Ukraine #3

We have already noted how complicated things in Ukraine are, and I trust I have cast suspicion on any approach that wants to reduce everything to clear and simple (and therefore ideological) talking points.

To the extent we are involved in this kind of thing at all, our chief job is to stay out of the current pending disaster, and possibly the one right after that. Our first task is not to set up shop to redress grievances going back to the 1300’s. We are not competent to untangle that skein of yarn, and this is why we need a Day of Judgment, with a more competent Judge than anything the Security Council could ever have.

Our task is more simple, which is to keep things from spiraling out of control now. In the medieval period, the Church attempted to restrain the constant violence by means of the Pax Dei and Treuga Dei (the peace of God and the truce of God respectively). The former attempted to establish a permanent set of “off limits” regulations, while the latter restrictions were more temporary in nature. For example, the Pax Dei prohibited making war on women and children. The Treuga Dei did things like attempting to keep the nobles from fighting on Thursdays. Not very effective, but better than nothing.

You play cards with the hand you are dealt. When the Soviet Union was cracking up, Ukraine found herself with a bunch of nukes. The United States persuaded Ukraine to give up their nukes in exchange for our guarantee of their borders, borders which we in fact failed to guarantee. Let that sink in. They succeeded in giving up their nukes; we failed to do what we said we would do in exchange.

One response to this (in the comments on a previous post) was rejoicing over the fact that Ukraine doesn’t have nukes. Yay for no nukes in Ukraine. Right, but did we really want to exchange that “no nukes” benefit for the downside of everybody knowing that our guarantees mean nothing? I know that no nukes sometimes come in handy, but so do believable guarantees.

In foreign affairs, we often believe that we are heading in one direction, when we are actually going in a direction directly opposite. One of the characteristics of the progressive mind is the tendency to believe that nobody in the world has any memory at all, and that we can do the “Lucy and the football” thing indefinitely. We give a despot assurances that if he cedes power, then he will be okay. We then double cross him after he relinquishes power, and we think that (magically!) we have somehow not encouraged every remaining despot in the world to fight until the last dog is hanged.

So back to Ukraine. If we say, soothingly, that “the Crimea” was historically Russian anyway, then mark that word “historically.” How much history are we allowed to bring into this? Once we start appealing to history, when do we stop? What has Russia, that regional hegemon, ever done that might make Ukrainians wary? Use of the word wary is, by the way, a colossal understatement. Maybe we should bring up the famine that Stalin imposed on Ukraine, in which twenty-five percent of the entire population was starved to death, something like 7 million in real numbers. That happened in 1932/33, within living memory. And we are not yet counting all those put on the trains to Siberia.

And this brings us to the next point. If it is replied that this was done by Stalinists — commies — not Russians qua Russians, I do grant the point. Communism is evil, and did as many bad things to the Russian people as were done to Ukrainians. But this provides us with a response to the “what about” thought experiment posed by my friend Peter Hitchens.

“I ask again, what Washington would do if, in a moment of national weakness, the lands the USA seized from Mexico by force in 1848 seceded, and Russian politicians came to Albuquerque to give their open support for rallies supporting an alliance between the new state and Moscow?”

Well, what Washington would think and what I would think might be two very different things. If Washington had been recently dominated by Stalinists, down to the late eighties, and if they had starved 7 million Texans to death when my father was a boy, and had then shipped millions of others off to work camps in Alaska, then I might be tempted to think that Russian support for our fledgling cause of freedom was the very best thing that had ever happened to us.

These are not chess pieces, where it is immaterial whether the pieces are black or white — and where the same rules apply. The rules of chess should be impartially applied to both players. In a football game, clipping should be a foul for both teams, even steven. But there are other situations where the moral equivalencies don’t work that way. Jesus can say the Pharisees are of their father the devil, and they don’t get to say that He casts out demons by the prince of demons, and the reason for this is that what Jesus said was true, and what the Pharisees said was false.

If someone said “what would you think if forces of the enemy marched up to the gates of your city, showing proud defiance, and if they had sent saboteurs behind our lines to creep up our central mountain, and throw the ring of power into that volcano?” Well, I don’t know what I would think, but what I ought to think is that I really shouldn’t have become an orc.

Now I am making a point here about how moral equivalence does and doesn’t work. I am not saying that the Cold War West was “the Jesus party.” But I am saying that while the Soviets and West were all made up of sinners, the Soviets really were an evil empire, and that to posit a moral equivalence between the hard East and the decadent West was to be willfully blind to actual facts on the ground.

Neither is this to say that we could never become a hardened and evil society like the Soviets were. Look at our abortion mills, and our ghoulish pro-partial birth abortion president, and it is obvious that we are well on our way. But we didn’t used to be that way, and it is worth pointing out that the progressives who have brought us to this iniquitous place were all the people asserting moral equivalencies before it was true. And now that they have made it true, they deny it hotly, at least where it comes to their bloodthirst.

But I said earlier that my sympathies are first with the believers in the Ukraine, and second with anyone who loves economic and true personal freedom. Ethnicity is a great complicating factor in this, but it is not the factor. This is because the conflict is driven by men who want power over others, not by men who happen to be Russian, or Ukrainian, or American. The current conflict is driven by the hard willful despotism of Putin, and the soft, wishful despotism of the West. The people in Ukraine that I would want to identify with are would rather function in the West because it gives them more opportunities for the gospel. This is not the same thing as being a cheerleader for the latest lunacy from the State Department.

What Scripture says about wicked men and their estates can also be applied to those wicked men who treat national borders as the boundaries of their own estates.

“Their graves are their homes forever, their dwelling places to all generations, though they called lands by their own names” (Ps. 49:11, ESV).