Lynn Smith: Putin’s American allies

“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, and 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 on 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.” ~ General Douglas MacArthur, Sept. 2, 1945.

MacArthur’s comments, made from the Battleship USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, opened the World War II Surrender Ceremony, and officially ended the bloodiest conflict in modern human history. The war, unleashed by Adolph Hitler and his totalitarian axis, had taken more than 50,000,000 human lives, and nearly demolished an entire continent. Sixteen million Americans had served in our military, and tens of millions served the war effort by working in factories, shipyards and a thousand other industries.

Prior to the war, European cities in the 1930s had represented centuries of human progress and served as testaments to the imagination and genius of mankind. When Hitler crushed it, he proved beyond any doubt, that a single man had the capacity to wreak unfathomable havoc, destruction and evil.

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.”

Vladimir Putin is the 21st century’s Hitler.

But within the span of a single human lifetime, the lessons of WWII have been erased from the GOP’s collective memory. Republican leaders refuse to spend $60 billion in a national security supplemental measure (or about 0.3% of our nation’s annual GDP) to stop Putin in his tracks on the continent of Europe. And at the recent Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, where Trump promised concentration camps, a police state, and imprisonment of his political opponents, Nazis mingled effortlessly with the MAGA/GOP activists.

This is the tragic bottom line: A concerning percentage of GOP leaders/members have become willing accomplices of our No. 1 geopolitical foe ... Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So how did the party of Ronald Reagan’s moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trump’s moral hollowness?

Trump’s political career is inextricably linked to Russia. Early on, former KGB agent Putin correctly identified him as purely transactional, more concerned with his self-interests than the best interests of his country. Because America has long been opposed to Putin’s nefarious and murderous anti-democratic activity, he needed Trump to divert and dilute American obstruction to Russia.

And Trump fell in line, shaming our country by extolling Vladimir’s “manly” virtues on the world stage, adopting autocratic talking points, and bringing Kremlin-style moral relativism to the campaign trail. For his part, Putin delivered highly sophisticated election interference in 2016, 2020, and most recently, Russian operative Alexander Smirnov.

We now know that the fiction surrounding the “Biden Crime Family” was obtained through Smirnov. Congressional Republicans knew months ago that Smirnov’s claims were unreliable, unconfirmed and probably tainted goods. Nevertheless, the lies were loudly and frequently used to justify an “impeachment inquiry” against Joe Biden, an American president whose opposition to Putin has been enduring and unyielding.

MAGA supporters are dead right when they claim that if Trump was still in office, there would be no war in Ukraine. Trump would have handed Putin the nation of Ukraine on a silver platter. To this day, Trump threatens to dismantle NATO, the historic alliance born in the wake of WWII, that continues to benefit every American alive today.

Putin wants to break NATO because he knows that would severely hamper America’s national security. He wants to destroy an alliance that controls 60% of the world’s wealth and military power, so if he is allowed to triumph after his illegal invasion of Ukraine, he will not stop at their western border.

Now that we understand the basis of Trump’s unholy alliance with Putin, why are so many other elected Republicans also eager to advance Russia’s goals? The answer is stunningly simple: GOP leaders have come to view Trump’s interests as their own.

Lest we forget American sacrifice and heroism during WWII, we must value facts above fiction, and we must place truth above tribe.

And in November, we must punish GOP leaders for their treachery.

— Community Columnist Lynn Smith is a retired wealth management executive who resides in Holland. Contact her at lynn.angleworks@gmail.com. 

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Lynn Smith: Putin’s American allies