Little men and big lies

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/06/2024 (664 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“He didn’t want Ukraine. He didn’t want Europe. Hell, he’s got enough land of his own. He just wants to make sure he does not have U.S. weapons in Ukraine.” — U.S. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, defending Vladimir Putin.

D-Day is on my mind.

Eighty years ago this week, under the command of U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, 160,000 Allied forces stormed the beaches of Northern France on June 6, 1944. The U.S. provided the greatest number of troops. The British and the Canadians provided most of the rest. And 14,000 Canadians landed on Juno Beach.

Every Canadian with a French vacation on their bucket list should visit the graves of the young Canadians who never returned from the battle that stopped the forces of fascism from incinerating freedom. The time-honoured truth is that many of us owe our very existence to their service.

But we need to acknowledge the sacrifice was made necessary because of insidious falsehoods. Fascism is born in the crucible of a big lie. The creators never stop repeating it. Enablers world-wide become useful idiots for the big lie.

Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach, is a Republican senator from Alabama. He is among those on Donald Trump’s team, running a playbook of lies on every page.

They enthusiastically enable the big lie of modern-day fascism’s most dangerous servant, Vladimir Putin.

From Russia’s perspective, Ukraine does the dirty work for the U.S.

Putin believes the U.S. objective is to destroy Russia by giving Ukraine U.S. dollars, U.S. weapons and U.S. military intelligence.

Sen. Tuberville this week repeated the biggest lie of all. He said that the reason for the war is that the U.S. wants it.

Tuberville sits on the highly influential Senate Armed Services Committee. This makes him one of modern-day fascism’s most useful idiots. I would not waste a word on this if there wasn’t a connection between the lies Putin tells, and those that gave rise to European fascism in the ’30s.

The salient reason for studying history is because it teaches us lessons. Our moral imperative is to learn those lessons so we can prevent a repeat of past mistakes.

We need a little bit of recent history, too, so that we can properly apprehend the extent of Putin’s deceit.

Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine wasn’t in February of 2022. That was a massive escalation of Russia’s first invasion, which occured eight years earlier.

In 2014, there was very little U.S. assistance to Ukraine. Barack Obama was in the Oval Office. There is no evidence that the Obama administration had any interest in starting a war with Russia.

But there is an important brutal fact of life that needs a full public airing. Putin is among many Russians who do not allow themselves to think of Ukraine as an independent country.

He is among a long line of Russians who think of every inch of Ukrainian territory as Mother Russia. To Putin and his fellow Russian hyper nationalists, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and those who support him are fascists — no different from the Nazis who invaded the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

Adolf Hitler and his allies wanted to wage a genocidal war against the inhabitants of Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union. Ten million combatants were involved in Operation Barbarossa. There were more than eight million casualties, most of them Russian. The transcript of every Putin interview you will ever read reveals that Putin’s disdain for Ukraine is fuelled by the Nazi invasion of Putin’s beloved Soviet Union, which began 83 Junes ago.

Putin has always viewed a Ukraine not commanded by Russia as a fascist puppet. It’s true that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s heritage is Jewish. But to Putin that is beside the point. He views Zelenskyy as a tool of the United States, which Putin sees as an existential threat to Russia. He compares the U.S. to Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Never mind that Americans aren’t mass murdering Russians, occupying Russian land, raping Russian women or stealing food from Russian families. Stubborn ideologues always ignore stubborn facts, jeopardizing the lives of free people everywhere.

This week we celebrated freedom by commemorating the sacrifices of those willing to fight for it.

History will always be kind to the Canadians, many of them from Manitoba, who landed on Juno Beach 80 years ago this week.

It must never be generous to those who made those sacrifices necessary — little men, telling big lies.

» Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. This column previously appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.