Rod Dreher's Blog, page 18

My podcast partner Kale Zelden and I recorded tonight a terrific interview with a young woman who wishes to be known only by her first name, Helena. She is the author of a long and powerful Substack essay about what drew her into transgender culture as an anxious teenager, what it was like living on testosterone, and how she finally broke the spell and returned to her biological sex. This young woman was so articulate, insightful, and self-assured that it’s hard to believe she’s only 23. We’ll post the podcast as soon as it has been processed by the editor.

We could have talked to her for hours. One thing that lingers with me about the interview — and you get a lot of this in her piece — is Helena’s discussion about how Tumblr and fan fiction culture was a refuge from reality. Eventually, these girls (she’s talking mostly about girls) got so caught up in the made-up world that they decided to take control of their bodies and try to force their bodies to conform to their fantasies. In Helena’s account, though, the power of narrative, combined with peer pressure, was so great that she lost control of the process.

Listening to her explain this, I kept thinking about the philosopher Matt Crawford’s great 2016 book The World Beyond Your Head. In it, Crawford talks about how we end up imprisoned inside our heads, and lose touch with actual reality. In our podcast interview, Helena talked about how hard it is to live today with so much information coming at you constantly. If you go down the rabbit trail of online culture, you eventually become swept away by the maelstrom, and lose all direction of your life.

Crawford gets it. Below is an excerpt from my subscription-only Substack blog, Rod Dreher’s Diary, where I talked the other day about Crawford’s book — this, as part of my research into the idea of re-enchantment. Crawford writes:

The moralist and the sociologist are both right. The question of what to attend to is a question of what to value, and this question is no longer answered for us by settled forms of social life. We have liberated ourselves from all that. The downside is that as autonomous individuals, we often find ourselves isolated in a fog of choices. Our mental lives become shapeless, and more susceptible to whatever presents itself out of the ether.

But of course these presentations are highly orchestrated; commercial forces step into the void of cultural authority and assume a growing role in shaping our evaluative outlook on the world. Because of the scale on which these forces operate, our mental lives converge in a great massification— ironically, under the banner of individual choice.

Crawford says that in contemporary life, we have torn down all the structures that used to teach us how to direct our attention. Attention is the bridge between ourselves and the world beyond our heads. He writes:

One element of our predicament is that we engage less than we once did in everyday activities that structure our attention. Rituals do this, for example. They answer for us the question “What is to be done next?” and thereby relieve us of the burden of choice and reflection, as when we recite a liturgy.

But I want to focus on another sort of activity, one that is neither rote like ritual, nor simply a matter of personal choice. The activities I have in mind are skilled practices.

More on this in a second. Crawford says that today, we live in a culture that fetishizes individual autonomy, and that construes “freedom” as the absence of obstacles to the exercise, through free choice, of that autonomy. Politically, both left and right found a way to reconcile themselves with the autonomous self. Whether we are shopping for goods, sexual partners, experiences, etc., what matters is that We Get To Choose. He writes:

Understood literally, autonomy means giving a law to oneself. The opposite of autonomy thus understood is heteronomy: being ruled by something alien to oneself. In a culture predicated on this opposition (autonomy good, heteronomy bad), it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world— because everything located beyond your head is regarded as a potential source of heteronomy, and therefore a threat to the self.

The paradox is that the ideal of autonomy seems to work against the development and flourishing of any rich ecology of attention—the sort in which minds may become powerful and achieve genuine independence.

More:

Autonomy talk is a flattering mode of speech. It suggests that freedom is something we are entitled to, and it consists in liberation from constraints imposed by one’s circumstances. For several hundred years now, the ideal self of the West has been striving to secure its freedom by rendering the external world fully pliable to its will. For the originators of modern thought, this was to be accomplished by treating objects as projections of the mind; we make contact with them only through our representations of them.

Early in the twenty-first century, our daily lives are saturated with representations; we have come to resemble the human person as posited in Enlightenment thought. Such is the power and ubiquity of these representations that we find ourselves living a highly mediated existence.

The thing is, in this style of existence we ourselves have been rendered pliable—to whoever has the power to craft the most bewitching representations or to control the portals of public space through which we must pass to conduct the business of life.

Autonomy talk stems from Enlightenment epistemology and moral theory, which did important polemical work in their day against various forms of coercion. Times have changed. The philosophical project of this book is to reclaim the real, as against representations. That is why the central term of approbation in these pages is not “freedom” but “agency.” For it is when we are engaged in a skilled practice that the world shows up for us as having a reality of its own, independent of the self.

Crawford says that we are pulled out of ourselves by giving our attention to objects outside of our own heads. This is the only way we can create anything: through the tension that arises when we connect with something outside our heads (my notes say that this reminds me of Iain McGilchrist’s insight that the tension that arises from asymmetry is how creation happens).

The thing is, the more we prize individual autonomy, and the more we deny the authority of unchosen institutions, creeds, and practices, the more we become a prisoner to those entities with the power to manipulate our attention. Reading this in Crawford, I thought about totalitarianism, and how it works by eliminating any mediating institution between the individual and the all-powerful state.

Here is a passage that is deeply McGilchristian:

According to a school of thought that has been gaining traction in the last fifteen years, these facts—our embodiment, and the possibility of movement that our bodies provide—are no mere accessory to perception, but rather constitutive of the way we perceive. As one researcher puts it, “Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.”

We think through the body. The fundamental contribution of this school of psychological research is that it puts the mind back in the world, where it belongs, after several centuries of being locked within our heads. The boundary of our cognitive processes cannot be cleanly drawn at the outer surface of our skulls, or indeed of our bodies more generally. They are, in a sense, distributed in the world that we act in.

That said, the more our culture drives us to retreat into our heads, via “virtual reality” and suchlike, the less agency we have, and the less freedom. Put another way, if we conceive of the material world as nothing but “stuff” that we can manipulate to impose our will and ease our anxieties, we will lose touch with reality itself.

This is what we are doing. The overarching liturgy of our culture is towards denying any reality that is not chosen by the individual to suit their preferences. Crawford illustrates this by talking about the Mickey Mouse cartoons of the past, versus the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse today. The old ones, he says, built comic routines around Mickey, Goofy, and the other characters interacting with exaggerated representations of the physical world that did not do what they wanted (e.g., the Murphy bed that wouldn’t stay locked into the wall). The humor has to do with the limitations of the characters and their inability to master the world beyond their heads.

But today, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse sends a different message to young viewers:

The current episodes are all oriented not around frustration but around solving a problem. One does this by saying, “Oh Tootles!” This makes the Handy Highlight Dandy machine appear, a computerlike thing that condenses out of the Cloud and presents a menu of four “Mouseke-tools” on a screen, by the use of which the viewer is encouraged to be a “Mouseke-doer.”

There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny. Like most children’s television these days, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is doggedly devoted not to capturing experience, that is, to psychological truth, but to psychological adjustment. It is not a depiction so much as an intervention—on behalf of parents, teachers, and others who must manage children.

The well-adjusted child doesn’t give in to frustration; he asks for help (“Oh Tootles!”) and avails himself of the ready-made solutions that are presented to him. To be a Mouseke-doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances.” The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

Ah ha! This is the very point that John the Savage makes to Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Europe, in their showdown in Huxley’s Brave New World. Here’s a link to Chapter 17, where the showdown takes place. It’s an amazing exchange! Mond lectures the Savage that there is no need for God anymore, because all things are taken care of by the State, and all anxieties are managed by therapeutic use of soma, the feelgood drug (“Christianity without tears,” is how Mond characterizes soma). Here is Mond reading a passage from Cardinal Newman to the Savage, to show him what kind of mentality has been conquered by the Brave New World:

He opened the book at the place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. ‘”We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God’s property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way—to depend on no one—to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …’”

That world is banished to the past now, says Mond. Man now lives with the illusion of independence, because all his needs are taken care of. Even the need for a sense of danger is artificially induced. Everything is managed by expertise and technology. All things unpleasant have been banished. But that means, the Savage understands, that man has been abolished. A world in which there is no friction, no asymmetries, a world where everything is easy, is a world that is inhuman.

Crawford:

But when dumb nature is understood to be threatening to our freedom as rational beings, it becomes attractive to construct a virtual reality that will be less so, a benignly nice Mickey Mouse Clubhouse where there is no conflict between self and world; no contingency that hasn’t been anticipated by the Handy Dandy machine.

… The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence. With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration. And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from a direct confrontation with the world. Being addressed to us, these representations allow us to remain comfortable in a little “me-world” of manufactured experience. If these representations make use of hyperpalatable mental stimuli, the world of regular old experience may come to seem not only frustrating but unbearably drab by comparison.

Isn’t that true? The fragility that has been engineered into a generation makes them easy to manipulate. Those who control the narrative of these young people, and who can provide them with a narrative that protects them from having to deal with facts and realities that frustrate them, can get these young people to do whatever they want them to. One thinks of the fragile students who demand that authority on campus protect them from unwanted thoughts and speech. This is going to become much worse once we begin experiencing the Metaverse.

“The design of things can facilitate embodied agency or diminish it in ways that lead us further into passivity and dependence,” writes Crawford. He goes on to talk about automobile design, and how it can either abstract us further from the physical world, or integrate us more fully into it. Crawford — who, recall, is a motorcycle mechanic — discusses how certain aspects of automotive engineering draw us into the physical reality of the phenomenon of driving. He writes:

This too is part of the time-locked stream of information, with varying time signatures, that makes our brains “bind” our various senses together and decide that this is not a dream or hallucination. There is indeed a “thing in itself” out there beyond our heads, revealed by coherent sensory patterns. But only if those patterns are preserved and conveyed to us.

My notes say, “Is this why the inquirers in our Orthodox parish say that Orthodoxy seems ‘real’ to them?” Orthodox Christianity is so sensual, meaning that it appeals not just to the mind but to the entire body, and it is heavily ritualized, meaning that one involves the body in worship to a degree I’ve never encountered in other forms of Christianity. For example, this week, the first full week of Orthodox Lent, worshipers who go to church each night for parts of the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, will find themselves flat on their faces during parts of the liturgy, expressing with this physical gesture of extreme humility their sorrow for their sins. This gets you outside your head, for sure.

More Crawford:

Perhaps this is what is left to us, given the deep contradiction that we live in: on the one hand, we have the individualist ideal—one is tempted to say the autistic ideal—of the unencumbered self who acts in freedom, and on the other hand we feel beset by insecurities and obscurities that emanate from the collective world. These latter are often technological in nature. We therefore seek out other, personal technologies that can give us safe haven: “manufactured certainties,” as Schüll puts it, that help us “manage [our] affective states.”

That is what computer games seem to do for our quasi-autistic cohort of young men; it is what machine gambling does for those who have gone down that particular path. Perhaps such pursuits help us manage the anxiety and depression that come when experiences of genuine agency are scarce, and at the same time we live under a cultural imperative of being autonomous. Escape to the autistic zone, where there are no impediments between your will and its realization, is precisely the remedy that is wanted if your life resembles that of the passive kitten on the carousel of modern life, who is nonetheless exhorted at each rotation to “seize the day!”

As we have seen in the case of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, children are educated into this contradiction from an early age. The Handy Dandy machine presents manufactured certainties, the point of which is to reassure the child that every problem is solvable—if only we allow some other entity to leap in on our behalf (“Oh Tootles!”) and insulate us from the kind of contingencies that easily lead to frustration. As we saw in our treatment of embodied cognition, these are precisely the contingencies we have to learn and accommodate ourselves to if we are to achieve adult agency and join ourselves to the world, grasped as something independent of the self.

Reading this made me think of the explosion of transgenderism, especially among the young. If we find it difficult to face the world as males or females, well, we have now created a world in which the deployment of medical technology promises deliverance from that anxiety by remaking our very bodies to have them suit our inner desires. Deploy the technology, then use social techniques to change laws and customs to remake the world to suit ourselves. We think that this is normal, because the dominant cultural liturgies of our time have taught us that there are no obstacles to achieving our will. We manufacture certainties.

So far, this strategy seems to be working, because the ideology of freedom, autonomy, and therapeutic technology condition all of us to accept this model. It is a false remedy for a very real crisis. But reality — Nature — will always have the final word. Always. There is no place far enough inside your head to escape a hungry belly, an empty wallet, or the enemy’s missile.

[End of excerpt.]

I was struck, and am haunted, by Helena’s warning about how little parents know about what their kids are exposed to online. She said that few parents would let their kids go roam around to the houses of total strangers for hours on end. Most responsible parents would want to know something about the places their kids were going and the kind of people they were going to meet there. But parents today never think about where their kids are going when they spend six straight hours online. Well, we didn’t give our kids online access when they were little, but we did let them watch a lot of children’s TV. Never once did I stop to think about how shows like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse were formatting their minds and engineering their imaginations. Did you?

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Lord have mercy:

 A Russian air strike badly damaged a children’s hospital in the besieged Ukranian port city of Mariupol on Wednesday, burying patients under rubble and injuring women in labour, Ukraine said.

The bombing, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called an “atrocity,” took place despite an agreed ceasefire to enable thousands of civilians trapped in the city to escape.

The city council said the hospital had been hit several times by an air strike, causing “colossal” destruction.

“Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage,” Zelenskiy said on Twitter.

There is video of the badly damaged hospital. Look:

10 minutes ago, Russian invaders launched an airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol pic.twitter.com/3wWw3LRS4j

— Roman Hryshchuk (@grishchukroma) March 9, 2022

A children’s hospital. The Russian military carried out an airstrike on a children’s hospital. There’s more video at Bloomberg, including of the moment the Russian bomb or missile hit. The Ukraine government says children were in the hospital at the time of the strike, but so far, independent media haven’t been able to confirm that. There is no doubt, though, that the children’s hospital was destroyed. There’s a huge bomb crater in the courtyard.

Patriarch Kyrill, in the name of God, find your conscience, and find your voice! Putin and his generals are bringing divine judgment onto Russia.

Before you ask, no, I don’t believe that NATO should attempt to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the wake of this, despite President Zelensky’s plea. That would mean World War III, which would likely mean a nuclear exchange. Do you understand that? A nuclear exchange. We cannot risk that. Still, all great Neptune’s ocean will not wash this blood clean from Putin’s hand.

UPDATE: From its record in Syria, seems like bombing hospitals is a thing that the Russian military does. 

However this thing ends with Ukraine, the reputation of Russia in the world will not recover for decades. Putin has led his country into disaster.

UPDATE.2: I don’t think Tom Nichols wrote this in direct response to the maternity hospital bombing, but it nevertheless explains why despite the horror of that attack, we have to keep our heads or countless more innocent people will die:

Let me see if I can (exhaustedly) clarify something here.

I am not worried that a direct NATO-Russia confrontation instantly produces WWIII. I am worried that the chaos of war, with heightened alerts will create the space for accidents and huge miscalculations. Same outcome. /1

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 9, 2022

UPDATE.3: Lots of pushback against this story, saying that the maternity hospital had been evacuated prior to the bombing, and that Ukrainian military had been using it as a base — the idea being to draw Russian fire to give Ukraine a propaganda victory. Please post credible sources questioning the Ukrainian narrative — I’m eager to know if I’ve been played here. If I have, then I will apologize and never again rush to publish anything, even if reported by Western sources, and even if accompanied by video support. And I will denounce Volodymyr Zelensky as a fraud who is eager to lie to us to compel Western publics to force their leaders into declaring World War III on Russia.

(I will still insist that Patriarch Kyrill denounce the war, though.)

I’m not going to take Russian sources as legitimate, though they may be telling the truth here. I just don’t know. But this is really interesting, and troubling:

the same victim in three different operations? SIGNAL discovered a girl photographed by photographers on the ruins of a maternity hospital in Mariupol. She turned out to be a model and a popular beauty blogger in Mariupol. Her name is Marianna Podgurskaya. pic.twitter.com/uzQdtq77pX

— Hotaru (@spookgirl19) March 10, 2022

Details:

Additionally, on March 7, Russia’s 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. Besides, they fully destroyed one of the city’s kindergartens.

The Russians believed this before the bombing, which indicates that they did not intentionally target a working maternity hospital, but a military target. The Russians might have been wrong in this belief, but that at least exonerates them from intentionally and heartlessly targeting a maternity hospital.

But what if they were right? I want to know — and if I allowed myself to be taken in by Ukrainian propaganda, I will retract and apologize without qualification.

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News from the world of the morally pure:

The Cardiff Philharmonic has cancelled an all-Tchaikovsky programme as ‘inappropriate at this time’.

The concert included his decidedly apolitical second symphony, known as the Little Russian.

The orchestra says: ‘: In light of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, with the agreement of St David’s Hall, feel the previously advertised programme including the 1812 Overture to be inappropriate at this time. The orchestra hope you will continue to support them and enjoy the revised programme.’

This is unutterably stupid. At the start of the First World War, the Proms conductor Sir Henry Wood informed the British government that he would continue performing Wagner and other Germans. The same rule prevailed in the Hitler war.

Only the Nazis ever banned Tchaikovsky.

Welcome to Cardiff 2022.

As the Rt. Rev. Donald J. Trump hath said, “Everything woke turns to shit.” Even Welsh orchestras.

Here’s a trigger warning for you who go into anaphylactic shock when exposed to anything Russian: The Moscow Times is a good source to read about the Russian government’s persecution of Russians who publicly oppose Putin’s war. For example:

One of Russia’s oldest universities will expel at least 13 students who were detained at the anti-war protests that have erupted across the country in recent weeks, the Kommersant business daily reported Wednesday.

The prestigious St. Petersburg State University is reportedly expected to draft more expulsion orders for students after protests against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continued into this week.

“I won’t get your hopes up, these students are doomed,” Mikhail Mochalov, chairman of the university’s student council, was quoted as saying in a student chat room Sunday.

Mochalov said the university’s vice rector is allegedly citing an unknown Interior Ministry letter as an “indisputable basis” for the students’ expulsion.

Here’s another story about how Russians who signed a letter calling for peace being fired. 

It’s one thing for us to demand that ordinary Russians get out onto the street, or in some other way publicly protest their leader’s war. But we need to understand that this comes with a severe cost to them. More than ever we need to refuse anything that causes us to dehumanize Russian people. I understand that the Russian government’s propaganda machine has for years worked to dehumanize Ukrainians, to prepare Russians to accept this war. But now arts organizations are choosing to censor themselves in the cause of construing all things Russian as inhuman.

This is not only a total violation of liberal principles, but it is also morally crazy. I know the head of MI6 thinks that the most important moral difference between the West and Russia is that we embrace LGBT rights, but I prefer to think that it’s in that we value free expression and tolerance. I like to believe that we are not the kind of people who ban Tchaikovsky because he is Russian. During the intense struggle against apartheid in the 1980s, nobody banned South African writers or musicians. China’s monstrous treatment of Tibet and the Uyghur people of Xinjiang does not provoke us to ban Chinese art, film, or literature.

Why Russians? During the Cold War, when Russia was ruled by a Communist dictatorship, and the West and the Soviet Union were at each other’s throats with nuclear missiles, we believed that it was important to have artistic and cultural exchanges so we could experience each other’s humanity. What happened?

In fact, we are not the liberals we once were. Woke institutions and the woke people who run them politicize everything, like a totalitarian state. The orchestra has to silence Tchaikovsky to protest the war launched by the man who is firing and punishing Russians who open their mouths to criticize the war. Because see, we’re morally superior to them, or something.

Please, parents, don’t let your little children watch old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. They might be tainted by exposure to cartoon Russians, and lose their precious bodily fluids by peeing their pants in horror.

UPDATE: It has just come out that there is more complexity to the story than first reported. It still in no way justifies what the orchestra did, in my view — nuts to these “best of intentions” — but it’s not quite as bad as first reported:

I just followed this up with Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, who said the following:@MusicMagazine, any plans to update your story, and give it some much-needed context? https://t.co/V8j1bX5m8c pic.twitter.com/zntzlh7fDQ

— Hugh Morris (@hwfmorris) March 9, 2022

UPDATE.2: Good piece by Jacob Siegel at Tablet about the stupidity and immorality of trashing everything Russian. Excerpt:

The notion that individuals should have their employment conditioned on the actions of a foreign government, or their willingness to denounce those actions, is frankly gross and authoritarian—the kind of thing I was raised to believe happened in Russia, not the United States.

In an atmosphere of intense anti-Russian sentiment, it becomes suspect merely to question these firings—let alone the utterly devastating impact of major financial institutions like PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa deciding that they will no longer do business with Russian cardholders. That decision affects any Russian who took out a credit card in their home country, including those who hate Putin, have protested against the war, or are now living abroad. Is collective financial punishment of this sort justified to end the Russian assault on Ukraine? Perhaps, if indeed it has that effect. But it will involve making normal, nonpolitical people suffer for the crimes of the government, and attempting to erase that suffering by dehumanizing those people is cruel and cowardly.

The point of all this, one suspects, is to make it easier for war spectators with no skin in the game to imagine that they are “doing something” and “contributing to the cause.” Preoccupied with their two minutes of hate, these people get to feel righteous while acting like small-minded, power-tripping chauvinists. They get all the old-fashioned thrill of picking on foreigners with none of the guilt. Maybe, condemning random Russians helps them feel better about the ways that U.S. policies have exacerbated the conflict while empowering Moscow to be a strategic negotiating partner in a new Iran deal.

Read it all. 

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I can’t get this MMA fighter Bryce Mitchell off my mind. He’s a working class white dude from Arkansas who was asked what he thought about the Ukraine situation. His response, in part:

When he’s not in the ring, Mitchell is a cattle farmer. He also holds odd beliefs, such as that Covid was engineered by the US Government and released deliberately into the population, and that mass shootings might be staged to justify taking away guns. You are thinking: wow, what a crackpot, why listen to him? Well, aside from the fact that he’s right on this particular issue, you should listen because this man and his social class are the kind of people who are sent to fight America’s wars. He is a straight-outta-central-casting Deplorable. A Bitter Clinger too, probably. Ha ha, look at the hick, some of you are saying. That “hick” has more common sense about what’s happening now than Sen. Lindsey Graham, among others.

Look at this poll from March 1:

There it is: the poorer you are, the less eager you are to want to go off and fight this war. Mind you, if NATO is attacked, America has no choice but to fight. Still, the point is that those making the least money are the ones least eager to fight, while the wealthier you are, and therefore the more insulated from consequences, the more eager you are to fight. While the class warfare aspect of these findings are important, it seems to me that of equal importance is the finding that even if war broke out in Europe, only half of Americans think the US should be involved. Think about what that says about support for our NATO commitments. My guess is that this is a reflection on twenty years of failed US warmaking. Most people are just tired of it — except for the richest Americans, of course.

Tucker Carlson was on fire again last night, talking about the tsunami of economic misery we’re about to suffer because of all this:

Two things can be true at the same time: that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal SOB, and that the American leadership class is driving our country into the ground for no good reason.

I really hope you will watch that Tucker segment. The man is saying radical things about the ruling class. He lays hard, too, into Republican leadership in Washington, saying that they are all screwing over their voters. Who knows how much longer he will be permitted to be on Fox… .

You watch: when our economy crashes because of all this, the ruling class, with Republican Party support, will construct a social credit system to control the dissent. As I have been saying, what is being done to the Russian people will ultimately be done to any and all of us here at home who get in the way of the ruling class in government and business. It is worth noting that only some of the withdrawal of US businesses from Russia is happening because of sanctions; most of it is the business class deciding of one accord to punish Russia. That is certainly their right, but listen to me, if you don’t think Woke Capitalism is preparing itself to cut any one of us out of the economy to punish us for being unpatriotic, bigoted, or whatever, you are fooling yourself. Watch the Tucker clip and listen to Sen. Elizabeth Warren talking about how the state has to go after crypto now to force crypto companies to stop doing business with Russians.

Putin’s claims that Russia invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country are absurd … but not totally removed from reality. The Azov Battalion is a longstanding anti-Russia militia made of actual neo-Nazis.That’s not Putinist propaganda: it’s true. In 2014, the Atlantic Council, the powerful Washington think tank, published a stirring piece praising Azov’s patriotism. Read this piece from VICE about how the neo-Nazi militia became respectable in Ukraine. Again, this doesn’t justify Putin’s invasion, but it damn sure ought to make you understand that the black hat/white hat vision of this war is false and manipulative. Everybody is so in love with the idea of Ukrainian president Zelensky as a hero — he really has been brave — that they are willing to excuse the fact that he too is an agent of propaganda aimed at manipulating the West into coming into the war on his side (e.g., the staged photos, the claim that Russia intentionally shelled a nuke plants, etc.). I can’t blame him, really, for going all-out to save his country, but Americans ought to realize that we are being sold a Narrative.

Part of that Narrative is strutting like a peacock on the American stage. The US ruling class — the professional managerial class, I mean — really does believe that America is on the Right Side of History. That history includes redefining marriage and family to suit ruling-class sexual values. Richard Hanania writes about how Vladimir Putin became the Great Satan of the ruling class after Russia in 2013 passed a law banning “LGBT propaganda” aimed at the young. More:

The US response in the media to Pussy Riot and the anti-gay law was nothing short of hysterical, and coverage of Russia, a country that had previously been viewed largely with indifference by American elites, has never been the same. My impression is that the gay propaganda law may have gotten more coverage in the American press than any other event that happened in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

In the 2012 election, when Romney called Russia “our greatest geopolitical foe,” Obama famously responded that the 1980s called and it wanted its foreign policy back. This was before the gay propaganda law. Although it’s hard to prove that this was the turning point, as someone who was studying international relations at the time on a university campus and who paid close attention to American politics, it felt as if some Rubicon had been crossed and any move towards friendlier relations was impossible. By 2015, even before the rise of Trump, Putin was not the leader of a country, but a Hollywood villain.

In 2014, we saw the overthrow of Yanukovych, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and the beginning of the war in Eastern Ukraine. While this was a big deal to foreign policy hawks, it did not capture the liberal imagination in the same way that the gay propaganda law did. Russiagate required years of demonization in order to take off, and beginning in 2016 Putin became not only a homophobe and anti-feminist, but the man who may ultimately end American democracy.

More:

I think most people are going to be inherently skeptical of the idea that LGBT and identity politics more generally play such a large role in international affairs. Yet people have less trouble accepting the fact that largely symbolic culture war issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation drive domestic politics. Foreign policy elites are from the same class that gave us the Great Awokening, and if your model of members of this class involves them being illogical and destructive fanatics on matters of identity (the correct model), you should assume that they take their attitudes with them when thinking about international affairs. Their assumptions, deepest convictions, and construction of reality shape the ways in which we discuss geopolitical issues, which most Americans have no firsthand experience with.

One may ask why Pussy Riot and the Russian gay propaganda law made such a big impression in the United States when other countries like Saudi Arabia have much worse records on human rights. There are some 71 countries right now that ban homosexual relations. Russia didn’t even do that, and there is apparently a gay scene in Moscow that looks a lot like it does anywhere else in Europe.

Russian opposition to LGBT triggers American elites more than anti-gay laws and practices elsewhere because Russia is a white nation that justifies its policies based on an appeal to Christian values. Unlike a country like Hungary, it actually matters for international politics. Remember, we’re talking about the same elite that can only get excited about random attacks on Asians if they can pretend it’s white people who are doing it, and can’t be bothered to care about black people shooting each other every day but will make excuses for those who burn cities down in response to a police officer shooting a criminal in the course of an arrest. Homophobic Muslims or Africans will never inspire all that much righteous fury in these people. The template of “white conservative Christians bad” is fundamental to their worldview, and this leads to not only hostility towards Putin, but also nations like Hungary and Poland, even if the latter are uneasily accepted as friends because they were grandfathered into NATO, the alliance that is of course aimed at Russia.

Yep. Last night I gave a talk to a group of college students in a small city in the north of Hungary. I talked about wokeness and sexual politics. I played for the students the clip of the Blues Clues Pride Parade propaganda created for pre-K children. You should have seen their faces. One girl sitting on my right turned her head away; she couldn’t believe that this was being promoted for little children in America. Yes, I told her: this is who we have become as a nation. It’s a country whose ruling class considers it a sacred obligation to destroy traditional family norms. The people who make and promote this stuff are the same people who falsely call Hungary a fascist dictatorship.

Look what appeared on Twitter yesterday. Tom Bevan runs Real Clear Politics:

Last night my 5th grader told us his vocabulary words for “science” class this week:

adolescence
consent
transgender
cisgender
non-binary

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) March 8, 2022

For those of you who questioned whether I made this up. pic.twitter.com/p9WZfdz1bn

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) March 9, 2022

Keep your eyes on hating Putin, and you will not be able to see how the US ruling class is destroying your children’s moral sense, and concept of normality.

To repeat: two things can be true at the same time: Putin is a war criminal SOB for invading Ukraine, and the Western ruling class is going to use Putin’s evil deed to further entrench itself and its values. Why is it that though Putin’s values regarding sex and sexuality are every bit as conservative as those held by the Saudi monarchy, nobody in the US ruling class cares about that? Why is it that Xi Jinping holds the same or similar values, runs actual concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims, and oversees a techno-totalitarian surveillance state that puts anything Putin does to shame … yet nobody in the US ruling class much cares. I think Hanania gets it: “The template of ‘white conservative Christians bad’ is fundamental” to the Western ruling class’s worldview. I remind you that the head of MI6, the CIA of Britain, publicly stated that the most fundamental difference between the West and Putin is over the way we regard LGBT.

I didn’t make that up. You can mock the Russian Orthodox patriarch for saying that this war is about LGBT — and I agree that it was a foolish thing to say in that context, especially as he has had nothing to say about how Russian bombs are falling on Ukrainian civilians — but the top spy in the UK has done the same thing, in terms of framing the war as a moral crusade.

Do you see the double standard here? You are permitted to make this observation without criticism from the ruling class, but only if you frame it in the “correct” way — not on the side of the Patriarch, but on the side of the British spy chief.

Shouldn’t that make you think about what’s being done here? About who benefits from these narratives? The same ruling class that is flooding our children’s schools with gender ideology, to the point of having written policies directing teachers to deceive parents about their children, and the same class that is busy destroying the foundations of American nationhood and constitutional order with their ideological fables about race, and punishing through social shame and other methods those who dissent — these are the same people who are on TV and in the newspapers exhorting Americans to accept their own impoverishment and dispossession to hurt the Great Satan, Putin.

Who benefits here? Why does it appear that our ruling class (including the media) do not seem capable of thinking about second and third-order effects? As Tucker points out, the US traded with Russia when it was ruled by a Communist dictatorship, including the tyrant Stalin, who is personally responsible for the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. Why is Putin even worse than Stalin? Why are we all being commanded now to regard all things Russian as so evil that we cannot even look upon them, listen to them, or have anything at all to do with them?

I understand that Putin is doing the same thing in Russia regarding the West. Of course he is: he is a de facto dictator. But I thought we in the West were different from that. I thought the most important things that separated us from countries like Putin’s Russia is our respect for liberal principles like free speech, open debate, reasoned deliberation, tolerance, and all those things. Well, I was wrong. The most important thing is that we fly the Pride flag, and Putin does not.

This is why I am convinced that what they’re doing to Russia now, they will do to conservative Christians, Deplorables, and Bitter Clingers — and they will justify it as part of the fight against Russia.

And this is how they are going to use this conflict to discredit any right-wing populist criticism of the neoliberal order. Russia’s stupid and cruel invasion of Ukraine was a great gift to these people. They’re thrilled that people on the national conservative right seem to be put on the defensive — as if any of us ever thought Putin was a great leader whom the West should emulate. It feels so good to have moral clarity once again. You watch: anybody who questions the Narrative in any way — like, say, asking out loud what exactly we are accomplishing by making the lives of tens of millions of Americans much harder, just to rub Putin’s nose in the dirt — will be further denounced as an agent of Putin propaganda today, and as a “domestic terrorist” tomorrow. All of this is a great way to silence criticism of the Great Awokening of the US military. Again, it is an important sign that the chief of British intelligence said the most important thing distinguishing the West from the new Evil Empire is the way we all regard homosexuality and transgenderism. So listen here, churches: if you don’t get on board with this message, if you stand by what the Bible says, then you are obviously Putin’s useful idiots, and will be treated as such during this new Cold War.

Yesterday, when I was in the train station here in Budapest, I tried to buy a Coke Zero for the trip, but had to walk away from this one vendor, because she only accepted cash, not cards. That was the first time that has ever happened to me in Budapest, in the half-year I have spent here cumulatively. I realized as I walked to the next convenience store, which did accept cards, that I almost never have cash in my wallet here. I too have been conditioned to live cashless. It would be so easy to cut me off from the economy: just make it impossible to use cash for daily transactions, and you make everybody vulnerable to the Elizabeth Warrens of the world, who would, with the push of a button, make it impossible for you to buy or sell if the ruling class determined that you were a political enemy.

This is coming. This is accelerating. It’s why I say in Live Not By Lies that we are living in a “Kolakovic moment,” a period of preparation in which all of us who are likely to run afoul of the ruling class’s priorities had better busy ourselves preparing networks — economic, religious, and otherwise — within which to live and thrive when the persecution starts. Russia brought this disaster on itself with its unjust invasion of Ukraine, but again and again I say to you: everything that the ruling class of the West is doing to Russia, they will sooner or later do to people like Bryce Mitchell … and people like you and your family. We are all indeed about to be a lot poorer, and the way the ruling class is going to control dissent until they can get the social credit system in place is to demonize people like Bryce Mitchell, Tucker Carlson, Richard Hanania, J.D. Vance, and, well, me, as Putin apologists. Well, if I’m a Putin apologist, I’m a sorry one: I hope Russia loses this war. I don’t think it will, but it deserves to. Yet — and here we go again with the Two Things That Can Be True At The Same Time thing — in no way do I think the American establishment deserves to win, whatever “winning” is when you have a country that has been beaten to hell by two years of Covid, and is now about to be crushed by much higher prices for gas and for everything, even as we continue to be told that we are a bunch of homophobic white supremacist bigots whose children need to be separated from our wickedness.

The post The Bryce Mitchell Option appeared first on The American Conservative.

I just returned to Budapest from most of the day spent in Miskolc, a small city in northern Hungary. Getting off at Keleti railway station, I walked with a friend through the side hall where charitable organizations and the government are processing refugees. I tell you, it is damned difficult to stand there with those poor people and not burn with anger at Putin for launching this war.

It’s also hard not to burn at the American leadership for encouraging Ukraine to think it could be part of NATO. I know many of you want there to be simple good guys and simple bad guys here. I don’t see it that way. Yes, the greater part of this war is all on Vladimir Putin, who has brought down economic destruction on his own country. But what is going on with this?

Oh, so when the Russians said we were developing chemical weapons in their backyard… https://t.co/lkgXrpjYkc

— Micah Meadowcroft (@Micaheadowcroft) March 8, 2022

Has the US been carrying out biological experiments there that they can’t do in the US? I don’t know, but something is not right here.

I see that Poland, which is dying to fight Russia, wants to give its fighter jets to the US for transfer to Ukraine. The idea is that Russia would be too scared to attack the US for sending fighters to the country with which it (Russia) is at war. This seems like an insane risk for us to take. We seem to be edging closer and closer to World War III, but it was a relief to hear that the Pentagon said it was not planning on receiving those jets and, well, flying them into a country at war with Russia. 

Look at this:

1) This letter, calling for a “Limited No-Fly Zone” in Ukraine is shocking, given who has signed it. Former generals & ambassadors, current heads or members of think tanks or foundations. People who understand that this would mean war with Russia. https://t.co/F2scQDkO9e

— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) March 8, 2022

Tucker Carlson last night knocked it out of the park. This is so damn good. Is anybody else on American media saying things like this? Watch till the very end, with the remarks by the MMA fighter from Arkansas:

That MMA fighter was asked in a press conference what he thought about the Ukraine war. He said he doesn’t know what’s going on over there, and doesn’t think anybody really does. He says if the US were invaded, he would dig in his boots and fight. But he is not about to go over and fight a war overseas because American politicians blundered into it.

He must not be a Democrat. New Quinnipiac Poll finds:

As the world witnesses what is happening to Ukraine, Americans were asked what they would do if they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country? A majority (55 percent) say they would stay and fight, while 38 percent say they would leave the country. Republicans say 68 – 25 percent and independents say 57 – 36 percent they would stay and fight, while Democrats say 52 – 40 percent they would leave the country.

Meanwhile, Biden has just cut off Russian oil and gas, at a time when gasoline prices are higher than they have ever been (but the Quinnipiac Poll finds strong support among American voters for this move). Russia in turn has cut off supplies like fertilizer to the rest of the world. How are we going to feed ourselves? Last week, a Hungarian friend said, “A lot of people who have never known hunger are going to find out what that’s like.” I didn’t understand what he meant; now I do. Tucker talks about how this is going to devastate the US economy. What kind of leadership do we have in this country?

Meanwhile, what’s going on with the Silicon Valley tech bros who help run this economy?  From the NY Post:

But as she got deeper into the tech revolution, Segall discovered that it wasn’t all about reinventing culture and bringing people closer together. Much of modern tech was about sex and experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what’s considered healthy sexuality.

Or, as Madame Rose asked Segall: “Want to see the nipple clamps?”

Hey, I got a letter today from a friend I had written to ask about his job hunt. He was fired nine months ago by his previous firm for refusing a vaccine shot. He’s a very well-educated and accomplished tech professional. He is an immigrant who is a naturalized US citizen, and who has a strange name. He is also a white guy. He can’t find work. He writes:

I have been told many times by people I knew who were listing a job position: “yes, you are a perfect match but the internal directive is to hire a black woman at any cost” or something like that. Some people when they see me (it’s not obvious from my name) stop talking with me immediately.

He has stopped looking, and now, in his fifties, is learning a blue-collar trade. He says it’s worth it to get away from all the DEI bullsh*t in his former profession.

I wonder how my friend celebrated World Women’s Day today? Not like Joe Biden:

President Biden on Tuesday announced he will ask Congress for “$2.6 billion for foreign aid programs that promote gender equity worldwide, more than double the size of last year’s request,” The Associated Press reports.

The woke economy, folks. Hope people remember this when we’re struggling to feed ourselves later this year, and can’t get to our jobs because we can’t afford to fill up our tanks.When all this crashes, it’s going to crash so damn hard. You’ll want to be on the side of that Arkansas MMA fighter, not Silicon Valley perverts, Washington politicians, retired generals, think-tankers, war machinists, DEI baizuocrats, school kiddie groomers, or any of these other people ruining America.

UPDATE: Um, wow.

The post Black Swan Flock appeared first on The American Conservative.

There has been a lot of eye-rolling in the West at this section of the Sunday sermon given by Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church:

For eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in the Donbass. And in the Donbass there is rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values ​​that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is such a test for the loyalty of this government, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of visible “freedom”. Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible – this is a gay parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of loyalty to that very powerful world; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world, they become strangers to it.

But we know what this sin is, which is promoted through the so-called marches of dignity. This is a sin that is condemned by the Word of God – both the Old and the New Testament. Moreover, the Lord, condemning sin, does not condemn the sinner. He only calls him to repentance, but not to ensure that through a sinful person and his behavior, sin becomes a life standard, a variation of human behavior – respected and acceptable.

If humanity recognizes that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity agrees that sin is one of the options for human behavior, then human civilization will end there. And gay parades are designed to demonstrate that sin is one of the variations of human behavior. That is why in order to enter the club of those countries, it is necessary to hold a gay pride parade. Not to make a political statement “we are with you”, not to sign any agreements, but to hold a gay parade. And we know how people resist these demands and how this resistance is suppressed by force. This means that we are talking about imposing by force a sin condemned by God’s law, and therefore, by force to impose on people the denial of God and His truth.

Therefore, what is happening today in the sphere of international relations has not only political significance. We are talking about something different and much more important than politics. We are talking about human salvation, about where humanity will end up, on which side of God the Savior, who comes into the world as the Judge and Creator, on the right or on the left. Today, out of weakness, stupidity, ignorance, and most often out of unwillingness to resist, many go there, to the left side. And all that is connected with the justification of sin, condemned by the Bible, is today a test for our faithfulness to the Lord, for our ability to confess faith in our Savior.

Everything that I say has not just some theoretical meaning and not only a spiritual meaning. Around this topic today there is a real war. Who is attacking Ukraine today, where the suppression and extermination of people in the Donbass has been going on for eight years; eight years of suffering and the whole world is silent – what does that mean? But we know that our brothers and sisters are really suffering; moreover, they may suffer for their loyalty to the Church. And so today, on Forgiveness Sunday, on the one hand, as your shepherd, I call on everyone to forgive sins and insults, including where it is very difficult to do this, where people are at war with each other. But forgiveness without justice is capitulation and weakness. Therefore, forgiveness must be accompanied by the indispensable preservation of the right to stand on the side of the world, on the side of God’s truth, on the side of the Divine commandments, on the side of that

All of the above indicates that we have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance.

I get the eye-rolling. With Ukrainian cities under Russian bombardment, families being killed, a million people on the move to escape Russian guns, and on and on, the supreme spiritual leader of Russia uses his platform on Forgiveness Sunday, which begins Let, to characterize Putin’s war as a fight against the gays?! Seriously, he said that? On Forgiveness Sunday?! He did. I think the most charitable thing that can be said about these remarks is that they are not helpful to ending the war, or even to explaining it. What I initially said was far from charitable, even though I’m sure the Patriarch and I are more or less in the same place about homosexuality (meaning that I believe what Scripture and the Orthodox Church teach about it).

On the other hand, however cynical these remarks may (or may not) be, the Patriarch is not entirely wrong. That’s the conclusion I drew from reading this analysis by the former NSA counterespionage officer John Schindler, who writes critically of Kyrill’s sermon. This is something that is much clearer from where I sit, in Hungary, than in America. Reading it, I thought of an offhand comment a Hungarian made to me not long ago: “If we were cool with LGBT rights, a lot of the problems we have with the West would go away.” Let me explain.

Schindler has less than zero sympathy for the Russians in this fight. But he writes that the West ignores the religious aspects of the war, from the Russian perspective.

The ROC’s [Russian Orthodox Church’s] condemnation of recent Western LGBT practices, including gay pride parades, an objection which Western post-moderns have difficulty understanding, is hardly new. As Top Secret Umbra has observed, our “elites, all of whom fall on the spectrum of Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, WEIRD for short, Putin represents an atavism whose motivations they cannot understand.”Neither are prominent Putinists shy about denouncing Western LGBT practices as Satanic or connecting it to Ukraine with claims that Russia’s war against that country is fundamentally about resisting America’s “Global F*ggot Empire.”

One of the ironies here is that, per regular opinion polling, Ukrainians are less open-minded than Westerners about gay matters, indeed their views are closer those found in Russia than among WEIRDs. Moreover, we must confront the difficult truth that Moscow’s obsession with Ukraine and the LGBT issue isn’t simply a figment of Kirill’s overactive imagination. Before its recent closure due to the war, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv regularly promoted LGBT issues and gay pride events; in 2018, the State Department contingent in Kyiv’s gay pride parade was led by Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch herself; and U.S. Government outlets frequently played up the involvement of official American representatives and entities in LGBT parades and events in Ukraine. However we may feel about the Moscow Patriarchate’s immoderate take on gay pride parades, we have to concede that, unlike “Ukrainian Nazi juntas committing genocide,” they’re not simply making this one up.

We see here, then, an example of a sociopolitical phenomenon I defined not long ago like this:

If Patriarch Kyrill talked about LGBT like a Western churchman, he would be hailed in the West as a prophet, and encouraged to talk more about it. But that’s not his view, and any statement of the traditional Christian belief about homosexuality is bound to be denounced as Kyrill’s “obsession” with gays.

Let me say it again: I think it was at best imprudent, and at worst morally outrageous, for the Patriarch to use this platform, on this particular holy day, to characterize the war as a battle against homosexuality. But as John Schindler, no fan of the Russians, writes, insofar as the Russians construe the war as a battle in the Clash of Civilizations with the West, they’re not wrong to focus on this (even if they are cynical, given that Ukraine is about as anti-LGBT as Russia is).

For more context, check out Schindler’s previous Substack entry, from February 24, the day the war started. In it, he characterizes the attack as a religious war. I’m sorry I missed this astute analysis when it first appeared. Excerpt:

It’s an article of faith in the Kremlin that the creation of the OCU is an American project designed to destroy world Orthodoxy and harm Russia. It’s painful for me to state this but the Russians have good reason to think this. Unlike absurd Kremlin propaganda lines about “Ukrainian Nazis” perpetrating “genocide” against Russians, the idea that Washington wanted the split of Orthodoxy in Ukraine is a reasonable inference upon examination of recent U.S. Government conduct. What’s the evidence?

Our Kyiv embassy congratulated the OCU for its birth and the selection of its first primate, then the State Department in Washington amplified the same. Celebrating Constantinople’s grant of autocephaly, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hailed it as a “historic achievement for Ukraine” which represented America’s “strong support for religious freedom.” Pompeo’s statement left no doubt about America’s backing the OCU against the UOC. Pompeo’s position in the worldwide Orthodox schism was made clear by his subsequent meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch, whom the Secretary of State hailed as “a key partner as we continue to champion religious freedom around the globe.” Neither was this a partisan project, since the position of the Biden administration on this issue is identical to its predecessor’s. Four months ago, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also met with the Ecumenical Patriarch, reaffirming U.S. commitment to religious freedom, which in Moscow unsurprisingly looked like support for the OCU.

Since very few Americans, and functionally no non-Orthodox ones, noticed any of this, it’s worth asking why the State Department felt compelled to take a public position on any of this. Does Foggy Bottom side with Sunni or Shia? What about Lutheranism versus Methodism? Who in Washington thought it was a good idea to throw its weight behind the OCU, since anybody who knew anything about Putinism and its religious-civilizational mission had to be aware that such statements were guaranteed to raise Moscow’s ire.

That ire has now taken the form of air strikes, missile barrages, and advancing tank battalions. Just last month, Lavrov restated his government’s position that the United States stands behind the “current crisis in Orthodoxy.” As he explained without any word-mincing, Washington caused “the most serious dispute in the entire Orthodox world,” adding, “The United States of America had an immediate hand in the current crisis in Orthodoxy. They created a special mechanism, a special agency for the freedom of religious confession, which actually is not dealing with freedom but most actively set up and financed Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew so that he conducted a device for schism, particularly in Ukraine, in the first place, for creating there the schismatic, uncanonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

We should not indulge Muscovite conspiracy theories nor countenance Russian aggression. However, the facts are plain enough. Simply put, by recognizing the OCU and hailing its creation, Washington changed the Kremlin’s game in Ukraine, making Putin’s long-term plans for his neighbor untenable. Without a united Orthodox Church across the former lands of Rus, answering to Moscow, the “Russian World” concept falls apart. Every secular geostrategic challenge cited as a reason for Putin’s aggression – NATO expansion, Western military moves, oil and gas politics – existed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to limit his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the Southeast. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to subdue all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Kremlin? The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with official American backing, is the difference, and Moscow believes this was all a nefarious U.S. plot to divide world Orthodoxy at Russia’s expense. Clearly Putin has decided that reclaiming Ukraine and its capital, “the mother of Russian cities,” for Russian Orthodoxy is worth a major war. Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if almost nobody in the West realizes it.

Even though I am an Orthodox Christian, my church is not Russian, and I also try to keep my distance from intra-Orthodox disputation, for the sake of not being drawn into them. I was pained over the Ukrainian schism, and quite annoyed with the Ecumenical Patriarch for getting involved (his rivalry with Patriarch Kyrill is well known), but I had no idea that the US Government played such a role. (John Schindler, by the way, teaches at the US Naval War College, so he’s not an Internet rando making this claim.) This infuriates me! Typical American meddling, only seeing religion in political terms, pushing ahead heedless of the damage this does to a thousand year old church.

On this blog the other day, a reader, can’t remember who, asked belligerently why Ukraine shouldn’t have its own church if it wants to. It’s not an unreasonable question from a modern American point of view, but to Orthodox Christians (and Catholics), it is almost impossible to explain canon law, and why these things are, if not impossible (as they would be for Catholicism), very hard to do, and require a slow process to be legal under church law. For example, the Greek Orthodox Church does not recognize the autocephaly of my own particular Orthodox jurisdiction, the Orthodox Church in America, not because the Greeks don’t like us but because they don’t believe that when the Moscow Patriarchate granted the OCA autocephaly (self-rule) decades ago, it did so in a canonically correct way. It’s nothing personal, but canon law matters. Moreover, to a Protestant mindset, a schism might seem to be merely a bureaucratic matter. But to those in the older churches — Orthodox and Catholic — it is far more like a divorce, the violent division of something spiritual and organic.

I was trying to think of an analogy to what the US did here, so I could explain its significance to American readers, but none exists. There is simply no religious phenomenon in American life and consciousness that compares to this. See, this is exactly what I mean when I keep banging on about how foolish we Americans are to close our eyes and shut our ears to the Russians, and trying to understand how they see the world, whether or not we agree with them. The fact that the US Government played a key role in this schism gives me a much better understanding of why Russia had enough of the West’s meddling. I still do not believe this justifies the war, but it is easier for me now to see why Russians believe it does.

So, thanks to Schindler’s analysis, now I better understand what Kyrill meant by bringing homosexuality into it. And this is why I bring Hungary into it too. It is hard to explain to people who live in the US — liberals and conservatives alike — and who have been macerating in the constant stream of LGBT propaganda for twenty years, how different things are on that front in Central Europe. Basically, it feels like 1998 over here — a time when homosexuals were visible, had Pride parades, and all that, but where homosexuality wasn’t thrust front and center into public life. Here in Hungary, civil partnerships for same-sex couples are permitted, and so is public discussion of homosexuality and transgenderism — unless it is aimed at children and minors. Last summer’s law passed by Hungary’s parliament restricting media and education aimed at normalizing homosexuality and transgenderism among children caused an uproar in Western Europe, prompting condemnation from EU leaders, and even the Prime Minister of the Netherlands to say that he wants to throw Hungary out of the union. Right now, the EU is withholding a massive chunk of money meant for Covid relief in Hungary, supposedly over Hungary’s violation of democratic norms. Everybody knows that this is really about the LGBT media law. For Western elites, LGBT rights are the summum bonum, the supreme good.

Now, think about this: Hungary has been a nation, and a Christian one, for over 1,000 years, and its laws about homosexuality not only reflect the will of the Hungarian people — who are largely non-observant regarding their religion, but culturally conservative — but also reflect an understanding about homosexuality and sexuality in general that most Europeans held a generation ago. But so central has LGBT liberation become in the hearts and minds of Westerners that any resistance to it is seen as HATE; we are conditioned to regard any objection at all as an expression of raw bigotry that under no circumstances can be seen as reasonable.

Last year I lived in Budapest for three or four months, and made occasional trips to western Europe — France, Spain, Austria — on book tour business. Each time, it was a shock to me to see how ubiquitous rainbow flags and the like were. Walking down a boulevard in Valencia, one of the biggest cities of Spain, I saw banners hung by the city government proclaiming that “in Valencia, women can have penises, and men can have vaginas.” That is morally insane — but this kind of thing is everywhere. Even a conservative like me had become numb to it … until I spent time in Hungary, where things are different. Where homosexuality is seen as a fact of life, but not something ideological, and not as a weapon of culture war, as it is regarded in Western societies.

I cannot regard Putin’s war on Ukraine as having anything to do with LGBT. Yet the Russians (and the Hungarians, and the Poles) are certainly right to regard the LGBT question as a matter of civilizational war of the West on Christianity, and on countries who have the audacity to disagree with Western cultural imperialists on this fundamental civilizational issue.

People in this part of the world look at what’s happening to America, and they’re afraid. They know that fifteen years ago or so, gay marriage was sold as a minor thing, a matter of justice, something that would not affect anybody else, only make life easier for committed same-sex couples. And they see that that was a flat-out lie. As soon as gay marriage rights were secure, it was on to transgenderism, a vastly more radical project. So, people here see this kind of thing going on now:

HOLY SHIT. A slide from @ecasdsuper staff training instructs teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ (gender) identities and it must be “earned.”
They are hiding information about sexual orientation and gender and teaching students not to trust their parents. pic.twitter.com/CYEllfuFlu

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) March 7, 2022

That’s from the public school system in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Here’s a story about it. Excerpts:

A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.”

The policy includes the following provisions:

Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.

It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy beyond its teacher personal development training.

The school board candidates are demanding school district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”

An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming.

ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”

This is their mantra: equitable, safe, inclusive, diverse. These are the words these groomer teachers and school administrators use to justify their policy of separating children from parents, and encourage children to think of themselves as of the opposite sex, or “non-binary,” or whatever. This is the language they use to anesthetize parents and others about what they’re actually doing. This is happening all over.

More:

Left-wing activists are organizing “sex ed summer camps” for 8-year-olds in Indiana. (via @TheTonus) pic.twitter.com/zIBvBOR1Wn

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) March 7, 2022

This thread about the same thing is more detailed:

An entire summer camp devoted to Sex Education for 10-12 year olds. Indianapolis is having an absolutely normal one. pic.twitter.com/47qAOvPbdh

— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) March 7, 2022

Please read it — the educator says she will talk to these little kids about trans issues, about condoms, about porn, all kinds of things. Who is part of her online groomer group?

UPDATE: Other notable members of her public “Let’s Talk About Sex Ed with Ms. Ashley” Facebook group include Indiana public school elementary teachers, a Senior engineer at PBS, and a program manager at the Indiana Arts Commission. pic.twitter.com/GLOGvIxoeE

— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) March 7, 2022

The United States is a country now where biological men can declare themselves to be women, and become the No. 1 women’s collegiate swimmer in America. Again, this is morally insane. And if you object to any of this, you risk cancellation. J.K. Rowling is one of the most influential writers who ever lived, but when she — a left-wing feminist — spoke out against the effects the trans rights movement was having on women’s rights, she was monstered by the media and activists. That is how utterly fanatical these people are. And I remind you of what our president said during his campaign:

No room for compromise. Shut up, you bigot parents, and get out of the way. We’ve got your kids now.

Though I don’t understand why, aside from cynicism, he invoked this to characterize Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Patriarch Kyrill is, nevertheless, exactly right that the LGBT struggle is a civilizational war. This is a war within the West; people like Joe Biden, as well as the educational profession, the media, and nearly all the institutions in Western society, are making war on families and children, and on traditional Christianity (and any religion that doesn’t affirm homosexuality and gender ideology). In the West, those who hold to an anthropology that directly contradicts what Christianity and natural law teach about the meaning of sexuality, are winning. A recent poll found that 21 percent of Generation Z considers itself to be LGBT or Q. Some on the Right try to cope with this by saying that most of them probably just think of themselves as bisexual. Yeah, good luck with that. We have an entire generation that American popular culture and institutions have convinced that their sexual identity is fluid, and should be infinitely explored. They are psychologically crippling these people — and in many cases, maiming them for life.

If you haven’t yet, you should read a detransitioner who writes about how she was convinced that she was trans, but later changed her mind. Excerpts:

My name is Helena, and as of this writing I’m a 23-year-old woman who, as a teenager, believed I was transgender. In the years since detransitioning (stopping testosterone treatment and no longer seeing myself as transgender), I’ve become interested in exploring why, in the last decade, nearly every English-speaking country has seen a meteoric rise in adolescents believing they are transgender and pursuing cosmetic medical and surgical interventions. Here, I’d like to go over how and why I came to see myself as transgender, the process of transitioning, and the events leading up to and following my detransition.

The short version of my detransition story for those who want the bare details is that when I was fifteen, I was introduced to gender ideology on Tumblr and began to call myself nonbinary. Over the next few years, I would continue to go deeper and deeper down the trans identity rabbit hole, and by the time I was eighteen, I saw myself as a “trans man”, otherwise known as “FtM”. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood to begin a testosterone regimen. At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19, sometime around February or March 2018. When the disillusionment fully set in, I stopped the testosterone treatment and began the process of getting my life back on track. It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr.

But what leads a girl with no history of discomfort with stereotypical “girl” toys and clothes, or even the slightest desire to be a boy in childhood, to want to be a “man” through hormonal injections as she approached adulthood? In a vacuum, such a profound confusion leading to such drastic measures sounds like it should be rare and a sign of some sort of severe mental disturbance. Was I a fluke? Was I some kind of idiot who mistakenly believed I was trans because I’m crazy or just downright irresponsible?

The truth is that there has been an extreme rise in adolescents, especially girls, believing they are transgender. UK NHS referral data shows a 4000% increase in pediatric gender service referrals (not a typo). So-called “gender dysphoria”, which was once a very rare diagnosis that described mostly prepubescent boys and adult men, is now most commonly diagnosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explosive numbers are a result of increased societal acceptance, and that at long last trans people are coming out of hiding and living as their authentic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see comparable rates of transgender identity across all age groups and between both sexes, but its disproportionately adolescent females feeling that warm and fuzzy inclusive acceptance. Considering “acceptance” now implies supraphysiological doses of cross sex hormones and having healthy body organs surgically rearranged, it’s worth a deeper look into what kinds of factors are driving this population clamoring to go under the knife.

You get to the end, and you may well conclude that the old Russian Orthodox patriarch in Moscow understands what’s happening in the West today better than 99 percent of the media commentators. I deeply regret that he tied this analysis to Putin’s war on Ukraine … but that does not make him wrong about the clash of civilizations in general. The United States, as the leading Western power, routinely flies the rainbow flag over its embassies abroad, most infamously over the Kabul embassy only a couple of months before the whole thing had to be abandoned before the Taliban triumphed. Last year, for the first time, the British spy agency MI6 proudly flew the transgender flag over its headquarters.

And lest you think that the LGBT phenomenon was inserted into the Ukraine war by Patriarch Kyrill, I refer you to this story from CBS News, broadcast one week after the war started, which could be headlined, “Russia Invades Ukraine: Transgendered People Hardest Hit.”  This is how the Western media class think. Far more significantly, I give you the earlier tweet by the head of MI6:

Do you see that? The top British spy, on the day after the war started, said that the most important distinction between the West and Putin’s Russia is their opposing stances on LGBT rights. 

See, if Patriarch Kyrill says it, it’s bad, and he’s an obsessed homophobe, but if MI6 chief Richard Moore says it, it’s an awesome display of commitment to social justice. The Law of Inverse Pathological Enthusiasm at work. Seriously, Vladimir Putin launches a war on Ukraine, and on the very next day, the head of MI6 characterizes the war as a contrast between the pro-LGBT West, and bigoted Russia.

The point is, Patriarch Kyrill was wrong (in my view) to invoke this in a sermon addressing the war in Ukraine, a nation that is every bit as culturally conservative on LGBT matters as Russia. But in terms of contrasting the West and Russia, he’s got it right —  and the head of MI6 agrees on the centrality of the issue, at least. The post-Christian West is increasingly godless and the enemy of the natural family. Russia, for all its sins and failings, including its unjust warmongering against Ukraine, is not. This is why I warn that everything being done to Russia now in terms of bounce-the-rubble (ruble?) economic punishment is eventually going to be turned against traditional Christians and other social conservatives in our country. This is the logic of the Western elites’ culture war. Patriarch Kyrill gets that, even if very many American Christian leaders are trying very, very hard not to understand it, just like the 1940s Slovak Catholic bishops I write about in Live Not By Lies. 

Once more, a reminder: Kyrill said on Sunday:

The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of loyalty to that very powerful world; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world, they become strangers to it.

He’s right about that. You cannot be part of the West, or a real friend to the West, if you don’t accept this ideology. Unless of course you are China, and you are too rich and powerful for the West to push around. If you consider yourself pro-LGBT, I urge you to do the non-WEIRD thing, just as a thought experiment, and step outside of your head to try to see how the West’s behavior and priorities look to people who don’t believe that sexual autonomy and expression is the most important measure of human freedom in the world. I don’t expect that most of you will, seeing as how you refuse to do that when considering your own countrymen. But then, you are not at risk of finding yourselves in a shooting war with your own countrymen if you fail to understand what motivates them. Russia is another story.

Since the Russian invasion, Ukraine has petitioned to join the European Union. This is understandable, but Ukraine should also understand this: if it succeeds, then the EU will treat it as the EU treats Hungary and Poland: as a bigoted country that must be punished economically and isolated until and unless it fully accepts LGBT ideology. On this, Kyrill as right too.

The post War & Culture War: Patriarch Kyrill & LGBT appeared first on The American Conservative.

In Christian terminology, a “confessor” is someone who has suffered for publicly defending the faith (as distinct from a “martyr,” who gives her life for the faith). I don’t know if Emma Camp has any religious beliefs, but the University of Virginia senior has certainly been a brave witness for free speech. A self-described liberal, Camp published a powerful op-ed in The New York Times denouncing the militant conformity and fear on her campus. Excerpts:

I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights protests and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.

In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way.

More:

Being criticized — even strongly — during a difficult discussion does not trouble me. We need more classrooms full of energetic debate, not fewer. But when criticism transforms into a public shaming, it stifles learning.

Professors have noticed a shift in their classrooms. Brad Wilcox, a U.Va. sociology professor, told me that he believes that two factors have caused self-censorship’s pervasiveness. “First, students are afraid of being called out on social media by their peers,” he said. “Second, the dominant messages students hear from faculty, administrators and staff are progressive ones. So they feel an implicit pressure to conform to those messages in classroom and campus conversations and debates.”

The consequences for saying something outside the norm can be steep. I met Stephen Wiecek at our debate club. He’s an outgoing, formidable first-year debater who often stays after meetings to help clean up. He’s also conservative. At U.Va., where only 9 percent of students surveyed described themselves as a “strong Republican” or “weak Republican,” that puts him in the minority.

He told me that he has often “straight-up lied” about his beliefs to avoid conflict. Sometimes it’s at a party, sometimes it’s at an a cappella rehearsal, and sometimes it’s in the classroom. When politics comes up, “I just kind of go into survival mode,” he said. “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.”

Camp says it’s not just conservative students. Progressive ones who diverge, or think they might diverge, from whatever the “correct” opinion is also clam up. She adds that it’s not enough to encourage undergraduates to be brave and take risks to speak out. She’s tried that, but without institutional support from the university, it does no good:

I protested a university policy about the size of signs allowed on dorm room doors by mounting a large sign of the First Amendment. It was removed by the university. In response, I worked with administrators to create a less restrictive policy. As a columnist for the university paper, I implored students to embrace free expression. In response, I lost friends and faced a Twitter pile-on. I have been brave. And yet, without support, the activism of a few students like me changes little.

Our universities cannot change our social interactions. But they can foster appreciation for ideological diversity in academic environments. Universities must do more than make public statements supporting free expression. We need a campus culture that prioritizes ideological diversity and strong policies that protect expression in the classroom.

Read it all. Seriously, it’s really very good. And notice some of the responses from the Left. Jesse Singal calls out the deranged Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley — about whom I have written in the past — for saying … well, look:

Example: This is such a profound misunderstanding of what journalism and opinion writing are. I find it really hard to believe that Jason Stanley actually thinks the Times has a ‘responsibility’ of this sort, or that he actually thinks we’re anywhere near McCarthyism. pic.twitter.com/oR9zNfkvBs

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 7, 2022

I think he probably does. He is a tenured lunatic consumed by hatred and paranoia.

Reading Emma Camp’s op-ed makes me sad for all the young people today who are being cheated of the education they deserve. The chief villain is the gutless college administrators and professors who have allowed their colleges to turn into woke madrassas. But all these kids who come to college out of a culture of bullying, where their first reaction is to try to silence by shunning anyone who thinks different, that’s on them and the adults (high school teachers and others) who allowed them to get away with it.

What kind of country are we going to have over the coming decades, when young adults who have been acculturated to this norm start running things? I think we know. It is going to be an even more oppressive, mindless, conformist culture than we have now. The backlash, if one ever emerges, is going to be severe. Nobody wants to hear it when people like me talk about wokeness as a national security issue, but it’s true. Who wants to risk their lives fighting for a country and a social order where they have been bullied into silence? If, say, the State of Virginia were to be governed by radical right-wing legislators who wanted to tear the University of Virginia down to punish these commissars, how many Virginians will say, “Good, UVA deserves it”?

Why are the people of Virginia paying taxes to support a university where young people are being educated primarily in fearful conformity? Why do no politicians, Republican or otherwise, ever question this? It’s a massively important question for the future of American society. It would be a wonderful thing if Live Not By Lies were not relevant to the present and the future of America, because we were a country and a culture that valued open debate, intellectual diversity, and tolerance. But we aren’t, and people like Emma Camp are going to find the rest of their lives are filled with walking on eggshells.

Ask the people who lived through Communism what it’s like to have to live constantly with the fear that some innocent thing you said will suddenly get you in serious trouble, and cost you everything. When I was in Moscow three years ago, I visited an elderly man whose father, a prominent Georgian orchestra conductor, was tortured to death by Stalin’s thugs in the 1930s. After we left, my translator pointed out that the old man had the large window in his living room covered with a thick black blanket. The translator said that in Soviet times, people covered their windows with those blankets to keep neighbors from staring in, drawing negative conclusions, and reporting them to the KGB. Nearly three decades after the fall of the USSR, this old man still lived like that. The fear never left him. To be sure, the fear college students in contemporary America have about expressing their opinion is not the same thing as a citizen of Soviet Russia would have. There are no gulags in America. Yet the intellectual and spiritual contortions that one learns to do to avoid trouble — those deformities stay with you.

Here’s a passage from Live Not By Lies about what the Polish exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz, in his great 1950s book The Captive Mind, taught about intellectual life under Communism:

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”

What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?

You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.

What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.

Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.

Under the emerging tyranny of wokeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practice one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly conforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: “They swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.”

The University of Virginia is teaching its undergraduates how to practice ketman. It is surely not the only one. This is going to cost us more than we can imagine.

I’m going to a provincial small city in Hungary tomorrow to talk to undergraduates. The last time I did this, I had a classroom with students who were liberals, students who were conservatives, students who were religious, and students who were secular. Every single one of them found it bizarre to hear my tales of what wokeness has done to campus culture, to friendships, and to the idea of education and free speech. I told them — as I will tell the students at the university tomorrow — that they have no idea how fortunate they are to have a campus culture that welcomes this kind of discussion. They will not keep it if they aren’t prepared to fight for it. What an irony: an American journalist appearing on college campuses in a former Communist country to warn students not to allow their universities to fall captive to the mind-killing habits of American universities.

It’s shameful. But that’s what the American left has done to us. That’s what the unwillingness of the American right to fight to protect our vital institutions from political capture has done to us.

Take a look at this short video in which Emma Camp talks about what the First Amendment means to her. What an inspiring young woman! If a campus had just fifty young people like her, they could save it, I bet, from woke bullies like Prof. Jason Stanley.

The post Captive Minds At Ketman U. appeared first on The American Conservative.

I met today with an American journalist who is here trying to understand the appeal of Viktor Orban for a certain kind of American conservative. We ended up talking about the war, mostly; though his project began before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, the war has emerged as an important part of the narrative.

I told him that being here in Hungary has given me a valuable perspective on all this. Even before the war broke out, I had come to see how narrow, moralistic, and all-consuming the US establishment narrative about liberal democracy was. It is impossible for most Americans, both left and right, to understand how much of their way of regarding the world is fixed by that rigid framework. This is why even some American conservatives stupidly think of Orban as “fascist”: they are prisoners of their own narrative.

I told my American interlocutor that I strongly oppose Russia’s war on Ukraine, and hope Putin loses, but that I also deplore how the US has exonerated itself of all sin and failing in the matter of this war. An American foreign policy analyst I know tells me that it is absolutely impossible right now, in the information climate in the US, to understand the Russian point of view. You have to do that if you are going to try to figure out the best way forward, but any attempt to understand why Russians think and feel the way they do is shouted down as carrying Putin’s water. I mentioned to the journalist that this is a vivid version of the way Americans think about Orban’s Hungary. We — and Western Europeans involved with the EU bureaucracy — are so convinced of our own righteousness that we refuse to grant any legitimacy to other ways of seeing the world.

I told the journalist that this is something that social and religious conservatives back home in the US are accustomed to. We almost never get a fair shake from the media, because the people who tell the stories and set the narrative have decided that trying to see the world through our eyes is in some sense to collaborate with evil. The shrill and total moralizing and politicizing of every question makes achieving real understanding impossible.

Right now, the United States is not at war with Russia. Yet according to what I see, and according to what I’m hearing from friends back home who are watching US cable news, there is absolutely zero space for dissent from the hysterically anti-Russian narrative. This is how it goes with our establishment, both of the left and the right. Most American journalism, I have come to believe, is not about trying to understand the world, but about imposing a narrative on the world. Remember how, in the months before the Iraq War started, the British ambassador to the US sent a note back to PM Tony Blair telling him this:

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The so-called “Downing Street memo” wasn’t revealed until 2005. The Bush administration knew what it wanted the narrative to be — one that justified war — and decided the only things it would consider as true were the things that supported that narrative. The US went to war. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died for that lie, and thousands of US troops were killed and maimed. Syria’s civil war came about because of the destabilization the US brought to the region. All of this we Americans just sweep under the carpet of memory. “NATO is just a defensive alliance,” they say. Oh? Ask the Libyans about that. Or the Iraqis. Or the Serbs.

Gaslighting. It’s all gaslighting. But now, we’re being gaslit into a conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia.

Again, none of this justifies Russia’s barbaric invasion. Russia should not have invaded! But this didn’t just happen out of nowhere. Are we not allowed to ask ourselves questions like: How can Ukraine win? What happens if we grind the Russian people into the ground? And so forth. From what I’m hearing from folks back home, even to ask those questions reveals one’s ritual impurity. This is totally crazy. You know that, right? Even if you stridently disagree with your opponent’s position, you need to understand how he sees the world, and let that understanding inform your response. But that’s not how we act.

This blind arrogance got us into a twenty-year quagmire in the Middle East. Where is it leading now?

Peter Savodnik has a good essay up today at Bari Weiss’s Substack. In it, he talks about living in the post-Communist former Soviet world in the 1990s and early 2000s, including in Russia. Peter writes:

That was the lesson of 1989 to 1991, when the whole communist charade unraveled and we imagined ourselves graduating into a borderless world—one that didn’t just validate everything that America had done but everything America was. This was the Great American Promise, the idea that, if enough heavily credentialed people in Washington got it just right, we could construct a future that would not merely build on but actually transcend the past.

It was easy for us to imagine this future to end all futures because we had just won the Cold War and because we were American, which is to say we had very little time for or interest in history. We knew about it. We had read about it and been tested on it. But we didn’t think inside it. We didn’t imagine ourselves being subjected to it. No, we were shaping it.

This was the prism through which I viewed our limitless tomorrow when, a month later, I arrived in Paris for a semester.

Then he moved on to the former Warsaw Pact countries, and then to Russia itself:

Toward the end, after all the vodka, the herring, the soup, the dumplings, more vodka, black bread, more vodka, one of my hosts, an older gentleman who had been a professor of literature, told me, as so many Russians had, “You can give up writing philosophical articles about Russia. You will never know it.” Ah, yes, this again. My outsiderness. “My sunny disposition doesn’t prohibit me from writing about your country,” I said, a bit too earnestly, in very stilted Russian that I had spent years slaving away at. Speaking slowly to make sure I didn’t miss anything, he replied: “It’s not your sunny disposition. It’s your frame of reference. Your frame of reference is America. But Russia does not want to be America. Russia exists in a parallel universe.”

At the time, I thought, Russia doesn’t know what it wants. There was little doubt by then about Vladimir Putin’s orientation, but Russians were another matter. It wasn’t just that they liked American popular culture—everyone did. It was that there was too much interaction between us and them. Too much business, cultural exchange, hop-scotching between New York and Moscow and Los Angeles and Vladivostok. We were connected now. Was that not validation of the Great American Promise?

In retrospect, the professor saw something—everything—that I did not.

What did the professor see? That there is no universal Enlightenment civilization. That Westerners were deluded. And here we are today. Savodnik goes on:

There will be alliances—that between China and Russia and Iran is already clear—but there will be no Big Idea to replace the one that ended the Cold War, no overarching set of rules or understandings or pacts or international conferences that will bind us together and ensure that we do not succumb to the violence and nihilism that came before the Pax Americana. The order America built after World War II—which, despite its many imperfections, brought more security and safety and prosperity to humankind than ever before in history—is melting back into the world that preceded it.

We can blame this on Putin or Xi Jinping or the North Koreans or this or that bad actor, but they are simply acting the way they have always acted. The problem is us. What has changed is not the barbarians of the world, but that we gave up on the justice of our cause.

I disagree with him here. I believe that our “cause” — certainly a contested term — was not as just as we thought it was. What is, or was, our cause? To make the world over in our image: as autonomous individuals who regard liberty as freedom from all unchosen constraints? To live in a frictionless world of comfort and peace? Well, what if other countries don’t want that? What if Muslims, say, prefer to be Muslim, not rootless secular liberals? What if Russians want to be Russian, Hungarians Hungarian? At what point do we Americans say, “You have a right to be who you want to be”? Or even, “We think you are wrong, but you have a right to be wrong”?

It’s easy for me, as a religious and social conservative American, to sympathize with the Hungarians in their stance against the EU. They are a minority that’s being looked down on and pushed around by a rich and powerful majority. They just want to be left alone to be true to their own traditions and ways of life. But the EU and the US won’t let them. Even now, when the Visegrad countries (Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia) are a crucial strategic bulwark against newly aggressive Russia, do you think that the EU and the US are for a single second going to give up on bullying these countries to be more secular and liberal and pro-LGBT? I doubt it. Because we have a Narrative to uphold.

It is far more difficult to sympathize with Russia, because Russia really is a warmonger here, and is murdering Ukrainians with no cause. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand why Russians think the way they do about the West, and to sympathize with their broader concerns, even as we disagree. You can’t do this if you are on the inside of power, and powerful institutions. Your hegemony looks like justice, like righteousness. You can’t imagine how any decent person could see the world any other way. When it comes time to deploy coercion, even violence, against the weaker parties to force them to conform, you tell yourself that it’s sad, but what choice did you have? Evil must not be given quarter, ever.

This is why I keep banging on about how hate Russia if you like, but know well that everything being used against Russia and Russians today will be deployed against Deplorables in our country, sooner or later — and by the same people, too. The journalist I had coffee with today said that he has been talking to conservatives here in Hungary who straight up support Putin. That startled me, because all the Hungarian conservatives in my Budapest orbit do not support Putin at all. The American said these are mostly country people, strong anti-Communists. I thought about it for a second, and told my interlocutor that my best guess is that these country people may hate the Russians, based on historical memory, but they probably regard the EU and the US as the new hegemons trying to force them (the Hungarians) to give up their traditions, their religion, and so forth. If they sympathize with Putin, it’s the same reason Third World people of a previous generation sympathized with Fidel Castro: because he gave Uncle Sam a sock in the nose, and got away with it.

That’s just a guess. I’m here to learn, not to lecture these foreigners on their own wickedness, and to shame them into getting right with the great god Davos. As wicked as the Russian government’s war on Ukraine is, I cannot endorse the full-scale impoverishment of the Russian people to punish Vladimir Putin. Putin’s warmongering will make a generation of Westerners hate Russia. Our disproportionate response will make a generation of Russians hate us.

Advantage: China. God help us all.

Last point: Peter Savodnik writes, of the post-Cold War period:

Everyone who had not grown up on the winning side of history got that Obama, like W., like Clinton, was blinkered, incapable of seeing outside the narrowing parameters of our politics. Trump got this instinctively, because, for all his riches, his victim complex and the Queens-born social outsider status he tried so bitterly to overcome had taught him what the American power elite looks like from the outside. So he went to war against the old institutions. But he had nothing to replace them with. He was blundering and polarizing. He made things worse.

He did. The answer, though, is not to stand up the American power elite. The answer is to stand up to the American power elite, but to do so constructively. This is where Viktor Orban comes in for us American national conservative types.

Look, I’m not asking you to support Orban. I’m sure as hell not asking you to support Putin and his war, which I certainly do not. I am asking you to wake up and realize that we are being gaslighted, again. Savodnik is right: the world we now live in is going to be treacherous. But we had damn well better learn how to live in that real world, not in the dreamland of Davos, Harvard, Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley.

The post Prisoners Of Narrative appeared first on The American Conservative.

I imagine that most Russians support their government in this war. But if they don’t, look at what happens to them if they dare to speak out:

#Russia Police in Ekaterinburg are beating a man who who was on the street protesting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine pic.twitter.com/dXCpDn6Uyv

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) March 6, 2022

Take a look at this incredible video made allegedly of three captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine. This is war propaganda, of course, so caveat emptor. And it is wrong to compel soldiers to make propaganda statements against their own government in times of war. That said, I don’t see the slightest sign of duress here, or fear.

If you don’t have time to watch the entire 22-minute video, start here, at the 7:56 mark, and listen to what Lt. Col. Dmitry Astrakhov in the middle says. He comes across as deeply sorry for what he and his fellow Russian soldiers have done to the Ukrainians. The officer speaks plainly, saying that he and the rest of the Russian people have been propagandized into hating Ukrainians and believe that they (the Russians) were participating in an operation to free Ukraine from the yoke of Nazism. Listening to him, I thought about this passage from Live Not By Lies, from an interview I did in 2019 with a Russian Orthodox priest:

Father Kirill was thirty-three years old when the Soviet Union fell. This man who grew up in the culture of official lies, and who has given his life to maintaining the historical memory of Bolshevik crimes, emphasizes that propaganda did not die with the USSR.

“Despite the fact that there’s so much information available, we see that so much propaganda is also available. Think of what’s happening now with Ukraine,” he says, referring to the armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Kiev government.

“We have seen the way TV changed us Russians from thinking of them as our family to being our enemies,” he says. “The same methods from the communist era are being used. People today have a responsibility to search out more information than what they are offered on TV, and to know how to look critically on what they’re reading and seeing. That’s what is different now than before.”

His point was that the cultural memories Russians have of closeness with Ukrainians are being erased thanks to propaganda.

So I am primed to believe this video because it fits what I have been told in the past by a source I know and trust. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that there is more to this video than meets the eye. Dutch analyst Henk van Ess breaks the video down, and casts serious doubts on its credibility (though not definitively debunking it).

I’m posting the video not because I think it is credible (though I believe it might be), but rather because it’s a great example of why the truth is so difficult to grasp in this war. Good propaganda is built on truth. I know it is true that the Russian people have been propagandized for years against Ukraine. I’m also against this war. Therefore, though the real audience for this clip is the Russian public, it is being widely shared on the Internet outside Russia. If this is real, Astrakov and the other two are dead men if they ever return to Russia, so what they’ve done is very brave. On the other hand, it’s almost too perfect.

How can any of us know if this is real or not? We could say the same thing about so much. It is remarkable to follow social media, and to see how enraged so many people are, on both sides of this war, by anyone questioning the narrative that critics prefer.

Here is one effect of important people believing certain narratives:

WATCH: Don’t take a no-fly zone in Ukraine off the table, @Sen_JoeManchin (https://t.co/A9qEVDhA58.) says.

“[Talking to President Zelenskyy] was so surreal. … He said, ‘Listen, if Ukraine falls, Europe may fall.’ … I would take nothing off the table.” pic.twitter.com/par2Ru8DcW

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) March 6, 2022

Sen. Manchin gullibly believed Zelensky’s claim that if Kyiv falls, so might the rest of Europe — and because of that, he’s not willing to rule out a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine, even though that would mean World War III. I have been assured by pro-Ukraine readers in the comments section of this blog that nobody serious believes we should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. But there you have one of the most important Senators in Washington declining to rule it out, because he believes a scary story that President Zelensky told him.

And you know that at least two former NATO Supreme Commanders last week endorse the no-fly zone proposal. On Friday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham took to social media to call for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. People are losing their minds, and drawing us all closer to nuclear war. What’s particularly bizarre to me is how many Americans, who have no dog in this fight, seem so eager to join in it. Our country has been at war for over twenty years, and lost both of the major conflicts we started (yes, having turned Iraq into a Shia puppet state of Iran is a loss). And yet, as a dog returns to his vomit, here we go again.

On Saturday morning I accepted the invitation of a Hungarian friend to join him at the Rudas Baths, an Ottoman-era thermal spa down by the Danube. It was really wonderful. We simmered like dumplings for two and a half hours in the pools fed by thermal springs. There were others there, both men and women, and lots of conversation. Amusing to think about how many times over the centuries men (only men were allowed until sometime in the 20th century) gathered there to bathe and talk about politics and war.

My Hungarian friend — I’ll call him Gabor — lived for many years in Britain, and holds dual citizenship. Like most Hungarians I know, he is very, very worried about this war. He is no fan of the Russians — members of his family fled Communism in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion — but said how much he hates the moral panic that is causing Western cultural institutions and others to cancel Russian artists and culture. He said that no country has given the world more cultural greatness than Russia, and that we could not understand ourselves as human beings without the gifts of the Russians.

He’s right about that. I fully stand with him in opposing and deploring cancel culture turned against Russian artists, writers, musicians, and others. It is precisely in a time like this when all of us need the testimony of beauty and humanity, and truth communicated to us through beauty. Rachmaninoff doesn’t make the bombing of Kharkiv okay, but the bombing of Kharkiv doesn’t negate the greatness of Rachmaninoff. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington don’t make Hiroshima and Nagasaki go down easier, but those twin horrors in no conceivable rational universe negate the greatness of those American musicians. Think, people!

Gabor is also disgusted by what he regards as the West’s hypocrisy. He went on a tear about the UK.

“London is the money-laundering capital of the world,” he said. “But now they’re going to lecture the rest of the world about morality, and think that because their prime minister speaks so many languages and went to Eton they have credibility.”

Why is it, Gabor asked, that Russians have “oligarchs” but Americans have “billionaires”? “Jeff Bezos is the biggest oligarch on the planet,” he said.

Well, the difference could be in how the rich made money in the two societies. Bezos didn’t make his fortune by cozying up to power-holders and exploiting those connections to get rich. Nevertheless, I take Gabor’s point: everybody knows that the superrich, whether on Wall Street or in the tech sector, run our country, and always have. Ukraine’s Zelensky, by the way, is a true hero for the way he has conducted himself in this war, but do not forget that despite his public stance as an enemy of oligarchical corruption, the Pandora Papers revealed him to be a hypocrite.

What brought this up was my mentioning Viktor Orban’s recent interview in which he said:

We know what the world is like under Anglo-Saxon dominance. But we don’t yet know what the world will be like when there’s Chinese dominance. One thing is for sure: the Anglo-Saxons want the world to recognise their position as morally right. For them it’s not enough to accept the reality of power; they also need you to accept the things that they think are right. The Chinese have no such need. This will definitely be a major change in the coming decades.

This is what set Gabor off on the subject of how the West cloaks its own exercises of power in morality. We talked for a bit about how distorting the morality lenses are when it comes to recognizing vital national interests. Nobody wants a totally amoral foreign policy, but at the same time, a policy that is primarily driven by moral concerns, absent any other, is dangerous. Think about how the US relates to Saudi Arabia. That is a highly immoral regime, the Saudis’, but if we don’t do business with them, we would be in serious trouble. I’ve written here before about how I once spoke to a retired senior US diplomat who served in Saudi, and he told me that the unhappy truth is that the al-Saud family is the most liberal force in the country.

I am not home in America, so I have no access to US television, and outside of the newspapers, I don’t know what the narratives being presented to the American people are. You tell me, Americans: are narratives like this one, which faults the US for meddling in Ukraine’s internal politics to overthrow the elected pro-Russian leader in 2014, seeing the light of day? If not, why not? Do Americans even care? We know that the state media in Russia only offers a single narrative about all this. But see, we are a liberal democracy, one that cares about free speech, and an open exchange of ideas, because that’s the only way we can find the truth. Right?

No wonder Gabor thinks we’re all a bunch of hypocrites. David P. Goldman (“Spengler”) writes a piece about how the world is sleepwalking into a 1914-like catastrophe. Excerpt:

We look back to 1914 in horror, and wonder how the leaders of the West could have been so pig-headed. Nonetheless, we are doing it again today.

That should be an object lesson for today’s Ukraine crisis. Vladimir Putin acted wickedly, and illegally, by invading Ukraine, but also rationally: Russia has an existential interest in keeping NATO away from his border. Russia will no more tolerate American missiles in Kyiv than the United States would tolerate Russian missiles in Cuba.

The United States could have averted a crisis by adhering to the Minsk II framework of local rule for the Russophone provinces of Eastern Ukraine within a sovereign Ukrainian state but chose instead to keep open Ukraine’s option to join NATO. That was rational, but also stupid: It backed Putin into a corner.

There is no excuse for Putin’s action, but there is an explanation that’s similar to one that applied to his forbears of 1914: Putin chose to attack before the West had the opportunity to arm Ukraine with sophisticated weapons that would raise the future cost of military action.

It’s a thoughtful analysis … but not one you’re going to find in a US newspaper, apparently. Goldman appended to his column, which appeared in Asia Times Online:

Note: The essay below was solicited by the editorial page of a major US newspaper, and then rejected because it did not fit its prevailing narrative. Not only are major channels of discussion closed off to dissenting views in the United States, but major news sources are blocked by internet service providers. Interfax, the post-Communist independent news service, is inaccessible from Western IP addresses, but accessible through Hong Kong, for example. The West is fighting for democracy, but using the propaganda and press control methods of authoritarian regimes.

Here’s a piece from the NYT about the frustration of Ukrainians whose family members in Russia don’t believe them when they tell them what’s happening in the war. Excerpt:

When Valentyna V. Kremyr wrote to her brother and sister in Russia to tell them that her son had spent days in a bomb shelter in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha because of the intensive fighting there, she was also met with disbelief.

“They believe that everything is calm in Kyiv, that no one is shelling Kyiv,” Ms. Kremyr said in a phone interview. She said her siblings think the Russians are striking military infrastructure “with precision, and that’s it.”

She said her sister Lyubov, who lives in Perm, wished her a happy birthday on Feb. 25, the second day of the invasion. When Ms. Kremyr wrote back about the situation on the ground, her sister’s answer via direct message was simple: “No one is bombing Kyiv, and you should actually be afraid of the Nazis, whom your father fought against. Your children will be alive and healthy. We love the Ukrainian people, but you need to think hard about who you elected as president.”

Ms. Kremyr said she sent photos from trusted media sites of mangled tanks and a destroyed building in Bucha to her brother, in Krasnoyarsk, but was met with a jarring response. “He said that this site is fake news,” she said, and that essentially the Ukrainian Army was doing the damage being blamed on Russians.

“It is impossible to convince them of what they have done,” Ms. Kremyr said, referring to Russian forces.

You might remember my writing here a while back about an interview I did back in 2002 with a Catholic seminarian, who told me about his unhappy experiences in his previous seminary full of sexually active gay seminarians, whose romps were known of and supported by the seminary administration. He told me that his mom and dad refused to believe him when he told them about it. They chose to believe their own son was a liar, because they were so bought in to the narrative that this kind of thing does not and cannot happen in the Catholic Church. Fortunately, the seminarian found a Catholic priest who well understood that he was telling the truth, and helped him transfer to a decent seminary.

I bring that up here to point out how susceptible we all are to propaganda narrative. If you are at all active on social media, you know how hard it is to dissent from what people want to be true about Russia and Ukraine, or even to question it. Never, ever, ever speak ill of Zelensky, who is Luke Skywalker to Putin’s Darth Vader! But:

Even @marcorubio went on TV today to warn that “a No Fly Zone means World War III.” But we’re all still supposed to worship at the feet of Zelensky, who is currently waging a furious campaign to guilt-trip the US into launching World War III

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 7, 2022

Seriously, selling your mind out for the sweet emotional rush of narrative could get us into World War III. Read Harry Kazianis’s piece.  

Look, the major event that turned me against the Iraq War was learning back in 2005 from an anguished friend, a straight-arrow conservative Christian who was very highly placed in the US natsec world, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was straight-up lying to the media about what was happening in Iraq — and the press was dutifully reporting it, because this man was the Defense Secretary, after all. My friend was torn up over this. He hadn’t believed this kind of thing was possible. He had believed in his country and its leadership. He had believed in the war. And then he saw what was happening with his own eyes.

I’ll finish by bringing up a point that reminded me of my conversation with Gabor on Saturday:

People in the West see the fact that we sanctioned Russia into the ground as a moral triumph, but I suspect that in the rest of the world, many people see that the West can destroy the economy of any country it doesn’t like whenever it feels like it and they are less excited.

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) March 6, 2022

Thomas Friedman seems giddy about the way that “the globalization of moral outrage” is bringing Russia to its economic knees. Okay, but remember: everything that is being done to Russia right now is one day going to be used on domestic dissenters. Mark my words.

People really want you to prove that you have the right emotions right now.

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) March 7, 2022

He’s right, but it’s infinitely more important to have clear thoughts.

The post Seeing Clearly Through War’s Fog appeared first on The American Conservative.

Earlier today, when I saw news that the Russian Army had attacked the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, I tweeted out this image, and suggested that the Ukrainians should have hired these good ol’ boys to protect the plant:

The painting is by Ilya Repin, the great 19th century Russian painter. Its title is, “The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.” It is based on a too-good-to-check legend about the Cossack band from the region, who were supposedly sent this ultimatum in 1676 by the Ottoman sultan:

Sultan Mehmed IV to the Zaporozhian Cossacks: As the Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians – I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks.

Here was their reply. Brace yourself, Bridget — this is crude:

Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!

O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons. We have no fear of your army; by land and by sea we will battle with thee. F*ck thy mother.

Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-f*cker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig’s snout, mare’s arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow. Screw thine own mother!

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won’t even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord. The day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!

Repin did several version of this scene. The original — or at least the one the Tsar bought — hangs in the State Museum in St. Petersburg. I saw it when I visited in 2019, and it’s so vivid you can almost smell the sweaty Cossacks.

Well, here’s good news: some cocky Ukrainian soldiers recreated the tableau! With this image, they are hurling the same hilariously vulgar curses at Vladimir Putin — and given how famous that painting is in Russian culture, every Russian and Ukrainian knows it.

MUCH respect to those Ukrainian soldiers!

The post To Putin, The Sultan Of The Kremlin appeared first on The American Conservative.