Slovakia goes to the polls this weekend in an election that The New York Times warns us could be a victory for the “far right” in Europe—and even a harbinger for the return of “fascism.” Why? Because Robert Fico, the right-wing politician who has a good chance of returning to power, is a critic of NATO’s strategy on the Ukraine war. It used to be said that with Washington’s neoconservatives, it is always Munich 1938. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, it has become true of the liberals too.
Back in the day, if you opposed the coming U.S. war on Iraq, right-thinking Americans condemned you as either a coward or a fool. I know this, because I was one of the conservative journalists who condemned dissenters. The dissenters were right; patriotic people like me were played by warmongers in the government. The results were, and continue to be, catastrophic for America and the world.
And yet, here we are twenty years later, and the same propaganda machine—only more powerful this time, because it has the entire Information-Industrial Complex on its side—is pumping out the same kind of story: those who question any part of NATO’s war strategy are fools, cowards, or worse, either Putinists, fascists, or somehow, both. None of this has to make sense. The important thing to know is that if you question authority, you are a very bad person.
The spell may be breaking. Slovakia has been firmly on Ukraine’s, and NATO’s, side since the Russian invasion in early 2022, but Fico seeks a change of policy.
The accumulated absurdities of NATO’s strategy may have reached a breaking point. Poland, which has been Ukraine’s most ardent supporter aside from the United States, recently cut off their arms supply to the Zelensky government in a trade dispute. Though most Americans still support Ukraine in its war, a growing number of congressional Republicans are asking why the U.S. continues to pour tens of billions into what is by now clearly a losing cause. Not even the near-total compliance of the American news media with Ukraine’s messaging can keep the facts hidden forever.
And then there was the utter debacle in the Canadian parliament. When Zelensky appeared there recently, Speaker Anthony Rota hailed Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian who had become a naturalized citizen, for his service during World War II fighting the Russians. Lawmakers gave Hunka, who was present, a standing ovation.
It emerged soon after that Hunka had fought with a notorious Waffen SS division composed of Ukrainian volunteers. The 14th Waffen SS Grenadiers (1st Galician) is notorious for its massacres of Jews and Poles. In 1944, it wiped out the population of the Polish village of Huta Pienacka , even massacring infants. One witness testified that the Ukrainian Nazis left two four-year-old boys alive for the pleasure of watching them try to awaken their dead mother.
In a speech to the 1st Galician division, Heinrich Himmler said, “Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost—on our initiative, I must say—those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews.” The SS chief added that if he ordered them to liquidate the Poles, “I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”
Mortified by the revelations about Hunka, Speaker Rota resigned his position, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered profound apologies to the Jewish community and others. Said Trudeau, “It was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust.”
Indeed it was. This humiliating mistake could only have happened in a world in which Western leaders have fully absorbed a cartoonish understanding of the region’s history. Anti-Russian Ukrainians = heroes, right? Well, not necessarily. On the other hand, those who are quick to condemn any Ukrainian (as distinct from the hardcore anti-Semites who volunteered for the SS) who allied with the Germans against the Soviets should ask themselves what they would have done if they had lived through the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932-33 that condemned millions of Ukrainians to an agonizing death.
The point is not to say one side is more evil than the other. The point is that the bloody history of Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in general, is far more complex than propagandists of NATO or contemporary Russia would have people believe. And so is the more recent history preceding the Russian invasion.
As the leading foreign policy realist John Mearsheimer has argued from the beginning, the Russian invasion did not come from nowhere. The United States, in violation of its assurances to Russia, pressed to bring Ukraine into NATO. This was always the brightest of red lines for the Russians, who could no more tolerate NATO bases on their border with Ukraine than the United States could tolerate Chinese military installations in Mexico. In fact, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the European Parliament earlier this month that Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
Well, yes. What was Russia supposed to have done? Don’t get me wrong, I do not support Russia’s invasion, which has been a disaster for Ukraine, for Russia, and for Europe. But NATO picked this fight. And now that it has, NATO has been lying to itself and to Western peoples about its prospects for success. Mearsheimer recently pointed out in a lengthy essay explaining why Ukraine’s vaunted counteroffensive failed, “Now, it is hard to tell a story about Ukraine’s future that has a happy ending.”
Many Western commentators frame the Slovak election as a potential victory for Russia and a defeat for liberal democracy. Once again, the simplistic Manichaean idea that one can be either on the side of NATO angels or the Russian devil distorts reality. Western thinkers also assume that Europeans who reach different conclusions about the wisdom of continuing the war can only be either Putinists or dupes who have fallen for Russia propaganda.
According to a poll by the Slovakia-based think tank GlobSec, support for NATO’s Ukraine strategy is cratering among Slovaks. Only 40% of Slovaks blame Russia for the war, and half consider the United States to be a threat to Slovakia’s security. An astonishing 69%—the highest number in Central Europe—believe that by continuing to arm Ukraine, Slovakia is “provoking Russia and bringing itself closer to the war.”
GlobSec, incidentally, blames this result on the success of Russian propaganda—a line repeated by Western media and political elites. It never seems to occur to them that the Slovaks, like Hungarians and others, have surveyed the facts on the ground and come to different conclusions in good faith. In 2002, the American government and a majority of the American people believed that the forceful application of U.S. might, money, and morality would result in Iraq becoming a liberal democracy.
In his 2004 Second Inaugural Address, George W. Bush enunciated the moralistic clarion call of American hegemony:
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.
This sincere belief led America to its catastrophic crusade in the Middle East, and now it is propelling the U.S. closer and closer to open warfare with a nuclear-armed Russia in Russia’s own backyard. Meanwhile, as the proxy war in Ukraine continues to drain U.S. weapons stockpiles, a rising China gazes across the Taiwan Strait and licks its lips.
This belief is also causing America to alienate old allies. David Pressman, the US Ambassador to Hungary, routinely provokes and insults the Hungarians (see this week’s tweet). It is normal for the United States to differ with other nations on policy. But is there another country in the world, much less a NATO ally, that has to suffer such arrogant behaviorVelvet Revolution in Bratislava, November 1989 by an American ambassador? In February, American emissary Samantha Power arrived in Budapest to seed local NGOs with $20 million to fight for “transparency” and “democracy,” which is the words Washington uses for “color revolution,” I guess.
Pressman routinely denigrates the Hungarians for being backwards bumpkins on LGBT matters—as if a radical view on sex and family structure that only became normalized among American elites about a decade ago is a non-negotiable human rights principle. The Hungarian people are not particularly religious, but they are socially conservative. Slovaks, on the other hand, are relatively pious—and at least some resent the cultural imperialism coming from Washington.
In Bratislava on Monday, I gave a speech at a conservative conference in which I urged Slovak conservatives to remember the lessons of the struggle against communism. I wasn’t talking about continuing the fight against Russia, but about resisting the new totalitarianism coming from the West—a ‘soft’ totalitarianism that manipulates them into surrendering their religion, their traditions, and their sovereignty for a post-Christian technocracy controlled from abroad. The Soviet Union was the imperial power in the previous era, but now, though Russia is certainly no friend of Slovakia, Washington and its Brussels allies are the greater threat to Slovak interests.
In the hallway afterward, a white-haired professor took me aside to talk. With emotion in his voice, he said, “Under communism, we all looked to America with hope, with admiration. What has happened to you?”
I gave him an answer, but it did not seem to satisfy the professor, nor did it satisfy me, if I’m honest. One wants to believe in liberal democracy, but when those words appear in the mouths of American diplomats and other Western elites, they really mean “do what Washington, Brussels, and Davos wants.” And if you don’t? You must be a Putinist, a sellout to the Chinese, an autocrat, a bigot, a nationalist, and an all-around hater.
Is there any wonder that people are getting fed up with the bullying? “You Americans are making it so easy for people around the world to walk away from you,” my Slovak interlocutor went on. “Some go to Russia. Some go to China. But they don’t see why they should stay with you, because of what you demand as the price of friendship with America.”
If the Slovaks vote in a Fico-led government on Sunday, we will see wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Western media about the Russian propaganda victory, and fascism on the march. Don’t you believe it. Like their Hungarian neighbors, Slovak conservatives who stand up to pro-war Western policymakers aren’t necessarily standing up for the Russians; they’re standing up for themselves.
Bratislava 2023 = Munich 1938?
Velvet Revolution in Bratislava, November 1989
The Slovak Parliament
Slovakia goes to the polls this weekend in an election that The New York Times warns us could be a victory for the “far right” in Europe—and even a harbinger for the return of “fascism.” Why? Because Robert Fico, the right-wing politician who has a good chance of returning to power, is a critic of NATO’s strategy on the Ukraine war. It used to be said that with Washington’s neoconservatives, it is always Munich 1938. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, it has become true of the liberals too.
Back in the day, if you opposed the coming U.S. war on Iraq, right-thinking Americans condemned you as either a coward or a fool. I know this, because I was one of the conservative journalists who condemned dissenters. The dissenters were right; patriotic people like me were played by warmongers in the government. The results were, and continue to be, catastrophic for America and the world.
And yet, here we are twenty years later, and the same propaganda machine—only more powerful this time, because it has the entire Information-Industrial Complex on its side—is pumping out the same kind of story: those who question any part of NATO’s war strategy are fools, cowards, or worse, either Putinists, fascists, or somehow, both. None of this has to make sense. The important thing to know is that if you question authority, you are a very bad person.
The spell may be breaking. Slovakia has been firmly on Ukraine’s, and NATO’s, side since the Russian invasion in early 2022, but Fico seeks a change of policy.
The accumulated absurdities of NATO’s strategy may have reached a breaking point. Poland, which has been Ukraine’s most ardent supporter aside from the United States, recently cut off their arms supply to the Zelensky government in a trade dispute. Though most Americans still support Ukraine in its war, a growing number of congressional Republicans are asking why the U.S. continues to pour tens of billions into what is by now clearly a losing cause. Not even the near-total compliance of the American news media with Ukraine’s messaging can keep the facts hidden forever.
And then there was the utter debacle in the Canadian parliament. When Zelensky appeared there recently, Speaker Anthony Rota hailed Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian who had become a naturalized citizen, for his service during World War II fighting the Russians. Lawmakers gave Hunka, who was present, a standing ovation.
It emerged soon after that Hunka had fought with a notorious Waffen SS division composed of Ukrainian volunteers. The 14th Waffen SS Grenadiers (1st Galician) is notorious for its massacres of Jews and Poles. In 1944, it wiped out the population of the Polish village of Huta Pienacka , even massacring infants. One witness testified that the Ukrainian Nazis left two four-year-old boys alive for the pleasure of watching them try to awaken their dead mother.
In a speech to the 1st Galician division, Heinrich Himmler said, “Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost—on our initiative, I must say—those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews.” The SS chief added that if he ordered them to liquidate the Poles, “I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”
Mortified by the revelations about Hunka, Speaker Rota resigned his position, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered profound apologies to the Jewish community and others. Said Trudeau, “It was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust.”
Indeed it was. This humiliating mistake could only have happened in a world in which Western leaders have fully absorbed a cartoonish understanding of the region’s history. Anti-Russian Ukrainians = heroes, right? Well, not necessarily. On the other hand, those who are quick to condemn any Ukrainian (as distinct from the hardcore anti-Semites who volunteered for the SS) who allied with the Germans against the Soviets should ask themselves what they would have done if they had lived through the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932-33 that condemned millions of Ukrainians to an agonizing death.
The point is not to say one side is more evil than the other. The point is that the bloody history of Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in general, is far more complex than propagandists of NATO or contemporary Russia would have people believe. And so is the more recent history preceding the Russian invasion.
As the leading foreign policy realist John Mearsheimer has argued from the beginning, the Russian invasion did not come from nowhere. The United States, in violation of its assurances to Russia, pressed to bring Ukraine into NATO. This was always the brightest of red lines for the Russians, who could no more tolerate NATO bases on their border with Ukraine than the United States could tolerate Chinese military installations in Mexico. In fact, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the European Parliament earlier this month that Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
Well, yes. What was Russia supposed to have done? Don’t get me wrong, I do not support Russia’s invasion, which has been a disaster for Ukraine, for Russia, and for Europe. But NATO picked this fight. And now that it has, NATO has been lying to itself and to Western peoples about its prospects for success. Mearsheimer recently pointed out in a lengthy essay explaining why Ukraine’s vaunted counteroffensive failed, “Now, it is hard to tell a story about Ukraine’s future that has a happy ending.”
Many Western commentators frame the Slovak election as a potential victory for Russia and a defeat for liberal democracy. Once again, the simplistic Manichaean idea that one can be either on the side of NATO angels or the Russian devil distorts reality. Western thinkers also assume that Europeans who reach different conclusions about the wisdom of continuing the war can only be either Putinists or dupes who have fallen for Russia propaganda.
According to a poll by the Slovakia-based think tank GlobSec, support for NATO’s Ukraine strategy is cratering among Slovaks. Only 40% of Slovaks blame Russia for the war, and half consider the United States to be a threat to Slovakia’s security. An astonishing 69%—the highest number in Central Europe—believe that by continuing to arm Ukraine, Slovakia is “provoking Russia and bringing itself closer to the war.”
GlobSec, incidentally, blames this result on the success of Russian propaganda—a line repeated by Western media and political elites. It never seems to occur to them that the Slovaks, like Hungarians and others, have surveyed the facts on the ground and come to different conclusions in good faith. In 2002, the American government and a majority of the American people believed that the forceful application of U.S. might, money, and morality would result in Iraq becoming a liberal democracy.
In his 2004 Second Inaugural Address, George W. Bush enunciated the moralistic clarion call of American hegemony:
This sincere belief led America to its catastrophic crusade in the Middle East, and now it is propelling the U.S. closer and closer to open warfare with a nuclear-armed Russia in Russia’s own backyard. Meanwhile, as the proxy war in Ukraine continues to drain U.S. weapons stockpiles, a rising China gazes across the Taiwan Strait and licks its lips.
This belief is also causing America to alienate old allies. David Pressman, the US Ambassador to Hungary, routinely provokes and insults the Hungarians (see this week’s tweet). It is normal for the United States to differ with other nations on policy. But is there another country in the world, much less a NATO ally, that has to suffer such arrogant behaviorVelvet Revolution in Bratislava, November 1989 by an American ambassador? In February, American emissary Samantha Power arrived in Budapest to seed local NGOs with $20 million to fight for “transparency” and “democracy,” which is the words Washington uses for “color revolution,” I guess.
Pressman routinely denigrates the Hungarians for being backwards bumpkins on LGBT matters—as if a radical view on sex and family structure that only became normalized among American elites about a decade ago is a non-negotiable human rights principle. The Hungarian people are not particularly religious, but they are socially conservative. Slovaks, on the other hand, are relatively pious—and at least some resent the cultural imperialism coming from Washington.
In Bratislava on Monday, I gave a speech at a conservative conference in which I urged Slovak conservatives to remember the lessons of the struggle against communism. I wasn’t talking about continuing the fight against Russia, but about resisting the new totalitarianism coming from the West—a ‘soft’ totalitarianism that manipulates them into surrendering their religion, their traditions, and their sovereignty for a post-Christian technocracy controlled from abroad. The Soviet Union was the imperial power in the previous era, but now, though Russia is certainly no friend of Slovakia, Washington and its Brussels allies are the greater threat to Slovak interests.
In the hallway afterward, a white-haired professor took me aside to talk. With emotion in his voice, he said, “Under communism, we all looked to America with hope, with admiration. What has happened to you?”
I gave him an answer, but it did not seem to satisfy the professor, nor did it satisfy me, if I’m honest. One wants to believe in liberal democracy, but when those words appear in the mouths of American diplomats and other Western elites, they really mean “do what Washington, Brussels, and Davos wants.” And if you don’t? You must be a Putinist, a sellout to the Chinese, an autocrat, a bigot, a nationalist, and an all-around hater.
Is there any wonder that people are getting fed up with the bullying? “You Americans are making it so easy for people around the world to walk away from you,” my Slovak interlocutor went on. “Some go to Russia. Some go to China. But they don’t see why they should stay with you, because of what you demand as the price of friendship with America.”
If the Slovaks vote in a Fico-led government on Sunday, we will see wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Western media about the Russian propaganda victory, and fascism on the march. Don’t you believe it. Like their Hungarian neighbors, Slovak conservatives who stand up to pro-war Western policymakers aren’t necessarily standing up for the Russians; they’re standing up for themselves.
READ NEXT
The Virtue That Enables All Others: A Conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Merry Christmas from The European Conservative
A Defense of the Small Christmas Ritual