Rod Dreher's Blog, page 17

A reader pointed me to this deeply informative interview with Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin, conducted by the New Yorker‘s David Remnick. Kotkin is one of the most informed Russia experts in the world. The conversation is wide-ranging, and I strongly recommend you read it all. Kotkin takes the view that NATO’s expansion did not trigger Russian hostility, but rather that Russia is just reverting to historical type: an militaristic, expansionist autocracy trying to expand, and, because weaker than it thinks, biting off more than it can chew.

Kotkin cautions that nobody really knows what is going on in Putin’s mind, because he is so self-isolated, but it seems clear now that he did not expect the Ukrainians to resist as they have. Zelensky, says Kotkin, was a weak leader who had only 25 percent approval at the moment of invasion because he couldn’t govern. But now his approval rating is at 91 percent because he has shown himself to be very brave. Kotkin makes an important point that it is not very good to have a TV actor and his crew running your country in peacetime, but in this kind of war, it’s a secret weapon.

Nevertheless, says Kotkin, Ukraine is winning the war only on Twitter. In reality, it’s losing. As a military veteran pointed out to me last week, the US needed three weeks to take Baghdad. Wars don’t run on TV schedules. There’s no doubt that Russia can conquer Ukraine in war if it wants to, says Kotkin, but there is every doubt that it can keep the peace. The Ukrainians will make it impossible to occupy.

Do read it all — there’s a lot here, including talk of the oligarch class, the possibility of a palace coup against Putin, and the things that the US is doing that nobody is talking about.

I want to take issue, sort of, with this passage:

[Kotkin:] The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.

How do you define “the West”?

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.

I’m not sure. I mean, yes, it seems obviously right that Putin thought the West would fold, and he was wrong about that, though it remains to be seen how long the appetite for sanctions remains with Western publics once the second-order effects begin to hurt them. Winter is ending now, but if there is no Russian gas to heat European homes next winter, that will be another story. Similarly, if the economic price Americans have to pay to punish Putin is taken out of our pockets at the gas pump, how much pain will we be willing to take?

And yes, we have indeed seen that the economic power of the West is staggering once corporations all get aboard with a cause and a narrative. But does that mean that the West isn’t decadent? If decadence is a synonym for impotence, then yes, it means that the West still has the power to make its collective will felt in the world.

In my view, however, impotence is only one facet of decadence. I do believe that the West is decadent, but I also believe — see Live Not By Lies — that the forces that defend a morally decadent order are very strong, and will use that strength to punish dissidents from that order. This is why I watch the crushing economic pain the West is bringing to Russia to punish it for its Ukraine invasion, and I think on the one hand good, Putin deserves it, but on the other hand recognize that the same force will be brought down eventually on people who believe the things that I do.

Some on the Right have seen in Putin a counter-example to Western decadence — this, because he promotes religion, and stands against wokeness (e.g., “antiracism,” gender ideology). I get the temptation, and I have praised Putin in this space before for things he has said about wokeness. Some things are true even if Vladimir Putin says them. That said, you don’t measure decadence only by whether or not a leader says the right things about religion, family, and sexual morality. As Kotkin points out, Putin created an economic and political system that does not operate in a strong, healthy way. It is despotic and exploitative. Nobody looks to Russia and thinks, “That’s a great model for how to run a country and a society.” It is decadent. Putin has tried to shore up the Russian Orthodox Church in part to fight the deep decadence in his country that was the result of seven decades of Bolshevik demoralization of the peoples. But he has doubled down on a different kind of decadence.

The West is doing a victory lap now over its standing up to Putin — Kotkin’s rhetoric is an example of this triumphalism — but I think this is wildly premature. We have a bad habit of only being able to direct our attention to one story at a time. The Russian invasion has dominated the headlines for the past three weeks, understandably, but all the things that were going on when the Russian tanks crossed the border are still with us. The likelihood that American liberals will take Putin as a proxy for all the conservatives they don’t like at home is quite high. They will use the Ukraine war, and the West’s response, as a reason to ramp up the culture war against dissident conservatives at home.

Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to cut off funds to Poland and Hungary over so-called “rule of law” violations, including failing to be sufficiently woke on LGBT issues. It’s an incredible thing: both countries are on the front lines of the refugee crisis, having taken in over a million fleeing Ukrainians. You would think that maintaining European solidarity in the face of a warmongering Russia would take pre-eminence over everything else. Wrong. The EU is going to find a way to punish the populist governments of Poland and Hungary, no matter what — even in a time of war.

This does not suggest that the West is remembering who it is. This suggests that the war is going to promote progressivist triumphalism. We are going to see this at home in the US too.

Here is a small but telling example:

This is so deranged. The View calling for Tucker and Tulsi to be investigated by DOJ and suggest prison. pic.twitter.com/t96QRUVKrb

— Watchdog (@LibWatchdog) March 14, 2022

Does this suggest that Americans are remembering who we are, or who we are supposed to be: a country where we respect free speech and the right of peaceful dissent? The US is not at war with Russia, but here, on a popular TV show, two co-hosts say that an American opinion journalist and a former member of Congress should be investigated and perhaps jailed for dissenting from the anti-Russian narrative. It’s insane. Again: we are not at war with Russia, but here you have popular media figures calling for prominent people who challenge the dominant narrative to be investigated and punished by the State. Like they do in Putin’s Russia!

This is the next phase of soft totalitarianism in America, I believe. Liberals and progressives in charge of institutions will use Putin’s evil war as a pretext to advance their own culture war on traditional Christians and anti-woke dissidents.

If the loss of the ability to speak freely without fear of repercussions in terms of job loss or in some other way being made a pariah is a sign of decadence, then yes, we Americans are decadent. Putin is decadent because he has to rely on force to suppress dissident opinion. We too are decadent because our ruling class no longer believes in the fundamental liberal values that makes the West, especially the United States, exceptional. Stephen Kotkin says that the Ukraine war makes the conservative case for the West’s decline “bunk,” but I don’t believe it for a second. The fact that the West has mustered a united front to punish aggressive Russia says nothing about the internal problems we face in the West — especially given that almost nobody believed that Russia was any kind of model for the West to follow.

We are still in the grips of a left-wing illiberal ideology — wokeness — that promotes racial identity at the expense of individual dignity and liberty.

We are still a civilization that is working overtime to destroy a fundamental aspect of civilization, the gender binary. Similarly, we are busy destroying the family, the bedrock institution of any civilization. In Florida, the state passed a law forbidding teachers from talking about sexuality and gender to children up through third grade — that’s nine years old — in response to widespread reports of indoctrination aimed at small children, without the knowledge or permission of parents. This is denounced by our propagandistic media as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and Disney is now seeking to punish Florida politicians for defending parental rights in this way.  Gov. Ron DeSantis makes the necessary point — one far too rarely made by Republican politicians — that the interest of parents has to be more important than the desires of woke corporations like Disney:

In a video exclusively obtained by @FoxNews Digital. @GovRonDeSantis slams #Disney saying “In Florida, our policies got to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations.” pic.twitter.com/Op87xgsLzB

— Kelly Laco (@kelly_laco) March 10, 2022

Is a society whose teachers, whose Democratic politicians, and whose corporate leaders believe it is morally urgent to teach little children that their bodies might be lying to them, and that they might be the opposite sex, or no sex at all, a healthy society? I say no — and Vladimir Putin’s foreign adventurism does not negate that fact. A society in which parents are fighting a David vs. Goliath battle to prevent schools from telling its kindergarten-age children that they might be the opposite sex, and catechizing them in sexual deviance, is far advanced into decadence.

The entire West is suffering from a fertility crisis. We are not replacing ourselves. It’s not just the West; this is a global phenomenon (Russia too), except for Africa. A society that cannot do the most basic function of any society — reproduce itself — is decadent. If it’s not decadent, then what is it?

We are rapidly falling away from the Christian faith, which has been for over one thousand years the unifying principle of Western civilization, and the ground of liberal democracy (read historian Tom Holland’s great book Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World for an accessible account of how what makes the West distinct comes from Christianity). The French novelist Michel Houellebecq, a superb diagnostician of Western decadence, is not a religious believer, but he illustrates the decline of the West with chilling precision.

Our university system was once the envy of the world. But we are destroying it for the sake of “diversity, equity, and inclusivity.” Rather than passing on the collective knowledge of our civilization, our universities are teaching that the West is nothing more than a long historical pageant of racism, bigotry, and the rest — that there is nothing worth valuing in it. And we have cast out competence and achievement for the sake of social engineering according to woke principles. If this isn’t decadence, what is?

Our elites — that is, those who run the government, corporations, universities, the media, the military, and other basic institutions — are at war with those within the country who oppose any of this. They are also presiding over a country where income inequality is exacerbating divisions within society. And they are willing to use technology to punish dissenters. In Canada, for example, just before the Russian invasion, the Trudeau government set out to seize the bank accounts of protesting truckers, and those who supported them. Russia’s invasion pushed this off the media’s radar, but it still happened. This is why I say that the immense collective power that the State and Big Business mustered to punish Russia will eventually be used against domestic dissidents. What will change is that these same elites will recognize the power they have to inflict ruin upon those they identify as evil can and should be used against their own dissenting populations.

The media and corporate elites are demonizing all things Russian, manufacturing a moral panic. Once again, let me say unequivocally that I believe Russia’s invasion was wrong, and that I hope Putin loses this unjust war. But Putin’s wickedness does not give Americans the right to abandon our own supposed beliefs in liberal democracy and its core principles. But this is what is happening. It was happening before Putin invaded, and it is going to accelerate from here on out. Having enjoyed the pleasure of demonizing the Other all out of proportion to their sins, we will not soon give that up.

Europe, the core of Western civilization, has over the past few decades opened its doors to migrants from other civilizations. Many European nations — Hungary and Poland are notable exceptions — have lost the will to defend themselves. I mentioned recently in this space a dinner I had with a Western European academic who took a big salary cut to move with his wife and kids to Poland, where they felt more secure. He told me about how Muslim immigration had all but destroyed his home city, largely because the ruling class there refused to take a stand against the violent aggression of these immigrants. When the adult son of a local imam called on social media for the murder of Jews and Christians, and nobody stood up to it, he and his wife decided it was time to leave. He told me — and I’ve heard this from many others in my visits to Europe in recent years — that the media in western European countries deliberately downplay these stories, because they don’t fit the multicultural globalist narrative.

Is that not decadence? Being unwilling to defend your borders and your people? The United States is a nation of immigrants, which means we have a different way of handling these issues. But we still haven’t gained control of our southern border. A nation that is unwilling or unable to control who enters it to live is … something other than strong. You might even call it decadent.

Many of our major cities are overrun with violent crime and homelessness, a phenomenon exacerbated by woke elites who refuse to act to stop it, because they are afraid to reckon with the causes of this crisis. They cannot free themselves from the woke narrative, and face reality. Kotkin says Putin probably went into Ukraine because he believed the stories he wanted to believe, and surrounded himself with people who reinforced his own prejudices. This is not a problem unique to Putin and the Russian elites.

The United States launched two major wars this century: on Afghanistan, and on Iraq. We lost both. The Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan, and Iraq, though free of Saddam Hussein, has been turned into a de facto puppet state of Iran. Our costly (in blood and treasure) plans to turn both countries into liberal democracies failed. We know too (from the Afghanistan Papers) that in Afghanistan, our generals lied to themselves, to Congress, and to the American people about the prospects for victory there, and kept throwing more and more money and bodies into the maw of an unwinnable war. Despite its terrible execution, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was the right thing to do. But we are a country that is incapable of holding its military responsible for the failure there. How is this not decadent?

Our military is now administered by people who wish to bring the benefits of wokeness to warfighting preparation. Now we are confronted with stories about this kind of agony, via Military.com:

Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Sam Rodriguez’s unit was in Norway for an exercise, but there was a basic issue the service hadn’t worked out beforehand.

Where should Rodriguez sleep?

Norwegian service members share coed dorms, but the U.S. Navy segregates its sailors by gender.

For Rodriguez, who identifies as nonbinary transgender, the Navy policy meant sleeping in what was little more than a “broom closet,” separate from everyone else in the unit a floor away. Rodriguez was the only U.S. sailor on the deployment who didn’t fit into the Navy’s traditional gender divide.

“I felt like Harry Potter,” Rodriguez said in a recent interview with Military.com, referring to the fictional wizard whose abusive aunt and uncle made him sleep in a closet. “They’re able to interact with each other; I’m basically just in this isolation.”

After a week, Rodriguez was moved to the same floor as everyone else, but was still secluded in a different room.

“It made me feel shitty having to be separated from my guys,” Rodriguez said.

The U.S. military has made strides in recent years to be more inclusive for different genders, gender identities and sexualities.

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which banned open service by gay, lesbian and bisexual troops, was repealed just over a decade ago. All combat jobs were opened to women in late 2015. And after a roller coaster few years of whiplashing policy, transgender service members have been able to serve openly since last year.

Nonbinary service is a frontier the military hasn’t grappled with yet.

That could change soon, as the Pentagon has quietly been researching how it could allow nonbinary troops to serve more openly.

Of course. Russia’s decidedly non-woke military has struggled in Ukraine, but only in the minds of propagandists and liberals getting high on their own supply does that mean that whatever the US military does to wokify itself must be a good idea.

As Kotkin points out, one of the deep faults of the Putin regime is that it is almost certainly impossible there to question the despot, to bring him news he doesn’t want to hear. If we cannot or will not hold our generals accountable for failure, is this not decadence? Similarly in 2008, with the economic crash, none of the Wall Street Masters of the Universe were ultimately held accountable for their failures.

We live in a society in which the young are addicted to electronic stimulation, including hardcore pornography. Nobody knows how to stop it. Pornography is tearing us apart. But it’s not just the content we watch on our devices that is driving us into decadence; it’s how they are formatting our brains and commanding our attention. Michael Crichton wrote back in 1999:

Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. . . . [E]veryone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century. In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained.The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

As you know if you have been reading me for a while, Philip Rieff got there long before the rest of us, with his concept of the therapeutic society and “Psychological Man”.

This is what it means to be decadent. Another definition of decadence is to be able to see what is wrong with your institution, or society, or even yourself, but to be unable to muster the will to act to reform them. Along those lines, the Roman historian Livy said, of his era, “We can endure neither our vices nor their cure.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. As encouraging as it may be that the West has stood united against Russian aggression in this instance, it would be crazy to assume that all is well with us. Russia’s own particular form of decadence does not negate our own. Putin works to distract his people from Russia’s severe problems, including his problematic governance, by ginning up hatred of Ukrainians, and of the West. It is no more accurate or justifiable when our leaders and propagandists do the same thing.

Besides, Russia, though a nuclear power, is relatively poor and weak. If rich, muscular, technologically advanced China chooses to confront the West militarily — say, by invading Taiwan — we will have a much better sense of how strong America and the rest of the West is.

The bottom line here is that Putin’s present and future quagmire in Ukraine, and the sense of solidarity his invasion has called up in the West, does not cure us from our deep cultural, moral, and spiritual sickness. Don’t buy the hype and get strung out on hopium. As I see it, family and religion are the core of any civilization; ours in the West is no different. In 1994, the geopolitical journalist Robert D. Kaplan wrote an influential article in The Atlantic Monthly, titled “The Coming Anarchy”. Nearly thirty years later, this passage has stuck with me:

Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or “Golden Mountain,” is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven—the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man’s striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one.

To see the twenty-first century truly, one’s eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. There are far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real—whose raw energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.

Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler’s checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home—order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. [Emphasis mine — RD] Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

The future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside the heads of Golden Mountain’s inhabitants.

The future of the West is being written inside the heads of our poor too — and of our shrinking middle class, who, thanks to technology, consumerism, radical individualism, and the militancy of woke elites and the institutions they control, are being weaned off of the fundamental values that made America great. We are not going to vote ourselves out of this crisis — a pseudo-solution in which decadent American conservatives like to believe. Despite what many decadent American Christians believe, we are not going to evangelize our way out of this crisis, not without an even greater emphasis on discipleship (this is what The Benedict Option is about).

Cast your eyes towards Ukraine, and take pleasure in a decadent Russia’s folly and failure there (though don’t let yourself believe that Ukraine is winning this war; even Kotkin admits that this is not true). I will join you in hoping that Russia loses its imperialistic gambit. But I will not join you in believing that all is well with the West now, that the supposed spell that had sapped our self-confidence has been broken. The facts do not bear this out. I expect Western elites to draw — groundlessly — more confidence from Putin’s failure, and to ramp up wokeness and policies that are leading to our decline and decadence.

What would prove me wrong? A return to liberal democratic principles of free speech, tolerance, and judging people by their individual qualities, not as bearers of collective identities. Reclaiming the Civil Rights era’s liberal defense of individual dignity, and a refutation of neoracism. Universities returning to their core mission of education, not politicization or social engineering. A rediscovery of religion, not as a therapeutic adjunct to consumerism and hedonism, but as a binding creed. A defense of the importance of the gender binary, and the normative importance of the traditional family, even as we recognize that we live in a society that is more tolerant of sexual difference. A society in which elites are held responsible for their failures, and our politicians recognize that a society in which the rich get richer while more and more people fall into poverty and hopelessness is not a society worth defending.

The few Western conservatives who looked to Putin’s Russia as a solution for our own decadence have now been relieved of their illusions. The much more powerful, and far more numerous, liberals, progressives, and neocons who look to Putin’s Ukraine invasion as the nullification of claims of Western decadence are not going to be easily relieved of their illusions, if they ever are. E pur si muove.

 

The post The West, Still Declining appeared first on The American Conservative.

Five years ago today, The Benedict Option was published. What has changed in that time? And what has not?

Nothing that has happened in the past five years negates the thesis. In fact, I firmly believe it is more relevant than ever — but then, I expected that when it was published. When I finished the first draft, I assumed, like nearly everybody else, that Hillary Clinton would be president. We got Donald Trump instead — but for all the good that Donald Trump was able to do as president, it made very little difference in the decline of the Christian faith in the West. In fact, Trump’s presidency, if anything, accelerated wokeness. This is something that is very hard for many conservative Christians to accept. But it’s true. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have voted for Trump, but only that the four years of the Trump presidency should have made it crystal clear that we are not going to vote ourselves out of this crisis.

It is far clearer now that traditional, small-o orthodox Christians, are a minority in America, and an increasingly despised one. I anticipated this. The Benedict Option has in some ways been overtaken by Live Not By Lies, which is about how to live as a faithful Christian (or someone who refuses the lies of wokeness, even if not a Christian). But the two books are complementary, in fact. Live Not By Lies is more or less an intensification of The Benedict Option — but the more general point of The Benedict Option still holds firm: that Christians who expect to make it through the storm that has overtaken our culture had better form resilient, strong, disciplined communities of formation and practice.

Two things surprise me, five years on. First, that I’m still having to argue with people that I’m not saying that Christians should head for the hills. Actually, I’m probably more open to the “head for the hills” strategy than I was when the book was first published, but I really don’t think that anybody is going to be able to escape these trials by geographically situating themselves. I believe that this accusation is part of a coping strategy on the part of Christians who don’t want to accept that things are as bad as they are. If they can write The Benedict Option off as a crackpot bunker strategy, they don’t have to face the hard questions it poses. If The Benedict Option is wrong in its diagnosis, then fine: what do you propose we do about the collapse of the faith among the young (and the not-so-young)? My prescription might be off-base, I dunno, but I don’t see how any reasonable Christian can deny the severity of this challenge.

Second, I am surprised that The Benedict Option has done so well in Europe. It took me some experience over here in Europe to figure this out. The people who read the book and take it to heart on this side of the Atlantic are mostly Millennials and Generation Z believers. If you are aged 40 and under and still go to church, you know all too well how isolated you are. You don’t have to be convinced, as American Christians do. You have already lived through the de-Christianization of your society and culture, and you are looking for ways to live out the faith in a post-Christian culture. This book helps in some ways, if only by telling the truth about where we are.

The greatest moment in this book’s life for me came on September 11, 2018, in Rome, when Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the private secretary to Pope Benedict XVI, delivered this speech lauding the book (read down in the item). Italian journalist friends before the speech told me that whatever Gänswein said, I could be confident that Benedict approved every syllable. I was very nervous before his talk, but if you read it, you can understand why it nearly reduced me to tears.

Since the book was published, more people have come to know the Tipi Loschi, the beautiful and God-loving Catholic community in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. Giovanni Zennaro and his friends have established a Ben Op community near the monastery in Norcia, where Catholic families can live together. In France, some young Catholics started a business called Monasphère, that puts families together with communities living near monasteries. There may have been more initiatives that I haven’t yet heard of; if so, please let me know in the comments section.

I am grateful to all of you who have bought the book and who have had good things to say about it. I pray that it will continue to bless people, and inspire those who have the gifts that I lack — for example, the gift of building things — to get busy. We are all in this together.

Today is the feast day (in the Orthodox Church) of St. Benedict. My publisher did not know that when they assigned March 14 as the publication date. I took that as a sign from God that His will was behind this book. I give glory to Him for any good that this book has done in the world, and I thank St. Benedict of Nursia for his prayers — and, I give thanks for the community of Catholic monks in Norcia, still living out their patron’s vision.

Did you read the book? What does it look like to you, five years later? What did it get right? What did it get wrong? Did it make a difference to you?

The post The Benedict Option At Five appeared first on The American Conservative.

Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham once again called for NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. So did Sen. Rob Portman:

Republican senior senator calls for no-fly zone over Ukraine.

While visiting Ukrainian refugees in Poland, Rob Portman urged the U.S. and NATO to close the sky over Ukraine contrary to Washington’s intelligence community worries that such a move would risk an escalation.

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 13, 2022

Fortunately, we are governed by a president with a cooler head — a president who would prefer that we not risk World War III:

I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO.

But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine.

A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 11, 2022

While the two GOP senators were making their cases for NATO risking WW3, I spent part of my Sunday in the military history museum here in Budapest, with my two American guests. There, in one exhibit, we saw the same old story, one that we seem incapable of learning: that war cannot be predicted. As the text of the exhibit reminded us, all the Great Powers in 1914 expected the war to be short and decisive. Instead, it dragged on for four years, and killed or maimed an estimated 40 million people. It was the death of monarchies and the savaging of nations. In one exhibit of propaganda posters of the postwar era, I saw this one protesting the dismemberment of Hungary by the Trianon Treaty, which settled the status of the losing power (Hungary, of course, was part of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire):

It says, “No! No! Never!” But the protest was pointless. Hungary had lost the war, and was dissected by the victors. Today, the only part of Hungary left as “Hungary” is the middle section (and even that is a bit smaller than what’s on this century-old map). They marched into war in 1914 behind their King, the Emperor Franz Joseph, and four years later, had lost most of their country — a wound that, let me assure you, is still keenly felt today.

Do you remember how we were promised by Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant Ken Adelman that the Iraq War would be a “cakewalk”? I was sure back then that this must be true. After all, the US had the most powerful military in world history. What could stand against us? As it turned out, we dispatched Saddam in a matter of weeks, but were left dealing with a horrible mess. It turned out that our war planning had not assumed a Sunni insurgency. We convinced ourselves that the Iraqis — all of them — would receive us as liberators, and fall into line behind liberal democracy. I’ll never forget the day, a few years later, sitting in my driveway in Dallas listening to an Iraqi refugee speaking on NPR, saying that she can’t believe it has come to this, but as much as her family suffered under Saddam, she wishes the US had never attacked — this, given how much more they have all suffered.

I guess I had not realized until this Russia vs. Ukraine thing how much I had absorbed an antiwar stance. I am not a pacifist. I believe war is sometimes the lesser evil, though it is still evil. Putin thought he would gain a lightning victory over Ukraine, and establish a new order. He has ended up (so far) with his nation isolated, despised, and on the brink of economic ruin. He will likely conquer Ukraine — for all its faults, the Russian Army is overwhelmingly strong compared to the Ukrainians — but it is impossible to see how he will subdue the postwar resistance. Many decent Russians who wanted no part of this war on Ukraine have fled the country, unwilling to live by the lies required by the authoritarian state.

As you know if you read this blog yesterday, I met over the weekend a young Ukrainian refugee. I heard her story, gave her some money to help her on her journey, and with her permission, am going to set up a GoFundMe account to raise money to help her get established in Canada, where she wants to go. Her grandmother gave the young woman, Annetta, 25, all the money she had saved to pay for her funeral and burial. But Annetta arrived in the West to find that Ukrainian money is worthless. Annetta is a victim of Vladimir Putin’s cruel folly. There are millions more, and we have a moral duty to help them.

And yet, as I read about how Putin’s regime has shut down any dissent, and compelled all media to spout his propaganda, I cannot help wondering about our own pro-war madness. We rightly despise Putin for trying to control the narrative, but we are also shutting down sources that tell the Russian side of the story. We are not formally at war with Russia, yet we are making it very difficult to hear any alternative account of what’s happening. Look how stupid we have gotten with this moral panic:

as seen at the Wisconsin mustard museum pic.twitter.com/tynV4sCg5c

— David Is Employable (@ExodiacKiller) March 13, 2022

No kidding — the institution that brands itself “America’ favorite condiment museum” (what’s the second favorite, I wonder?) is so on board with the cause that it has sent Russian mustards to Siberia.

Because YouTube removed Oliver Stone’s documentary “Ukraine On Fire,” which tells the story of the 2014 Euromaidan protests from a Russian point of view, I watched it last night on Rumble. A few years ago, I had tried to watch Stone’s 2017 interviews with Putin, broadcast on Showtime, but turned them off because it was obvious that Stone was enamored of his subject, and was not interested in asking hard questions. I expected “Ukraine On Fire” to be propaganda, and indeed it was. But that doesn’t mean it is entirely a lie, and in any case, it’s important to know how the other side regards a conflict, if only to understand how they are likely thinking.

I’m glad I watched it (on Rumble), because I had not realized the extent to which Ukrainian nationalism is tied up with right-wing extremism, even neo-Nazism. I still consider Putin’s claim that he had to invade to “de-Nazify” Ukraine to be risible. Nevertheless, there’s no way to avoid the fact that neo-Nazis really are present among Ukrainian nationalists. Stone’s account of the history of far-right extremism in 20th century Ukraine downplays the Holodomor, the deadly famine that Stalin engineered, which killed millions of Ukrainians. You and I, had we been Ukrainian back then, might well have joined the far right too, because they were the most vocal enemies of Stalin. (Similarly, in Live Not By Lies, I quote a Czech Jewish woman who escaped the Nazi death camps at the end of the war, and became a Communist when she made it back home, simply because the Communists were the furthest thing from the Nazis; only after her Communist husband was murdered by the regime did she turn against the Left.)

The point is, the Russians aren’t making up this Ukraine neo-Nazi story.

“Ukraine On Fire” talks about the role of money, NGOs, and new media in driving Euromaidan protests. I can tell you from my work in Hungary that some NGOs work directly for political change. I have written in this space before how the US Agency for International Development teamed with Soros’s Open Society Foundation to publish Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals in Macedonia, to undermine the conservative government there. The film shows how this sort of thing worked in Ukraine to promote the coup that removed Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian elected president. For example, one of the TV networks set up in Euromaidan was funded by the governments of the US and the Netherlands, and George Soros.

The Stone movie discusses the role that the US Embassy played in helping coordinate the protests. Infamously, State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt were caught on an intercepted phone call discussing who ought to be ruling Ukraine. And there was this lovely quote from their conversation:

The film shows senior US politicians, senators like Chris Murphy and John McCain, going to Maidan Square to address the crowds, and to urge them to overthrow their government. Isn’t that incredible? Top American politicians going to a foreign country to goose crowds to force regime change. At the 49-minute mark, the film talks about neoconservative strategies for regime change. An American journalist describes the way this has worked in all the color revolutions:

“You’ve got a black hat versus a white hat, and you keep repeating that basic scenario — and it works with the American people. You make them into demons, and the American people find that the way they can understand the world. Once that happens, it’s very difficult for journalists or anyone else to say, you know, hold it, that guy has more than a gray hat than a black hat or a white hat. And if you say that, you’re suddenly a Yanukovich apologist or a Putin apologist, and then the attacks come onto the person saying it — the journalist, the academic, or whatever.”

This is where we are today in discussing the Russian war on Ukraine. You can say, as I do, that Russia should not have invaded. You can say, as I do, that you hope Russia loses this war. But if you do not endorse 100 percent the black hat-white hat construct, you stand accused of being a Putin promoter. You will have noticed that Victoria Nuland is back in the saddle, just as David Frum, who authored the “Axis of Evil” speech promoting war on Iraq, is now becoming a favored pundit of the pro-war elites.

Once again, Ukraine On Fire is pro-Russian propaganda, straight up; it sanitizes Russia’s malign involvement in Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely fabricated, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t things to learn from it. You should watch it, if only because the Cathedral doesn’t want you to. Shouldn’t we Americans want to know what our government, and US NGOs, might have done to destabilize Ukraine in the past, and promote a pro-Western revolution there? Shouldn’t we consider the Mearsheimer/Kennan argument that the West has pushed Ukraine, and Russia, to this point? You don’t have to endorse their view fully to recognize that it has at the very lease some merit. All this information certainly complicates the simplistic narrative — the kind of narrative that gets mustard removed from museum displays — but if we want to avoid being manipulated into supporting war, we need to understand the complexity of these situations. I understand why Putin wants to keep information away from his people; they are easier to manipulate if he keeps them in the dark. But what’s our excuse?

On Saturday, I took my visiting friends to Terror Haza, the Budapest museum set up in the former secret police headquarters, and dedicated to explaining the totalitarianism of the Arrow Cross (Nazi collaborating) Hungarian government at the end of World War II, and the Communist regime. I had last been there in 2018, before I started working on Live Not By Lies. It was stunning to me to read the displayed examples of Communist propaganda, especially the parts about how Communism is bringing in social justice, liberty, and the rest. No wonder the people who lived through this are now saying they’re seeing the same kind of lies manifesting in America today. This propaganda back then said that the Communist state was doing the exact opposite of what it was doing in real life. Similarly, we live in a society in which anti-white racism is branded “anti-racism.” It’s the same thing. We are being conditioned to accept bondage and oppression. Why? Who benefits?

Matt Taibbi says, of us, “Orwell Was Right”. Excerpts:

One would hope there would be at least a few Americans left who’d hear about Russia barring the BBC and Voice of America and at least recognize the sameness of the issue involved with banning RT and Sputnik. Or, seeing how pathetic and manipulative it is for Russians to prevent reporting on war casualties, we’d recall the folly of the ban we had for nearly twenty years on photographs of military coffins, or the continuing pressure on embeds to avoid publishing images of American deaths from our own war zones. We should be able to read that Twitter and Facebook are cracking down on the “fake accounts” spreading “misinformation” that “Ukraine isn’t doing well” and notice that Russia’s measures against “fake news” and “disinformation” about its own military failures — though far more draconian and carrying much more severe penalties — are rooted in the same concept.

We don’t, however, because we long ago reached the doublethink phase predicted by Orwell, where most of the population is conscious of double standards but ignores them effortlessly. A healthy person should be able to be horrified by what’s happening in Russia and also see a warning about the degradation that ensues from using “pre-emptive” force, or from trying to control discontent by erasing expressions of it. But years of relentless propaganda have trained Americans to doublethink their way out of such insights. Cornel West just laid all of this out in an interview with the New Yorker:

Everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow. [Biden] sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years. Come on, America, do you think people are stupid? What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?

That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster—of course he is. But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize. Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror. That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.

We’ve been trained to rage against this thinking. We even have our own borrowed Newspeak word for the offense: Whataboutism. The offender supposedly does a bait-and-switch, distracting with charges of hypocrisy without refuting the actual argument. But a Soviet giving a professionally two-faced answer to questions about Gulags by saying, “And you lynch blacks” isn’t the same as the much more serious thing West is talking about. Lying to others is shameful, but lying to ourselves and not even realizing it, that’s hardcore spiritual decay. We’re being driven faster toward the cliff-edge of this moral insanity with each new act of mass forgetting.

More:

Moral panics erase memories. It’s their primary function. 9/11 wiped the national hard drive of everything from the third degree to My Lai to Operations Phoenix and Condor to the Church Committee to the School of the Americas to countless other shameful episodes, and the lessons learned from them. The Trump-Russia scandal blotted out Snowden, made the spooks the good guys again. 2016 rehabilitated neoconservatives, now reinvented as never-Trumpers, cleaning away the shame of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, etc.

The “misinformation” panic wiped out the WMD fiasco, restoring honor to credentialed press. The DNC leak erased “Collateral Murder.” After George Floyd we hated cops, after January 6th we loved them. Ukraine now is openly being sold as a blue-pill cure for everything that went wrong during the War on Terror, including the recent defeat in Afghanistan. “Realism” is in disgrace, and “leadership,” “regime change,” and the “universal appeal of freedom” are back, only this time their primary backers are the upper-class cosmopolitan Democrats who marched against the simplistic “freedom against evil” plot neoconservatives tried to sell them twenty years ago.

We’re at the end of a twenty-year cycle that has taken what was once the oppositional-skeptic portion of the American population and seen them rallied behind the people they once hated the most. This has been accomplished by keeping us in a rage that always escalates and is never watered down by contradictions, thanks to mastery of “reality control” via “an unending series of victories over your own memory.”

Read it all.Well, look, all I can tell you is that I am not going to be baited into war with my own memory. I remember well how they all led us down the primrose path to war on Iraq by manipulating our emotions. I remember the cakewalk lies, and all the rest. I remember the painful conversation with a childhood friend who was working at a senior level of government at the time, who told me that he had discovered firsthand that the state was flat-out lying about how well the war was going — and that this shattered him, previously a straight-arrow true believer.

I do not want my government or the woke-capitalist tech regime telling me what I can and cannot read, see, or hear, because it deviates from what they want me to believe about Ukraine and Russia. This is what Putin does to his people — but we, unlike the Russians, are supposed to be a free people, a people that doesn’t fear the truth.

You may not like Candace Owens, but she asks an important question here, one that recalls Cornel West’s words quoted by Taibbi:

Well? We are a free people, allegedly. These are the kinds of questions free people ought to be asking out loud. Unless we want to be frog-marched moralistically off into a war whose consequences we cannot possibly anticipate.

One more time: I denounce Russia’s war on Ukraine, and I hope Putin loses. But at the same time, I denounce the American war machine — both government and private — that is controlling the narrative to manipulate the American people into coming together behind pro-war policies. I will not make war on my own memory of how these people — some of them the same damn people — did this before.

UPDATE:

The bar for "treason" keeps dropping. Beginning to think the uniparty doesn't hate Putin — they want to emulate his speech codes. https://t.co/f8bGKqN0R0

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) March 13, 2022

I remind you: the United States is not at war with Russia. In what sense is Tulsi Gabbard’s criticism of US policy “treason”? What a disgraceful thing for a US Senator to say.

The post War On Our Own Memory appeared first on The American Conservative.

It’s very late here in Budapest, but I need to tell you about what happened tonight.

My friend Ed is visiting me from Alabama, with his 11-year-old son Bo. Tonight I took them to Fono, a Hungarian folk music venue and dance hall. On stage tonight was a youth band, playing traditional music while a couple from the national folk dance ensemble led a large group of kids in practicing traditional dance. It was an amazing and beautiful thing, which I will write about on my Substack later. But that’s not why I’m writing now.

I met Ildi, a Hungarian American who lives here, and whose sons play in the band. As we were sharing drinks at a table, she mentioned that a friend of hers was hosting a young refugee from Ukraine, whose name is Annetta. Annetta is 25, and has been here since shortly after the war started. She is headed, she hopes, to Toronto, to start advanced photography studies, if she can get everything sorted. Ildi said Annette was there at Fono. Can we meet her? I asked. Sure, said Ildi — and her English is very good.

Shortly thereafter, Annetta came over to our table. She sat down, and we asked her to tell us her story.

She’s from Kyiv. She lives there with her mom — her dad is not in the picture. Her mom got her out of the country, but is staying behind to care for her elderly grandmother, who can’t leave. The two older women told her to leave and not to look back. Grandmother gave her all the money she had been saving for her burial. But the money is not convertible, as nobody wants Ukrainian currency. She is penniless, and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Annetta is leaving on Tuesday for France, where she will be staying with friends of friends, and sorting out her passage to Canada.

Two weeks ago, she said, everything was normal. “Now I wake up every day, and the most important thing I think about is whether or not we have survived,” she said.

Annetta said that nobody in her world expected the Russians to invade. Yes, they knew the Russians were massing troops on the border, but they didn’t think anything would come of it. And then they invaded. Her mom and grandmom moved to a country house they have in the Kyiv suburbs.

Annetta was surprisingly composed, telling this story, then she suddenly burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, then again: “I’m sorry. I thought I had finished crying.”

Don’t be, we said. When she gathered her emotions, she said that she never had any hatred for Russians before this invasion. She had affectionate feelings for them. “After this, we will never be brothers again,” said Annetta. “It’s over. I would strangle Putin with my bare hands if I could.”

We talked for a while. She was so friendly, but also modest. It was shocking to be in the presence of a young woman not much older than my own oldest kid, cast out into the world by this war. She told me about how she had been to the United States once, to Los Angeles, where she worked for a short time before her visa was revoked.

“L.A. is my city,” she said. “I want to be in a place where everybody speaks English all the time. I love English. It sets me free.” She went on to talk about how free she felt in America, especially in Los Angeles.

“I love the ocean,” she said.

We talked for a while, and I was so moved by Annetta’s story. I think we all were. Ildi’s mom and dad escaped from communist Hungary decades ago, and settled in New Jersey. They have a place here in Budapest, where they spend some time. I met Mom and Dad. When I told them I am from Baton Rouge, they said they know the wife of a famous LSU basketball coach of my youth, from folk dance circles. Dad went off to the dance floor, but I bought Mom a pálinka shot, and we talked about Annette. If I understood correctly, Mom and Dad are helping support Annetta here in Budapest these days, paying her rent at a hostel. They know what it is like to flee from oppression, and want to help.

At the end of the evening, I told Annetta that I wanted to help her if I could. She’s broke, and has no idea how she’s going to support herself if she makes it to Canada. I have some extra euros, I told her; may I share them with you? No, no, I can’t, she said. That’s very kind, but I can’t take your money.

It’s not my money, I said. It’s God’s. He has blessed me, and I want to pass the blessing on. I had to work hard to convince her. She’s proud, and doesn’t want charity. But I told her to please consider that maybe God brought us together tonight in this Hungarian dance hall, a place she didn’t even know existed two weeks ago when she was happily at home in Kyiv.

We made plans to meet after church tomorrow so I could give her this gift before she goes to France. I see now that I’m home that my attempt to e-mail myself her contact information failed. I’m going to write to Ildi right now to see if we can rectify that. I can’t stand the thought of this sweet young woman going to France with nothing in her pocket. I also told her about Go Fund Me, and asked her to consider whether or not I could set up a Go Fund Me to ask readers of my blog to donate to help her as she makes her journey to freedom. She told me she would think about it. She also said that all she can think about now is her mom and grandmother back in Kyiv, facing the invading Russian troops. They want her to face west and to keep moving.

How many times in history has something like this happened?

I want to ask you readers to pray for Annetta and her family back in Kyiv. If I get her permission, I will establish a Go Fund Me account for her, and then ask you to consider donating to it. Watch this space for details. It could be that she decides she doesn’t want it, or perhaps I will lose touch with her. She kept saying tonight, “I don’t deserve this. There are so many people in worse shape than I am.”

That is true, I told her, but you are here, and so am I, and so are my readers.

Whatever you think about this war and its roots, here we are faced with one of the war’s victims: a young woman cast out into the world by the actions of men, and by the compassion of a mother and grandmother who see her escape as the focus of their lives now, as Russian soldiers encircle her hometown.

This is when the abstraction of war became flesh and blood for me. Annetta has fallen into a circle of loving Hungarians who are doing their best to help her, even though they are all afraid of what might be coming next, and even though people in this country are facing skyrocketing prices and an uncertain future. By the grace of God, the Hungarians brought me into Annette’s life tonight, and therefore you as well.

I will have more to report in the next day or so, if I am able to see her again. For now, keep her and her family in your prayers. If I am able to establish the Go Fund Me, I will give you the information needed if you care to donate. If you live in Toronto and are able to help receive her and get her established there, please e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and put “ANNETTA” in the subject line, and I will reach out to you once she is on her way. She told me that she would be living with kind strangers in Marseilles until things can get worked out with the Canadians.

Two million Ukrainians are on the road, running away from the war. I met one of them tonight. We can’t help them all, but here is one that we might all be able to help. Talking to Annetta, this sweet young woman who thinks Los Angeles is paradise on earth, I didn’t think about what the West had done to lay the groundwork for this war. I didn’t think about Russia’s aggression, and the wickedness of Vladimir Putin. I didn’t think about anything but: how can we help this poor girl get to safety? I don’t need to think beyond that. Do you?

The post The Human Face Of War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Look at this, sent to me by a friend who subscribes to Life 360, an app that allows parents to keep up with where their kids are via their smartphones:

What? What on earth does an app that lets anxious parents keep track of their kids have to do with the war in Ukraine? Nothing, actually: it’s a branding opportunity. It’s just like how all the corporations sought to sign on to Black Lives Matter, to show that We Care about the cause du jour.

This is really astonishing. Along those lines:

On Thursday afternoon, 30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed the influencers about the United States’ strategic goals in the region and answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.

As the crisis in Ukraine has escalated, millions have turned to TikTok for information on what is happening there in real time. TikTok videos offered some of the first glimpses of the Russian invasion and since then the platform has been a primary outlet for spreading news to the masses abroad. Ukrainian citizens hiding in bomb shelters or fleeing their homes have shared their stories to the platform, while dangerous misinformation and Russian propaganda have also spread. And TikTok stars, many with millions of followers, have increasingly sought to make sense of the crisis for their audiences.

This war is a pop culture and consumerist phenomenon. We are crazy people. This is a conflict that could lead to World War III, and even a nuclear exchange, but the great pop culture machine is taking it in and turning it into a consumer emotional experience.

It is impossible now to think clearly about what’s happening, and what is the right thing to do. Who knows where this is going next? Remember how all the public health orders about how to deal with Covid were thrown by the wayside after George Floyd, so everybody could enjoy the pleasure of protesting against police brutality and racism? Here we are again — but this time, with nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, a friend in Romania, which borders Ukraine, writes:

So everybody — me included — is freaking out fearing that the war will soon be here. Nobody really wants war with Russia, because nobody wants war. We are just a relatively small country at the NATO border (a proxy target). Of course, media and “influencers” are in emotional implosion over it and the climate is toxic, much like in US, but we don’t have any Carlsons or Greenwalds in here, just trumpets fomenting gross propaganda, in sharp contrast with the feelings and fears of the regular guy. On top of that, it’s bewildering to see an (almost?) inescapable chain of escalation coming from the both sides of the conflict.And to think that we all thought that the pandemic madness was over, just to be thrown in the trenches of the WW3… What signs do we need more to understand that we are at the edge of the apocalyptic abyss, and the abyss is looking back at us?

Hush, mister, we have a thrilling pop culture phenomenon to attend to! You are harshing our pleasure.In other insane things our people are doing, a leading university in Switzerland kicked Metropolitan Hilarion, a senior Russian Orthodox Church official, off of its faculty for his failure to condemn the war. A priest friend e-mailed to say:

I am trying to find a parallel case in Church History, but so far I am unsuccessful. For instance, I cannot think of a single European university professor in the 13th century who was required, as the price for remaining on the faculty, to condemn his country’s invasion into another country or its involvement in the Crusades.

I am wondering if the Apostle Paul would have had his apostolic credentials taken away for his silence about Rome’s recent invasion of Parthia. We know the Corinthian Christians, for example, were morally sensitive folks; they probably had strong feelings on the point.

Absolutely bonkers, we are. This is a moral panic. A moral panic that involves the prospect of a new world war. I don’t know how we will be able to go back to normal, with people having smashed all their standards for the sake of signaling their virtue, and participating in the Cause.

This is a war, not a social media spectacle. Well, it is a social media spectacle, but it should not be, because turning this into BLM, or the Beatles’64, makes it impossible to think clearly about what’s going on. Personally, I want Russia to lose this war, but for pity’s sake, this is the kind of thing that’s going to lead to a massive mistake that will get a lot of people killed. We need sobriety. Not this.

The post Ukraine: This Year’s BLM appeared first on The American Conservative.

Well, if this isn’t the most hypocritical thing:

Vladimir Putin has given the green light for up to 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East to be deployed alongside Russian-backed rebels fighting in Ukraine, doubling down on an invasion that the west says has been losing momentum.

The move, just over two weeks after Putin ordered the invasion, allows Russia to deploy battle-hardened mercenaries from conflicts such as Syria without risking additional Russian military casualties.

At a meeting of Russia’s security council, the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said there were 16,000 volunteers in the Middle East who were ready to fight alongside Russian-backed forces in the breakaway Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Putin said: “If you see that there are these people who want of their own accord, not for money, to come to help the people living in Donbas, then we need to give them what they want and help them get to the conflict zone.”

“Volunteers” my foot. Putin, the great protector of Orthodox civilization, is bringing in Islamic mercenaries to fight Orthodox Christians, joining his Chechen Islamist mercenaries in doing the same. I guess this is Assad paying back a debt.

How can ordinary Russians tolerate this? Ukrainian Christians being shot at and killed by Muslim mercenaries on behalf of the Great Orthodox Tsar Vladimir? Could there be any more vivid proof that all of Putin’s rhetoric over the years about the greatness of Russian Christian civilization, and positioning himself, with the help of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, as its defender — all of it was a phony cover story for raw power.

I wonder how Patriarch Kyrill feels about this. I wonder how he can live with himself knowing that his fellow Christians, Orthodox and Catholic both, will be murdered, and Christian women possibly raped, by Muslim mercenaries in the pay of his patron Vladimir Putin. How can he possibly remain silent? Unless, of course, all of his Christian preaching and teaching was just a cover for the acquisition and maintenance of power too?

UPDATE: Something I see from the comments that some of you don’t get. If Putin had presented himself as a secular leader only, this would have been hardly worth commenting on. He didn’t; part of his self-created cult of personality has been presenting himself as an arch-defender of Orthodox Christianity, especially in the face of the woke West. What’s more, Islam and Christianity are each other’s historical great enemies. Orthodox people suffered badly for centuries under the Islamic yoke. It is very hard to take when he hires Muslims to fight for him against other Christians whom he considers to be part of the Russian nation. Again, if he had been simply an ordinary secular leader, this wouldn’t have merited commentary. But he has depended on the Russian Orthodox Church and its pageantry to consecrate his rule. And now this.

(BTW, I don’t think these Muslims are ISIS. I think they are part of the Assad coalition that fought ISIS alongside the Russians.)

And, yes, the Ukrainians killed by these mercenaries will be just as dead as if they were shot by Russians. My comment is not really about them, but about Putin and the suicide of his reputation as a defender of Christianity.

The post Putin’s Islamic Mercenaries appeared first on The American Conservative.

If you haven’t yet listened to the podcast interview that Kale Zelden and I did with “Helena,” a 23 year old woman who has detransitioned from transgender to biological female. I cannot urge you strongly enough to do it. You might think you have a good handle on this phenomenon, but I guarantee that most of you do not. I did not, though I read about this stuff all the time:

Helena is not a religious believer (I asked, at the end), but Kale and I are, and we both believe in the reality of the demonic. After we finished the interview, we both talked offline about how gobsmacked we were about the spiritual warfare aspect of what Helena had told us.

In explaining how she fell into believing that she was really male, she talked about the role of Tumblr culture — the online website that has been influential in convincing young women to transition. To sum up, she said that it’s an extremely intense but cultlike culture that draws in vulnerable young women who are unsure of themselves, and desperate for community and approval. She said that within that culture, everything that normie culture considers to be good — Christianity, sex with love and tenderness, etc — is considered evil. She explains that she was taught by that culture that extreme, painful, pornographic sex was good, and that if she wasn’t prepared to submit to it, no man would ever love her. The culture overwhelmed her, and all those in it, with information, a maelstrom that confused them and caused them to submit to ideas and practices that enslaved them to their disordered passions. (This is not quite how she described it — I mean, using that language — but that’s what she talked about.) In other words, this culture shattered the inner lives of the teenage girls who participate in it by telling them that they are worthless, and can only be made worthy if they remake themselves according to its rules.

As Helena talks about the process of surrendering to this, chills ran up and down my spine, literally. She is not a religious person, and couldn’t have understood what she was saying in a religious context. But if you know anything about the literature of demonic possession, the narrative she told is very close to what happens in a case of possession. At one point she talks about how she gave herself over to these thoughts, and before she knew what was happening, they were controlling her.

Yep.

At one point, she says, after she had begun her transition, she would be sitting in her apartment for hours, fighting the urge to stab the needle from the syringe full of testosterone into her thigh. Everything in her was screaming, “Don’t do it!” she said, but she also had this overwhelming urge to do it, an urge that told her only by submitting to these hormones that were reorienting everything in her mind and body would she be free.

I’m telling you, this is incredibly powerful stuff, Helena’s story. I wish every parent who reads this blog would watch it. I wish every pastor and religious leader, especially those who are tempted to affirm transgenderism, or those who think that it is just a passing fad, will listen to what Helena has to say. Again, she did not convert to Christianity, nor is she a conservative (though she did say this experience caused her to become extremely critical, in a healthy way, of all ideologies; social justice ideology, she explained, is at the heart of Tumblr culture). She’s just a brave and extremely articulate young woman who talks about what happened to her. It’s also shocking and depressing to hear her talk about how in her school, the adults in her life — guidance counselors especially — pushed her to embrace this identity, thinking they were helping her.

Anyway, Helena’s story makes it clear that we are living in an acutely demonic moment in our culture. I mean that in a literal sense, but even if you don’t believe in the reality of malevolent discarnate beings who seek our destruction, you can and should still interpret this cultural moment as demonic in the sense Dostoevsky meant in his great novel, Demons, also called in English The Possessed. According to the Wikipedia entry for the book, “For Dostoevsky, ‘ideas’ are living cultural forces that have the capacity to seduce and subordinate the individual consciousness, and the individual who has become alienated from his own concrete national traditions is particularly susceptible.”

This is us. This is who we are today. The family is being dissolved. Male and female are being dissolved. The individual human personality is being dissolved.

I woke up this morning in Budapest to this news from Reuters:

Meta Platforms (FB.O) will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.

The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to internal emails to its content moderators.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

The calls for the leaders’ deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method, one email said, in a recent change to the company’s rules on violence and incitement.

Citing the Reuters story, Russia’s embassy in the United States demanded that Washington stop the “extremist activities” of Meta. read more

“Users of Facebook & Instagram did not give the owners of these platforms the right to determine the criteria of truth and pit nations against each other,” the embassy said on Twitter in a message that was also shared by their India office.

The temporary policy changes on calls for violence to Russian soldiers apply to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, according to one email.

Facebook is giving permission for people to call for death to Russians. Do you see what’s happening? They are deciding what kind of hatred is permissible in the biggest public forum on the globe. Look, I totally understand wanting Russian invaders to be repelled violently. Russian soldiers deserve it; they have no right to be in Ukraine. But that’s not what this is really about. What this is about is a global media platform choosing to suspend its rules against violent, hateful expression, to justify it when directed against Russians.

Do they do this for expressions of hatred against the Chinese, for what the Chinese government does to Tibetans and Uyghurs? To Saudis, over Yemen? To Muslims, over terrorist attacks carried out by Muslim extremists? No, no, and no. Only Russians, only now.

What is going on? As I wrote in an update to last night’s post, Twitter removed two Russian Embassy tweets offering Russia’s side about the Mariupol hospital bombing. Twitter will not allow the Russians to defend themselves by claiming that the hospital was empty and was being used as a military encampment, thus making it a fair target in the war. Maybe the Russians are lying — but maybe they aren’t. In any case, Twitter has decided what kind of speech about the war will be permitted on its platform — and it’s all directed one way.

How can we not recognize what’s happening here? Even if you deplore the invasion, as I do, you surely must be shocked at how public opinion in the West is being manipulated. Putin is doing the same thing at home, we are told, and I’m quite sure he is. But how does that justify our doing it? Do you really want to be lied to, or told what you can and cannot say? I think many people do. I’m hearing from friends back home in America that war fever is getting intense. One friend said he can’t even talk to his extended family about it; they are allowing themselves to feel pure hatred for the Russians, and to work themselves up into a war fever. The point is not that what the Russians are doing is in any way good. The point is that we are being manipulated into casting aside all restraint and prudence, to give in to our passions. Socrates taught that the tyrant is the least free man, because he is slave to his desires. We are being taught to surrender to our passions, to make ourselves their slave. And for what? So we can rush towards World War III?

Demonic. Putin has unleashed demonic passions with his invasion, and the demons are working on us in the West too.

Remember what I’ve been telling you: Everything being done to the Russian people now will eventually be done to people in the West who dissent from the party line. I have been saying in this space that even though Russia deserves to be sanctioned for its evil invasion, it is utterly chilling how quickly governments and corporations got in line to destroy Russia economically. Corporations have gone far beyond what governments require. They are doing it at their own expense because they believe it to be virtuous. If you have been an observer of woke capitalism, though, you had better be chilled to the bone by how quickly an entire nation has been destroyed economically because capitalists decided that it was the morally correct thing to do. It does not require you to bless the Russian invasion to be in awe and terror at the power of states and corporations to control our economic lives. Yes, Putin brought this on to Russia, but Putin’s evil deed also exposed how shockingly vulnerable we all are in this new world order.

Well, I was at a geopolitics conference yesterday here in Budapest, and imagine my shock when I heard a prominent Hungarian analyst make the same point: that the swiftness with which global corporations got their acts together and moved as one to bring the hammer blow down on Russia, for moral reasons, reveals a terrible power that he (the analyst) doesn’t think we should be sanguine about, despite the fact that it is being used here to punish a bad actor, Russia. He’s right! What do you think is going to happen should Twitter, Facebook, and the rest decide that it is permissible to hate people who hold certain moral, religious, or political views it considers to be “hate”? The stampede to demonize these people will be irresistible. Moreover, corporations, having proven that they are willing to act not in the economic interests of shareholders, but in what they perceive to be the moral interest, to lose business for the sake of making a moral point, will have every incentive to cut deplorables out of commerce, much as they have done to Russia.

Your bank does not have to do business with you, you know. What if you can’t get a bank account because you have been identified as the holder of racist, sexist, anti-gay, conservative opinions? The precedent for acting in such a way to suppress Evil has been set. This is what a social credit system is all about. Open your eyes and look around you: the mechanisms, moral and technological, are being established now, to punish Russia in a way no other nation has been punished, ever.

You might think: Fine by me, Russia deserves it for what it has done. But just you wait: it is going to be turned on many of us.

There is also this, by the invaluable N.S. Lyons, the pseudonymous author of a must-read Substack, The Upheaval. In the one that dropped overnight, he warns against the adoption of Central Bank Digital Currencies. As Lyons explains, CBDCs are now being discussed by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank as the next step in global finance. Here’s how it works:

A CBDC system would be radically simplified. A customer opens an account directly with a country’s “independent” central bank (let’s say the Federal Reserve), and the central bank issues (creates) digital money (whether denominated as dollars, or FedCoins, or whatever) in that account. This makes the money a direct liability of the Fed, rather than of a private bank. Using digital tools (like say a “FedWallet” app) the customer can initiate direct transactions between Fed accounts. The digital money is deleted in one account and recreated in another essentially instantaneously. No promises or trust is necessary; every transaction is permanently recorded on a digital cryptographic ledger in real time. Kind of like Bitcoin, but exquisitely centrally managed. The Fed retains complete oversight and control over the creation, destruction, and “movement” of money, no matter who “has” it, or where it “is.”

Or as Agustin Carstens, General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), helpfully put it at a 2020 summit of the International Monetary Fund:

“We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that… and that makes a huge difference.”

Got that? Central banks would have absolute control over every penny you have. Basically they would do away with cash and make financial transactions much easier. Lyons explains, though, why this would be the greatest expansion of totalitarian power in human history. Elites who control the financial system could alter the digital currencies at will, causing them to hold different values for different people, depending on one’s social status. There is no end of control here. Lyons writes, speculating on how CBDCs could be used:

But why not go higher resolution than that: how about targeted microfinance grants, added straight to the accounts of those people and businesses that are extra deserving? There’s no need to wait for annual tax credits and loopholes when those are now antiquated.

A Fed-funded discount could even be applied to those businesses the people most want to help; Google and Yelp already flag which businesses are or are not black-owned or LGBTQ-friendly, presumably so people can preference their patronage, so why not assist with a little nudge here and there? Or we could go in the other direction and effectively change the price of anything based on the identity of who’s buying it.

Indeed a CBDC could make ending any kind of systemic inequities much easier, and through market friendly means. And as the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has reminded us, after all, being “‘race-neutral’ is not enough” when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy. The central bank could really be doing more in general.

Discriminatory practices like redlining by banks would certainly be a thing of the past; unless of course we wanted to do a little bit of redlining, just to make things a bit more equitable maybe, in which case we could do it, like, super easily.

Prison abolition has proven challenging. But a CBDC could help: just geofence the location within which parolees’ money can be used and not disappear – house arrest will never have been better incentivized! This would also work great in case we wanted to keep people confined to their homes for any other reason.

Should people be incentivized to eat the foods we think it’s best for them to eat? CBDCs can do that. Trying to get people to make reductions in their carbon footprint? CBDCs can help with that too.

But why just focus on individuals? Why not provide preferential financing to companies and investors virtuously meeting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals? This can be finely graded based on how closely they conform to standards.

And we could help nudge consumers away from organizations and businesses that are undesirable, too. Why not collect additional fees for transactions with “risky” businesses or charities that have low ESG scores? Or slow down their transaction speed to allow for greater “verification.” Just as a nudge, of course; people would still have free choice.

In fact why not create comprehensive credit scores based on behavior and number of associational connections with dangerous, risky individuals and organizations? It’s only logical as a next step.

Isn’t this conspiracy theory? How seriously should you take this? On Wednesday, while we are all hanging on news of the war, President Biden issued an executive order directing the federal government to work towards designing and implementing a CBDC system. 

This is happening, right now. I remember when I was a kid, reading a Christian End Times book, and wondering how they could ever come up with a system in which you could not buy or sell unless you had the “mark of the Beast” — meaning, symbolically, that you were a slave to a global system (in the Roman Empire, slaves had tattoos on their foreheads or hands, to mark them as property). Well, now I know. And so do you.

Read it all, and please subscribe to The Upheaval — this is a Substack you cannot afford to miss.

There is a quickening now in the world, on multiple fronts. This would be happening even without the Russian invasion, but it is a prompt, a rationale for its acceleration. Putin, the self-styled great protector of the family and traditional values, is playing an unwitting role in bringing it about. The Russian people are now not allowed to buy or sell in the global economy. And you watch: he is going to learn from his new best friends, the Chinese, how to do this to his own people too — and he, or his successor, will do it, all in the name of fighting the West.

I talk about the coming totalitarianism in Live Not By Lies, and how to start preparing for it. We are now accelerating into that world. What Putin has done is what tyrants have always done: invaded a nation he wanted to subdue by violence. But the swift global response that is destroying his nation’s economy — that’s new. The willingness of corporations to act in unison, beyond government orders, to suffer economically themselves in order to punish a bad actor — that is new too. The power of global communications platforms to decide which narratives will be allowed and which will not, and to suspend rules designed to prevent the expression of violent hatred against others for the sake of allowing Two Minutes Hates directed against Russians — also new. And all this is happening with our suspicions having been disarmed because if you question any of this, what are you, a Putin apologist?

We are being prepared for something. And if you are not preparing for how you and your family are going to live in this diabolical new world order, you are a fool. You might be sitting there thinking that this will all pass you by. It’s going to be a different story twenty years from now, when your child or grandchild tells his teacher that he thinks he’s trans, and your objection to this, and refusal to take him immediately to the trans clinic to start cross-sex hormones, gets you reported to Child Protective Services, and suddenly you find your digital bank account frozen by government order.

This is not crazy speculation. This system is being built right now, this very day. Our passions are being generated and manipulated to manufacture consent to this global system. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have laughed at such claims. I don’t anymore. Read the signs of the times. See. Judge. Act.

 

 

The post This Diabolical Moment appeared first on The American Conservative.

I am trying to determine if I fell for Ukrainian propaganda last night with my post about the Russian attack on a maternity hospital. There is no doubt that a maternity hospital was hit by the Russians, and devastated. And there is no doubt that Russian forces in other engagements have been known to hit hospitals (e.g., in Syria).

What is in doubt is the number of casualties. All we have are Ukrainian government figures. It is a large facility, and if it had a significant number of mothers and children in it, or medical personnel, wouldn’t we see bodies? Wouldn’t the Ukrainians be eager to show those bodies to the media? Maybe the bodies are all buried — but if so, then the Ukrainians would certainly be anxious to hurry up and get them out, if only to show the world’s press what the Russians have done. I guess we will see in the next few days.

What is also in doubt is the Ukrainian story. The Russians say that the hospital had been evacuated, and that Ukrainian soldiers were using it as a place from which to fire at Russians, and to draw their fire. Why would they do that? To get headlines like this on the front page of the world’s most important newspaper today:

 

Again, there is no doubt that Russia hit a maternity hospital. The question is whether or not there were patients inside it, and whether or not the Ukrainian military drew Russian fire deliberately on it for a propaganda victory. Here’s video that might boost the Ukrainian story that there were people in the hospital:

“Children comforted by soldiers who are barely adults.”@mattfrei reports on the aftermath of the Mariupol women and children’s hospital attack, as Kyiv braces for further Russian strikes. pic.twitter.com/ItBk1jmnNt

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) March 10, 2022

The world first learned about this attack yesterday from the Twitter account of Volodymyr Zelensky, who sent this out:

Mariupol. Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity! How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now! Stop the killings! You have power but you seem to be losing humanity. pic.twitter.com/FoaNdbKH5k

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) March 9, 2022

He has been desperate to draw NATO into a shooting war with the Russians, which is what would happen if NATO tried to impose a no-fly zone, as Zelensky wants. This morning at a security conference here in Hungary, I heard a top natsec expert praised Zelensky’s bravery, but also say that Zelensky risks overplaying his hand by pushing too hard for Western publics to pressure their leaders to enter the war by trying a no-fly zone. Zelensky has been putting out propaganda all along, as, of course, have the Russians. Such is war. But this maternity hospital thing could be a game-changer. There is something so primal about an army attacking a haven for women and babies — so much so that when I saw the video last night, I remember thinking briefly, “Where are the bodies?”, but then suppressing it, and then posting in outrage.

As I said as an update to that post this morning, the Russians believed as of earlier this week that the Ukrainians had evacuated that hospital and had put it to military use. From what the Russian UN ambassador said:

Ukrainian radicals show their true face more distinctly by the day. Locals reports that Ukraine’s Armed Forces kicked out personnel of natal hospital #1 of the city of Mariupol and set up a firing site within the facility.

Is this true? You can’t take the Russian ambassador’s word for it … but the lack of visible casualties, including dead bodies, suggests that the Russians may be telling the truth here. Then again, as I said, if there are scores of bodies buried under rubble somewhere (though all the buildings still seem to be standing), then obviously there were people there. Still, you can’t take Zelensky’s word for it either. He and his government have been putting out false or distorted stories all along.

I assume that this is what warring parties do. Remember how the US and Kuwaiti governments produced the Kuwaiti nurse who testified to Congress about invading Iraqi soldiers who killed babies in the maternity ward of the Kuwait City hospital? That atrocity story helped build domestic US support for the first Gulf War. It turned out that the “nurse” was actually the teenage daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and had been coached by an American PR firm.

The reason why we should be far more careful about Ukrainian propaganda — and I’m chastising myself here too — is that Zelensky is doing his dead-level best to draw NATO into this war. This morning I received an e-mail from a reader in Baton Rouge, saying that one of his co-workers is ready for America to fight the Russians over Ukraine. This is completely crazy. True, Russia’s invasion is wrong, unjust, criminal, call it what you like — but if NATO engages the Russians militarily, we will be in World War III with a nuclear-armed superpower. 

Does the Baton Rouge man want to see New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and the petrochemical corridor between the two cities, incinerated? Does he want to see life on earth exterminated? Then keep thinking and talking like that. This is the risk that we are running by crediting everything Zelensky and his government say. You don’t have to believe that the Russians are good, or truthful, to understand that.

And then there is this incredible broadcast from Tucker Carlson last night. It is hard to believe that someone on national cable TV is saying such radical things — but thank God he is:

You have to watch it. Please watch it. In the segment, Tucker talks about Victoria Nuland’s revelation in Congressional testimony that there is at least one biolab in Ukraine dealing with deadly biological substances — and that the US Government is worried that the Russians are going to get their hands on it. Wait … what?! The Russians had been claiming that these things existed, but a lot of Americans — including Tucker himself, as he admits — thought it was nonsense. The US Government called it Russian disinformation, and so did the European Union.

But now we know from Nuland herself that yes, this facility exists. At the 3:30 mark, he introduces the video in which Sen. Marco Rubio asked if Ukraine has biological or chemical weapons. Nuland says, “Ukraine has biological research facilities,” and they’re worried about the Russians gaining control of them. Why would they have to worry about that material falling into the hands of Russians if it was on the up and up? Tucker says, correctly, that Nuland’s strained answer indicates that this research is for biowarfare — just like the Russians have been saying.

Tucker goes on to point out that this facility was funded by the US Department of Defense. The claim the US Government makes is that it was only a place that studied deadly biotoxins — anthrax and so forth — so as to determine how to fight against them. Really? That’s hard to believe — especially if, as Tucker says, the US Embassy in Ukraine just scrubbed its website of information about what that lab was up to. He also shows how the Pentagon’s spokesman dodged a reporter’s direct question about the relationship between the biolab and the Pentagon.

The show reached out to the State Department and asked what’s going on here. State sent this response:

 

Two things: 1) nobody claimed DoD owned or operated biolabs in Ukraine — but we know that DoD helped fund them; and 2) what, exactly, is the difference between a “biological weapons” facility, and one intended to “counter biological threats”? Serious question. If there is nothing suspicious going on here, why doesn’t the US want Russian troops to find out what’s there?

Whether something nefarious was going on in that lab or not, this is the second instance we have of the US Government participating in research on diseases that, if they escaped the lab, could prove to be a weapon of mass destruction. Covid was the recent one (we funded, or partially funded, this research in Wuhan). Why are the US taxpayers funding this stuff? asks Tucker, rightly.

Point is, our people are lying too. What have we been up to in Ukraine — and why does the US Government deserve the benefit of the doubt? Glenn Greenwald takes the Nuland answer and runs with it. Excerpt:

Any attempt to claim that Ukraine’s biological facilities are just benign and standard medical labs is negated by Nuland’s explicitly grave concern that “Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of” those facilities and that the U.S. Government therefore is, right this minute, “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.” Russia has its own advanced medical labs. After all, it was one of the first countries to develop a COVID vaccine, one which Lancet, on February 1, 2021, pronounced was “ safe and effective” (even though U.S. officials pressured multiple countries, including Brazil, not to accept any Russian vaccine, while U.S. allies such as Australia refused for a full year to recognize the Russian COVID vaccine for purposes of its vaccine mandate). The only reason to be “quite concerned” about these “biological research facilities” falling into Russian hands is if they contain sophisticated materials that Russian scientists have not yet developed on their own and which could be used for nefarious purposes — i.e., either advanced biological weapons or dual-use “research” that has the potential to be weaponized.

What is in those Ukrainian biological labs that make them so worrisome and dangerous? And has Ukraine, not exactly known for being a great power with advanced biological research, had the assistance of any other countries in developing those dangerous substances? Is American assistance confined to what Nuland described at the hearing — “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces” — or did the U.S. assistance extend to the construction and development of the “biological research facilities” themselves?

As Greenwald said, none of this, even if true, justifies Russia’s invasion. But let us all note well that the “fact checkers” of the American media have been telling us that claims that the US funds secret biowarfare labs in Ukraine was all Russian disinformation and conspiracy theory.

Maybe there is an innocent explanation for all this. But at this point, why would you buy it?

The Russian government lies. The Ukrainian government lies. The US government lies. This is the way of the world. But now we are in a situation in which the Ukrainian government is desperately trying to draw NATO into the war on its side, which is the only real chance it has to prevail against Russia. The temptation for Zelensky and his people to exaggerate or to outright lie about Russian atrocities is massive.

I understand people falling for propaganda. It happened to me too, and it will happen again, despite my best efforts to resist. Everybody is lying or shading the truth now in this war. What I do not understand one bit is why so many people — they are all over social media — do not care if an atrocity claim, or an atrocity denial, is true, as long as it fits the narrative that they want to believe. I do not understand why people cannot seem to grasp that just because they support Ukraine in this war (or Russia), that that means everything their side claims must be true, and that everything the other side claims must be false.

“Truth is the first casualty of war,” as someone once said. Once again, the reason why we have to be so damned careful about truth claims here is that the Ukrainians are desperate to save their nation by convincing NATO to come into their war with Russia on their side. I don’t blame them for their desperation, but we are not them, and if we allow ourselves to be convinced by them, we will find ourselves in a shooting war with a nuclear-armed enemy. This is what we run the risk of:

In case anyone needs reminding of what Nuclear War actually means pic.twitter.com/pK3oUZpNUJ

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) March 1, 2022

UPDATE: Does it not bother you that Twitter takes it upon itself to decide what you can and cannot hear/read about the war? It censored these tweets from the Russian Embassy in London:

The Russian Embassy could well be lying here. But leave that to us to decide! I don’t trust Twitter censors any more than I trust the Russian Embassy. Twitter is managing the Narrative, as usual.

UPDATE.2: More Narrative management by the media, in this case, Britain’s Daily Mail. This is how its front page on the Internet looks right now:

I am grateful that the US president is trying hard not to be dragged into starting World War III. The Daily Mail is trying to lay blame for a chemical weapons attack (if it happens) on Biden, because his spokeswoman won’t commit America to attack Russia if it uses chemical weapons in Ukraine. Once again, people need to get it through their thick skulls that for NATO forces to enter into this war attacking Russia would almost certainly spark World War III with a nuclear power. Whatever evil the Russians do in Ukraine does not make it worth that risk. Somebody said in the comments box today, or maybe on Twitter, “So you’re saying that the Russians can do anything they want to Ukraine, and nobody can attack them because that would mean a serious risk of nuclear war?” Yeah, I am. If they attack NATO, all bets are off. But the Russians hold a trump card here: nuclear weapons. By using weapons of war to try to stop Russian evil in Ukraine, we could easily trigger an incomparably greater evil — the greatest evil, in fact: global nuclear holocaust.

I don’t like it either. If the Russians used chemical weapons on the Ukrainians, I would be happy to blow Russian troops to kingdom come. But this is the real world. Assad used chemical weapons against his people, and we didn’t do anything about it not because we are uncaring people, but because it was too risky. If we cannot stop all the evil in the world — and we can’t — then we have to have some kind of calculus to help us decide when it is prudent to launch a war, and when we simply have to bear the pain and shame of doing nothing.

I’m sitting in Budapest now. When the Soviets invaded this country, and this, its capital city, in 1956 to put down the revolution, President Eisenhower did not send in US troops to stop it. He judged that the suppression of Hungarian patriots was not worth the risk of nuclear war with the Russians, who exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949. Was he right or wrong about that? As someone who cares a lot about Hungary and Hungarians, my heart tells me he was wrong … but my head says that he was almost certainly right.

The post Truth & The Propaganda War appeared first on The American Conservative.

I commend to you heartily George O’Neill’s great TAC piece about the rottenness at the heart of Conservatism, Inc. George, who is a generous funder of conservative initiatives, writes about a meeting in Florida for donors that he attended late last year:

I was being foolish. Just as the meeting was to begin, in walked Matt Schlapp, the head of the group feasting on conservative donors at CPAC. Schlapp is the very definition of Conservatism, Inc. He provides the RNC and other establishment mouthpieces platforms to spin their views. And now, here he was purporting to offer a real alternative. It saddened me beyond words. After Schlapp’s presentation, replete with pep talks from a number of career operatives about how we could send money to a new and better organization, I realized the whole event was a head-fake to convince donors who are unwilling to support the Swamp to give money to a Swamp organization disguised as an anti-Swamp organization.

The good news is that the predators of GOP, Inc., and establishment conservative groups believe they have to pretend they are something new now, because the donors are simply walking away from their tired hustle. I and some others walked away more convinced we should not fund these grifts. More and more, people realize the futility of contributing to big GOP organizations or the fat, bloated battleships of Conservative Movement fame. They know their money goes to overhead, big salaries, lucrative consulting contracts for friends, fancy offices, and precious little actual engagement with voters or lawmakers.

More and more, people know that a “Republican Congress” for two years did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration invasion and endless wars. They know that Republican political operators will use the term “America First” as little more than a mantra hoping you will fall in line. But they can’t define what it means to put America first, let alone believe in it. Today we are being subjected to demands that America protect the borders of Ukraine, from politicians who have done nothing to protect our own borders and fellow citizens.

But more and more people have seen the path forward, and it does not include any of the major GOP organizations, which do not provide the promised results but only enrich their ranks. It does not include one “think tank” or advisory group. It does not include a single D.C.-based partisan organization.

Read it all. 

You should ask yourself: why is it that the most effective opposition to the racist, anti-American, destructive Critical Race Theory infesting American educational institutions and others is a young guy from the Pacific Northwest, Christopher Rufo, and not any Republican Party politician or DC think tank or activist group. Why is it that it took a self-organized coalition of parents in Northern Virginia to stand up effectively to arrogant CRT educrats, while Conservatism Inc. fiddled and fundraised? Why is by far the most important voice for conservative beliefs a broadcaster, Tucker Carlson, than anyone affiliated with the GOP establishment and Conservatism, Inc.? Donors, if you want to see real change, donate to people like Chris Rufo.

I was stunned this week to read that Matt Schlapp, one of the most important and successful conservative operators of his generation, writing sympathetically about Lia Thomas, the male-to-female transgender athlete who is destroying women’s athletics under woke NCAA rules allowing biological males who identify as women to compete against females. It is an outrage, not only against women athletes, but more broadly as an acute manifestation of a civilization-destroying madness sweeping our country: gender ideology. Don’t look to Washington Republicans for resistance. If GOP-led resistance is happening, it’s happening at the local level, with politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has directed the state’s child protection agency to investigate parents pursuing hormonal and surgical alterations of their minor children as child abuse. The case is tied up in court now, and Abbott might not prevail — but at least he’s fighting against this horrible phenomenon.

Similarly with Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida and his various initiatives, especially the controversial (to liberals) bill that prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in schools up to the third grade and limits it to age-appropriate in higher grades. Liberals are screaming that it punishes LGBT children and their families, but what it really does is protect the rights of parents to prevent their children from being propagandized by gender-ideology activists. Contrast that with the useless Republican Gov. of Utah, Spencer Cox, who plans to veto a bill passed by the state’s legislature that would prohibit transgender student athletes from sports competitions.

Anyway, here’s what Schlapp tweeted:

Now look, certainly young people suffering from gender dysphoria deserve our compassion, but that’s not the meaning of Schlapp’s tweet. It signals that the head of CPAC is opening itself to affirming gender ideology; notice that Schlapp uses female pronouns for this man. What about compassion for the young female athletes who are being dispossessed by this man and his powerful institutional allies? What about the young women who are, and who yet will, have to endure this penis-haver in their dressing rooms? What about what this normalization is doing to our society, with the destruction of gender norms?

If conservative leaders like Schlapp cannot even conserve the idea of the gender binary, a fundamental basis of human civilization, what the hell good are they? Seriously, what is the point? My guess is that Schlapp has looked at the demographic data and observed that Generation Z is far more accepting of transgenderism than its predecessors. He’s protecting the brand. If so, then he’s not about defending and advancing conservative principles, but about defending and advancing his brand. To hell with that.

But there’s more. Check out this thread by a pro-life activist:

CPAC claims to be the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the nation.

I’ve always been happy that #CPAC included the discussion of abortion and prolife speakers, and have spoken twice at the conference. Once pregnant and once as a new mom. pic.twitter.com/TzsXzttATc

— Alison H.Centofante (@AlisonHowardC) March 9, 2022

Grift. Obscene grift. More:

Watch this:

Asked by @news_ntd why there were no prolife speakers at CPAC 2022, Matt Schlapp said it was his decision. Incredibly problematic. pic.twitter.com/2dpnxOps8F

— Alison H.Centofante (@AlisonHowardC) March 9, 2022

 

This autumn, everybody expects the GOP to retake Congress. I certainly hope it does. But you watch: the right-wing Blobsters will probably end up satisfying itself with Owning The Libs instead of doing real things that help ordinary people, and bring the fight to the Left over substantive issues. It is not enough to be Not The Democrats, though my fear is that’s exactly the calculation the GOP is making. The main reasons conservatives like me have been trying to get my American confrères to pay close attention to Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is first, because he offers a different model of conservative governance, one based on prioritizing sovereignty and family values, and second, because he demonstrates what can be done if you fight for principles, not just relying on the Trump approach of prioritizing lib-owning, and making substantive policy and legislative accomplishments a sideshow.

In some ways, Chris Rufo is the Howard Jarvis of our time: a grassroots conservative who prioritized a particular issue (in Jarvis’s case, tax revolt) and ended up leading the conservative movement and the GOP in his direction.

CPAC remains enormously influential, but it has to be asked: has it lost its way? Has Conservatism Inc.? Do conservatives stand for something substantive, or do we simply want to hold power and amuse ourselves by pissing off liberals? I can’t believe that the grifters are going to prevail, in the end. The sooner they are shown the door, the better for us all. George O’Neill advises:

So, live local, give local, act local, and refuse to support the destructive designs of the tired hucksters.

The future of conservatism is happening outside of Washington, and beyond the decadent precincts of Conservatism Inc. George O’Neill represents the donor class. When and if they start redirecting their tithes away from the institutional “church” of conservatism to those that actually believe in something, and are willing to fight effectively for it, we will see real change. But not until.

Chris Rufo: donors, if you want to fund the future of EFFECTIVE, PRINCIPLED conservatism, he’s your man

 

The post Against Conservatism Inc’s Grift appeared first on The American Conservative.

From an unlikely source — The Pillar, a terrific Catholic newsletter — comes a detailed and well-reported piece about the shattering of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. It’s so well done, I reckon, because the guys at the Pillar — J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon — are both canon lawyers who understand the deeper issues in play. Their correspondent on the ground in Ukraine does a great job with it, quoting a variety of theologians and priests in Ukraine. Excerpt:

As Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill continues to support the Russian invasion of their country, priests in Ukraine’s Russian-affiliated Orthodox Church say their communion is splintering, and a formal divide now seems to many inevitable.

A growing split comes as bishops and priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), which falls under Kirill’s jurisdiction, push back against the Moscow patriarch’s support for Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.

Despite the well-known pro-Russian sympathies of the UOC-MP’s leader, Metropolitan Onufriy of Kyiv condemned the Russian president’s actions on Feb. 24, the first day of the war, describing Putin’s aggression against Ukraine as “Cain’s crime” — fratricide.

At the same time, several UOC-MP bishops announced they would cease commemorating Patriarch Kirill, who has been seen to give cover the invasion, in their liturgies.

There is a breakaway Ukrainian Orthodox Church that came into existence a few years ago. It is not recognized by the Moscow Patriarchate, and is considered to be uncanonical by many Orthodox, though the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul granted it autocephaly, prompting a schism. There is no relationship between the breakaway church and the one loyal to Moscow, but with a Ukrainian hierarchy.

Now, though, with Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church continuing to back Putin’s war, a total break with Moscow is brewing. Some Ukrainian priests of the church loyal to Moscow spoke on the record to The Pillar:

Fr. Andriy Kliushev a UOC-MP priest in Irpin, near Kyiv, stopped commemorating Patriarch Kirill in 2014.

He described the patriarch as the “ober-procurator” of the Holy Synod.

“In tsarist Russia there was such a position, the minister who oversaw religious affairs. I used to respect him a lot; we had high hopes for him. But now I’m disappointed. [Kirill] can not stop the war. But he could tell the truth into the face of the ‘tsar’ as Metropolitan Philip II of Moscow once did, exposing the atrocities of Ivan the Terrible.”

“Although,” Kliushev noted, “Phillip was a confessor who died as a martyr.”

UOC-MP priest Fr. Maksym Dynets assessed the position of Patriarch Kirill even more sharply, telling The Pillar he thinks the Church in Russia has become a mouthpiece of state propaganda.

“This structure is not only less and less Orthodox but also [less] Christian. What we’ve heard is not the voice of the Church; this is the voice of Goebbels’ state propaganda,” Dynets said.

Read it all. Good job, Pillar. Again, this is a very complicated story to tell, precisely because of Orthodox ecclesiology. The Pillar points out that no situation quite like the one emerging has ever happened in the history of the Orthodox Church. As an Orthodox Christian, I can tell you that the tragedy playing out here is tectonic. Patriarch Kyrill and Vladimir Putin are going to go down as the Russian leaders who lost Ukraine, politically and religiously. The only way Kyrill could possibly save Church unity at this point — if it’s even achievable — is to effectively martyr himself by publicly and unambiguously denouncing the war. Putin would do away with him somehow — either professionally or literally by martyring him — but he might have a chance at saving the unity of the Church. If not, though, Ukraine, the birthplace in the year 988 of Russian Orthodoxy, will be lost to Russia forever.

And how can you blame the Ukrainian Orthodox? If I were one, I would feel exactly the same way, especially if I had been loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate all these years, even in the face of the recent schism with the EP’s project. As an Orthodox Christian who is not under the jurisdiction of Moscow, but who loves Russian Orthodoxy, and who has been spiritually formed and nourished by the Russian Orthodox tradition, which has been one of God’s greatest gifts to me, I grieve this deeply. If you, reader, have been wondering about joining the Orthodox Church (Russian or otherwise), I beg you, do not let this scandal cause you doubt or hesitation. Yes, it damages our witness, but this too shall pass. And anyway, you cannot blame all the world’s Orthodox churches — Greeks, Arabs, Romanians, and the rest — for what Moscow does; you can’t even blame all Russian Orthodox, as there is a petition going around in which over 200 Russian Orthodox priests of the Moscow Patriarchate have publicly protested the war. Still, I recognize the scandal here, and I hate it.

The worst cost of Putin’s war is the loss of human life. But this comes next. This is fratricide, and by not openly condemning it, the Patriarch appears to bless it. For years some of my Orthodox friends in Moscow have been complaining that the Church is far too close to the State, and has compromised its independence. If true, we now see the true cost of that deal. What a long, painful Lent for the Orthodox Church in Russia and Ukraine! Russian Orthodoxy — grounded in Truth, long-suffering piety, and a matchless beauty that magnifies the Eternal — will survive this, as will Orthodoxy in Ukraine. But both will be diminished and wounded. It will be left to generations to come to heal this war between brothers — a war that did not have to happen, but was chosen by Vladimir Putin, and effectively sanctified by Patriarch Kyrill.

UPDATE: All this should cause Catholics who favor integralism to think hard about the wisdom of closely uniting Church and State. When the Church becomes a de facto arm of the State, people will hold it responsible for State decisions. The Russian state has channeled a fortune into the redevelopment of the Russian Orthodox Church after decades of persecution and destruction at the hands of the Soviet regime. This is all to the good — but now we see that it makes it very hard for the Church to speak prophetically to the State in times of crisis. The theory has it that the State benefits from the guidance of the Church, but to paraphrase the theologian and canonist Mike Tyson, everybody has a theory until the army of the State punches somebody in the mouth. The Church does get a seat at the table of power — but at what cost? I would love to see The Pillar do a story analyzing what lessons for Catholic integralism this situation in Russia and Ukraine offers — similarities, differences, and so forth.

UPDATE.2: I just arrived at a conference in Budapest. Met a visiting Ukrainian scholar, an Orthodox Christian. Very grim. He said, with reference to the future of the Orthodox Church in his homeland, “Everything is destroyed, all of the previous structures. Nothing will be the same again.”

The post Russian Orthodoxy’s Tragedy appeared first on The American Conservative.