Just guessing, but it probably sucks to be Pootey right now.
Putin thinks it sucks to be Putin as much as Trump thinks it sucks to be Trump. I'm only saying this because they seemed to get along so well, and it's not because the countries they were leading at the time had much in common.
People like Hitler and Putin and Trump do not change. They are simply, eventually rendered meaningless.
On the contrary, such men ultimately, perversely, do good in a strange sort of way.
We would not know how evil antisemitism and other forms of extremist hate were unless Adolf Hitler had made such a mull of engaging in it. It is quite possible for similar degrees of evil to go entirely unpunished, and the despicable creatures that engage in it can even go on to be celebrated as great leaders. The slaughter of the Circassians by the forces of Tsar Alexander II went without very much notice for centuries, and he got away with it because he had also enacted several popular policies and sold away Alaska to the United States. The United States put entire races of people to the slaughter in its westward expansion. The actions of the British in Australia and New Zealand were some of the most evil actions ever taken by a government. The Spanish had laid waste to once flourishing civilizations in South and Central America. Things like that had really happened throughout history. What it took to bring to our attention that genocide is, indeed, evil was for someone to engage in it while also making earning for himself much of the world's united scorn. Otherwise, the practice of conveniently brushing away any ethnic group that might be in the way might have persisted in perpetuity, and we might even be proudly saluting the leaders that did so and calling them "heroes of our people." Someone that succeeds at making serious evils unpopular is, therefore, a sort of accidental hero.
Putin is doing something similar, here. Everybody understands this: Putin had no intention of only taking Ukraine. He has been meddling in French politics, too. He has had every intention of destablizing and, if possible, utterly disintegrating the European Union and NATO. If Ukraine had fallen as easily as he had hoped, there is no telling when or if he ever would have stopped, in his territorial greed. He made it clear that he had developed a sense of contempt toward the western world and toward western values, and he wanted to see how far he could go in running roughshod over us in service to that contempt. He has effectively made a dread enemy of the entire western world.
Let me point out how good could eventually come of this. The United States had gotten away with similar acts of military conquest in the Middle East and Central Asia. Our invasions of Iraq and of Afghanistan were really not very much better, in the long-run, than Putin's invasion of Ukraine. However, all that we really did was spend away a substantial amount of international goodwill by doing so. We did not really succeed at making it extraordinary to send troops into another country's sovereign territory uninvited. We merely did not have as much carte blanche, to engage in what amounts to
realpolitik, as we did before those campaigns. Much as we damaged our popularity, we did not quite succeed at earning the truly united contempt of the world, only their annoyance and exasperation. Quite frankly, we have gotten away with some things that we really should not have done.
Putin's actions in Ukraine might be unpleasant actions, but he has also managed to insult, threaten, and generally piss off just the right people while engaging in those actions. He has succeeded at earning the united contempt of the world while engaging in actions that should have always been deemed as unacceptable, but now that he has given those actions something more like the vicious character they deserve, it will be harder for other governments to get away with such actions, in the future.
However, this effect can only occur if those sorts of individuals actually do earn the world's united contempt. We must learn to regard them as the very pictures of worthlessness of character. We must make sure that such individuals are never allowed into any position of power in any government for any reason whatsoever. It is absolutely imperative that we should hate them because it is only by us hating them that their actions actually can result in some positive effect.
But then we must make sure that we learn to recognize the warning signs when we see them. Vladimir Putin's habit of representing himself as a "calculating chess-player" was really a coded message. He was always and always will be a creature of utterly ruthless ambition, blind to either morality or any sense of justice whatsoever. From now on, we must learn to regard such individuals as deserving of the righteous contempt of their entire society. If someone represents himself as a snake, then he is probably a snake.
Dragons, by the way, are warm-blooded, and ironically, most of us cry easily
.
