arms coordination, and communication.  Notes Trotter:

Nor did the Red generals appreciate the amount of trouble the Wehrmacht [i.e., German Military] had taken to perfect tactical coordination between the component arms, to ensure a reliable and redundant network of communications, and to instill in its frontline commanders a sense of drive and individual initiative.  Those very qualities, if displayed in the Red Army, were more apt to earn a man a trip to the gulag than a pat on the back.  Many of the battalion and regimental commanders who would lead the Russian attacks were by this time little more than groveling flunkies whose every battlefield decision had to be seconded by a political commissar before orders could go to the troops. (36)

As for the Ukraine war today, it has been amply noted (including by me) that these elements have been a resounding disgrace for the Russian military: troops using easily trackable sim cards in their cell phones, thus revealing their positions/relative strength; troops communicating with totally unsecured and easily monitored methods, such as those cell phones; a general getting killed because Ukraine could track his phone calls; command posts getting hit regularly by Ukraine; a lack of coordination overall and between different military branches, including air support that does not arrive; poor, mercurial, and unclear command structures (if a recent report that Putin may be micromanaging things on the battlefield, this only makes this last problem exponentially more insurmountable); and the list could go on…

For another similarity, Stalin was fairly isolated, having not-too-long-before committed a series of massive purges of the Soviet military, intelligence, political, and bureaucratic leadership.  To say that the survivors and replacements were hesitant to tell Stalin something that he did not want to hear would be a massive understatement.  In particular, his main diplomatic man in Helsinki, Vladimir Derevyanski, was a constant source of wildly rosy, inaccurate views of the real mood and situation on the ground in Finland.

Putin, too, especially in this pandemic era, is a pretty isolated leader: his long meeting tables with himself and the guest sitting on opposite ends and the vast separation from his council at major government meetings are only the most obvious representations of this isolation.  Along with this isolation, it is almost certain that he has been getting from advisors afraid to tell him the truth a fantastical version of the situation on the ground on Ukraine on which he based his plans and adjustments and on which much of the massive failure of Russia during the early phase of the war can be blamed.  His senior advisors, like Stalin’s inner circle after the purges, nervously fear being imprisoned or worse (as is already happening) and very likely adjust what they tell Putin accordingly; the same can be said for many of their sources.

For Stalin’s man in Helsinki, Derevyanski, we can substitute Ukrainian Viktor Medvedchuk as Putin’s man in Kyiv, whom I have profiled before.  Like Stalin’s Derevyanski, Medvedchuk is thought for years to have been providing Moscow with bad information that is far from the reality on the ground, contributing to the gross misjudgments of Putin’s that have the world in the situation with Ukraine that it is now.  Medvedchuk is so close to Putin that the Russian president is even godfather to the man’s daughter; her godmother is the wife of Putin’s temporary successor to the Russian presidency from 2008-2012, Dmitry Medvedev, now the top official on the Russian Security Council after Putin himself (notably, Medvedchuk’s wife—Oxana Marchenko—seems to have had financial ties through a super-shady Ukrainian “businessman”—Igor Anopolskiy—who was seriously involved with the scandal-plagued, ill-fated Panama City, Panama, Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, a hub of money laundering for the Putin-allied Russian mafia and Latin American drug cartels alike).

One of the longtime leaders and orchestrators of the pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine, Medvedchuk has been trying to hand Putin influence in Ukraine through his corrupt politics and media operations, most recently in Ukraine’s parliament as the main opposition figure to Zelensky.  The coalition party he leads—Opposition Platform—For Life—runs multiple disinformation television stations in Ukraine that are like a mix of Fox News and RT (one of the Russian government’s top disinformation/propaganda outlets), on a mission to undermine his political foe Zelensky and the West while boosting Putin and Russia.  U.S. intelligence has said Medvedchuk is part of a plot to overthrow Zelensky, and he has been charged with treason in Ukraine.  Unsurprisingly, he fled his house arrest, only to be captured by Ukrainian forces last month, after which Zelensky’s Instagram account displayed this photo of Medvedchuk in handcuffs:

If people spend so much time creating an alternate reality, they might actually just believe in it, and while it is impossible to tell from the outside to what degree Putin and his minions believe what they profess even as it changes so often, reality has certainly to a significant degree eluded them.

A further interesting parallel, this one between Finland then and Ukraine today, involves their preparations for war.  The political leadership of both nations professed publicly that they did not take Moscow’s threats entirely seriously, that it was bluffing as a negotiating strategy more than actually preparing for a serious war.  In the case of the Finns, this mentality very much characterized the actual beliefs of Finnish Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, President Kyösti Kallio, Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, and the rest of the Finnish leadership team, with the main exception being Gustav Mannerheim, the man who would actually lead Finland’s military effort during the war.

With Ukraine today, at least one telling interview with CNN’s excellent Matthew Chance convincingly supports the idea that while Zelensky publicly downplayed the threat of a Russian invasion, he was privately deeply worried one was coming and did not only downplay the threat to help Ukrainians keep calm, but by design to bait the Russians into a sloppy, rushed, overconfident approach to their invasion (I would say this claim of Zelensky’s is well-supported by how events have played—and continue to play—out).

In the cases of both countries, though, the military leaders were planning meticulously what to do in the event of an invasion launched by Moscow, well aware of their relatively small size and fewer resources available (in contrast, the Soviet planners never thought they might be fighting a war against only Finland; their planning had envisioned much grander conflicts, ones in which Finland was quickly co-opted or occupied itself by a major Western power and used as a staging area for invasion).  Whatever Finnish or Ukrainian politicians were saying, whatever they meant, then, the military folks in both Finland and Ukraine took the opportunities to plan, train, and prepare during the years in the run-up to the actual invasions very seriously and to incredibly good effect; to quote Mark Hertling, Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army in 2011-2012, “during my assignment as commander of U.S. Army Europe, I also spent a significant amount of time with the Ukrainian Army and was amazed as I watched them grow in professionalism and effectiveness.”  He had also seen them over the years in other capacities, which makes that already considerably weighty statement carry even more weight.

Sill another situation where commonalities are present is a related similarity involving how both Finland and Ukraine would explain their position to the rest of the world.  In this vein, the following passage of Trotter’s on Mannerheim’s and his subordinates’ strategy struck me powerfully:

In the long run, Finland’s only real guarantee of continued existence was the conscience of Western civilization.  Finland, it was hoped, would be regarded as a vital outpost of everything the Western powers stood for, and as such the country would not be allowed to vanish from the map.  Thus was born a strategy designed to enable Finland to hang on long enough for outside aid to reach it. (39)

Both Finland and Ukraine had plans, too, for continuing to fight against Russia even under occupation and/or if the West did not come to its aid or aid came too late to prevent the fall of the country to the invaders.  But it is the overlap from Ukraine today with the above-quoted themes that is most striking, not least in terms of the rhetoric we are hearing today from Ukraine matching Finland’s characterization in 1939-1940 of itself as the defender of Europe and the West and its values—the defender of freedom and democracy—in the face of rampant aggression from Moscow.

A final key parallel involves how the wars began.  Ever the propagandists, the Soviets even went through the trouble of a false flag attack (an attack committed by one party but blamed on another for propaganda purposes), firing artillery barely into their own territory—perhaps some 800 meters from Finland’s border—on November 26, 1939, then claiming it was the Finns who fired to start the war:

The…shots, [Khrushchev] claimed, were set up by Marshal of Artillery Kulik, a brutal and cretinous NKVD general whose military incompetence would cost the Soviet Union terribly during the first weeks of the German invasion.  It is logical to assume that Zhdanov and Stalin both knew of the fabrication and condoned it.  Khrushchev deals coyly with the question of who fired first at whom: “It’s always like that when people start a war.  They say, ‘You fired the first shot,’ or ‘You slapped me first and I’m only hitting back.’  There was once a ritual which you sometimes see in opera: someone throws down a glove to challenge someone else to a duel; if the glove is picked up, that means the challenge is accepted.  Perhaps that’s how it was done in the old days, but in our time it’s not always so clear who starts a war.” (22)

This seems to be similar in spirit to how Putin started his massive late-February 2022-through-the-present escalation against Ukraine: shelling from his Russian military and the pro-Russian separatists Russia supports in the Donbas all across the main lines there, coupled with (nearly-certain-to-be) disinformation that Ukrainian forces were initiating escalation by firing intensely into separatist territory or even sending “saboteurs” into Russian territory (among other inane claims).  The Ukrainians, far more credibly accusing Russia of lying and even carrying out a false flag attack, denied the relatively absurd claims that they as the far-smaller and far-weaker party—the one that wanted to avoid war—somehow managed to deliberately start the war and provoke the far more powerful party of Russia, to whatever inconceivable ends.  After all, Zelensky has shown himself to be no fool and Moscow is the party here with a history of false flag attacks and gaslighting about its own roles in participating in various conflicts.  The Biden Administration along with Boris Johnson’s British Government has rather deftly publicly called out Russia’s disinformation and false flag efforts preemptively and consistently, further undermining the Kremlin’s game plan to make the world think Ukraine was the aggressor and one-upping Putin on the information war front with an unprecedented, bold approach to releasing and sharing intelligence.

Moscow over the years seems to do far more than most nations to prove the old saying that “truth is the first casualty in war.”

Dumfounding Déjà Vu

What is crazy about all this is that this article and others in this series simply arose out of reactions to just the beginning of Trotter’s book on the Winter War.

One thing that is clear: in trying to understand the events between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939, for Trotter:

Motives, true feelings, and lines of responsibility are not very clear at this level of the Soviet command even today. The whole Finnish campaign was an embarrassment to the officer caste, and even half a century later there is little discussion of it in print on the Russian side. (34)

Three decades after Trotter’s book was published, Putin’s pathetic execution of his war in Ukraine demonstrates clearly that there has been little serious high-level discussion or understanding of any sort in the Kremlin of the First Soviet-Finnish War.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 5, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—George Santayana famously wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Marx expanded on the thoughts of a fellow German when he wrote in an essay that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”  The ancients Aristotle and Polybius found history to be cyclical, as did Ibn Khaldun of the Middle Ages.  The saying “the past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” is attributed to Mark Twain.  And Stephen Hawking gave us this zinger: “We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.”

Today, Russia is proving all of these, and rather pathetically.  I have seen or heard some casual comparisons of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current campaign in Ukraine to the Soviet-Afghan War or the recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such comparison are off when compared to a little known war within World War II that would be overwhelmed and dwarfed historically by the much larger conflicts of World War II, this sub-war being a relatively small sideshow.

I am writing of the so-called Winter War, or the First Soviet-Finnish War, which lasted from November 30, 1939, to March 13, 1940, especially apt to consider now as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression. 

Just in the early pages of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages)—the mind-numbing parallels are shocking, and will be dissected throughout this series, this piece focusing on the parallel hubris (for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated.  For a far brisker take on the big strokes of the entire war with a bit of comparison to Russia’s current Ukraine war and post-Soviet Russian-Chechen wars, see John Sipher’s smart summary in The Bulwark).

Soviet Hubris in 1939

At a final internal meeting just before the Soviet-Finnish War began late in November 1939, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and his innermost circle clearly felt that the coming fight against the Finns would be a cakewalk, that if there would be any resistance, it would be brief before they gave in to Soviet demands.

There was one particular faction in the Kremlin led by Andrei Zhdanov, the zealous political leader of Leningrad, that urged rapidity against Finland.  As Trotter succinctly summarizes, Zhdanov’s Leningrad District crew

based its hasty and slipshod operational planning on two misconceptions: one being the belief that Finland did not have the capacity to offer more than token, face-saving resistance, and the other being the hoary Politburo [senior Kremlin decision-making council surrounding Stalin] delusion that the Finnish working class would rise up and paralyze its exiting government, if not actually turn its guns on them, just as soon as the Red Army came across the border. (18)

I was reading this passage well into the current Ukraine war and my jaw literally dropped: in terms of the planning, you could switch out “Finland” for “Ukraine” and “Finnish working class” for “Russian-speaking-as-a-first-language Ukrainians” and it was essentially the exact same situation!

Explains Trotter, the Finnish “populace was supposed to be so restive already that Soviet planners expected their efforts to be augmented by a large ‘fifth column’ deep inside the country.  What happened was something very different” (36).

The subordinates for the main planners for the Soviet war against Finland—Zhdanov and his staff and the military commander he oversaw, Gen. Kirill Meretskov—did not think they needed resources beyond what was already built up in the Leningrad District and expected victory in mere days.  Writes Trotter:

Some idea of the optimistic mood that prevailed, and of the power wielded by political officers [commissars] over their military counterparts, can be gleaned from an anecdote published in the memoirs of N. N. Voronov, a gentleman who, by World War II, had risen to the rank of chief marshal of artillery. Voronov was in charge of logistics for the guns, a task that would prove herculean, and it was in this capacity that he paid a visit to Meretskov’s headquarters during the waning days of November.  Meretskov welcomed him, then kept his mouth shut; most of the talking was done by the artillery officer Kulik and a commissar named Mekhlis. These two asked Voronov what sort of ammunition stocks they could draw on during the coming campaign. “That depends,” replied Voronov: “Are you planning to attack or defend … and by the way, how much time is allotted for the operation?”

“Between ten and twelve days,” was the bland reply.

                Voronov was not buying that estimate; all he had to do was look at a map of Finland. “I’ll be happy if everything can be resolved in two or three months.” This remark was greeted with “derisive gibes.” Then-Deputy Commissar Kulik then ordered Voronov to base all his ammo-consumption and fire-support estimates on the assumption that the entire Finnish operation would last twelve days, no more. (35)

Soviet plans as executed also had the Red Army invading Finland in the early days of the war from “eight different directions” (39) in “ten separate campaigns” (67) rather than concentrating on few attack corridors.  There were even “sacks of goodwill gifts, presumably for all the disaffected Finnish workers [Soviet] troops would encounter in the woods… the Soviet political assessment was fantastic in its presumptions” (54).  The Soviets were also so confident that they did not even feel the need to give their troops detailed briefings and included brass bands, presumably for parades for the what they presumed would be a welcoming Finnish populace:

many [Soviet soldiers] were so ignorant they didn’t even know the name of the country they were invading.

Whole divisions entered Finland with no worthwhile intelligence estimates of their opposition, guided by hopelessly inaccurate maps, yet fully burdened with truckloads of propaganda material including reams of posters and brass bands. (37)

As a stunning aside that is a testament to the carelessness at hand, this passage of Trotter’s bewilders:

After the war, Marshal Timoshenko, who masterminded the cracking of the [main Finnish defense] line, showed Nikita Khrushchev proof that Soviet intelligence had all along been in possession of detailed maps of the Mannerheim Line; but nobody had bothered to consult the intelligence service before starting the war.  “If we had only deployed our forces against the Finns in the way even a child could have figured out from looking at a map, things would have turned out differently.” (66)

Russian Hubris in 2022

Today in Ukraine, similar hubris (and carelessness) is all over the Russian planning and execution of this war.

We know that many ill-used Russian troops were told they were only going to take part in “exercises” and were not even briefed that they would be invading Ukraine until just before they crossed the border; some were told that when they did, they would be greeted as liberators.  Such careless treatment of their own soldiers has characterized the Russians’ approach to this war, as I have in detail noted before. 

Russia’s plan actually had Kyiv falling within a few days and the rest of the country not that long after, a wildly overoptimistic plan that has utterly failed.  Part of this failure involved Russia trying to advance along many fronts at the same time (as the Soviets did in Finland), spreading out their forces relatively thinly and leading to every Russian front either stalling or collapsing (the Kharkiv front being the latest example of the latter).  Some among the early waves of troops were even, apparently, made to bring their formal dress uniforms with them for a victory parade in Kyiv that would have occurred after the anticipated Russian capture of the capital city that did not materialize.

And, as I noted in another article and the parent piece from which both were excerpted, Putin was wildly overconfident about Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population buying his propaganda about their supposed oppression at the hands of Ukraine’s supposedly “Nazi,” “Fascist,” and “Banderite” leadership (see my related explanation, also excerpted from the same parent piece, of the history involved and the term Banderite).  Instead, he succeeded in largely uniting Ukraine behind its President Volodymyr Zelensky and against Russia, when before for years there had been major pro-Russian sentiment amongst a significant segment of the population.  Putin’s miscalculation has pretty much destroyed that sentiment.

Finally, in a broader sense, as I have noted across several pieces before, Putin’s hubris here also extended to the degree he thought that the West and NATO were weak and divided and would simply accept such a challenge from him to its partnership with Ukraine and European security in general.  Instead, the West and NATO have rarely been as united, and Finland—which stayed out of NATO for the entire Cold War and the decades since—and Sweden—which has been neutral for over two centuries, since the late Napoleonic Wars—are both banging on NATO’s door for formal membership in it, demonstrating further grossly hubristic miscalculation on the part of Putin and his people.

History (Inexcusably) Repeating Itself

Historically, I mentioned earlier that this war was a sideshow within World War II.  But it was no sideshow to the Finns or immense numbers of Soviet troops who perished.  And it should not have been a sideshow to Putin or his planners in the run-up to, and now during, this ill-fated, disastrous waste of a war in Ukraine.  Had even the most basic lessons of the Winter War—ones obvious to even anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of tactics and strategy (“even a child,” to requote Khrushchev)—been taken in into account by today’s Kremlin planners, Russia’s current war effort would be far more successful today and Ukraine far, far worse off for that.  Lucky for Ukraine, the free world, and anyone with a respectable conscience, that is not the case.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 2, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—Distorting the Soviets’ pre-planning for the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, among other factors I explain elsewhere, was the issue of a fringe fascist movement in Finland, known as the Lapuans, that tried to have a coup in 1932 but never was competent or numerous enough to pose a real threat and would fragment into even smaller fringe groups, some of which agitated for the part of Karelia on the Soviet side of the border that still was home to ethnic Finns.  One of these groups even created maps of a “Greater Finland” including Soviet territory.  Writes Trotter:

One can easily imagine the impact such documents had when they fell, as several specimens did, into the hands of Stalin’s intelligence operatives.

[Soviet Premier Joseph] Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic. (9-10)

The outsized effect of these tiny, fringe groups, with almost no power base and even less political support, are instructive for both what would transpire in 1939-1940 between Finland and the USSR and what is happening now between Ukraine and Russia and the whole absurd “denazification” talk of Putin’s Kremlin, as will be explained.

Official Soviet publications and news services referred to the Finnish government and leaders as “the Fascists” and emphasized the supposedly oppressive conditions of the Finnish working class and their readiness to ally with the Soviet would-be “liberators.”

Soviet official publications and news also trumpeted that “’the Imperialists” (i.e., the West) were already in motion to use Finland as a base for an invasion of the Soviet Union.  Writes Trotter:

This was, and to a certain extent still is, the official justification given to the Soviet Public for why the war was fought.  It permitted the Kremlin to rationalize the apparent lunacy of a nation of 3.5 million souls attempting to invade a nation of 171 million.  These claims also laid the groundwork for later explanations of the failed offensives and staggering casualties suffered by the Red Army.  These could be explained away as being the result of Imperialist aid to the treacherous Finns.  (19)              

Russia’s playbook today clearly draws from the same themes the Soviets used in the Winter War, as nearly 83 years later, the same hubris, the same assumptions of their own popularity in a foreign country, the same lack of due diligence and willingness to subscribe to self-serving narratives—falling for their own propaganda—infested the decision-makers in Moscow planning another war against a far-weaker, far-smaller neighbor without any formal allies, only this time in Putin’s Kremlin, rather than Stalin’s.

Putin and his folks seemed to have really believed that many Ukrainians would not only sympathize with Russia, but would actually join Russia and collaborate.  For Putin, Ukraine is Russia and the Russian speakers in Ukraine are not Ukrainians, they are Russians who have tragically been wrested from the Motherland.  Even ethnic Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian as their primary language are not really Ukrainians to him, just a different kind of Russian.  At Russian gunpoint, these people would feel very differently than he did; in the past, those ethnic Russians especially had voted for the pro-Russian faction in Ukrainian politics, but Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine since 2014 has turned vehemently against both him and Russia the very Ukrainians who used to view both favorably, as I have noted before.

For Finland’s Lapuans, today in Ukraine we can substitute the much-blown-out-of-proportion, glibly-over-simplified Russian hyperbole on the (somewhat formerly far-right) Azov Battalion of Ukraine; anecdotal evidence suggests Russian soldiers are obsessed with ferreting out the unit’s fighters (real or imagined) and supporters as well as other “Nazis” (amounting to “denazificaton”).

As I have noted at great length before, Putin’s brands of revanchist ethnonationalist colonialism and imperialism are utterly banal and thoroughly unoriginal, always playing on old themes from the past.  On May 8, 2022, just before Russia’s grand celebration of its Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin accordingly remarked: “Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours,” that, “today, it is our common duty to prevent the rebirth of Nazism.”  On Victory Day itself, Putin devoted much of his speech in the Kremlin’s Red Square to similar themes, calling the opposing leadership in Kyiv “neo-Nazis and Banderites” (I have gone into detail on the history, context, and importance of that very specific latter term, on Stepan Bandera and his nationalist movement, in my last excerpted article as well as the original deep-dive from which both these pieces are excerpted).

Putin then went on to portray the current fighting as “unavoidable” because of the West’s support for Ukraine and supposed plans for aggression, condemning that support and NATO.  He falsely blamed NATO and the West for instigating and orchestrating the current conflict, claiming his decision was “timely and the only correct decision.  A decision by a sovereign, strong, independent country.”  When the moment of silence for the fallen was called for, Putin invoked the memory of two groups: those who died fighting Hitler’s Nazi regime long ago and those whom he referred to as “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine today, explicitly linking both the Ukrainian government and current fighting to Nazi Germany and World War II, respectively, something the Kremlin has done ever since Putin’s favored stooge, the now disgraced Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown from Ukraine’s Presidency in the 2013-2014 (Euro)Maidan Revolution.  “Neo-Nazis,” “fascists,” and “Banderites” are terms that have been used to describe both post-Yanukovych presidential administrations in Kyiv, that of Petro Poroshenko and his successor, the now-legend-in-his-own-time Zelensky.

So it is that in the crudest of ways, Putin is trying to link the Great Patriotic War—Russia’s term for its fight in World War II against Nazi-led fascist armies—with the war against “Nazi” Ukraine today.  And he and his crew made similar mistaken assumptions about fascists in the country he was about to attack in early 2022 that Stalin and his crew did in 1939 with Finland.  Putin failed to learn from history, and the results are similarly humiliating for Moscow as they were in the beginning of the Soviet Finnish Winter War.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 31, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—As I have noted at great length before, Putin’s brands of revanchist ethnonationalist colonialism and imperialism are utterly banal and thoroughly unoriginal, always playing on old themes from the past.  On May 8, 2022, just before Russia’s grand celebration of its Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin accordingly remarked: “Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours,” that, “today, it is our common duty to prevent the rebirth of Nazism.”  On Victory Day itself, Putin devoted much of his speech in the Kremlin’s Red Square to similar themes, calling the opposing leadership in Kyiv “neo-Nazis and Banderites.”

That latter term—Banderites—may seem puzzling to those not familiar with certain details of Ukrainian history, but it is important to understand Putin’s framing and views of this war (for much of this Banderites discussion, I have relied on this excellent Reuters Institute/University of Oxford Fellowship Paper by Christian Esch).

In the period before Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, a die-hard Ukrainian ultra-nationalist fascist named Stepan Bandera saw an opportunity and made an alliance of convenience with the Germans before the coming conflict, thinking they would be an instrument of Ukrainian independence.  Bandera and some of his fighting units would roll with the Germans into Lviv in western Ukraine (recently picked off by Stalin from dismembered Poland), where he would declare an independent Ukrainian state on June 30, 1941.   But this alliance lasted only very briefly as Hitler was uninterested in an independent Ukrainian state, so Bandera was arrested by the Germans and his group—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera faction (OUN-B)—became the object of a German crackdown in early July, less than a week after their proclamation of an independent Ukrainian state.

While Bandera was in captivity, his organization fought on and often engaged in atrocities against Jews, Poles, and others they wanted to cleanse from a future Ukrainian state—some had even participated in the Holocaust before becoming insurgents—as they fought against the Nazi occupation, but Bandera was in German captivity for most of this period, far away in Berlin.  He was only released late in 1944—after the Germans and their allies had lost Ukraine to the advancing Red Army—to wreak havoc on the Soviets; he did not go back to Ukraine but from a distance encouraged his followers to fight.

They and other Ukrainian nationalists did, forming the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954 (the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign.  Bandera himself was assassinated by the Soviets in Munich, West Germany, in 1959.  In Soviet memory, it was convenient to simply paint all these UPA/OUN anti-Soviet insurgents as “Banderites”—i.e., fascist allies of Hitler’s Nazis, indistinguishable from the Nazis themselves—rather than a genuine Ukrainian nationalist resistance movement, while, particularly in west Ukraine, Bandera was remembered as a nationalist hero, his extremism and the atrocities of some of his followers less remembered or excused in the context of a brutal few decades in Ukrainian history.

The full truth involves a combination of both narratives (not necessarily equally so), but which resonates more with a particular Ukrainian in the post-Soviet era of today has much to with geography and ethnicity in the country.  While popular in Ukraine’s west and more so among ethnic Ukrainians, Bandera and his nationalists were unpopular in the east and more so with ethnic Russians.

The roots of this are deep and have tremendous bearing on the current conflict.

As I noted in a companion excerpted piece and the original deep-dive from which these pieces are excerpted, Ukraine suffered a particularly awful history of Russian discrimination against Ukrainians, up to and including genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, Russian colonialism, and cultural suppression from the days of the tsars and well into the Soviet era.  What resulted was a massive depopulation of Ukrainians—deported, starved to death, and/or straight-up murdered—especially in the east and the south alongside and/or followed by demographic engineering replacing many of them with Russians over a period of several centuries.  It was particularly bad in the Stalin era, and some of the most intense shifts occurred in Ukraine’s east and south, regions that are currently the main targets of Putin’s iteration of his forbears’ imperialism.

Those dramatic upheavals left a lasting legacy of a significant population of non-native Russians that has played into Putin’s planning for the current fighting.

Playing into Russian paranoia of “Banderists” has been the partial rehabilitation of Bandera and his symbols in Ukraine since 1991—the year of the Soviet Union’s demise and Ukraine’s independence—first especially in the west of Ukraine but also more widely after the 2004 Orange Revolution and especially the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution and Russia initiating war thereafter, when pro-Western, anti-Russian leaders came to power amid Russian interference, corruption campaigns, even war directed by Putin.  The semi-rehabilitation of Bandera was not greeted warmly in the Russian-speaking parts of the east or in Crimea.

You can see the wheels turning in Putin’s brain, with him thinking invoking Bandera and his fighters in 2022 would galvanize many Ukrainians—especially in Ukraine’s east, and especially the Donbas’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions—to Russia’s side.

Little did Putin imagine that Russian aggression since 2014 had pushed many of them away from Russia and that his massive 2022 invasion would only dramatically intensify this process, uniting nearly the entire country behind both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and resistance against Putin and Russia.  For Ukrainians, the memories of Russian aggression against Ukraine over the past decade, it turns out, were far fresher, relevant, and resonant than those of controversies from fighting wars back in the mid-twentieth century.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 25, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—In trying other times to convey the emotion and time-span of the struggles highlighted herein, in the past I have used a particular excerpt from a particular poem and will reuse it here because it is terribly apt and revealing, especially when noting the date:

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762 by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

As the above quote demonstrates, for centuries, Ukrainians have fought for their freedom and to preserve their identity against an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist Russia (something I have discussed at length before). Below is a brief (not by any means comprehensive) history of Russian and Soviet mass atrocities carried out in what are now the modern borders of Ukraine.

Imperial Russia had control over Ukraine’s east for far a longer time than its west (part of that not even coming under Russian control until the mid-twentieth century), and the tsarist era saw systematic top-down suppression of Ukrainian as a language and identity (some Ukrainians even adopting Russian to suffer less discrimination) as well as suppression of the Muslim Crimean Tatars that was so bad that a large majority fled Crimea, leaving the Tatars who remained a minority in the face of colonialist settling of Russians and others in Crimea and other areas within Ukraine’s current borders (especially the Donbas), just some of the tsarist policies collectively known as “Russification.”

A free Ukrainian state finally emerged from the collapse of Imperial Russia at the end of World War I, only to be caught up in a number of conflicts, including the Russian Civil War; when the fighting was over after years of killing in Ukraine, Ukraine’s brief independence had been snuffed out by the time it was integrated as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, in 1922 (and far from willingly).

The Soviet era would see even more dramatic demographic shifts. 

A decade after being forcibly integrated into the USSR, in the face of both maintaining Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s policy of collectivization of farming, Stalin took what was a terrible situation with a regional famine and specifically directed and aggravated that famine towards Ukraine, killing millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 through starvation and its accompanying diseases in the man-made genocidal disaster that has come to be known as the Holodomor (the most detailed estimate approximates 3.9 million dead).  During this genocidal famine, Russians were resettled into some areas where Ukrainians had been starved to death or sent off to gulags, particularly in the east and south, so that the land could still be worked and yield harvests.  As the Donbas area in particular was a center of major industrialization, Russian and other Soviet migration to that region was considerable in this period. 

Understandably, when German armies came rolling through Ukraine in 1941, many Ukrainians with little love for Stalin, Russia, or the Soviets and their Union saw an opportunity in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation.  But the Nazis were uninterested in Ukrainian nationalism, so, not long after their invasion of the Soviet Union, they turned on their Ukrainian allies after some of them—Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B—proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state.  Bandera some of his Ukrainian nationalists were caught up in the crackdown, but some of the rest fought the Nazi invaders, even as their old enemies, the Soviets, eventually came back during their great counteroffensive against Hitler’s armies.

Thus, the OUN-B fought the Nazis and Soviets at once (until the former were driven out), eventually forming alongside others the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954, the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign against—as the Soviets blanketly called all insurgents—the “Banderites,” after Bandera (more on that by me here). 

There was so much killing and depopulation during World War II by the Nazis and Soviets in Ukraine that the people of the Ukrainian SSR suffered one of the highest casualty totals of the war both in proportionate terms and absolutely (about 6.85 million dead, some 16.3% of the total population in the relatively recent accounting of one Russian historian).  Additionally, the Germans deported some 2.4 million people from within Ukraine to work in Germany as forced slave labor (of whom, by some estimates, 400,000-450,000 died from the brutal conditions).  Then, when the Soviets retook Ukraine and other Soviet territory occupied by Hitler’s forces, large parts of populations that had collaborators in their midst or were merely suspected by paranoid authorities of having collaborated or harbored collaborators (or even just because they were seen as troublesome “foreign” elements) were deported to Soviet Central Asia or Siberia under appalling conditions that saw many of those deportees perish.  The deported included all of the Crimean Tatars (estimates range, but quite roughly 200,000) in just a few days in 1944 on the grounds that they had, en masse, collaborated with the Nazis.  In reality, only a small percentage actually had, and the Soviet government even admitted in 1967 that the accusations were false (I did not even realize I was writing this section on the anniversary of the beginning of this genocidal deportation, May 18).  Many ethnic Ukrainians were also deported by the Soviets from Ukraine (over 200,000 from western Ukraine alone, where UPA was most popular).

Few Russians are likely aware of the supremely sick irony of Putin pushing an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist war on Ukraine to reintegrate ethnic Russian populations back into Russia considering those populations mainly came to be in Ukraine’s south and east because tsarist and/or Soviet-engineered oppression, genocide, famine, mass killing, and mass deportations of Ukrainians and Tatars occurred alongside colonialist population transfers of Russians into Ukraine, settled often on the literal blood and bones of the previous inhabitants. 

Apparently true to its horrific legacy, Russian in this the current war has been accused by Ukraine of forcibly deporting some 1.2 million Ukrainians, including well over 200,000 children, to Russia, actions that can only bring back nightmare memories of the past horrors described above (on May 23, Ukraine updated the accusation to a total of 1.4 million Ukrainians, including over 240,000 children).

Thus, Ukrainians’ resistance to Russian imperialism, whether in the past or today, is not inspired by Western support or American manipulation into becoming “proxies” of the U.S., but a deep, lived experience passed on from generation to generation of being at the receiving end of a long history of atrocities that, sadly, in part defines what it means to be Ukrainian.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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