Vladimir Putin and the Big Lie

Two days ago, Vladimir Putin plunged Europe into the most dangerous conflict since World War II by invading Ukraine, a sovereign nation. In a speech that attempted to justify this drive to overthrow that country’s democracy, Putin repeated old and unsubstantiated assertions of genocide against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority and the need to “denazify” the country.

In making these claims, Putin was employing a propaganda technique associated with Adolph Hitler: the big lie. The big lie refers to a lie so enormous that people will not believe that you would ever try to deceive them on such a large scale. Putin is seeking to attach the label of Nazism to the government of Volodymyr Zelensky who is Jewish and whose grandfather’s family was murdered in the Holocaust.

Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University, a scholar of authoritarianism, pointed out that, in his speech, Putin spoke of the need to protect “people bound by blood” from a “virus.” It is not Zelensky but Putin who is using Hitlerian rhetoric.

Putin’s control of Russia is built on an authoritarian system with loyalist security forces, a subservient judiciary, no real free press, the suppression of dissent and government manipulation of elections. Authoritarian leaders achieve and maintain their power by replacing the rule of law and truth with the axiom that might makes right and with lies.

In his book On Tyranny, Professor Snyder wrote: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis to do so.”

We are in a global struggle between authoritarianism and democracy. If we are to have any hope of preserving democracy, we must not abandon truth. Our responsibility is to always strive to discern the truth and oppose the big lie.

Ron Koehler

Ukraine

The rumors of war in Ukraine appear to gain credence with each passing day. Behind the seemingly incompatible pronouncements of Russian, Ukrainian and NATO leaders are geopolitical realities that any diplomatic solution must accommodate.

Because it lacks natural barriers such as mountains or seas, Russia has been invaded from the West five times since 1605—by the Poles, Swedes, French and twice by the Germans. This experience has led the Russians to seek strategic depth, the acquisition of territory that creates distance between forward defense lines and the heartland. Strategic depth was a crucial factor in defeating the near-fatal invasions of Napoleon and Hitler. It is also goes a long way in accounting for Soviet Russian dominance of Eastern European countries during the Cold War.

For the Russian leadership, the present threat from the West is NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance created to defend Western Europe from invasion by Soviet Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has expanded eastward to include nine countries that were part of the Soviet buffer. The prospect of Ukraine joining the alliance and the 2014 overthrow of a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv was, for the Russians, a step too far.

Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” is at odds with the facts. Many Ukrainians are native Russian speakers and Ukraine was a part of the Russian Empire for centuries, but there are bitter historical memories. Almost 4 million Ukrainians died in the famine engineered by Joseph Stalin in 1931 to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. At the same time the Soviet secret police made mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectual, cultural and political leaders who were then exiled.

Feelings of Ukrainian national pride were consolidated when, in 2014, Russian troops seized Crimea, a strategically important peninsula on the Black Sea and pro-Russian separatists set up two rebel republics in part of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Today Ukraine is a westward looking democracy in which opinion polls show that more than 80 percent support independence, and more than half back joining NATO.

While Soviet Russia emerged from World War II seeking security from the West by establishing friendly governments in Eastern Europe, U.S. interests lay in maintaining a capitalist system and free trade around the world to provide the American economy with markets and raw materials. These interests led in 1949 to the U.S. commitment to defend Europe against Soviet expansion through the NATO alliance.

The horrors of World War II impelled the French and Germans to resolve their fears of each other by accepting the presence in Europe of a single overwhelming power—the United States. Seventy three years later––and 30 years after the collapse of communism in Russia––the NATO alliance remains intact. Its absence would likely see a return to a balance-of-power system in Europe with each nation seeking the kind of military alliances that led to two world wars. The Russian-Georgian war of 2008 and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 serve to remind us that war in Europe is indeed possible.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO and President Biden and other alliance leaders have made it clear that they will not militarily intervene in Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion. They have also stressed their commitment to Section 5 of the NATO treaty which says that an attack on one member will be considered an attack on all.

Field Marshal Hellmuth von Moltke, the nineteenth century Prussian strategist, said that “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” The danger is real that a war in the Ukraine could spill over into a NATO country and precipitate a conflict in which both sides possess nuclear arms.

This is not a time for war. It is a time for diplomacy. A diplomacy that is clear-headed and cognizant of the geopolitical realities.

Ron Koehler

Zenger

Jury selection begins tomorrow in the defamation lawsuit brought by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin against the New York Times. In a 2017 editorial the Times incorrectly asserted a link between Ms. Palin’s political rhetoric and a mass shooting near Tucson Arizona that killed 6 and wounded 14. The Times maintains that the statement was an error. A correction was printed within a day.

Longstanding legal precedent dictates that, in order to find the Times liable, the jury must determine that the writers of the editorial acted with malice. The 1964 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan established that news outlets could be found to commit libel only if plaintiffs could show first that a report was inaccurate and harmed their reputation, and second that those who published it knew it to be false or acted with a reckless disregard of the truth. The decision is considered a landmark in the protection of freedom of the press.

It seems clear from the legal briefs and public statements of Ms. Palin’s legal team that, should the court rule against them, they are prepared to appeal their challenge to media protection in cases of unintentional error. The present Supreme Court might give such an appeal a sympathetic hearing. Last year Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch both wrote dissents stating that Times v. Sullivan should be overturned.

The threat to a free press in this case goes beyond protection from liability for honest mistakes. If elected officials and other public figures must no longer meet a high bar for proving harm from a press report they dislike, journalists without the resources of a large news organization behind them will be deterred from publishing unsympathetic news accounts and analysis. Self-censorship can be as harmful to democratic discourse as government censorship.

A free press is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution but the struggle against those who would use the libel laws to muzzle it goes back to colonial times. In 1734 John Peter Zenger, a young German immigrant, was arrested in New York and charged with seditious libel, then defined as the unjustified publication of material detrimental to any “public man.” Zenger was the printer of the New York Weekly which had published articles accusing William Cosby, the royal governor of New York, of corruption and violation of the people’s rights.

Zenger’s trial did not begin until April 16, 1735 and, because a high bail had been set, he languished in jail for nine months. During that time his wife Anna continued to print the newspaper. After the selection of a jury stacked with people on the governor’s payroll, Anna Zenger’s reporting led to the seating of a new and impartial jury.

At the pretrial hearing Zenger’s lawyers had challenged the impartiality of the three presiding judges since their appointments were “at the Governor’s pleasure.” The Court responded by disbarring the lawyers leaving Zenger without counsel. Andrew Hamilton, a Philadelphia lawyer, stepped forward to take up his defense.

Hamilton acknowledged that Zenger had printed the papers but asserted that, to be proved, a libel must be both false and malicious. Citizens, he said, have a right to publicly “put their neighbors upon their guard against the craft or open violence of men in authority.”

Then, in his summation, Hamilton told the jury that the question was “not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty.”

After a ten minute recess, the jury returned with a verdict of not guilty.

Freedom of the press is an essential thread in the fabric of democracy. It acts to expose government corruption and the abuse of power. It communicates the facts and opinions that enable citizens to make informed decisions.

For these reasons authoritarian leaders are always the enemies of press freedom. They know that their power will last only as long as they can control what people write, read, say and think.

© 2022 Ron Koehler