Vladimir Putin is making his move

Adolf Hitler was precocious. He tried to overthrow the government at age 34 atop a movement of committed extremists. He wrote his memoirs — dramatically entitled “Mein Kampf (My Struggle)” — at age 36. He became chancellor of Germany at 44, and Führer of the Third Reich at 45. 

Have you ever been to Pompeii, or the site of any ancient ruins? What about archaeological sites in the United States at slave plantations in the South, or at Jamestown or Williamsburg? What I have always found interesting is that civilizations build on top of one another. Ancient Rome still hides in part under modern Rome.

European cities in the 1930s were the sum of centuries of human progress. They were testaments to the imagination and genius of mankind that had emerged from caves and built cathedrals. They were centers of artistic genius and beauty. They were the home of millions of Jews who had lived there for centuries in relative peace and prosperity. 

The 1930s were dark years. They were years of economic depression and fear. They followed a decade of craziness that followed a global pandemic, as well as the first global war that killed more than 18,000,000 human beings by harvesting the technological revolution of the early 20th century for killing. 

The great American journalist Dorothy Thompson was the first American to interview Chancellor Hitler in 1931. In her book “I Saw Hitler!” she wrote about her impressions of the man:

He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure.

She was wrong. Profoundly wrong, and she wasn’t a woman who was often wrong about anything.

What was she wrong about though?

She looked at Adolf Hitler and saw nothingness. Emptiness. Preposterousness.

Think about that. One of the most discerning and astute journalists in history looked Adolf Hitler dead in the eye in 1931 and saw no danger.

She was a titanic woman, and she was dead wrong.

When the war ended, 2,000 years of European civilization was shattered. Civilization itself had reached the edge of an abyss that would have been imponderable for a millennium’s worth of scholars and philosophers.

In his memoirs of World War II, Winston Churchill referred to Hitler as:

A maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast — Corporal Hitler.

His view of Hitler was different than our treatment of him today. Churchill’s view of Hitler was different than today’s caricature.

He didn’t view him as a cross between Voldemort and a Marvel villain. He wasn’t an abstraction, and he wasn’t ten feet tall. Adolf Hitler was a man who proved beyond all doubt the capacity of a single human to wreak havoc, destruction and evil.

When pondering the life and achievements of Adolf Hitler a question must be asked: how did that happen?

The first question begets a second, which is how can such a disaster be prevented from ever occurring again?

The war wrought by Adolf Hitler and the fascists was humanity’s greatest event and last warning. I have written about this concept frequently in The Warning. I beg of you to read these words from the Battleship USS Missouri where General Douglas MacArthur laid out the realities of the new world that had emerged from the ruin of the Second World War. He understood humanity faced self-extinction, and he warned about it:

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death -- the seas bear only commerce men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way. I speak for the unnamed brave millions homeward bound to take up the challenge of that future which they did so much to salvage from the brink of disaster.

As I look back on the long, tortuous trail from those grim days of Bataan and Corregidor, when an entire world lived in fear, when democracy was on the defensive everywhere, when modern civilization trembled in the balance, I thank a merciful God that he has given us the faith, the courage and the power from which to mold victory. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.

A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found insofar as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years, It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

We stand in Tokyo today reminiscent of our countryman, Commodore Perry, ninety-two years ago. His purpose was to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress, by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world. But alas the knowledge thereby gained of western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement. Freedom of expression, freedom of action, even freedom of thought were denied through appeal to superstition, and through the application of force. We are committed by the Potsdam Declaration of principles to see that the Japanese people are liberated from this condition of slavery. It is my purpose to implement this commitment just as rapidly as the armed forces are demobilized and other essential steps taken to neutralize the war potential.

The energy of the Japanese race, if properly directed, will enable expansion vertically rather than horizontally. If the talents of the race are turned into constructive channels, the country can lift itself from its present deplorable state into a position of dignity.

To the Pacific basin has come the vista of a new emancipated world. Today, freedom is on the offensive, democracy is on the march. Today, in Asia as well as in Europe, unshackled peoples are tasting the full sweetness of liberty, the relief from fear.

In the Philippines, America has evolved a model for this new free world of Asia. In the Philippines, America has demonstrated that peoples of the East and peoples of the West may walk side by side in mutual respect and with mutual benefit. The history of our sovereignty there has now the full confidence of the East.

And so, my fellow countrymen, today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully with the calm, deliberated determined fighting spirit of the American soldier, based upon a tradition of historical truth as against the fanaticism of an enemy supported only by mythological fiction. Their spiritual strength and power has brought us through to victory. They are homeward bound—take care of them.

Each century of human existence has been deadlier than the one that preceded it. The climax of killing was the war unleashed by Hitler and his totalitarian axis that killed upwards of 100,000,000 human beings across the globe. The war between slavery and freedom was the greatest event in all of human history, yet somehow within the span of a single human lifetime its lessons have been forgotten and erased from collective memory. It is astonishing.

Hitler was a man just like Vladimir Putin. His ambitions were nearly identical to those of Vladimir Putin.

Do you know the difference between Putin and Hitler?

Hitler is less dangerous. The most evil human being in history was defeated. The grubby Führer of the thousand-year Reich blew his brains out in a dank Berlin bunker after poisoning his wife and dog. Decades later, his ashes were dumped in a Moscow sewer. Gone. Dead. We know what happened.

Vladimir Putin is making his move. He is in the process of becoming what he will be remembered as. Even after 12 years of ruling Russia he is still a dynamic figure of the future. What Putin has done is prologue for what he will do. It is a clue and a preface for the ending of the story, which is the only part our descendants will remember.

Vladimir Putin is making his move. He murdered Navalny for a reason. It’s a message. It’s a warning.

The tragedy is that most people can’t hear it yet, but I promise you this: soon, it will be inescapable.

Who is Putin?

He is the 21st century’s Hitler.

The difference between the two is that we don’t know the end of the crisis and war ahead.

Everything we have been taught and thought about the world is unraveling. A great struggle and test is drawing closer. Can you see it?  No? Soon you will.

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