Quick Take: Appeasement, Kennedy Style
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says he gets why V. Putin feels so threatened...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent interview with Russell Brand on the latter’s "Stay Free" podcast should shock no one, really. Kennedy has a long and disreputable record as a conspiracy theorist, and his take on the Russo-Ukrainian War is well in character:
And Ukraine today is a victim of U.S. aggression, because our government has admitted, President Biden has admitted that this, the old neocon aspiration, this war is about getting rid of Putin, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin acknowledged in April 2022 that the U.S. purpose of engaging this war is to exhaust and degrade the Russian army so they're incapable of fighting anywhere else in the world. So that is our objective in this war. And it is a proxy war that is using the bodies of the flower of Ukrainian youth, putting them into an abattoir where they are being mercilessly killed.
Got that? Russia has invaded Ukraine, its armed forces committing countless war crimes, including indiscriminate missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities designed to terrorize the civilian population—but the real aggressor is the United States. Somehow, our Svengali in the White House—Joe Biden!—has cast a spell over the Ukrainian people, causing them to fight in defense of their country when what they really should do is lay down their arms and accept the demanding embrace of the Russian bear.
Kennedy’s sympathies are reserved exclusively for poor, put-upon Russia:
The Russians have been invaded three times through Ukraine, the last time they were invaded during World War Two, they were invaded through the Ukraine and one out of every seven Russians was killed. Thirteen percent of the population.
Russia was leveled. My uncle in 1963 gave his most important speech, the American University speech, and in that speech, he tried to do what I'm doing right now. He told America, it was a speech to the American people saying you've got to put yourself in the shoes of the Russians and understand how they have a worldview. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your adversary, and he went through this history of the suffering that Russia had endured during World War Two and explained why it would want to have a legitimate claim to protect its borders.
As Kennedy tells it, V. Putin is merely protecting his country’s borders against aggression from…whom, exactly? He seems to agree with Putin that NATO is some predatory cabal with imperialistic designs on Holy Mother Russia. That, of course, is nonsense. NATO is and always has been a defensive alliance. But though it poses no threat to Russian national security, NATO does stand in the way for Putin’s ambition to recreate the Russian imperium that was lost when the USSR collapsed. That’s always been his problem with NATO expansion: that it now encompasses countries that once were Soviet provinces or satellites. The Russian despot wants them back.
As for Kennedy’s reminder that Russia was invaded “through Ukraine” in 1941, he omitted to mention the background to that event. In 1939-41, J.V. Stalin was Hitler’s good comrade. The USSR connived with National Socialist Germany in the dismemberment of Poland, ingested the then-independent Baltic States, gobbled up a chunk of Romania, and attacked Finland—all this while supplying Germany with grain and other vital raw materials. Stalin, of course, was playing for time. He knew that war with Germany was inevitable and hoped to stave it off for as long as possible. Hitler, however, was in a hurry to commence his Drang nach Osten—and the peoples of the USSR paid a terrible blood price for Stalin’s exercise in Realpolitik.
Though the appeasers of the 1930s were misguided enough, their policy was based on rational calculation, however deficient. They reasoned that Germany had legitimate grievances; if these were ameliorated, war could be avoided. In the minds of British and French statesman of that time, dreadful memories of the Great War were fresh and vivid. One can understand why they believed that everything possible must be done to prevent the outbreak of a second, even more terrible, world war. Unfortunately for Europe and the world, their good intentions facilitated that outcome.
RFK, Jr. has no such excuse for his eager appeasement of the Russian despot. Like the antiwar national conservatives, he deals in fake news, junk history, and outright lies. Kennedy asserts, for instance, that the KIA ratio in the present war is 10-1 in Russia’s favor. He claims that 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. If that were true, the war would have ended months ago, with Russia victorious. But such mendacity is only to be expected, I suppose, from an irresponsible and dishonest anti-vaxxer.
This unsavory character, a Democratic presidential candidate with real support in his party, thus excuses and justifies V. Putin’s brutal act of aggression while slandering his own country and its allies. That’s just despicable. Nor do I think that his uncle, the late President John F. Kennedy, would second his nephew’s analysis—if that’s the word for it—of the Russo-Ukrainian War. It seems slanderous, indeed, to associate JFK’s memory with the lunatic rants and ramblings of RFK, Jr.
The question is why now, similar to Trump’s popularity, do people trust celebrities as opposed to the expertise of genuine legislators. I was talking to a stranger about politics recently--perhaps a mistake--where I happened to mention that the one Republican candidate I liked was Nikki Haley and this guy retorted but isn’t she a “Davos globalist?” I had no idea how to respond to that. He said to me “what has a republican ever done for me? I think I like that RFK Jr guy.” WHY? What reason other than that he’s a Kennedy, one of the few things about him that’s not a lie, do you like him? People are so shallow
I agree with every comment in your article, save one: your assertion that there is support in the Democratic party for RFK, Jr's candidacy. Of course, there may be a few benighted souls who automatically associate the Kennedy name with Camelot, but their numbers are small. Every Dem I know -- and that's a lot, as I live in the liberal bubble that is Seattle -- thinks he is an idiot.