WASHINGTON: Myron Cohen, a garment district silk salesman turned popular comedian in the Ed Sullivan era, liked to tell this chestnut:
Imagine a skinny little guy, a shrimp, nothing.
He enters a lumber camp looking for a job. The foreman is sceptical, so the shrimp steps forward and knocks down a towering oak tree in 90 seconds. Where did you learn that? said the foreman.
In the Sahara forest, answers the guy. You mean the Sahara Desert, corrects the foreman. Of course now, said the guy.
Hubris guided Vladimir Putin’s malicious and clumsy assault on Ukraine.
As The Associated Press has pointed out, US military officials assumed that Russia would deploy electronic and cyber warfare to blind and cripple Ukrainian air defences and communications. But the Russians did not take control of Ukrainian airspace when they launched their attack.
Putin was sure of himself, dismissing Volodymyr Zelensky as a shrimp, a nothing. But Zelensky showed the world what true stature is.
Putin has always had a Napoleonic complex, puffing out his bare chest on horseback; fishing shirtless in Siberia; win demonstrations of judo and hockey.
But Zelensky understands that stature isn’t just about fake macho photo shoots. Stature is a physical quality, but, more importantly, it is a human and moral quality. Keats was barely five feet tall, but look at his spiritual height.
Our military leaders recently quoted Napoleon, who said: Morale is to the physical as three to one. We saw it with the Ukrainians, who not only bravely resisted the Russians, but also launched counter-offensives.
As The Times reported, the number of Russian casualties sapped morale; our intelligence reports described Russian soldiers simply parking their tanks and wandering through the woods.
Putin doesn’t realise what the world knows: you don’t show your muscle by levelling cities, bombing a maternity ward, a boarding school for the visually impaired, a bread line, a community centre and a shelter painted with a message in Russian pleading that the children are inside. What kind of monster treats the word CHILDREN as an invitation to kill? It simply proves that the Russian dictator is, as President Biden and his Secretary of State claimed, a war criminal.
You don’t show your power by starting a war that reveals the weakness and mediocrity of your army and strengthens European ties when your goal is to divide and weaken Europe.
No matter what happens in Ukraine, Putin will be a loser with no moral stature and Zelensky will have a towering moral stature.
Donald Trump, who called Putin a barbaric strategic genius and savvy after spending four years legitimising this evildoer, is also a loser. Trump is stuck on the fringes of his party, sharing the bad side of a moral divide with Tucker Carlson, J D Vance, Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump and Putin, what a pair, losing stature in the eyes of the world. Tiny, tiny Trump and cruel idiot Putin. Corrupt and paranoid germophobes love to surround themselves with sycophants, conjure delusional worlds, and give messy rants.
Putin has let go of those who question his badly started war: any people and even more so the Russian people, will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and spit them out like a gnat that has accidentally flown into their mouth. Spit on the sidewalk.
He even attacked his friends, the oligarchs, who cannot do without foie gras, oysters or so-called gender freedoms in Miami or on the Côte d’Azur.
Trump and Putin have sown the seeds of their own destruction. They wanted all the attention and credit. Now they deserve all the blame.
Grandiose and fantastical worlds will trip up those poisonous authoritarians. Neither man has a democratic bone in his body. And both think they know better than anyone.
When you have an autocrat who has been in power for too long, he no longer listens to people and this war was plagued by very bad decision-making, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian who teaches at the University of New York, on MSNBC. This left Putin vulnerable and humiliated in front of Russian elites and the world, she said.
But it also left him uncompromising, because autocrats don’t negotiate.
Stephen Kotkin, professor of history and international affairs at Princeton, told New Yorkers David Remnick that Russians have a fractured identity. Culturally and scientifically, they are a world class power. But economically and politically they find it difficult to compete with the West, so they resort to coercion.
The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the confusion of the Russian state with a personal ruler, Kotkin said.
Instead of getting the strong state they want to run the gulf with the West, they instead get a personalistic regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism.
Zelensky spoke at a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, comparing the terror in Ukrainian skies to death descended from the skies at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and in New York and Washington on 9/11.
He also showed a devastating video that brought lawmakers to tears.
Highlighting his role as David to Putin Goliath, Zelensky said: Strong doesn’t mean big. Strong means supporting human rights and freedom and demanding the right to die when your time is right and not when it is wanted by someone else, by your neighbour.
-- The New York Times
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