Dear Editor:

The two largest land wars in Europe since 1939 were started by dictators who disingenuously claimed the need to expand their empires at the expense of independent nations on their borders.

The parallels between Hitler’s ‘Lebensraum’ (‘Living Space’) campaign against Poland and Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine are instructive. History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes; let’s hope we learn these hard truths before it is too late.

A discharged German corporal rises to power in the democratic Weimar Republic, ten years after the defeat of the Second German Empire in World War I — “the war to end all wars.” Humiliated and bitter, Adolf Hitler schemes to destroy the postwar order by establishing a military dictatorship to reconstitute the German Reich.

A discharged KGB agent in East Germany rises to power in the democratic Republic of Russia, ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The winners of the Cold War proclaim “the end of history,” confident that liberal democracy will always prevail against repressive autocracy. Humiliated and bitter, Vladimir Putin schemes to destroy the postwar order and establish a kleptocratic dictatorship to reconstitute the USSR.

Hitler’s genocidal crimes begin incrementally: reoccupying the Rheinland; taking over Austria; carving out the western, German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia; and conspiring with Stalin to divide Poland. European diplomats fail to stop him through appeasement —accepting one major violation of the Versailles Treaty, then another, hoping each time that the aggressor will be satisfied with his gains.

Putin’s war crimes begin incrementally: destabilizing Western countries with cyberwarfare, sabotage, and election interference; attacking Chechnya; invading Georgia; annexing Crimea; invading Ukraine to carve out its eastern, Russian-speaking region; conspiring with Trump to legitimize his crimes; and, most recently, violating the airspace of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, and Romania. Trump, Kushner and Witkoff fail to stop him through appeasement as the world watches their shameful capitulations in Moscow.

The Führer was not content to rule Grossdeutschland; the Russian dictator is not content to dominate a country extending across eleven time zones. Unsurprisingly, our Appeaser-in-Chief longs for the days of Andrew Jackson and William McKinley, tweeting about adding Canada, the Canal Zone, and Greenland to the fourth largest country in the world.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay