Thank you for your thoughtful comments and for this discussion. That means a lot to me.
> While I don't have any deep insight what actually drove Churchill what you described to the be an almost inquisitive research on Hitler's motives, I do think that he was able to see beyond the first level array of interests of his political class and understood the second order and long term implications for the British Empire and the European society as a whole when it came to let fascist take power on the continent.
I agree. And it seems to me that precisely this "seeing beyond" the immediate future, and paying attention to second order effects is suspiciously missing from public discourse, at least on the Western side.
You ask why viewpoints like this get downvoted. I don't know either. If I had to guess, I think it might have to do with the fact that most of us are overloaded with information and with decisions. We cope by employing a "swipe left" strategy, where we feel relieved if we can find a reason to dismiss a piece of input quickly without exerting too much energy on it. So we can get on to the next thing that needs to be dealt with.
Also, it's not very satisfying to most people if new questions are being raised without a clear-cut answer being provided. In a sense, it's almost as if that's inflicting a form of psychological pain -- creating an open loop with no resolution.
A few years back I had the opportunity to have a chat with the grandson of C.G. Jung, the psychologist. I asked him what he remembered as the most striking trait of his grandfather. And he said that it was C.G. Jung's ability to "stay with the tension" of two competing narratives. His ability to stay with a question without succumbing to the urge of arriving at a conclusion.
The same I have heard being said about Peter Thiel. And when I read biographies of Churchill, or JFK, I see that same trait as well.
And it's a trait that we, as the internet generation, seem to be losing. Because it's just so easy to swipe left and say, "Next!" That's why it sometimes feels as if you were talking to GPT-3. Use a few wrong keywords, and the reaction is pre-determined.
That being said, I also understand that, while we are philosophizing, people are losing their homes, or even their lives. So if someone has these pictures in mind, and they come across a post like this one, it can easily make them angry.
Even my own wife gave me the "stare of death" when I began voicing my concerns. She's not a random stranger on the internet. She loves me, and she knows me for more than a decade. And still, when I started speaking my mind about this topic, she initially resisted heavily, because it sounded to her as if I was somehow "on Putin's side". That's just how the human brain works, I guess. But the thing is: We only ended up having a conversation because she stayed with me on this, and actually heard me out. Random people on the internet are not going to do this. And for the same reason, if you are a newspaper, or a blogger, or a YouTuber, you would need to be very, very careful. Because if you say something that triggers that "stare of death" in your listeners, they will not hear you out. They will "swipe left" - or worse.
Actually, this dynamic of our internet-driven media is beginning to give me the chills. There is this part in Sebastian Haffner's account about living inside Hitler's Germany where he describes how intellectually isolated he became. All of his friends from university became Nazis. All stimulating books were banned. And so, if you had any doubts, any questions, or any dissenting views, you became a prisoner in your own head.
We are still very far from such a reality. Russia is a lot closer to that. But still, I would guess that there are probably many people who have views that are different from what is being -- reflected? No -- fed to us in the media. But they are going to keep quiet. Because they see that you cannot take any chances. They are afraid not of being wrong. That would be easy. That might actually be a relief. No, what they are afraid of is that people are going to "swipe left" on them, not because of anything they really meant, but because one other person did not hear them out and drew some grotesque conclusion.
I normally try to stay as far away from politics as I can. I also never paid any attention to Russia. It is not a country I am interested in. And when the news about the invasion hit, my own thoughts also immediately went to Hitler, and to Czechoslowakia.
The thing is: I just couldn't find an answer on what the hell Putin actually wants in Ukraine. It just didn't make any sense to me. As far as I know, the man practically owns Russia. Nobody knows his precise net-worth, but it doesn't seem like there is anything he could not buy if he wanted to. So self-enrichment hardly can be a motive.
Also, starting a war is a very dangerous move. He is putting his own power on the line. Not only is he giving the western world more reasons and more urgency to depose of him. But he's also risking a revolution from inside his own country.
And whereas the other statesmen just care about the term they are elected for, Putin practically "is" Russia (or at least he sees it that way). He is not merely putting other people's blood and money on the line. He has got to have a really strong motive for this.
Now, Hitler had such a motive. His motive was that he thought himself to be the chosen one to "free" Europe from an imagined "oppression by the Jews", and to build an Arian empire that should last for a thousand years. That was a lunantic motive, of course. But it was there, plain to see and hear for anybody who would pay attention.
(We can forgive those who read it and dismissed it as "not to be taken literally". Just imagine somebody predicting the Holocaust before the Holocaust actually happened. People would have laughed at you. But for us, who come after Hitler, that excuse is no longer valid.)
So for me, that thing about NATO and the U.S. missile defense system really does make a lot of sense. I've read a lot about JFK. And one of the big insights that JFK had was that in a world where nuclear weapons exist, world peace depends on an equilibrium of both powers having them.
If Putin is afraid that his country's nuclear deterrent is being "castrated" by an expanding NATO, that can hardly be counted as "just a pretext".
And there's also the human element. Posner talks about this in his talk at Yale [1]. The Russians want to be taken seriously. Let's not forget: They were the ones who paid the highest price in WW2. And they eventually lost out in the Cold War. We know from Germany what this can do to a country's psyche.
And Putin has, as I hear, voiced his concerns about NATO at Russia's borders frequently. He has pointed out that the West had broken promises that were made when Russia pulled out of Germany in 1990.
And now here we have this crisis. People are being killed. Homes are being destroyed. Families are being ripped apart. And we have our leaders fly to the Kremlin and hold six hour talks with Putin. But what I'm not hearing is that the concerns Putin has voiced and which look to be quite likely a major motive for his current actions are being addressed.
Instead, it is being said that Putin's fears about NATO expansion are unfounded, because Ukraine isn't going to join anytime soon, anyway. In other words, his concerns are being dismissed.
That's basically like when your wife has been complaining for years that you spend too little time with her. And now she's about to divorce you, which you claim you absolutely want to avoid. And what do you do? You tell her that her concerns are unreasonable. That she has no reason to complain.
I can tell you exactly how this story is going to end. If John Gottman had written a guide on How to Seed Distrust, Break A Relationship and Make Life Miserable for Everybody, this would be it.
In fact, Gottman has a term for what the West is doing with Russia: Stonewalling. "It's all your fault, I've got nothing to do with it, and I'm not even going to listen to you any longer. Or I'll just pretend to be listening, but then turn around and tell everything you just said to me to my friends to prove just how crazy and unreasonable you are."
Thas is not de-escalation. I don't want to call it "provocation", because I don't want to take agency away from Russia (that would be ridiculous). But somewhere, somebody must have been able to predict that this kind of behavior is going to increase the likelihood of Putin doing something stupid and dangerous.
I'm grateful for places like HN where thoughts like these can be discussed. Because, frankly, the possibility of this thing escalating into WWIII concerns all of us. And once that happens, the question "Who started it?" or "Who is to blame?" will have become totally meaningless.
I mean, whose fault was WWI? I think not even the historians can tell at this point. And with WWII, it surely is a lot easier to say who started it. But at the same time, with hindsight, it is also obvious how Hitler could have been stopped early on. Perhaps as early as Versailles.
I understand that that kind of reasoning doesn't make for as good as a Disney movie where it's just that one bad person out there that needs to be overcome. But then again, hasn't C.G. Jung shown that even such stories are just symbols? That the evil we see personified "out there" might very well be something inside of us? Some fear, some desire to be right, to exert power, to blame, to fit in, to be comfortable -- or even just to have all the answers.
[1] https://youtu.be/8X7Ng75e5gQ