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How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
Putin didn’t know his army was complete shit. He didn’t take a good gamble and get unlucky. Some limited nato training since 2014 simply eclipsed the entire Russian military.
How do you know here or great men?
Jobs is a great man. Not for inventing the smart phone but for his design ability. We would have bbm or microsoft designed phones. Not sure if this on net was good because industry structure would be completely different and phones probably go the way of being cheaper with many producers.
Musks is a hero. Electric cars might exists without him but he sped it up. And the rocket industry is decades ahead because of Musks.
The founding fathers were heroes. Jefferson and other writers of the constitution and Declaration of Independence gave this country a special mission. America should have been rich because of our geographic advantages and raw resources. But it’s not like great countries haven’t failed before (China disappeared for a millennia and I don’t think their national mythos and authoritarian state is good). I’m fairly certain saying constitution and Thomas Jefferson = good makes me a heretic today.
Milton Friedman was a hero. He gave the intellectual framework to defeat communism and rejuvenate the US economy.
A lot of people in history I believe were just marginally better and someone else would have pushed thing forward a year or two later. But these are some of the people that changed the paths that others built on.
I’ve always liked and believed in the idea of psychic history and mathematical formulas and believe most of history resolves around the sun of many forces. But I do think there have been some key battles or people who changed history.
An interesting debate for an atheist would be whether Jesus Christ changed history or if Roman power meant that the world was ripe for a slave religion to develop and it would have happened as a physics equation to develop an alternative for those under Roman power.
Perhaps, but if Ukrainian leadership had panicked and fled, I doubt the training makes a difference. See the Afghan Army and security forces in the face of the Taliban just last year.
Even if the war wasn't the utter disaster for Russia, I don't see any plausible scenario where it ended up net beneficial to Russia. It could've been a perfectly smooth two week conquest, but after that Ukraine would remain a constant simmering pot of rebellion that sucks up money for little gain. And Russia would still end up with massive sanctions.
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