Patriots advocating surrender: a great success for the enemies of the West

As the days go by, the arguments of many of Trump's die-hard supporters are taking on grotesque characteristics.

Some wise words from Ronald Reagan in 1964 on peace and appeasement
Yesterday ETA, today Putin: the same rubbish to support giving in to criminals

An unjust peace that makes invasion profitable

A look at social media these days offers a bleak picture: many defenders of solemn principles have gone over to the side of those who believe that when faced with an attack the most prudent thing to do is to surrender, the side of those who believe that there is nothing left to save in the West and that it is preferable to give in if we are attacked, the side of those who believe that it is not worth taking any risks to defend your homeland, the side of those who consider that it is better to live oppressed than to risk your life in defense of freedom if a tyrant attacks your country.

I am not exaggerating at all. Under cynical appeals to "peace", to an unjust peace based on the fact that it is profitable for the invader to invade a country and massacre unarmed civilians (which is what dictator Vladimir Putin has been doing in Ukraine, while those pacifists looked the other way), what they are telling us is that Ukraine should have surrendered on the first day and surrended to Moscow, instead of fighting bravely, inflicting huge losses on the invaders and proving that the Russian army is a giant with feet of clay.

A suspicious rush to get Ukraine to surrender

In any situation it is disgusting to read a promotion of surrender like that (because what Trump has been doing is not opening a peace process, but a process to force Ukraine to surrender and give in to Putin), but it is especially disgusting to read something like that from people who boast of patriotism and defense of national sovereignty, people who have spent years admiring the Spanish Tercios and praising their determination to fight until victory or death, Spaniards who proudly remember the Flemish War (which lasted 80 years) but who are now in a suspicious hurry for Ukraine to surrender, precisely at a time when Russia is suffering colossal losses, much greater than those suffered by the USSR in its invasion of Afghanistan, which ended in a Soviet defeat.

A clear psychological warfare operation

What we are seeing is a great success of Russian propaganda and a very clear psychological warfare operation. In case anyone is unaware, let us remember that one of the purposes of military units dedicated to psychological operations is to get your enemy to surrender without fighting, demotivating them and undermining their combat morale, in order to achieve their defeat in a much easier way. Putin's regime has been investing huge resources in these operations, and what many are doing now, some knowingly and most involuntarily, is to become part of one of these operations.

Of course, this success will be capitalized on not only by Russia, but also by all the enemies of the West, including Iran, China and North Korea, which happen to be allies of the Putin regime. To get anything they want from a free country, they will only have to ask Moscow to activate its entire network of whiners to cry out that they would rather submit to tyrants than take the slightest risk to fight them.

'Revolutionary defeatism' was already defended by Lenin

We must remember that this apology for surrender is not new: it is the "revolutionary defeatism" that the communist dictator Lenin promoted in an article published in 1915 during the First World War, in which he stated:

"During a reactionary war, a revolutionary class cannot but desire the overthrow of its government. (...) Revolutionary action in time of war against one's own government undoubtedly means not only desiring its overthrow, but actually facilitating it. (...) When, before the war, the Italian Social Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt rightly from its own point of view, that this would be high treason and that the Social Democrats would be treated as traitors. This is true, just as fraternization in the trenches is high treason.

The far right assumes the defeatism of the far left

Until now, this defeatism was promoted especially by extreme left parties. It is enough to review the arguments of any Western communist party to detect authentic useful fools at the service of Moscow, just as they were in the past. The novelty is finding the extreme right and part of the right doing this.

Of course, it is not difficult to imagine the consequences of a part of the right having joined this purely hippie attitude, as if suddenly their main reference was no longer El Cid or Blas de Lezo, but John Lennon or Jane Fonda. If tomorrow Morocco invaded Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish cities that this Islamic kingdom has coveted for decades, how many of these patriots would risk their lives to recover them after telling the Ukrainians that it is better to surrender to an invader than to risk their lives for their homeland?

A decadent attitude promoted by those who criticized decadence

When that day comes, what will happen to the crude demagogy that we have seen these days, in the form of messages saying that those of us who support Ukraine actually want there to be deaths because of that war, forgetting who caused it? What will those who associate the defence of the Homeland with certain and vain death do then? Or would that certain and vain death cease to be so in Ceuta and Melilla, simply because they are not Ukraine?

The paradox is that many of those who promote surrender are the same ones who consider the West to be in decadence, that it is a part of the world in which only the rubble of a glorious past remains. At the same time, they promote such decadent attitudes as proposing surrender to an invader, arguing for one of the things that Russian propaganda has tried most insistently to instill in the West: fear, a fear that clouds our sense of justice and encourages us to want to sacrifice the country of others (how many would give up a fifth of their country in the face of an invasion, as is being demanded of Ukraine?) so that a tyrant stops threatening us and we can stop trembling.

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Photo: Jan Jacobsen.