A letter writer in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal is deeply along the right track.
The most reliable way to understand dictators’ thoughts is to read their own writing…. From Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” (1902) to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (1925) and Mao’s “On New Democracy” (1940), the blueprints for conquest are there in black and white. So it is with Vladimir Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021).
Add Stalin to that, and there are a host of others in recent and distant history. A weakness that good people have, though, is that having read those dictators’ words, as many of us (most of us, at least of some of them?) have, too many of us don’t believe they really mean it—they’re just exaggerating for effect, or they’re too mad to be taken seriously, or…any excuse to dismiss avert our eyes will do.
It is a serious weakness: good people have an extremely difficult—often fatal—time believing the depth of evil and depravity that exists in dictators and especially of their willingness and intent on acting on their written intensions.
It’s necessary to take them at their word. And then to take the necessary next step: hold them to their word and move sternly to preempt them. And where preemption fails, to counter them decisively and totally, as we finally did in eradicating Nazi Germany and fascist Japan and Italy, remaking those nations as friendly to and respective of their neighbors.
