By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
The protests against U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War during the 1960’s and 70’s gave rise to this saying: America, love it or leave it.
It made a great bumper sticker and tee shirt for those American patriots who were more concerned about folks criticizing the U. S. military than they were about defending our constitutional guarantee of free speech.
Essentially, that expression means if you don’t like how the federal government runs this country then you are free to live elsewhere.
I was reminded of those days last week when I heard asinine statements by certain Washington politicians and Fox News commentators blaming President Biden for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and not Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Soon after the attack began, a former U. S. president who now apparently holds title to the Republican Party went so far as to compliment the Russian dictator as a man of action and someone he admired.
As a student of American and world history, I don’t recall any world leaders in the 1930’s and 40’s saying positive things about Adolf Hitler as he was rising to power with his goal of world domination.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that Putin is trying to resurrect the old Soviet Union by bringing back those 14 small countries which gained independence in 1991 when that police state fell apart.
Ukraine clearly wants to remain a democracy and thousands of soldiers and civilians, some armed only with small bottles filled with gasoline, are fighting and dying to keep their country free.
Those gasoline bombs are known as “Molotov cocktails”. Ironically, they were named for a former Soviet foreign minister during World War II.
Putin sent his troops to occupy the Crimea in 2014 and annexed that part of Ukraine, basically without interference from any other nation. It appears he is using the same strategy for the rest of Ukraine.
Invading another sovereign nation is a violation of international law and that makes the Russian leader a war criminal…just like Hitler.
