Predicting a Bad End for Autocrats by Steve Parks

I once proclaimed, at least half in jest, that the top 3 on my 20th-century list of heroes, in no particular order, are Groucho Marx, Keith Richards and Muhammad Ali. When friends complained that my list was sexist and/or frivolous, I expanded it to a top 5 including Margaret Sanger, who championed the birth control pill, and Winston Churchill, who stood alone in all the free world until the USA and other allies helped him save humanity from Hitler.

Lately, I’ve noticed that so far, the new millennium isn’t much better than the old one, or worse, in that we may all be under water some day. So it’s long past time to recognize new heroes. I make no apologies for extolling Ali, who had everything to lose in standing on principal against the Vietnam war, or Groucho, the comic genius who once lent his image to the most brilliant album-cover commentary of the last century: Firesign Theatre’s “All Hail Marx and Lennon” substituting Groucho and John Lennon for Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin as Soviet founding fathers. (Keith, of course, stands on his unassailable Rolling Stones merit.)

It was easy to be glib about the Soviet threat – witness the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” – even with the Cuban Missile Crisis and assassination of JFK, allegedly by an American defector to the Soviet Union fresh in our national psyche. But if my choice of heroes was sophomoric, it’s because they were formed when I was an actual college sophomore. Geopolitically speaking, what worried me most was the draft once my student deferment ended following graduation from the University of Maryland. (By luck, I drew a safe number in the first-ever draft lottery.)

Whatever I’ve learned through my subsequent journalism career lends me no special insight into my first nominee for hero of this still-new millennium. Unless you are brain dead or under Vladimir Putin’s spell, the head of this new hero’s list is found at the end of the alphabet: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky (whether spelled with one y or two.)

While Ukraine may not be spared mass war-criminal murder, any more than Jews and other victims of Nazi genocide, Zelensky and the democracy he stands up for should inspire freedom-loving people everywhere to defend what they once held dearest. I’m a Boomer, born after the “Greatest Generation” that preceded mine, rescued us all from another madman’s world-conquest obsession. Successive generations in Western democracies have enjoyed uninterrupted, if not unthreatened freedom to choose our leaders, for better or worse. And we have grown complacent, taking our liberties for granted.

In the United States, our respect for democracy – even one with one-person, one-vote principles compromised by the Electoral College – allowed a nincompoop miscreant to be elected president and inaugurated in a peaceful transfer of power. All that out of allegiance to millions of fellow

Americans who voted him in by the rules of our presidential elections. In turn, while he was defeated four years later by the exact same Electoral College margin plus a far more decisive popular vote, he defiled the office of the presidency by conspiring to overturn the verdict of the same American electorate.

His unsurpassed facility for lying is what made Donald Trump president. Among his most consequential lies is that he was not doing Putin’s bidding to undermine the bulwark alliance that has kept America and Europe free from what we are witnessing today in Ukraine, and that he withheld crucial, congressionally approved weaponry from Ukraine as hostage for “dirt” on Joe Biden, ultimately his 2020 presidential opponent (Trump impeachment No. 1). We will never know whether it was 2016 Russian interference that made the difference between a second President Clinton and Putin’s Lap Poodle. To me, the key factor was then-FBI director James Comey’s last-minute choice to cover his ass in the matter of Hillary’s emails. Because Trump failed to destroy NATO, despite his clumsy best efforts, and because he failed to gain a second term despite essentially treasonous incitement of insurrection (Trump impeachment No. 2), Putin may have been emboldened to test the resolve of an internally challenged alliance.

Putin will fail ingloriously because a new American president long familiar to and trusted by NATO partners is, with them, rising to the occasion, inspired in no small measure by a former comedian and current Churchillian hero of his nation and all the free world. Though Putin may murder innocent civilians by the thousands – unarmed mothers, children and grandparents – while destroying the neighborhoods and infrastructure of a sovereign nation that poses no threat to Russia’s dictatorially brainwashed masses, Zelensky-led Ukraine will not fold.

For our most recent ex-president, I envision a future in which the best card he can play is to plead nolo contendere to myriad charges that prevent him from seeking any electoral office ever again. He deserves jail time, but it’s worth making him permanently neutered as a candidate. In any case, his history as head of the Putin Apologist Society would make him unelectable, along with Mike Pompeo and Tucker Carlson, should either (among others) decide to run for office.

As for Vlad the Invader, I envision a calamitous end to his career as a Napoleonic runt menace. (Like Putin, Bonaparte was 5-foot-6.) When his troops defect after they are left stranded in a NATO re-armed Ukraine, out of gas, starving and unsupported by a bankrupt Kremlin, Putin will be hunted down and captured to stand trial by the United Nations’ International Court of Justice. While international law does not prohibit capital punishment, it seems unlikely Putin will wind up, as Saddam Hussein did, with a noose around his neck. Too bad because, as President Biden once observed as a Catholic who believes in souls, Putin lacks one.

Steve Parks is a retired journalist now living in continued freedom in Easton.

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