IF MY THOUGHT DREAMS COULD BE SEEN...

If my thought dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head in a guillotine”

– Bob Dylan, “It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”

Last night, Senator Lindsay Graham went on Sean Hannity’s show and called for someone to assassinate Vladimir Putin.

Yesterday:

Milan University banned the teaching of Feodor Dostoyevsky, on the grounds he’s Russian (FYI, Dostoyevsky did his best writing after he was shipped to Siberia for the crime of reading banned books in Czarist Russia).

The International Cat Federation banned Russian Blues from being entered in competitions.

The Canadian Junior Hockey League banned 16 and 17-year old hockey players from Belarus and Russia from the player’s draft.

Reading that news, I was reminded that, in the summer of 1917, following America’s entry into World War I:

My eight-year old father found his pet Dachshund that had been missing for a day in a back alley in their upper-middle class neighborhood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The two year old dog was near death, with its ribs kicked in on the right side. He brought the dog home, and his father took it to their veterinarian, who saved it over the course of a week. The Dachshund, a “German” dog, had been named Kaiser. When he came home from the vet’s, Kaiser became Teddy. And stayed inside for the next two years with his human while they both weathered the Pandemic of 1918.

My four year old mother was awakened early one morning when it was still dark outside, when the family barn on their farm in Alamosa, Colorado, caught fire. It was mostly destroyed before the fire was put out. The arson happened because the family name was Weist. A “German” name. This despite the fact that Peter Weist, the first of that line to come to America, had arrived in 1849, a refugee with a Prussian price on his head for having been a member of the Congress of Frankfurt in the (anti-Prussian) Revolution of 1848.

These events, and many similar across the country, were the result of a government-sponsored “Anti-Germany” campaign designed to rouse a citizenry that had re-elected the president the year before on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

I get it. I have to turn off the television when watching the news these past seven days.

As a military historian, I have thought about the fact that, in 1992 when the Soviet records were opened, it was found that in 1951 the USSR had four A-bombs and their only delivery system was a reverse-engineered B-29 that couldn’t get further than Minneapolis on a one-way mission. At the same time, the US had 100 A-bombs and over 100 bombers capable of getting to Soviet targets. Saturday night I found myself thinking that perhaps Curtis LeMay, the commander of those bombers, was right to say World War III should have been fought “while we could have won.”

Fortunately, a few minutes later, I reminded myself that was Crazy Thinking.

Tom Nichols, who has thought about all this stuff professionally for all his adult life, wrote yesterday:

“A few days ago, I was watching footage of Ukrainian mothers, panicked and crying, trying to evacuate their children from a beautiful city that a paranoid dictator has now turned into a war zone. I looked over at my wife, sitting a few feet away from me, and saw the tears welling in her eyes. I felt helpless. And for once, I was at a loss for words.

“Night after night I find myself staring at the television, almost paralyzed with anger and grief. Russian President Vladimir Putin, after a catastrophic strategic miscalculation, is now embroiled in perhaps the greatest military blunder in modern European history. In his desperation, he is resorting to the classic Russian military playbook of indiscriminate and massive violence. His unprovoked war of aggression is rapidly escalating into war crimes.

“It’s going to get worse. The images and sounds from these first few days are a mere prologue to what will come once Putin realizes that he is on track to lose this war, even if he somehow ‘wins’ by flattening entire cities.

“In my rage, I want someone somewhere to do something.”

We’ve watched those shots of people in the railroad stations, desperate to get out of Kyiv to Poland and the West. Last night, She Who Must Be Obeyed asked me to turn it off, because it reminded her of the stories her mother had told her of how the family got out of Lithuania in 1945. Her mother spoke fluent German, and was able to convince an SS officer that she and her husband and SWMBO’s older brother were Volksdeutsch - ethnic Germans - and should be evacuted to Germany in the face of the Soviet offensive that had reached Lithuania. When the Soviets took over in 1940, her father - a pilot in the Lithuanian Air Force - had been sent to a prison camp from which he only emerged a year later after the Wehrmacht arrived and threw the Red Army out of the country. They knew what they were running away from, just as the people at the Kyiv station do.

I think of my friend, Evgeny Evtushenko, designer and creator of really beautiful scale model kits, a model geek’s model geek, who I last heard from last Friday morning when he e-mailed me that he had transferred all his computer designs to flash drives he could carry in his pocket, and that he and his wife and their two kids were going to try to drive to Lviv with friends in hopes of getting to a relative living in Poland. I hope they got there.

Yesterday I got a message from a Russian modeling friend that he wouldn’t be in touch further. Being in touch with a westerner is now a crime in Russia. As of this morning (Russian time) the Duma passed a law that people arrested in antiwar demonstrations would be considered to have been conscripted into the Russian Army and would be sent to the front. Journalists whose reporting contradicts the official line on the war can be charged with treason.

There are news reports that the bullet trains from Moscow to St. Petersburg and on to Helsinki are full of people a Finnish reporter said are arriving “with everything they own they can carry.” Julia Ioffe reports that all her friends in Russia have either left or are trying to. There’s a report that the Russian government may ban travel out of the country to block this departure.

I would cheer if that 40-mile convoy 20 miles outside Kyiv got hit by a wing (48 airplanes) of A-10 attack jets dropping precision bombs on the vehicles and then strafing with their 30mm Vulcan cannon, turning it into a 40-mile long “Highway of Death.” I’m sure right now, we all would.

It’s not going to happen. It has settled in to the consciousness of Western leaders that we really are dealing with an opponent who really is capable of using those nukes he placed on heightened alert status this past weekend. The Russian Army has actually come up with plans to win a war in Europe with the use of nukes. Drop one at the outset, to prove themselves willing to do so, and tell the Europeans that any similar response will only get a worse response, then unleash their army. We may think after this past week that the Russian Army is inept, but that is dangerous thinking. Their original plans were “over-optimistic,” but now they have reverted to the way Marshal Zhukov fought the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: overwhelming force and no thought of mercy. We are dealing with a country whose leadership is “that crazy.” We can’t expect a Russian field marshal to shoot Putin when given an order to launch a nuclear strike.

So we are now left with what we have: economic isolation and strangulation. It won’t likely save Kyiv from what’s coming. But right now, it’s working.

This massive show of what is called “non-state soft power” may be the first experiment in a new kind of conflict, or at any rate a broad-based version of something that has only happened before at much smaller scales. While no state of war exists between the government of the United States and the government of Russia, a sort of opt-in, cultural-economic quasi-war exists between American civil society and the Russian government. The same goes for many if not all of the other countries arrayed against Russia.

Apple is no longer selling computers or iPhones in Moscow. YouTube has taken down all pro-Russia content. DirecTV dropped RT, which closed its doors as a result. Ford and General Motors and Mercedes-Benz and BMW aren’t delivering cars to Russia. Intel isn’t delivering chips. Boeing and Airbus are not providing maintenance information and parts; within a month Aeroflot’s Boeings and Airbuses will be grounded for lack of parts and maintenance, and travel in a country that spans 11 time zones will revert to railroads.

This raises lots of interesting and difficult questions: How many of these institutions have thought about the long term? Will they keep up these restrictions indefinitely if the war on Ukraine becomes an indefinite occupation? Can the Russian government retaliate against American civil society? Does the American government have a duty to protect these groups from retaliation, even if, like the hackers, they violate American law?

But all those stupid things I listed at the beginning? Calling for assassination? Banning Dostoyevsky and cats and kids? That’s the kind of bullshit and ignorance that feeds right into Putin’s plans. He doesn’t have to invent it that we want their leader dead. Unfortunately, 80 percent of the Russian public believes the horse shit on Russian “news” programs; a young woman hiding in her bathroom in Kyiv sends photos she takes out her window to her mother in Moscow, who responds that it couldn’t be the Russian Army doing that, that it’s the Ukrainians trying to make Russia look bad.

Having the footage of Senator Huckleberry Weathervane shown on Russian state TV will only strengthen the power of the horse shit.

We can’t do what we did in 1917 and expect it to work this time.

This project works due to the support of the paid subscribers. There are now three more than there were last night. If 147 others of the 239 free subscribers changed to paid subscriptions, the plans I have to improve this for subscribers could become reality. Please consider upgrading your subscription.

Comments are limited to paid subscribers.