What Putin has in common with Hitler

We are always cautioned against comparing a modern political event with those that led up to the second world war. One can see the risk of hyperbole and slander. But as Vladimir ‘Inky Poops’ Putin re-invades Ukraine, he will be making such comparisons himself. His long and bitter address on Monday showed his taste, common in tyrants, for historical disquisitions designed to turn grievance into aggression. He lambasted the foolishness of the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and 1930s which had laid ‘a mine to destroy state immunity to the disease of nationalism’. With the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989, he went on, this had led to the rise in Kiev of ‘aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism’ and ‘a parasitic attitude acting at all times in an extremely brash manner’. Wicked oligarchs (yes, the President hates them, apparently) ‘embezzled the legacy inherited not only from the Soviet era, but also from the Russian empire’. Nato fastened on this, making Ukraine ‘a colony’ run by ‘puppets’. This makes it positively virtuous, in Putin’s view, for Russia now to intervene as ‘peacemakers’ in ‘independent’ Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin is displaying a righteous anger similar to Hitler’s as he invaded to ‘help’ Germans in the Sudetenland or Danzig. Like Hitler, Putin has long published his extreme versions of history, yet the democratic West paid little attention and neglected the international order. Hitler was emboldened by encountering western leaders. He said: ‘Our enemies are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are little worms. I saw them at Munich.’ Putin may be making the same calculation, and he may be right. Hitler was righter militarily, than his generals, until Barbarossa. Putin, too, will have gained confidence from his previous conquests. ‘They won’t dare stop me,’ he must think, raking in the money from oil and gas.