A Fool, Her Money, and Empirical Fantasies

I was in a coffee shop and noticed a copy of the Sunday edition (13 April 2025) of the New York Times. While perusing it, I came across a large ad placed by one Eileen Hamilton. It contains two columns, one reads 'Putin' and the other 'Hitler' meant to tease out analogies and make direct comparisons. It got my attention.

It lists Prior Job - Putin as KGB officer and Hitler as 'spy'? Hmmm, I thought, this is questionable to say the least. I must say up front despite similar rhetoric in Western media I find the whole thing to be questionable as I don't believe a case can be made comparing the two men. But I'm willing to listen. But from the get-go I was wondering if this was going to be an honest accounting.

Hitler did work briefly as an intelligence agent but he was a minor figure to say the least. He was only a lance corporal in the German military - hardly the equivalent of Putin's status in the KGB - which has also been overplayed by his critics.

The list went on to mention Targets - Putin being after the Democratic State of Ukraine and Hitler - Law-abiding Jews.

How strange I thought. Hitler's targets and aspirations were certainly far more expansive than mere Law-abiding Jews. For that matter if one wanted to stir things up and engage in some fear-mongering, one could argue that Hitler also had designs on Ukraine! What a missed opportunity for one wishing to stir the pot and get people worked up.

It lists Putin's tactics as:

Authoritarian Regime Censorship,

Disinformation - something the US and NATO also engage in I might add.

Unprovoked ground invasion - like the US in Iraq?

Conscription - given that many Western nations use or have used the same, what's the point?

Foreign troops - well, the US has long relied on 'allies' to fight its wars.

Tanks - okay, what's the point?

Aerial assault - Do we need to point out that no one has bombed more than the United States. Not even close.

Drones- okay, perhaps she should talk to the people living on the Afghan-Pakistan border about US drones.

Murder of Civilians - Putin has killed his thousands, America its millions.

Hospitals - I will presume she means the bombing of hospitals. Not only does the US bomb hospitals, it covers for Israel who does the same.

Schools - see above

Residential areas - see above

Torture - see above

Kidnapping - see above. I guess we've forgotten about rendition programmes, Black Sites, and Guantanamo. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We could also talk about how under Trump people are starting to be 'disappeared'.

Rape - Where's the evidence of this? The US has long suppressed its history of rape in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Japan, the Balkans, and Afghanistan.

Nuclear Terrorism - how so? The US is the only nation that has used them.

It then lists numbers of displaced which is very odd as Hitler is listed as only having displaced 340,000? That's generous. I can think of some Hitler apologists that would like to quote that figure.

Under 'Killed', Hitler is charged with 6 million Jews but only 5 million 'non-Jewish'. Given that over 20 million died in the USSR alone, I think that figure is highly problematic. I might also add that it's salient to Putin's historically driven strategic thinking regarding Eastern Europe. Most Americans know little about the Eastern Front of World War II, but you cannot hope to understand Putin's thinking apart from it.

And then there's some 'Reconstruction Cost' figures which are subjective and therefore meaningless.

However the column that took the cake was listed as 'Fantasy'.

Hitler's is described as 'Aryan Supremacy'.

Putin's fantasy is listed as 'Russian Empirical Expansion'. That's not a typo.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud. This poor deluded and ignorant person spent thousands of dollars running this ad in the New York Times, filled it with misinformation and if that wasn't bad enough she apparently doesn't know the difference between 'Empirical' and 'Imperial'.

Watch out for that Putin! I hear his epistemological aspirations know no boundaries!