Flashbacks to historical analogies over the Ukraine crisis

Harold Meyerson (On Ukraine: Bernie vs. DSA The American Prospect 02/11/2022) praises Bernie Sanders' excellent speech on Ukraine, Diplomacy in Ukraine 02/11/2022:

Meyerson notes that he has been a decades-long member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the social-democratic group which, as he notes, has seen "explosive growth since 2015 is largely a by-product of Sanders’s presidential campaigns."

But Meyerson criticizes the DSA's position on the Ukraine crisis for being not being harsh enough on Russia:

The word “Russia” appears just three times in its 608-word statement ... That Russia (and Putin, who is not mentioned in the statement at all) instigated the current crisis by its own rather hard-to-miss “ongoing militarization,” or that it even so much as played a role in the bewildering appearance of an army (the Russian one, it would seem) on Ukraine’s border, is somehow omitted from the statement, which attributes the current standoff solely to expansive U.S. militarism. That Putin’s Russia is an autocratic regime that actively seeks to undermine democracy wherever it can is also, apparently, not worthy of comment. [my emphasis]

There's seems to be a heavy dose of nostalgia in Meyerson's comments. What I mean is that during the Cold War, the small number of committed social-democrats like the predecessor to the DSA tended to want to draw a bright line between themselves and the also small number of supporters of the US Communist Party, which was known for consistently reflecting whatever the official Soviet position of the moment on foreign affairs was.

Without trying to rehash the complicated history of social-democrats and communists and their influence on the US labor movement, in the US labor federation AFL-CIO anti-Communism was a strong influence both within labor and in terms of the AFL-CIOs enthusiastic support of Cold War foreign policies. See, for instance: Lovestone’s Thin Red Line The Nation 05/24/1999). Jay Lovestone was a former head of the US Communist Party (1927-1929) who later became the very hawkish head of the AFL-CIO's international affairs operation.

Meyerson ends with a flashback to the old days:

When the Communist Party of yore uncritically praised Stalin’s Soviet Union, not least when it hailed his 1939 pact with Hitler and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Poland, it at least could count on payments of Moscow gold for its efforts. To the best of our knowledge, the current group of DSA apparatchiks—innocents all—provide such encomiums for free.

"Moscow gold" is a real nostalgic touch.

But the Russia-baiting is similar, even though the context is radically different. The parties that were members of the pre-World War II Communist International (Comintern) actually did take the Soviet system as a model goal. I won't say that there are not socialist-minded groups out there who may somehow take Putin's (capitalist) oligarchical form of government as a model. But who knows what quirky variations are out there?

In general, though, to the extent that Putin and his government has cultivated explicit disciples in European and American politics, they have been almost exclusively rightwing parties like Viktor Orbán's Fidesz in Hungary, Marine Le Pen's National Front in France, and the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria. And there may be people on the left who are uncritically enthusiastic about the reporting today on the Russian state channel RT.

But any serious antiwar perspective, from the left or any other point on the political spectrum, has to take a critical perspective on their own country's claims in situations that can lead to war. This week, we're looking at the strange spectacle of the US predicting a possible Russian invasion this week while the Ukrainian President who would be leading the Ukrainian defensive war is publicly mocking the idea that Russia will invade in a day or two. Americans of all political orientations would do well to pay attention to such strange inconsistencies.

The experience of portions of the US labor movement in uncritically backing US Cold War misadventures was not a very inspiring one. (See: Anthony Carew, Conflict Within the ICFTU:Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950Conflict Within the ICFTU: Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950 International Review of Social History 41:1996)

But I was also struck by Meyerson's analogy to "1939," in this case what's known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, formally the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That agreement was a direct sequel and result of what is surely the most-cited historical analogy, the "Munich" analogy. That would be the Munich Agreement Britain made with Hitler and Mussolini in 1938 that allowed Germany to take part of Czechoslovakia.

Foreign policy by analogy is risky. Jeffrey Record addressed that problem notably well in two books: Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002) and The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). A shorter version of the latter is available online, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Aug 2005)