I honestly do not have a dog in this fight. I don’t like the Russian government. I do not forget Ukraine’s involvement in the Russian hoax and their systemic corruption.
Is this Hitler and Poland? Well consider this:
I often look at people who are consistently wrong for guidance... guidance as to what is the wrong position.
That gives me pause.
Then I look at what the media is trying to sell me. Again, for guidance as to what is false.
You can call me a Putin puffer all you want. Doesn’t make it true. Not my dog, not my fight, and I hope the dogs mortally wound each other because both are pests in the neighborhood.
The difference between Ukraine and Russia is that Ukraine was and is trying to leave the corruption and moral decay of the Soviet years behind them. It’s akin to an alcoholic quitting booze and it’s not an instantaneous event where suddenly an entire nation embraces Western values.
Communism and other centrally controlled socialist economic systems naturally devolve into a state of endemic corruption. Once a bureaucracy takes control of an economy scarcity becomes a normal situation and government officials quickly discover that they can enrich themselves by handing out scarce resources in return for favors and bribes. The people are not fooled and they see the hypocrisy of government officials preaching equity all while living in fancy homes, driving nice cars, eating well, and rolling in money.
When the communist system finally collapses the corruption doesn’t collapse with it. As we saw across Eastern Europe government officials saw their nascent capitalist economies as an opportunity for plunder.
This is where I applaud the European Union because as a condition of membership the new members had to implement market and justice reforms to remove the culture of corruption left over from the Soviet era.
Poland is a fine example of a success story. They implemented reforms over the protests of their mostly Soviet-era judiciary and the country started to prosper. Then they managed to irk the EU by going a step further and purging the remaining communists from all levels of government. The leftists in the EU whined about this but now Poland is prospering and starting to move ahead of some of her Western European counterparts. The logic of purging the communists is writ large in terms of jobs and savings accounts.
Ukraine looked to Poland and said, “We want that too.”
That (censored) prick Putin couldn’t stand the idea of a free and prosperous Ukraine that didn’t see the Almighty State as God and here we are. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine to build a free and wealthy state built on laws because that’s a threat to the Russian traditions of corruption, bribes, and oppression.
Is Ukraine perfect? No, but they’re working on it.
And that makes them worthy of my support.