In the struggle between left and right, one of the right’s greatest failings has been ceding language “command and control” to the other side. Among its other weaknesses this regrettable retreat, perfectly outlined by Jeff Goldstein at Hot Air in 2009, diminishes the right’s ability to place current and historical events in context. Even as John Donne noted, no man is an island; neither is any historical event. The order is roots to branches, for branches do not grow without unseen roots underneath supporting their skyward reach.

Embodying this shortcoming are the present cries regarding Ukraine in general, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in particular, being unworthy of support in the Russian-Ukrainian war due to Ukraine somehow being a current bastion of Nazism due to its open support of Germany during World War Two. This occasionally hides beneath a thin veneer of not wishing to send American military personnel into harm’s way, a widely shared sentiment among even Ukraine’s most fervent supporters.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there, instead going on into full-fledged rage against Ukraine and Zelensky — each being a disingenuous, duplicitous, and every other -ous dirty cuss. Reference the frothing hysteria that sprung forth when a simple question was asked regarding why Matt Walsh was, and is, so fiercely opposed to Zelensky, he attacks him with vastly more fervor than he demonstrates calling out Russian war atrocities.

Walsh’s Daily Wire cohort Candace Owens has been equally strident, so much so that Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel publicly commented on how past actions do not somehow minimize today’s war:

“In fact, Ukraine also doesn’t want to be involved in this war,” Mendel said in response to Owens’ latest comments. “This is only the Russia — the Russian leadership and Russia who attacks the countries. We don’t want to be involved, but it doesn’t matter what we want. Russia just comes to the territory of different country, kills its people, taking the territory.”

Helpful hint: the bad guy is the country that invades another country and deliberately targets its civilians. But I digress; back to language retreat.

A main theme both spoken and unspoken among those on the right more intent on bashing Zelensky and Ukraine than decrying Putin and Russia’s war crimes is Ukrainian support for Germany in the Second World War. While not denying this took place, ignoring historical context renders drive-by opinion snatchers’ hot takes on the matter moot. Author Helen Dale, who has spent decades examining Russian culture on multiple levels, recently noted in Law & Liberty how surface appearances of past events neither demand condemnation of current activities nor reveal the full reasoning behind said actions:

My novel is clear both on the extent to which bits of the Final Solution simply would not have been possible without Ukrainian assistance, but also that some of those perpetrators blamed Jews for communism’s depredations in their country. This was not in the “Marx and Trotsky were both Jews” sense, an argument one still encounters on the loopier reaches of the far right. The bulk of Ukrainian ire was directed at Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s Commissar during the Ukrainian Famine.

Dale goes on to note:

Both while I researched the book and continuing long after it was published, I had Ukrainians tell me they supported Hitler because only Fascists were fighting Communism, and Jews tell me they supported Stalin because only Communists were fighting Fascism. It was as though Winston Churchill and the United Kingdom did not exist.

In one place, I explained that Vladimir Putin’s invasion has roots in the widespread Russian belief that Ukraine has always been part of Russia; in that sense, there are parallels with China and its claims over Taiwan and Tibet. Elsewhere, I pointed out that one can have a desire for imperial grandeur—as Putin clearly does—without being a rug-biting nutter. Was Julius Caesar delusional? Clive of India? Catherine the Great? In another place again, I observed that Ukrainians electing a Jewish president is more significant in historical context than Americans electing a black president.

Putin is using this terrible history in a disingenuous way to feed his obsession with “Ukrainian Nazis.” This even though the far right won only two percent of the vote in Ukraine’s 2019 elections and hold but a single seat in the country’s Rada. Locals do not deny what is well-documented historical fact, either, including at the (now bombed) Babi Yar memorial outside Kyiv. For Putin, Ukrainians are always and everywhere the worst version of themselves.

The word “Nazi” is thrown about so freely by both sides, it is in danger of becoming this year’s RINO. It is a word deserving application to actual 1930s and 1940s Nazis. Even Putin, despite his directed ongoing atrocities against Ukrainian citizens, has yet to reach Holocaust level, not that he hasn’t tried.

Before one entertains the next nutter rant regarding any combination of Ukraine and/or Zelensky, Rothschilds, World Economic Forum, etc., take a moment to instead of reading a bumper sticker, try opening a book. If you are more intent on bashing a country, which despite Owens’ claims didn’t suddenly spring out of the earth a handful of decades ago, and its leader than condemning Putin, while blasting Zelensky and Ukraine by throwing the other N-word around, you’re doing it wrong.