Rod Dreher's Blog, page 19

Here’s a long, fascinating interview with Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, appearing in the conservative magazine Mandiner, which translated it into English. Like Orban or not, it’s well worth reading for a look into the geostrategic challenges facing small countries in this suddenly volatile region. These parts stood out to my American eyes:

In the 1990s it seemed that the United States was the only remaining world power with real global influence, and that it was succeeding in integrating Russia and China into the world order that it led. Looking at developments over the last two decades, what point do you see in talking about a unipolar, US-dominated world order? How do you assess the balance of US-China rivalry so far? 

A change of position is taking place among the world’s top countries. As things stand today, China will soon be the world’s strongest economic and military power. America is in decline, while China is growing stronger. With its ten million inhabitants,

Hungary will need to manoeuvre skilfully in such times.

We’re in alliance with the West, but we also want to develop a beneficial relationship with the emerging new superpower. For policy makers this is a complex task, bordering on the realms of art.

How will this change affect the question of sovereignty?

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.

As an American, it’s unpleasant to read this … but is Orban wrong? What he’s signaling here is a recognition that the Chinese, the rising global power, don’t require allies to remake themselves in China’s image. You might recall me telling you late last summer in this space that Ugandan Catholic legislators told me that China is cleaning the West’s clock in Africa because of this. The West ties development aid to compelling the Africans to adopt pro-LGBT laws and policies, which strongly goes against their local culture. It’s not that the Chinese are more magnanimous; rather, it’s that they only thing they care about is if a country is on their side. But as LGBT rights has become the supreme cause of the Western ruling class, Western governments are trying to impose these policies on countries that don’t want them. If there is an alternative source of patronage, these countries will take it. This is one way in which wokeness is, for us, a national security issue.

In any case, this is the kind of thinking that we’re going to be seeing more of in the decade or two to come, as the balance of power around the world shifts. Orban told his interviewers that for Europe, “The next decade will be about security.”

It will also be about sovereignty. Orban was fairly close with Germany’s Angela Merkel, though they had a fierce row in 2015 over the migration issue. Now Germany is ruled by a left-wing coalition. Mandiner asked Orban about that:

We know the outcome of the German election: the Left, the Greens and the Liberals formed a government. How might these developments affect German-Hungarian bilateral relations?

Reading the programme of the new German government, we have many questions. They’ve declared Germany to be an immigrant country, they deny that society is divided into only men and women, they’re legalising “soft” drugs, they’re hollowing out the concept of nation, and they want a federal Europe. We don’t know whether this programme will actually be implemented, or whether they’ll try to extend it to the whole of Europe. We’d like to conclude a “tolerance agreement” with them, so that on these issues we can go our own way. They don’t have to be like us; but, similarly, we don’t have to become like them.

I hope that leaders in Western European capitals have wised up in the past week since the Russian invasion, and have come to realize that it profits them nothing to push Central European countries, which are more socially conservative, to the wall over LGBT issues.

The Hungarian Parliament last summer passed a law restricting media and education on LGBT themes aimed at children. After being viciously attacked by other EU leaders, Orban is putting the law up to a national referendum on election day. I found an English-language source saying these questions will be on the ballot:

Are you in favor of children in public schools being taught about sexual orientations without parental consent?Are you in favor of promoting sex change procedures for minors?Are you in favor of minors having access to sex change procedures?Are you in favor of media content of a sexual nature that impacts children’s development being presented to them without restrictions?Are you in favor of media content depicting sex changes being shown to children?

In putting a query about the referendum to Orban, Mandiner said there are only four questions on the ballot. I can’t find out which one is correct. Anyway, read:

The Government’s decision to hold a referendum on four child protection questions is also linked to family policy. Why is this referendum necessary?

I never thought that it would come to this. If, a few years ago, someone had said to me that one day I’d be proposing that we write into the Constitution that a father is a man and a mother is a woman, I’d certainly have smiled. I’d have said that the purpose of the Constitution is not the confirmation of self-evident biological facts. And now I’m the one who’s initiated this. We can see how quickly even social views that were thought to be stable can change when concerted action is taken by political and economic actors. If we don’t deal with these issues in good time, we’ll wake up one day to find that we’ve been tricked – as was the case with liberal democracy. If we remain silent, if we shrug our shoulders, we’ll be creating a climate in society in which we’ll be the ones attracting strange looks.

A situation may arise in which we who defend the traditional institution of the family are portrayed as the enemies of freedom. Things must not come to that. We must mount the defence in good time. The advocates of the “open society” attack the nation and the family, and then weaken our identity with mass migration. Now they want to make our children unsure of themselves. We must not let this happen! Hungary is a free country, and all adults can live as they wish. But our children must be protected from gender propaganda, and the best way to do this is through a referendum.

Amen to that. Imagine having a conservative leader who fought for families with courage and conviction. Contrast this with George W. Bush, who had Karl Rove cynically arrange for gay marriage initiatives to be on state ballots in the 2004 presidential election to juice voter turnout. Then, when he was re-elected, Bush gave weak, pro forma support to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which died in the Senate. Instead, Bush, true to GOP establishment form, spent his political capital on a failed (thank God) attempt to privatize Social Security.What’s interesting, and what you pick up from reading the whole interview, is that Orban’s defense of the family on questions of sexual morality is part of a broader push by his government to incentivize family formation. The Fidesz government has an array of tax policies to make it easier for Hungarians to form families — this, to combat the grim fertility rate, which is below-replacement.Orban is pretty frank about how nothing major will change for Europe until one of the core states of the European Union elects a national conservative government like his. Even if he wins:

We shouldn’t overestimate our own importance. Our victory won’t be enough to achieve a conservative turnaround in Europe. The conservative, Christian democratic approach will be battling against a headwind until the moment when at least one of the EU’s founding Member States steps onto the same path as us. Until then, the intellectual and strategic confrontation between the Left and the Right will be presented as if it were merely a dispute between the Western Member States and “new” ones in the East – which missed out on Western development and are unreconstructed hayseeds. This narrative can be dismembered by getting the first founding Member State on our side. Being good border fortress warriors, we can hold out for a long time, but this will only result in a real victory if we find partners.

Orban is still trying to explain what he meant by using the term “illiberal democracy” to describe his governing philosophy:

The consensus among analysts is that the last twelve years will enter the history books as the Orbán era. Earlier you’ve called your policies “illiberal”, but you’ve also talked about Christian liberty, and now you use the term “conservative renaissance”. If you had to characterise the last twelve years ideologically, what term would you use?

It’s no accident that this lexicon is so variegated. People like us lost the language wars in the early 1990s, and since then we’ve not only failed to find our bearings, but also our language. In the first third of the 20th century, European democrats clearly identified the common enemies to be fascism and communism. Thus the two otherwise competing democratic tendencies – liberal and conservative – joined forces against the common enemy: the fascists and the communists. We cast aside our intellectual differences and joined forces to fight totalitarian ideas. And in 1990 we won. The liberals woke up first, realising that once the common opponent had been eliminated, the old competitive order would be restored: liberals on one side, conservative Christian democrats on the other. In order to gain a competitive advantage, they’ve created their doctrine: democracy can only be liberal. Since then the conservative side has been fighting a rearguard action, and its lost momentum has allowed the doctrine of liberal democracy to become the dominant view. Since then we’ve been trying to come up with a competitive counter-narrative: Trump said “America First”, and I talk about illiberalism; but really we’re just looking for positions from which we can competitively challenge the liberal doctrine.

He goes on to explain how the whole concept of “liberal democracy,” in the traditional sense of the term, has been hollowed out by the Marxist march through the institutions and the minds of left-liberals. When ordinary Christian ideas and concepts have been marginalized within democratic discourse as “illiberal,” all bets are off, he says. I’m not going to quote Orban’s explanation, because it’s long, yet it is well worth reading, because the very same processes are hollowing out our political discourse in the US.  He says:

This is the trap the liberals find themselves in. We could call this “woke”. Sooner or later we’ll have to face up to the fact that, opposing the Christian democratic camp, we’re no longer dealing with a group espousing liberal ideology, but with a group that’s essentially Marxist with liberal remnants. This is what we have in America today. For the time being the conservative side is at a disadvantage in relation to the Marxist, liberal camp. But in this duel we must pick up the gauntlet.

One more passage:

Recently Mandiner alone has interviewed conservative big guns such as Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony and Niall Ferguson. In the past, there was no such interest in Hungary, yet today they’re coming here, researching and intellectualising, and they’re open to Hungarian conservatism.

Hungarian air sets you free. And freedom is a great attraction. They’ve experienced first-hand that at home they cannot say what they think. The Western liberal hegemony – which is gradually becoming Marxist – at best tolerates ideas that differ from its own – and in certain places doesn’t even tolerate those. This phenomenon is very strong in the Western academic world, and you can also read specific examples of it in Mandiner. I should note that Gáspár Miklós Tamás wrote about this ten years ago. The point is that over there you find hegemony, but in Hungary there’s pluralism.

Hegemony always threatens freedom, especially intellectual freedom. Pluralism, on the other hand, always opens up space for freedom, because it finds pleasure in the fact that we can discuss serious issues with one another, even from very different points of view. In pluralism we see this as beautiful and we enjoy it. Hegemony sees this as a threat, persecutes it and makes life increasingly bleak and grey. So freedom and the diversity that comes with it are a great attraction. And today there are very few countries where conservative Christian democrats can express their opinions as freely as they do in Hungary, surrounded by interested members of the younger generation. So to those unfortunate intellectuals I could say that Hungary remains for them.

Read the whole interview. 

On that final point of Orban’s, here’s a link to an essay the cruelly embattled Princeton professor Joshua Katz wrote about his recent visit to Budapest. Katz, you’ll recall, is the top Classics scholar whom a mob is trying to drive out of Princeton because though he’s not a conservative, he dared to stand up to an attempt to force race ideology onto the curriculum, and into the life of the university where it doesn’t belong. I wrote about it here. Katz has been savaged on campus by fellow academics, colleagues, and some students. In his New Criterion essay this week, Katz wrote:

I recently returned from beautiful Budapest, where I spent a week as a guest of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an educational institution that was the subject of a hit piece in TheNew York Times last June. The reasons the Gray Lady disapproves are clear enough: mcc has received lavish funding from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s socially conservative government, is unabashedly elitist in courting top students, and has as the chairman of its board of trustees a close adviser of Mr. Orbán.

To speak frankly, I hesitated before accepting the invitation. While some of my friends are fans of Mr. Orbán and his party, Fidesz, others are vehemently opposed. They think of the prime minister as a dictator, objecting to his overt nationalism, desire for tight borders, supposed anti-Semitism, distaste for the new gender orthodoxy that has so rapidly swept over the West, and seeming friendship with Donald Trump (and, of particular concern since my trip, Vladimir Putin).

In truth, though, I didn’t hesitate for terribly long. For one thing, two socially and politically very different friends told me they were going to be at mcc at the same time: the philosopher Peter Boghossian, who is a staunchly atheistic man of the Left, and the writer and journalist Rod Dreher, a staunchly religious man of the Right. Furthermore, as a longtime professor of ancient languages at Princeton University—a 501(c)(3) entity that has an endowment of nearly $40 billion and receives substantial government funding each year despite self-flagellating claims of being guilty of systemic racism (in which case it is arguably in violation of a number of Civil Rights statutes)—I hardly feel in a position to criticize the way a country I barely know spends money on education.

Nor do I have a fear of association. There are surely lines I would not cross, but with both Peter and Rod enthusiastic, I wanted to check out mcc for myself. And so in I went to what Rod ironically calls “Magyar Mordor,” a land that self-respecting American liberals and some establishment conservatives as well have been primed to view with suspicion.

More, about the MCC conference:

[W]hat I saw at MCC was what American universities used to be like and what all institutions of higher learning should still aspire to be: fora where the wise and the curious transmit and absorb knowledge and, when circumstances are propitious, move us ever closer to an understanding of ideas that elude our easy mental grasp. During the week, all of us engaged in real conversation about tough issues rather than blindly accepting the orthodoxy du jour—or, for that matter, criticizing said orthodoxy without providing arguments against it. We did this on stage and we did this in the breaks, over cherry strudel. Profound disagreements might not have been resolved, but at the end of the day, there were handshakes, drinks, and good-natured banter—the better to return to the differences the next morning.

The final public event was a “fireside chat” between Peter and Rod. They began by discussing the recent appointment of Sam Brinton, a nuclear engineer and lgbtq activist, to a post in the United States Department of Energy. As readers may already know—there has been a great deal of press about this—Mx. Brinton, who uses the pronouns “they/them,” is a gender-fluid member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a group of men who dress as flamboyant nuns), a practitioner of a fetish known as pup play, and, more generally, an activist for kink.

In brief, Rod believes that Mx. Brinton, though qualified for the job, should not have been appointed, for one thing because they deliberately “provoke people into having ‘conversations’ about lgbt matters . . . , [which] amounts to bullying.” Peter, by contrast, believes there is no cause to object. The two of them duked it out in front of a rapt audience, with the conversation skillfully moderated by the mcc chairman, Balázs Orbán, a charismatic lawyer and political scientist who is, confusingly, unrelated to his boss, the prime minister. It may surprise you—certainly it surprised me—to learn that Balázs, though sympathetic to Rod on some points, on the whole sided with Peter. Sooner or later, the conversation will appear on YouTube, and I recommend you watch it. It is a model of civil and spirited disagreement.

Do you understand how remarkable this is? Such a conversation—a simple exercise in free speech on a controversial topic—would be nearly unthinkable on any progressive (read: in many ways, regressive) American college or university campus today. If it were to be scheduled, “traumatized” students would put the administration under tremendous pressure to cancel the event; if it went ahead anyway, there would be heavy security; and you could count on more than a handful of students (and perhaps some faculty members) to show up and shout down the speakers, or worse. None of this happened at the putatively illiberal (read: in many ways, classically liberal) mcc. And I like to think that none of this could happen at MCC, though I admit I failed to imagine the appalling condition in which America’s educational establishment would now find itself. Clearly, constant vigilance is required to prevent any institution from becoming woke-ified.

Read it all. I hope you will come to Hungary and see for yourself what it’s like. It’s not like what you read about and hear in our media. The universities in Hungary are much freer places to speak than most of the universities in America. You won’t read about that in our media. But it’s true.

At this conference in Madrid where I’ve been late this week, the estimable French scholar Chantal Delsol, who is a friend of mine, gave a talk in which she said that my talk about our culture in the West becoming “totalitarian” is wildly overstated. I didn’t hear this myself, because there was no English translation for Delsol’s lecture, and my French isn’t good enough to have followed her. But several scholars came up to me throughout the afternoon, after her talk, to tell me what she said. Most of them added that she really doesn’t see what’s happening. Well, I’m not going to criticize Prof. Delsol without knowing precisely what she said, but I don’t see how it is even a question but that we in the West are becoming more and more totalitarian in effect, even if we aren’t following the classical model of totalitarianism (meaning, top-down one-party state control). If you have one ideology controlling all the major institutions of a society, and that ideology is rigidly intolerant of dissent, then despite the fact that the society in question has formal guarantees of free expression, there’s a term for that: soft totalitarianism.

Viktor Orban gets it. I would say that he would not put up for one second with the kind of garbage that happened this week at the University of North Texas. But then, Hungary is a country where for the time being, even the Left would not undertake that kind of woke-fascist behavior. It remains to be seen if Texas lawmakers care enough about defending free speech and free expression to hold UNT responsible for protecting the right of students to hear speakers. If America can’t defend these principles in Texas, it can’t defend them anywhere. Hungary, however, can.

UPDATE: A priest friend writes:

I was struck by the observation that the Anglo-Americans want countries to acknowledge that they are morally right whereas the Chinese just want acknowledgement of the reality of power.

It reminded me of my seminary experience. I used to tell guys that a conservative seminary administration was preferable to a liberal one not because one was necessarily better than the other (that would depend on particular points), but because the conservatives just demanded obedience whereas the liberals demanded agreement. This, I maintained, was because conservatives had no problem admitting they were wielding authority/power whereas the liberals hated authority and had to hide from themselves that they were exercising it–they were only being reasonable. Hence, the conservatives were largely satisfied with external conformity, but the liberals demanded assent (and they would be infuriated if you said you were conforming out of obedience because that revealed their exercise of raw power). The conservatives want your body; the liberals demand your soul.When the ill-liberal left, for example, demands acceptance of gender ideology be enshrined in national and international law, it’s about requiring openness, but when a family or nation refuses to allow their own children to be subjected to that ideology it’s an abusive use of parental or governmental authority.  See how it works? We’re not authoritarian, we’re just right.Particularly ironic that the ill-liberal left simultaneously holds that the meaning of reality is socially constructed, yet insists on calling their opponents wrong or inhuman–as if there were an objective standard by which reality and ethics can be judged.  What they mean, by their own ideology, is merely that they are culturally dominant and have arranged society to marginalize those who disagree. Well, Putin’s answer is that he aims to construct an alternate narrative by force. Other than name call what can the ill-liberal left do unless they are prepared to wield power to impose their narrative?

Interesting. Every exercise of morality is an exercise of power. That can’t be denied. But what Orban says (in light of this priest’s observation) is that every exercise of power by the Anglo-Saxon world has to be justified morally to neutralize the squeamishness Anglo-Saxons have about using power for its own sake. The priest indicates that in seminaries, this is a liberal thing, not a conservative thing. Viktor Orban says at the nation-state level, it is a habit of the Anglo-Saxon mind. I wonder, though, if it’s not more accurate to say, regarding geopolitics, that it’s a product of the modern Western mind — that is, the classical liberal mind. After all, agree with him or not, Orban is good at exercising power, but he always has a justification for it, because that is what people expect.

The post The Orban Interview appeared first on The American Conservative.

At what point will state legislatures step up and actually do something to force publicly-funded universities to act like universities instead of woke madrassahs? Look at what happened at the University of North Texas the other day. when a Texas House candidate whose son was taken from him by the courts in a widely-reported transgender custody case came to speak to a class at the invitation of a campus conservative group:

At the University of North Texas in Denton, far-left activists shut down the Young Conservatives of Texas (@YctUnt) event featuring the father who lost custody of his trans child. The radicals pounded on the table & shouted, “F— you, fascist” over & over.pic.twitter.com/QRIAXcWBZK

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) March 3, 2022

More. Look at the loony woman:

One of the far-left protesters at the University of North Texas (@UNTnews) in Denton moved to the front of the room so she could scream at the speaker, a father who lost custody of his child after opposing his ex wife’s desire to help transition the child. pic.twitter.com/GTC37dTSjl

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) March 3, 2022

Here is the full video of the madness that took over that room:

From the Houston Chronicle:

Texas House candidate Jeff Younger, who seeks to outlaw transgender youth care, was driven out of an event hosted at the University of North Texas by protesters on Wednesday, March 2. The event played out on a thread from Twitter user Ismael Belkoura last night, who was posting photos and video from the event. Belkoura’s thread has since been taken down by Twitter.

Younger, who is running for Texas House District 63, was scheduled to speak at an event organized by UNT chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas. The room where Younger was to speak was filled by protesters who drowned out Younger and organizers with a “F**k these fascists” and “trans rights” chants.

The Post Millennial talked to the conservative student organizer of the talk. Scary what happened to this person:

For Neidert, the “most jarring part” of the event was after Younger had attempted to speak, which went on for about 45 minutes, and she and Younger had left the building. She was outside, Neidert said, a target of the mob, and was separated from police officers who were escorting Younger to a car.

“I was with two officers at this point and they pushed me inside of the closest building,” she said. “So we go in this entrance, it’s kind of the side entrance is pretty much in a stairwell. So we get in the stairwell, the policeman lock the door and then they run me off to the main hallway of the building. But down the hallway you can see one of the entrances. And there was just a mob of people outside.”“I don’t know if the door was locked. I don’t know if it was unlocked and they just hadn’t tried to come in at that point,” Neidert told The Post Millennial. “But they were banging on the windows and so the cops understood like, ‘we can’t go out that way.’ And so then they turned me back around. They’re pushing me and we get back to the stairwell we came in and they have me running upstairs.”They made it to the third floor, she said, and the officers were looking for an open door, “but the secure ones all seem to be locked,” she said. “Finally, we get to this janitor’s closet, and they push me in there, they put an officer in there with me, and then the other officer we were with at that point, leaves.”“At this point, I’m in this little janitor’s closet with the officer and we’re kind of whispering us, making sure I was okay. He had me move away from the door. I wasn’t really hyperventilating, but I was definitely like, kind of like I was freaked out,” she said. The officer had her move away from the door.“Then all of a sudden we start hearing doors opening and closing. Like it’s really loud,” she said. “We could hear that and so about the police officer turns the lights off. And we’re standing there in silence. Again, the light was off. I couldn’t really see but I do he had his hand on his holster. We start hearing people coming up, we just hear like shrieking, like just I don’t know how to explain, just awful, a person shrieking. When they come down the floor they jiggle the handle of the door to see if they could find us.”

This protest was documented by a sympathetic student, who deleted his Twitter posts when he realized Andy Ngo had retweeted them (too bad; they had been archived). Are there any UNT students present? Then expel them. They shut down the event and threatened people’s safety. If UNT will not do this, then the Texas legislature should start withholding funds. Enough of this garbage. The only way university presidents will start fulfilling their responsibilities to make universities places where there can be civil discussions, and even unpopular speech is protected, will be to hit them where it hurts: in the institutional wallet.

Neil Smatresk is the president of UNT. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas ought to have him on the phone Monday morning, demanding to know what Dr. Smatreks is going to do to make things right on his campus — and not being satisfied until he has concrete answers. Watch the video above: this is what happened on the campus Neil Smatresk controls. There are plenty of students identifiable on that video. Every one of them who can be positively identified ought to have their butts hauled into the president’s office and handed a notice of expulsion. They are unfit to be in a university.

This will not stop on campuses until there are serious consequences. There will be no serious consequences until (in the case of state universities) lawmakers compel them. The trans fanatics must be halted, without hesitation or apology.

We know that West Coast and East Coast lawmakers don’t have the balls to hold universities accountable for permitting anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, fascist protests like this. But legislators in Texas? I expect more of them.

The post Defund Woke UNT Now appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woke up this morning in Madrid to this:

 

A senior US senator is openly encouraging the assassination of the leader of a nuclear power. Think about that. These are days.

So little of this makes sense. So many people seem desperate for World War III. You should read the comments section of this blog, which is like:

Me: It would be a great idea if we took extra efforts to avoid a nuclear holocaust.

Them: So you’re saying we should just let Putin have whatever he wants then?

The other day I wrote here, citing Tanner Greer’s recent piece, about people who cast reasoned analysis to the wind, and instead fix facts around the emotional conclusion they have already reached. I cannot get out of my head the things I’ve read about the summer of 1914, as all of Europe marched towards a civilizational conflagration, both the leaders and their publics supremely confident in themselves, and in the rightness of the war.

Some people see what’s happening now as inspiring, as a return to moral clarity and righteousness. Here’s David Brooks this morning. Excerpts:

There’s been a restored faith in the West, in liberalism, in our community of nations. There has been so much division of late, within and between nations. But now I wake up in the morning, pick up my phone and am cheered that Sweden is providing military aid to Ukraine, and I’m awed by what the German people now support. The fact is that many democratic nations reacted to the atrocity with the same sense of resolve.

More:

The creed of liberalism is getting a second wind. There’s a school of academic realists who imagine that foreign affairs is all about cold national interest, conducted by chess master strategists. But this week we saw that foreign affairs, like life, is a moral enterprise, and moral rightness is a source of social power and fighting morale.

Well, maybe. I am genuinely cheered by beautiful scenes like this:

Look at all these Berliners lining up at the station to ask fleeing Ukrainians if they’d like to come to live with them at their homes pic.twitter.com/HYQwNGkAal

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) March 4, 2022

… but I cannot regard what’s happening now as a cause for celebration. Don’t get me wrong: I believe the Ukrainians have been very brave and that Putin has been a villain. I want the Russians to lose. I even would be massively relieved if some of the people around Putin removed him from office (which I don’t mind saying as an Internet commentator, but which I would hope that I would not be so foolish as to say as a US senator). But we have just entered into an extremely dangerous period of life on this planet. People who are thrilled over the moral clarity of the moment must have forgotten that the Cold War, with the terror of nuclear war hanging over our heads constantly, was a time of moral clarity too.

I can’t see where the West had any choice other than to have imposed harsh sanctions on the Russian government, but Westerners delighted by the punishment we are inflicting on the Russian people (as opposed to seeing it as a tragic necessity) are fools. We are in the process of immiserating an entire nation, and turning its people against us for a generation or more. We are driving that nation, which we needed to help the West contain China, right into China’s arms. There may well have been no alternative here — at this point, I can’t think of one — but this has been a massive strategic defeat for us. The realist foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer is persona non grata among a lot of people this week for saying things like this, which he told Isaac Chotiner in an interview with the New Yorker:

Looking at the situation now with Russia and Ukraine, how do you think the world got here?

I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the nato Summit in Bucharest, where afterward nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of nato. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just nato expansion. nato expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.

You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?

If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of nato, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no nato expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.

You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy.

It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.

The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.

Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.

I know, I know: we aren’t supposed to say these things. We are supposed to stay focused on the evilness of the Putin regime. Any introduction of complexity into the narrative cuts the purity of moral clarity. But facts don’t disappear because they are inconvenient to the story we want to believe. I’ve seen tweets in the past day or two from people saying that yes, the Ghost of Kyiv legend wasn’t true, nor are some of the other heroic pro-Ukrainian myths passed around this past week … but so what (they say): what’s important is keeping up Ukrainian morale.

To openly prefer a manipulative lie to the complicated truth is corrupt. And it’s not only corrupt, but extremely dangerous, given that we are talking about the possibility of stumbling into World War III here.

I’m taking some criticism in the comments section for spending more time talking about the way we in the West are responding to Russia’s aggression than I am talking about the aggression itself. What, do we lack for news, information, and commentary on what rat bastards the Russians are for invading Ukraine, and ought to turn their tanks around and go home? I can’t see that we do. But not enough people want to hear that this is all likely to end very badly, and that the thing we can least afford now is banishing a tragic sense from our deliberations.

Meanwhile, President Zelensky is trying to goad the West into tripping World War III by declaring a no-fly zone over Ukraine, something that could only be enforced by the willingness of NATO jets to fire on Russian aircraft. I understand why desperate Zelensky is doing this, and I understand why it is difficult to sit back and watch the Russian military brutalize Ukraine, and do nothing about it militarily. But — and I want to yell my head off here — the alternative is to risk a shooting war with a nuclear-armed superpower! My God, think about what so many of you are suggesting here! We cannot fix the entire world. Life is tragic. The cost of acting militarily against the Russians in this case could easily be the annihilation of life on earth.

We have to be prepared to take that risk if Russia attacks a NATO country. Ukraine is not a NATO country. Treaties matter. I had hoped that the tragedy of the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan would affect the ability of Americans to think about the limits of military power, and of the power of the United States to impose its will on the world. Nope. We are now the kind of people who kick Anastasia off of Disney Plus, because she’s Russian.

It has struck me that we are all being gaslit by a media-constructed narrative. I’m quite sure the Russian people are too, by their state-controlled media. If you read Live Not By Lies, you will recall the lament that Father Kirill Kaleda, a Russian Orthodox priest, made to me in a 2019 interview: that the Russian state media were training, via propaganda, the Russian people to hate Ukrainians. What few of us Americans are considering now is the possibility that our media are doing the same thing to us regarding the Russians today.

Yesterday at the Madrid conference, I fell into conversation with a Mexican woman, who said that Americans have a bad habit of believing in their own good intentions. We don’t like to try to stand outside ourselves and understand what the world looks like through the eyes of others. If you think the only smaller, weaker nations who have to bow down to great-power hegemony are those in Russia’s orbit, talk to a Mexican, or anyone living under the Monroe Doctrine. If Mexico decided to align itself militarily with China, you would see how quickly the US would turn into a Yankee Doodle version of Putin’s Russia.

About the media-constructed narrative: does this kind of thing not strike you as insane?

“Anastasia” Removed From Disney+ (US) https://t.co/D5ttYbhWHk #disneyplus pic.twitter.com/yvJHovHhDr

— What’s On Disney Plus (@disneyplusnews) March 2, 2022

Anastasia, a movie about the legend of a Russian princess who escaped the murderous Bolsheviks, is now cancelled by Disney because it is about a Russian. What is wrong with us? The superstar Russian soprano Anna Netrebko has now been forced out of Western opera companies because she refuses to denounce Putin personally, as the mob demands. She wrote last week:

I am thinking about the human rights outrages that China visits routinely on people — most especially the Uyghurs, who are facing cultural genocide at Beijing’s hands — but that the West is prepared to take in stride. You will not see Disney removing Mulan from its repertoire in solidarity with Uyghurs. There is far too much money to be made in China. We are such hypocrites.

Ah yes: Russians as incarnations of whiteness. Finally, a woke principle that can unify liberals and conservatives. Thanks, Putin.

Reading my friend David Brooks’s optimistic column this morning about the moral clarity all this brings, I recall a dinner conversation I had last night with a professor from a European country that struggles with violent Muslim immigrants. He told me that he and his family moved out of his hometown because they knew that there was no hope there. He said that Muslim immigrants, who make up a high proportion of the local population, decided that they weren’t going to obey parking regulations in the city. So the city backed down, as it always does, afraid of trouble.

All over his native country, the professor said, the police cede more and more areas to Muslims, turning them into no-go zones. Everybody knows this is happening, but elected leaders don’t want to face it, and the media don’t report it, because they police themselves well for Islamophobia. The thing that tipped the professor was when the son of a prominent local imam posted something on social media in which he (the son) performed a song calling for the murder of Christians and Jews. Nobody dared to say a thing about it, because they didn’t want trouble. The professor told me that this was the last straw for him, the point at which he realized that the people of his home country no longer have the will to defend themselves.

He moved his family to a Central European country that is less, um, diverse. Most European governments are unwilling to defend their countries from this immigrant invasion, but they are in high dudgeon over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I don’t blame them at all for being outraged at Russia’s outrageous behavior, but which invasion is more likely to affect the lives and futures of European peoples this century? Answer: the one the ruling class refuses to talk about.

“We are now in an era of civil conflicts that will emerge all over the West,” he said (this is an era of academic speciality for him). He went on to say that he expects this to eventually result in a left-wing authoritarian regime, and when that one fails, he expects a right-wing one. He said, grimly, “This is the kind of environment that produced Hitler.”

We can only keep up this optimism by living in denial about the whole picture. The world is falling apart, and we in the West have played, and are playing, a role in its disintegration.

 

The post The Absence Of A Tragic Sense appeared first on The American Conservative.

The war in Ukraine started only a week ago, and already we in the West are succumbing to anti-Russian hysteria that is both disgusting and frightening. I thought that most of us understood that it is possible to despise a government’s actions while not demonizing all the people of a country. I thought most of us in the enlightened West knew that collective guilt is a terrible thing.

I was wrong.

Look at this monstrous tweet from Obama’s ambassador to Moscow:

McFaul was so heavily criticized from all corners for this tweet that he eventually took it down. Good for him, but think about it: this man was the US ambassador to Russia, and this is how he thinks.

He’s not alone. People are deranged by hatred. Look, I completely get the anger at the Russian government for this unjust and cruel war. I share it! I also believe that Russia should be severely sanctioned. But there are some stupid, frightening things happening.

In Munich, Russian conductor Valery Gergiev was fired by the Munich Philharmonic for refusing to denounce Putin’s invasion:

Russian conductor Valery Gergiev was issued with an ultimatum by Dieter Reiter, the mayor of Munich. If he refused to denounce the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he would be removed from his position as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.

Gergiev’s dismissal from the orchestra comes after he was dropped by his management and removed from several concert and festival line-ups following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His longstanding support of Putin and refusal to denounce the regime has led to his dismissal as music director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra and the cancellation of appearances with the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna Philharmonic and concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Lucerne Festival, among others.

The decision has been made by the Munich Philharmonic to remove Gergiev from his post three years before his contract was set to expire. He has held the position since 2015.

That is appalling. It is wrong to put a man in the position of denouncing the leader of his country when his country is at war, and he is in a foreign country, as a condition of his employment. I know nothing about Gergiev, and I find his reported support for Putin distasteful, but as longtime readers know, I strongly believe there should be a bright, clear line between an artist and his or her political commitments. Artists, musicians, and other creative people often believe foolish and extreme things. That does not mean that they are bad artists. We should not want to live in a society in which artists can be fired because they refuse to endorse a political statement. I wish Gergiev would denounce the war too, and denounce Putin, but I find it appalling that he was forced out of his job not because of anything he said, but because of what he refused under pressure to say.

By the way, Gergiev has also been banned from conducting at La Scala in Milan, for the same reason. Also in Milan, a university in Milan cancelled a course on Dostoevsky.Paolo Nori, a Dostoevsky scholar who was to teach the course, read the letter on Instagram informing him that it was off:

“Dear professor, this morning the Vice Rector for Didactics informed me of the decision taken with the rector to postpone the journey on Dostoevsky. The aim is to avoid any form of controversy, especially internal as it is a moment of strong tension.”

Yes, because that’s what university life is for: avoiding any form of controversy. The university was dogpiled on social media, and reversed course. 

In the Czech Republic, the chief law enforcement officer said that if a Czech citizen publicly expresses support for Russia’s war on Ukraine, he could be charged with a felony and sent to prison. Think about that. Prison for simply saying that you back Russia in this war — a war which does not even involve your country! The EU punishes Hungary for far, far less.

The Glasgow Film Festival abruptly cancelled the screening of two Russian films:

Unbelievable! The film festival directors admit that this has nothing to do with the filmmakers and their views. The Stockholm Film Festival has followed suit. Gutless, anti-intellectual, anti-art. The West didn’t do this to Andrei Tarkovsky and other Soviet filmmakers during the Cold War, when the USSR was a savage dictatorship. But now, we do. I endorse this response to Glasgow:

Contemporary liberals are simultaneously the most bigoted and mind-numbingly boring people imaginable. If you find yourself sympathetic to this kind of stuff I genuinely question whether you could ever truly appreciate a single poem.

— JJ (@smalwigwamlight) March 2, 2022

The Financial Times reports that PR firms are abandoning Russian clients. One anonymous PR executive said:

“It’s become impossible. Unless they publicly criticise the war in the Ukraine then it’s very difficult to see how you could represent them.”

Another unnamed PR exec remarked:

“There is no nuance right now. Working with anyone from Russia feels toxic.”

Feels toxic. Because they’re Russian. So you drop them, because they’re Russian, and the Russians are all BAD PEOPLE. After all, as Ambassador McFaul said, there are no innocent Russians.

It’s sickening. Glenn Greenwald is right:

Look at how often now we are told that crises are so severe and dangerous that we simply must accept centralized censorship for our own good: Russiagate, 1/6, COVID, now this. Just an endless training course in acquiescing to having information curtailed:https://t.co/qDLYbxHXDN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 2, 2022

I feel this quite personally, not only because I’m a writer, but also because I’m the writer of Live Not By Lies, which is about how to keep your integrity when those in power persecute you for what you believe, and what you say, or refuse to say. I took to heart what I was taught about the importance of defending free speech, even when it’s speech we dislike. And I am absolutely certain that the same liberals who are throwing their weight around like this against Russians, simply for being Russian, or for being the wrong kind of Russian, are eventually going to do the very same thing to conservative, Christians, and other deplorables.

This kind of thing is not contemporary. It has always been around. When the US got involved in World War I, Germans and German-Americans were heavily stigmatized. Antiwar protester Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist, was jailed over his dissent, much to America’s shame. This kind of thing is in our nature. But I’m old enough to remember when liberals led the principled opposition to this kind of thing. Now, everything has flipped. We’ve lived with cancel culture long enough that silencing dissent and driving people who hold unpopular opinions out of public life has become the normal reaction, I guess.

Shame on us. Shame! I also feel strongly about this because a hyper-liberal friend of forty years cut me and my family off permanently with a text message after she read a letter to the editor I wrote defending Louisiana US Sen. Bill Cassidy’s vote to impeach Donald Trump after the January 6 event. What she objected to was that in the letter — a letter in which I said that Donald Trump deserved impeachment — I wrote that Trump had some accomplishments to his name, but none of them were sufficient to overcome his shocking behavior on January 6. For my ex-friend, the fact that I didn’t despise Trump with enough purity of heart was enough for her to end a four-decade friendship. This is what the dominant strand of Leftism in the West has become: crudely censorious, bigoted, and a menace to liberty.

Back in the early 2000s, liberals correctly jeered at right-wing yahooism over “Freedom fries,” trashing the Dixie Chicks, and pouring French wine down the drain to protest France’s refusal to join the US attack on Iraq. Now they’re as bad or worse about Russia.

I’m writing tonight from Madrid, where I arrived this evening for an all-day university conference tomorrow. This conference has been scheduled for a long time. There are two Russian academics on the schedule to talk about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity. I hope they were able to make it here. I’m going to make a point to find them as soon as I can and let them know that whatever their view of the war is, I appreciate their presence, and look forward to hearing what they have to say about religion. The thought that these two scholars might now be afraid to show their faces amid this anti-Russian mob hysteria disgusts me, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stand for it.

Last week when I was in Debrecen, a Hungarian provincial city, talking to college students about wokeness, I was heartened to see and hear from these kids that they don’t understand why their generation in America is so intolerant. This was a group of nineteen young men and women, all with diverse political and religious views (I polled the class to find out). I told them that whether they were liberal or conservative, religious or atheist, they had a moral duty to defend the right of all people to be heard — especially if they disagreed with a person under fire for his or her views. We in America used to be a country where most people, especially educated people, believed in that principle. But we lost it, and that’s why we’re losing our country.

Defending Ukraine from Russian aggression does not require you to despise Russian art and culture, or to hate all Russians and treat them like lepers. I can understand someone in Ukraine succumbing to that kind of passion under such extreme circumstances — but what’s our excuse? The pleasure of hating indiscriminately?

Back in November, at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando, I saw a surprising number of Hungarians there. One young Hungarian woman I talked to told me, “You have no idea what it’s like to come to an international conference, and when people find out you’re Hungarian, they are happy to meet you.” She was talking about how her people are treated like pariahs in many conferences in Europe because a liberal habit is to blame all Hungarians for Viktor Orban. This infuriated me. I’m sure she was an Orban supporter — it was a conservative conference, after all — but the point she was making was that Hungarians draw scorn and spite from liberal Europeans who have no idea about their individual political commitments: it’s enough to know that they are Hungarian, and therefore Bad People Who Must Be Shunned. I’ve heard that in some settings, Israelis get the same treatment.

One more time: I denounce the Putin government, and I despise its vicious war on Ukraine. But I love Russian art and culture (especially Russian religion), some of which are among the greatest treasures of humanity. What kind of animals convinces himself to hate the works of Dostoevsky, Rachmaninoff, Tolstoy, Stravinsky, and so many other works of staggering depth and beauty, because of politics? I’ll tell you what kind: the kind of animals who ran the Soviet Union, and who persecuted artists who did not follow the approved political line. Some Russians have been very kind and hospitable to me, and the Russian people as a whole are tragic, violent, holy, courageous, long-suffering, brave, passionately loving and hateful alike, and one of the most vividly human races on the face of the earth. I love them, and no pig-headed mob of liberal yahoos is going to make me say or think otherwise.

Don’t you see what’s happening here? We start out by dehumanizing others for their nationality or ethnicity, and we end up dehumanizing ourselves. We may not be able to stop Putin from destroying Ukrainian cities, but surely we can prevent him from destroying our minds and our hearts. Right?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Read your post on the weird anti-Russianism. Made me think of how careful the US was to distinguish Muslim radicals from true Islam. In fact, if it had been suggested by anyone in 2001 that a Muslim must publicly denounce other members of his faith in order to avoid public shaming, it would have been condemned as sheer bigotry, Islamophobia.

But this is the logical outgrowth of identity politics. No one is an individual that is tethered to traditions and families. You are a particular instantiation of your identity’s Platonic ideal. So, if Russia is essentially Putinism, then all Russians are by their nature particular instantiations of the universal “Putin”.

This way of thinking, we were once told, is the essence of bigotry. This is why we look back in shame at the Japanese internment camps during WWII. What is being said about Russians who live abroad is right out of that mentality.

Yes. The liberals told us we couldn’t say “China virus,” but now many of them treat Russians like lepers. I guess “Russianness” is a subspecies of “whiteness” now.

But see, it’s the Right that’s bringing the culture war into this, as usual… .

This morning I’m thinking about being in Paris briefly in the summer of 1984. I was seventeen years old, and on a guided trip my mom had won in a church raffle. Wandering the streets I met some other boys my age. All were French, except this one kid who was the son of a Soviet diplomat. The French boys goaded us to get into an argument. The French boys hated Ronald Reagan, so that was the basis of their game. In fact, I too hated Reagan back then (I would go on that fall to co-found a Walter Mondale activist group at my school). When the boys demanded that I denounce Reagan, it was easy to do … but I felt dirty doing it on foreign soil, in front of a smirking jackass son of a Soviet ambassador (who, I hardly need to point out, was not encouraged by the French boys to denounce Chernenko or Communism).

I felt dirty doing it, not because I was secretly pro-Reagan — I very much was not — but because I felt bullied into doing something that was a violation of ordinary patriotic sentiment. I’m not going to be part to any moral bullying like that against a Russian abroad. Even if they support Putin, unless they want to fight about it, I am going to treat them with dignity and charity, because my own sense of dignity and honor demands it.

The post The Hate-Russians Moral Panic appeared first on The American Conservative.

Readers, I was away from the keys for most of yesterday, which is why it took so long to approve comments. I am leaving shortly for a conference in Madrid. I will keep blogging, but comments approval is going to be spotty. Below, I present you an essay by my Canadian friend Hans Boersma, an Anglican theologian. He gives me permission to reproduce it here.

By Hans Boersma

Canadians love their Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is not without reason. It begins with a preamble that reads, “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” The supremacy of God and the rule of law are the foundation of Canadian democracy.

When on February 14, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, the announcement caused shockwaves all over the country and, indeed, throughout the world. What serious threats might Canada face that this most drastic of measures was taken? As an aside, let me observe that the term “Emergencies Act” is a form of newspeak. Newspeak is an important instrument in attempts at reshaping people’s views. It served that role in Orwell’s 1984, and it does in Trudeau’s Canada. Canadians no longer have an External Affairs or Foreign Affairs Department. Instead, we now have a Global Affairs Department, so as to accommodate Justin Trudeau’s view as expressed to the New York Times that Canada is the “first postnational state,” since “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” He may be right, though for me this observation is cause for lament, not celebration.

 

But I already digress. I simply mean to say that to talk of an Emergencies Act is to acquiesce in newspeak. The Act’s predecessor, in force until 1988, was more accurately called the War Measures Act. To invoke the Emergencies Act is to impose a martial law—with or without boots on the ground. It’s the kind of extreme measure that nations avoid until they can no longer. Ukraine didn’t invoke it until after Russia had already begun its invasion. Canada invoked the War Measures Act during both World Wars, and then again during the so-called October Crisis of 1970, when the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) had kidnapped Quebec’s Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross. Not everyone was convinced the latter crisis warranted the use of the War Measures Act, but few disputed that Canada faced a serious crisis. War measures are for times of war—or something closely akin to it—when the very existence of the nation is at stake. Clearly, no such crisis existed at any point while the truckers made their voices heard.

 

The words of the Charter too have been subjected to neglect and abuse. The preamble’s language of “the supremacy of God” has been ignored as an inconvenience and treated as an embarrassment. The words are there, but we have lost a sense of what they might mean. We do well to ask at this critical juncture of Canadian history: how do we understand these words? And what do they have to do with the current crisis? The first thing to observe is that “the supremacy of God and the rule of law” are one and the same thing. God’s supremacy indicates that he is utterly free—beyond all human scheming. This utter freedom or transcendence of God is identical to his own eternal law. Freedom and law are not each other’s opposites; they are identical in God, for God is One.

 

Human freedoms and human laws participate God’s freedom and law—in God himself. We could also say: these human freedoms and laws are finite attempts at mirroring God. To the extent that they are truly grounded in God’s eternal freedom and law, they are not gifts from a generous government. They are gifts emanating directly from God. Section 1 states, therefore, that these freedoms and rights are “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The Charter’s basic point is that the freedoms and rights of citizens come directly from God and ought not to be tampered with.

 

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does a pretty good job of articulating the ways in which human freedoms and rights should reflect God’s supremacy (or freedom) and his eternal law. Section 2 of the Charter lists freedom of conscience and religion; freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; freedom of peaceful assembly; and freedom of association. Among Canadians’ rights, the Charter lists in section 6 the right of “every Canadian … to enter, remain in and leave Canada” and of every Canadian to “move to and take up residence in any province; and to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.”

 

Despite this setup of the Charter, ever since March 2020, provincial governments have systematically regulated and limited freedom of worship, mostly with general appeals to health concerns. My home province of British Columbia simply abolished religious freedom and the right to worship for four months on end. The assumption appears to be that religion is a luxury, the practice of which the state may or may not grant to the church, depending upon the situation. Put differently, by abolishing the church’s worship, the state has cut the participatory link between human freedoms and laws on the one hand and God’s own freedom and law on the other hand.

 

Other freedoms too have been curtailed by the state. The unvaxxed have not been allowed to travel by plane or train within Canada, let alone leave the country. They are essentially imprisoned, Soviet-style, within their own country. Most worryingly, as I hope to show, the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression is under attack by the federal government of Canada. Suppression of unacceptable views is the stated aim of the Liberal regime’s Emergencies Act.

 

Not all human freedoms and laws are equally truthful and real. Only to the extent that they participate in God do they carry genuine weight. The truth and validity of our freedoms and laws depend upon their faithful reflection of and participation in God’s freedom and law. When the state regards itself as ultimate lawgiver, it shouldn’t surprise us that they feel free to curtail or abolish Charter freedoms and rights and instead impose laws and restrictions that fail to reflect the character of God. Such so-called laws, because they fail faithfully to participate in God’s freedom and law, do not carry weight. They are empty, unjust words of human origin. As such, they may well give rise to tyranny. The Emergencies Act is not legal simply because of Trudeau’s fiat. Martial law is legal only when it corresponds to the Charter—which is to say, when it faithfully reflects and participates in God’s freedom and law.

 

Language matters. The language of the Charter certainly does. The pious mouthing of the Prime Minister and government officials that the Emergencies Act leaves the Charter fully in place simply cannot be taken at face value. Already during the two years before the Emergencies Act’s invocation were the Charter’s rights and freedoms systematically trampled by Canadian governments. It is beyond satire to suggest that martial law would somehow leave Charter rights and freedoms intact.

 

The problem goes back to our Prime Minister’s view of how words function in the Charter. While he pays lip service to the “rule of law” mentioned in its preamble (and I have no idea how he would even try to make sense of the language of the “supremacy of God”), it matters little to him that the freedoms and rights mentioned in sections 2 and 6 have been suspended for well over a year. But as we have just seen, freedoms and rights may be set aside without consequence only where they are mere constructs of the human will—the gifts of a benevolent dictator perhaps. When, instead, they are a participation in the freedom and law that is the nature of God himself, it is unconscionable to bracket them for any length of time without demonstrable justification. In short, it is a radically voluntarist—not to say Nietzschean—view of reality that undergirds Canada’s regnant political climate.

 

Just as human laws are (or should be) grounded in eternal law, so human words derive meaning from the eternal Word. When we sever the link between human laws and eternal law, we invariably also sever the link between human words and the divine Word. Like human laws, so human words become the playthings of those with the most clout. Philosophically, this linguistic approach may be traced to nominalism (from the Latin nomen, meaning “name”). For nominalists, things are what we name them; their meaning is not a truth we are meant to discover. When words no longer participate in reality, we end up using them to construct reality as it suits us—while banning words that express views we reject and disdain.

 

This nominalist construction of reality in line with our own whims is apparent in the Canadian Prime Minister’s actions. When the trucks first started rolling from the west coast toward Ottawa on January 22, he spoke of a “fringe minority” that held “unacceptable views.” He did not specify, but it’s likely he had in mind the truckers’ opposition to vaccine mandates and passports. Weeks earlier, he had already denounced the unvaxxed by saying, “They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist. It’s a very small group of people, but that doesn’t shy away from the fact that they take up some space. This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: do we tolerate these people?” To the Canadian Prime Minister, the unvaxxed hold unacceptable views and should not be tolerated. Antivaxxers are (very often) misogynistic and racist; their views should be banned.

 

It’s a commonplace now—except among Liberal MPs, ruled by their party leader’s iron-fisted discipline—that the country’s leader is divisive and that he uses language as a key tool to divide his populace. During the House of Commons debate on the invocation of the Emergencies Act, Trudeau called in the heavy verbal artillery when he responded to a Jewish Conservative MP with the accusation that Conservatives stand “with people who wave swastikas.” That the comment is outrageously untruthful does not seem to bother him.

 

Since the trucker demonstrations were entirely peaceful and looked like a fun carnival or a neighborhood party, language had to be marshaled to obscure and deflect the reality that people witnessed on the ground: down-town Ottawa littered with bouncy-castles, saunas, hockey games and barbecues, people singing the national anthem and praying the Lord’s Prayer, truckers cleaning the streets and handing out food to the homeless. Language has the power to name and hence to control; sadly, the Prime Minister’s demagoguery employs it with evil intent and with eminent skill.

 

So, you ask, if the protests were mostly just a street party, why did the Prime Minister invoke martial law, and how did he get away with it? I am not privy to the stirrings of Mr. Trudeau’s heart, so it’s hard to say what, in the end, provoked him to do so. But we are familiar with some of his views and with those of his inner circle. We also know what he did during the few days that he had a nearly completely free hand.

 

In a 2013 townhall meeting, Trudeau was asked which country he most admired after Canada: “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” Trudeau responded. “Their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say, We need to go greenest fastest, we need to start, you know, investing in solar.” For some reason, China first popped into his mind. Admittedly, China’s social credit system is efficient—terrifyingly so. It’s a system that gives individuals scores based not just on vaccination status, but also on compliance with environmental policies, food purchases, dog registration, you name it. But it’s not easy to transplant such a system from China to the free West. Without QR passports you simply can’t do it; they are indispensable if you want to introduce a China-inspired social credit system here in the West.

 

It’s hardly surprising that Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset, published within months of the onset of the Covid crisis in 2020, warmly welcomes the opportunity it affords: “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world,” exclaims Schwab. Justin Trudeau, one of the so-called Young Global Leaders groomed by Schwab, couldn’t agree more. Nor could his Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, a Board of Trustee member of Schwab’s World Economic Forum.

 

Terence Corcoran, one of the National Post’s most perceptive journalists, observes that Trudeau’s opposition to the freedom convoy is directly related to his attempt to advance the WEF ideology: “That possibility may explain why Justin Trudeau has now turned to extreme rhetoric and unprecedented constitutional action against the trucking convoy and its multi-faceted supporters. His reaction is an attempt to divert attention away from the flaws in policy and the failure of the WEF-shaped model he adopted to guide policy.” Trudeau’s “extreme rhetoric” serves to protect the vax program, which (for Trudeau, at least) in turn serves to advance the authoritarian agenda of Schwab’s so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.

 

Why impose martial law? The peacefully demonstrating truckers were having a good time; to some, nothing is as dangerous as ordinary working stiffs having a good time. Think of it: the trucking party scored major successes, simply by driving to Ottawa and parking their trucks. First, the Conservative MPs turfed their not-so conservative leader Erin O’Toole in a parliamentary caucus revolt. Then, five provinces—Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and even Ontario—declared an end to all mandates. Why, they even started banishing QR passports. This last development obstructs, of course, the very best thing about the pandemic: the possibility of digitally controlling every single aspect of ordinary citizens’ lives. The success of the trucker convoy put a major spoke in the WEF’s wheel.

 

Now, naturally, these are not the reasons Trudeau gave for invoking the Emergencies Act. Instead, in proclaiming a national emergency, the government’s stated rationale mentioned “continuing blockades by both persons and motor vehicles that is occurring at various locations throughout Canada and the continuing threats to oppose measures to remove the blockades, including by force, which blockades are being carried on in conjunction with activities that are directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property, including critical infrastructure, for the purpose of achieving a political or ideological objective within Canada.”

 

In truth—in a universe where language and reality correspond—the contrast between this rationale and the realities on the ground could hardly be more obvious. Trudeau’s proclamation pointed to blockades throughout Canada presumably because the Emergencies Act defines national emergency as an “urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature.” In this case, the situation was so local, so not-urgent and not-critical, and so temporary that all of the border blockades had already ended by the time Trudeau invoked the Act. The only protest remaining was that of a small rag-tag group of truckers and their sympathizers in Ottawa, none of them in any way violent.

 

Pressed on what the “acts of serious violence” might be, Minister of Public Safety Marco Medicino commented, “There is an ideologically-motivated operation that we see in the rhetoric here that is meant to incite.” Queen’s University Professor Bruce Pardy points out how dangerous this statement really is: “They have no actual violence occurring. They have no intelligence about threats of violence occurring. I’m sure you can work out what the consequences are if this is to be considered a proper use of the Emergencies Act.” There is no hiding the shocking reality: Trudeau imposed martial law simply to silence political dissidents whose only crime was to hold opinions different from his.

 

To make the case for martial law stick, the Canadian government basically broadened the concept of violence. No longer does it refer just to physical violence (the use of arms to overthrow a government); it can now also refer to rhetorical violence (discourse used for political purposes). How does one critique this broad application of the word violence politely? Well, by its own admission, the Canadian government imposed a national emergency to silence people with “unacceptable views.” Canada had martial law imposed so the government could silence alternative viewpoints.

 

It is hardly surprising that a majority of the provinces immediately rejected Trudeau’s attempted subversion of democracy, that he faced court challenges from the Canadian Constitution Foundation, from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and from the Alberta government, and that he was forced to admit defeat and let go of his so-called emergency hours before the Senate was likely to vote down the government’s naked grab for power.

 

Words matter. The Prime Minister’s consistently incendiary and divisive rhetoric makes clear that he is keenly aware of the power of words. And his fearful reaction to truckers and their “unacceptable views” shows how afraid he is of other people using words he dislikes.

 

We must unequivocally denounce this misuse of words that turns a peaceful protest into an illegal act of “serious violence” to be suppressed with every power the state has at its disposal. Truckers were put in prison, their trucks impounded, their bank accounts frozen. Numerous ordinary people, having donated $20 or $50 to the truckers’ good cause via the crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, scrambled to safeguard their bank accounts because of threats emanating from government ministers and officials.

 

Canadians—those who have had the temerity to disagree with the Prime Minister, either by refusing to get vaxxed or by peacefully protesting vax mandates and QR passports—have suffered egregiously from Trudeau’s misuse of language. They’ve been excluded from all public transit; they’ve been shut up in their country; they’ve been imprisoned; they’ve had their vehicles impounded and their bank accounts frozen—all because a Prime Minister considers their so-called fringe views unacceptable.

 

Perhaps the issue of proportionality should finally be raised. What is the more serious legal offense: to peacefully protest vax mandates and QR passports or to pressure and coerce people into submission, grievously violating the very heart of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, withholding all public travel from the unvaxxed, and imprisoning people for so-called violent rhetoric? Truly, the rule of law and democracy are safer in the hands of the peaceful truckers now in prison than in the hands of the violent Prime Minister residing at Rideau Cottage. In a world where words still had meaning, they would be told to trade places.

 

Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin. A Canadian citizen, he resides in Langley, British Columbia.

 

 

 

The post Justin Trudeau & The Misuse Of Words appeared first on The American Conservative.

Good morning from Budapest. Woke up here to see news that the Russians are moving in the big guns to wage total war on the Ukrainians, who have the gall to resist Moscow. You want to scream. You want heaven to open and rain down fire on Vladimir Putin for doing this.

I also saw a quote from the French Finance Minister, saying, “The sanctions inflicted on Russia are extremely effective. We are waging total economic and financial war on Russia. We are going to provoke the collapse of the Russian economy.” If you have French, watch:

Les sanctions infligées à la Russie sont d’une efficacité redoutable. Nous livrons une guerre économique et financière totale à la Russie.
Nous allons provoquer l’effondrement de l’économie russe. pic.twitter.com/NqB36CbWX4

— Bruno Le Maire (@BrunoLeMaire) March 1, 2022

Two thoughts come at the same time: 1) Good, Putin deserves it over what he’s doing, and 2) my God, this really could mean World War III.

Seriously: a senior government minister in a major Western power openly boasts that the West is waging “total economic and financial war” against Russia, a nuclear-armed superpower. It’s obvious that the West is doing exactly that, but the fact that this man is also on TV bragging about it is terrifying. Unhinged, even. It is clear that madness has overwhelmed Putin, but a reactive madness is also overwhelming us. If the goal is to punish Russia maximally for what it is doing to Ukraine, no matter the risk, then it makes sense. But if the higher goal is to avoid World War III, well, this ain’t the way to do it.

Neither is this: Ukrainian pilots are on their way to Poland to pick up fighter jets.

1 This is becoming a NATO-EU war on Russia.
2 Maybe this scares Putin into stopping his war on Ukraine.
3 Maybe this scares others into getting rid of him.
4 Maybe fear of 1 or 3 makes Putin do horrifying things to Ukraine, Europe, or the world.
5 We are led by psychopath elites! https://t.co/ILyLMeE4ZY

— Titus Techera (@titusfilm) March 1, 2022

This all feels so familiar to me. I will spare you yet another tour down memory lane, to the time between 9/12/2001 and the day in 2003 that we launched the war of choice on Iraq. But I’m telling you, if you were there, you remember the same moral fervor, the same certitude that we were right to do this, that it was all going to work out because, as Karl Rove boasted at the time, “We create our own reality.” You remember, or you should remember, how anybody who said, “Hang on, wait a minute” was derided as weak, unpatriotic, and all those things. People poured French wine down the drain (because France wouldn’t support the war) in the same way they’re pouring out Russian vodka today. The Dixie Chicks lost their audience and their fame for opposing the war. On and on it went … and look what happened.

A few years later, a Democratic administration was in the White House. Turmoil broke out in Libya, which was then ruled by the brutal Muammar Qaddafi. NATO — a purely defensive alliance, we are supposed to believe — led airstrikes against Qaddafi, bringing down his government. Video of Qaddafi’s capture by his enemies went viral, as did images of his dead body. A triumphant Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comically boasted before a 60 Minutes interview, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Libya went from being a dictatorship governed by a brute to a failed state governed by many brutes, where Islamic extremism thrived, human slaves were bought and sold, and through which hordes of migrants headed to Europe were funneled. Years later, after he left office, President Obama said failing to anticipate and plan for the post-Qaddafi order was the worst mistake of his presidency.

We do create our own realities when we wage war … but they are not necessarily the realities we want to create. Putin is finding that out right now in Ukraine, which he thought would fall quickly. Now, though, the Russians are bringing in the big guns, and are going to unleash hell on those poor people. It is despicable, and yes, the Russians should be made to pay a price for what they are doing. But keep in mind that the most important thing in front of Western leaders now has to be preventing the war from becoming a world war.

Nobody wants to talk about this now, because Russia is behaving evilly in Ukraine, and to reflect on how the world got to this point feels like breaking faith with the suffering Ukrainians. Resist that urge: it’s the same emotivist mistake that people like me made post-9/11, when any questioning of the proposed war on Iraq felt like breaking faith with the 9/11 dead. Read this useful thread:

 

Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path.

No-one listened to them and here we are.

Small compilation of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) March 1, 2022

All these men who issued those warnings were foreign policy realists. Their aim was to avoid war. Nobody listened. And here we are. None of that is to excuse Putin’s choice to make war on Ukraine — the ultimate fault is his — but that does not excuse our leaders for making policy choices that helped to get us here.

And now these same leaders are waging total economic and financial war on Russia, and arming the Ukrainians. They are making it awful damn tempting for Russia, as its economy collapses virtually overnight, to lash out militarily against a NATO country … in which case, welcome to World War III. This is not a joke. This is not a “what if”. This is happening in real time.

Look, though, at what NBC’s chief foreign policy correspondent, on the ground in Ukraine, is doing: trying to goad NATO into war:

Perhaps the biggest risk-calculation/moral dilemma of the war so far. A massive Russian convoy is abt 30 miles from Kyiv. The US/NATO could likely destroy it. But that would be direct involvement against Russia and risk, everything. Does the West watch in silence as it rolls?

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) February 28, 2022

This is not journalism — this is pro-war advocacy, from one of the biggest US television networks! This is propaganda! Russia Today, the state-funded broadcaster, is being forced off the air in the West and online because we have to protect ourselves from pro-war Russian propaganda. But pro-war American propagandists are allowed, you see, because reasons.

Watch this 20-minute monologue from Monday evening’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. It is one of the most important things you will see and hear this week:

Seriously, please watch it — especially if you are a liberal. Tucker points out the utter madness of senior figures in this country, political and retired military, who are advocating for shooting war with Russia, and using the Ukraine conflict to stifle domestic dissent. Note especially Democratic Sen. Mark Warner telling the Washington Post that he’s had positive feedback from US tech giants responding to his request that they kick “Russian propaganda” off their platforms. As Tucker points out, what defines “Russian propaganda”? Tucker’s same presentation features Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Lee likening Russia’s war on Ukraine to Republican opposition to Democratic voting rights proposals. Don’t you see where this is going? Any questioning of US policy towards Russia in this war is going to be denounced as “Russian propaganda.” We do have a First Amendment, but if compliant tech firms start bowing to the requests of American lawmakers to take “propaganda” off their platforms, dissent damn sure will be silenced. This is exactly what I warn about in Live Not By Lies: you don’t need to have a state with totalitarian powers to achieve a totalitarian result, if the tech oligarchs and other senior figures of the ruling class are of one mind.

Thank God Tucker Carlson can still broadcast. I don’t know how much longer he will be allowed to do so. What he’s pointing out, standing up to the lies the herd lives by, is that the American people are being stampeded into a shooting war with nuclear-armed Russia by a ruling class that has blundered from one war to another in the past twenty years, and has never once been accountable for its catastrophic failures. How many Pentagon generals have been made to account for their lies and failures in Afghanistan? None. And so forth.

Tucker is also saying that what we see rolling out now, in real time, is a presentiment of how the regime is going to suppress the deplorables and anyone else who dissents from their order. Here’s something from a Los Angeles-based writer:

At this moment, in my own country, in America, I am not free to express my opinions in public, put certain politician signs on my lawn, bumper stickers on my car, or otherwise break from regime consensus without suffering severe physical or economic consequences.

— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) February 28, 2022

But I should drop everything, risk nuclear annihilation, to cry for a far off place I will never see or visit. (A place some ancestors came from, but who cares). Those people over there deserve to be free and independent, and enjoy fair elections!

But I don’t. “Equity,” amirite?

— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) February 28, 2022

You see everything that’s being done to Russians now by the liberal democratic leadership of the West, heedless of its wisdom or justice, simply because the Russians Are Evil and whatever we do to them is justified? If you don’t think this is going to be turned on political and religious conservatives who dissent from the ruling class’s priorities, you are deluding yourself. This is not a defense of the Russians; this is a reminder that whenever the neoliberal ruling class achieves consensus to attack its perceived enemy, the consequences can be devastating.

Events are very fluid as I write, but what  I fear will emerge in the US out of this catastrophe is total resolve by the governing elites to strike at any critics of the neoliberal order and its priorities by smearing them as allies of Putin. All these conservative Christians who are eager to sign up for the regime-change-in-Moscow cause out of laudable sympathy for suffering Ukrainians and reflexive anti-Russian spite from the Cold War will find the same sword of total financial and economic war, and other things, turned on them at home. Mark my words.

Finally, here’s an essay by Tanner Greer praised by Tucker Carlson at the top of his monologue. It’s called “Pausing At The Precipice,” and it should be read by every one of you. Excerpts:

None of these [US, EU, and NATO] actions are as audacious as the Russian invasion which precipitated them. They are a natural, proportional, and even predictable response to Putin’s decision to settle the question of Ukrainian nationhood through the force of arms. Yet it is precisely the naturalness of our policy that we should be wary of. A righteous reaction may be a dangerous one. The imperatives of action disguise an ugly truth: in the field of power politics it is outcomes, not intentions, that matter most. Failure to slow down and examine the assumptions and motivations behind our choices may lead to decisions that feel right in the moment, but fail to safeguard our interests, secure our values, or reduce the human toll of war in the long run.

Greer goes on to discuss a 2019 book by Michael Mazarr about the decision-making process that led to the Iraq War. “To discover how the United States leapt headlong into catastrophe,” Greer writes, “Mazarr read all of the administration memoirs, tracked down all available open-source material on the pre-war debates, and interviewed just about everybody involved save George W. Bush himself.”

What Mazarr found was not that the Bush Administration intentionally lied to get us into Iraq. What he discovered was something even more unsettling: that nobody at the senior levels of the Bush Administration ever really discussed whether or not this was something we should do.

No one ever asked “should we invade?” Instead they debated questions like “if we decide to invade, what must we do to prepare?” and “When we invade, what must our objectives be?” Mazarr explains this curious lack of first-order thought, the origin point of the motivated reasoning that produced both flawed intelligence assessments and unnecessarily hasty demands for action, as a byproduct of moral imperatives.

In sum, the discussion about war is not carried out rationally, in terms of debating pros and cons, but is rather about assembling rationales to support policies that have already been decided for moral reasons. With the Iraq War, the idea was that the US had to do something in the wake of 9/11 — that “something” turned out to be this catastrophic war on Iraq. The decision makers felt that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, and they talked themselves into it. Here is Mazarr, quoted by Greer; the emphases are Greer’s:

Such an approach to arriving at judgments allows us to see the Iraq decision for what it was: a creeping (or sudden and powerful) feeling that a given course of action was the right one, based on simple rules or convictions that were more moralistic or normative than analytical. And the fact that the decision had this character allows us to better understand many seemingly confusing aspects of it: the moralistic language that surrounded the policy process, the resistance to dissent, and the refusal to take risks seriously. Judgments undertaken in such a frame of mind have more of the cast of faith than of consequentialist decision-making, more in common with revelation than calculation. When people are applying sacred values, they come to have an almost thoughtless conviction in what they are doing. It is right—it feels right, from the depths of their well-honed intuitive judgment—and practical arguments have little place in such a thought process.

That is how we careened into the disaster of Iraq. And it is how we are careening into whatever far greater disaster awaits us around the bend. We can all look at what Putin is doing to Ukraine and be outraged by it, rightly so. But that does not mean that everything we might do to punish Russia for its unjust war is wise. Few people in positions of power seem to be thinking about that now — even though Russia is not a Third World power like Iraq. Instead, the consent-manufacturing machine is kicking up into overdrive, as Tucker Carlson and Tanner Greer say. Here is Greer, talking about the things the West is now doing to punish Russia:

One can make a convincing defense for any one of these measures. It is quite possible that all of them, combined with the other options now being discussed in Western capitals, will successfully blunt Russian aggression, strengthen NATO’s long term defense, or deter countries like China from repeating the Russian playbook in places like Taiwan. It is possible. Yet events are passing swift. The rapidly spiraling deployment of these policies does not suggest a carefully calculated campaign of pressure so much as a rushed attempt to meet the demands of our own moral imperatives.

The logic of the imperative has led the West into disaster before. We must be vigilant lest we blindly leap into catastrophe once again.

Read it all.Think about it. Though most Americans at this point don’t want the US to engage in direct military action with Russia over this, many of the people who lead us do not have our best interests at heart. And no matter what The New York Times, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Twitter allege, saying so does not make Vladimir Putin a good man.

“We came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha!” Hillary Clinton is no longer in government, but don’t doubt for one second that people with her mentality are the ones calling the shots. And the top media are in the same class. Glenn Greenwald is all over them:

Second NBC/MSNBC personality today, after @RichardEngel, to casually suggest that the US and NATO should brush off the risk of global nuclear annihilation to go militarily confront Russia directly over . . . Ukraine. https://t.co/EvEYH71f78

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2022

And:

 

The post The West At The Precipice appeared first on The American Conservative.

You know how the hive mind says that we are now forbidden to consider the ways the West contributed to Putin’s unconscionable and utterly indefensible attack on Ukraine? Matt Taibbi, who cut his reporting chops as a gonzo journalist in 1990s Russia, is not letting folks get away with that. From his blockbuster Substack essay,after Taibbi quoted DC think-tanker Ben Wittes saying that we need to do “regime change” in Russia. Taibbi says he wouldn’t care if Putin were shot into space, but:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man with whom we could do business,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Thus follows a long list of detailed ways the West facilitated the rise of Putin. Honestly, I knew very little of any of this, though as Taibbi documents with quotes and links, much of it was out there in the press back in the day. Here he’s talking about actually covering Russia in the Wild West Nineties:

This was my first experience learning that “experts” lie. I’d believed all the tales of a benevolent American aid program helping Russia convert to democracy. Unfortunately the real story of Russia during those years was that it was leapfrogging both Europe and America in its progress toward a purely predatory capitalist model. It became overnight what America’s own future would eventually resemble. Occupy Wall Street would not identify the “1%” in America until 2011, but Russia achieved the parody version — a handful of mega-billionaires surrounded by a vast population with negative wealth — as early as 1995-1996.

The revolution of 1991 was really a greed-fueled intelligence mutiny, in which a collection of senior communists and KGB officers worked with Western partners to dismantle the Soviet Union. A happy by-product was that these insiders got to act as the bulwark to counter-revolution by privatizing the country’s wealth into their own hands, becoming the billionaire owners of obscene mega-yachts and jets and sports teams like Chelsea football and the future Brooklyn Nets. They became the instant-coffee elites whose personal investment in the survival of their states’ institutions are a consistent element of modern neoliberal democracies everywhere.

Instead of explaining this, Western reporter colleagues based in Moscow sent mountains of stories home about Russia’s “remarkable progress” (the term regularly used by the West’s aid community) toward a free-market, Western-style paradise. They churned out hagiographic profiles of the English-speaking, often Western-educated politicians like Anatoly Chubais, the aforementioned Gaidar, Maxim Boyko, and other architects of Yeltsin’s transition. The crucial events were the privatizations of Soviet industry, conducted at every step with the counsel of American (and specifically Harvard-trained) economists. These transactions were often described as “rough” or “bumpy.” Some of the more corrupt episodes, like the loans-for-shares auctions in which the Yeltsin government lent cronies money needed to buy controlling stakes in companies the size of Exxon or AT&T for pennies on the dollar, were described using mind-boggling euphemisms like “relatively fair” (the Washington Post formulation) or “relative transparency” (Euromoney, in naming Chubais “Central Banker of the Year”).

Taibbi recalls that the Russian oligarchs’ hold on post-Soviet Russia was settled at a 1996 Davos meeting at which their looting of the country was ratified internationally. Yep, Herr Great Reset himself had a hand in that. Now, if you have read anything about the 1990s in Russia, you know that for 99 percent of all Russians, it was a horror show of poverty, decline, misery, and humiliation. I remember thinking at the time that well, democracy and capitalism are messy, but it’ll all work out. What a fool. I was buying the same wishful thinking propaganda appearing in our media. Taibbi says that independent Russian journalists in the 1990s — some of them friends of his — risked their lives to tell the truth about what was happening to their country. That’s not the picture we had in America. We huffed hopium and looked the other way.

When he took power, Putin stabilized things. He did it crudely and cruelly, but he had overwhelming support from ordinary Russians who couldn’t take anymore of the chaos and suffering. Taibbi said Putin used to be our bastard, but then he became his own bastard, and here we are today. He goes on:

Not unlike Donald Trump, Putin made a wager early on that his country would fare better taking the nationalist path than it would as a vassal state to a global economic system he believed was declining. Now that he’s made such a dramatic commitment in that direction, his story is destined for the same treatment in the Western press as Trump’s election, as an unspeakable evil whose origins are a taboo subject. Anyone who even brings them up must be an apologist. What sort of person cares from whose womb the devil emerged?

Condoleezza Rice was on Fox Sunday, where host Harris Faulkner asked her to comment on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” Rice answered with a straight face: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” This dovetailed with Mitt Romney saying Putin’s invasion is “the first time in 80 years a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” and EC chief Ursula von der Leyen claiming Putin has “brought war back to Europe,” as if a whole range of events from Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo never took place.

If you’re wondering why the levels of media insanity in response to Putin’s attack have been cranked up to levels never before seen on the Internet — “as if there had been Twitter on 9/11” is how one reporter friend put it — it’s not just because Putin’s act in isolation is horrible, and barbaric, and a tragedy for Ukraine and the region. It’s also because the event creates a massive propaganda imperative. Even though the pre-emptive war pretext Putin invoked was identical to the one Rice, her boss George Bush, and current media hero David Frum deployed to attack Iraq, there will be an effort now to hammer home with younger audiences especially that Putin’s war is the first violent break of the international order since the Sudetenland. For people like Rice and Frum, Ukraine is a ticket to absolution.

Whatever you’re doing now, stop it and read the whole thing. 

If I had seen Condi Rice denounce invading sovereign nations as “war crime,” I would have thrown something at the TV. See, that kind of thing is why I both denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but also refuse to march along blindly to whatever the talking heads are telling us is the correct opinion to have about Russia and Ukraine.

I don’t know how true this is — I wonder if there’s a reliable history in English that tells the story — but I have been informed that Viktor Orban’s rise to power in Hungary followed the same general pattern as Putin’s, in this sense: he stood up to the corrupt post-Communist clique that exploited its connections to profit off of the sale of Hungarian state-owned industries after Communism fell. He took the nationalist route on behalf of the rural and small-town people who saw Eurocratic elites moving smoothly from their premier social and economic roles in the Communist order to the same position in the post-Communist order. (The book to read about this phenomenon in post-Communist Poland is Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon In Democracy).

The British novelist of Hungarian descent Tibor Fischer tells an amusing version of Orban’s rise in The Hungarian Tiger, available as a Kindle Single for only 99 cents (free if you have Kindle Unlimited). I read it in published form, but my copy is on the other side of the Atlantic, so I just bought the electronic version. Here’s Fischer talking about how Orban was voted back into power in 2010, after the ex-Communists had run Hungary for eight years. Fischer said it was their second victory, in 2006, that was their undoing:

You can’t understand a thing about Orban’s election to power in 2010 without knowing about the infamous leaked 2006 speech given by Socialist PM Ferenc Gyurcsany to a private party conference. It was supposed to be a confidential speech, but someone in the room recorded it, and leaked it to Magyar Radio, which broadcast it, causing two days of serious political protest, and an Orban victory at the next election. This Wikipedia entry about the profane speech, in which Gyurcsany admitted that his government hadn’t done any good, and had lied to win votes, is a good backgrounder. This one-minute clip of the speech, with English subtitles, gives you the gist:

Orban came in, sorted things out, and put the economy back on track. The Left has never recovered.

Towards the end of the essay, which was published in 2014, Fischer laments that Orban has surrounded himself with some unimpressive characters. But Fischer also says how much he hates the way the Western media simply lies about Orban and Orban’s Hungary. The idea that the anti-Orban media is suppressed here is absurd, he says. Despite all Orban has done for Jews here, including making Holocaust education mandatory, the West still accuses him of anti-Semitism, a groundless charge (the Right criticizing George Soros is no more evidence of anti-Semitism here as the Left criticizing Sheldon Adelson was in America). They condemn Orban as “far right” even though his politics are in many ways center left. And so forth.

Tibor Fischer writes about Orban’s rise from the very beginning, when he gave an incredibly brave public speech near the end of the Communist era, calling on the Russian troops to get the hell out of Hungary. Fischer’s account of Orban’s rise, and of Hungarian politics of the late Communist and post-Communist era, is highly entertaining. How much do you know about what brought Orban to power, and why Hungarians voted for him? Little to nothing, I bet, because our English language media doesn’t tend to report that kind of thing. How much do you know about the extent to which the Communist elite remade themselves into liberal Eurocrats, and continued to run things in post-Communist countries? Many of the people who vote for parties like Fidesz in Hungary and Law & Justice in Poland do so out of resentment that these people got away with it, and still get away with it.

I probably shouldn’t have gone off on this Orban tangent, when the real issue in front of us today is Putin. Taibbi’s blistering essay, though, reminds us of how little we actually know about what happened in history to get us to where we are today. And it should make us aware of how likely we are to be spun by our media and the pundit class. Just today I learned that the Hungarian government has had a longstanding beef with the Ukrainian government over what Budapest regards as bigoted mistreatment of the Hungarian minority living in far west Ukraine. I obviously don’t know enough about the history of that conflict to know what to think about it, but this information made me realize how damn complicated all this is. Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression, which cannot be justified … but Ukraine is also a highly corrupt state. All of these post-Communist countries are to some degree. The undeniable heroics of President Zelensky are deeply admirable, and he’s made himself into a Luke Skywalker battling Putin’s Darth Vader. I hope the Russians come to ruin over what they’re doing to Ukraine right now. But let’s not get carried away with Narratives. When Condi Rice goes on national TV to denounce an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, we had all better be on notice that we are being spun.

It is right to loathe what the Russian military is doing to Ukraine. But the war hysteria overtaking our chattering class is getting scary. Late last night, out of curiosity, I watched a little bit of English-language RT, the Russian state media channel, on YouTube. It’s being banned in the European Union, and will probably be off YouTube later. Facebook and Microsoft have banned it from their platforms in Europe. I wanted to have a look at it to see what was so horrible.

I saw an interview with a British academic who was angry about the way Western governments are seizing the mansions of Russian oligarchs and other rich people, as well as banning RT. I was astonished to realize that here, on Moscow-funded television, the man was making a sensible point. Nobody likes Russian oligarchs, but what gives us the right to seize their property and their bank accounts because we hate what the Russian government is doing? Asset forfeiture is a bad policy, even when it seizes the property of unpleasant figures. Why are we being coaxed into hating everything Russian now? Why shouldn’t Western audiences have the opportunity to get the Russian government’s point of view in media broadcasts? Is this liberty? I think the Russian government is doing something evil to Ukraine, but I still want to know what their messaging is saying, because I don’t have full faith in our media’s presentation of the conflict.

All of this stuff is happening so quickly, because everybody hates Russia over Ukraine. It reminds me of the stampede to pass the Patriot Act in the aftermath of 9/11. If you were against taking maximalist stands like that, then you were soft on terrorism. Might it not be the case that in our rush to punish Putin’s regime over Ukraine, we are trampling over some important liberties?

Maybe so. Maybe not. I don’t know. But I do know that we aren’t talking about it, and our ruling class doesn’t want us to talk about it. Knowing how badly they report the whole truth about Viktor Orban and Hungary, because they are globalist liberals who have decided that Orban is evil, and that narrative doesn’t need to be complicated by facts, balance, and context, I am distrustful of how the Russia story is being sold to us. It is not that I think there is any excuse for Russia’s invasion — I don’t! And I hope Putin gets taken out by his inner circle. It’s rather that it seems we are barreling towards a wider war, maybe even World War III, and a lot of intelligent people are choosing not to think hard about any of this.

They probably don’t want us to talk about the role of the Davos elites in ravaging Russia in the 1990s, and in bringing Putin to power, either. A media class that can rehabilitate Condi “We Don’t Want The Smoking Gun To Be A Mushroom Cloud” Rice, and David “Unpatriotic Conservatives” Frum, author of the president’s “Axis of Evil” speech justifying the Iraq War, is not one that is all that interested in reviewing any of that history. Memory hole it, Hollywoodize the new narrative, get the American people to stop thinking about the role their own elites played in bringing this catastrophe into existence, and let’s get on to manufacturing consent for the next war. Read Taibbi — you’ll be glad you did.

(You watch: it’ll take about five minutes before some comments-section bleater will say, “So, Dreher, you’re saying Putin was right to invade Ukraine? Four legs good, two legs baaaad!”)

UPDATE: A bit off-topic, but this story from The Guardian about what Putin’s warmongering has done and is doing to the Russian economy is harrowing. Excerpt:

If there was shock on the streets, then the mood among the business community was even more dour. Several owners of mid-sized companies said that the invasion and subsequent isolation of Russia had made their businesses unprofitable overnight.

One, the owner of an advertising services company with 100 employees, said that he was about to announce to his employees this afternoon that he is leaving the country for Armenia with his wife and two sons.

“I’m going to tell them that we are going into a crisis that we have never experienced before,” he said. “It’s like flying on a plane with no engines or the engines are on fire.”

His company, which handles contracts for international brands like Pepsi and automakers like Volkswagen, was booming as recently as January 2022, a record month for them. Now many of those brands were pulling out of the Russian market and his business was shrinking “immensely”.

Another business owner with hundreds of employees in the food and beverage and tourism industries felt that he was completely in the dark about the future under Vladimir Putin.

“We have no fucking clue what he will do next,” he said. “No one in the business community has a clue any more. Everyone is so depressed. I have experienced so many economic crises here, the pandemic being the latest.

“But there was always a reason to keep on fighting for your business,” he said. “Now, I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. Even if peace is achieved, the damage is done. How do we reverse it?”

There was a sense on Monday that this crisis was passing the point of no return, as Russian bombers began flying over Ukraine and rocket artillery began firing on populated districts of Kharkiv, a city of more than one million people.

 

 

The post Taibbi On Putin, Our One-Time Bastard appeared first on The American Conservative.

Readers, what follows is part of a post I included in my Substack newsletter, Rod Dreher’s Diary, yesterday. Subscribe here for twice-weekly discussions of culture, religion, art, and my ongoing book project about the re-enchantment of the world. No culture war, no politics, no bad news in the Diary! I have left the icon images at the same size as they appear in my newsletter — perhaps a bit ungainly for a blog post, but I thought you would find the imagery rich. — RD

This icon of the Transfiguration is from the hand of Ukrainian iconographer Ivanka Demchuk. Here is a link to her Etsy page. Take a look at her astonishing work there, where you can buy it, or if you just want to look, here, on her website portfolio page. I ordered this, not only because it is strikingly beautiful, but also because I want to support a Ukrainian artist in this grievous time. Yet Etsy warns that because of the war, it could take her longer to ship them. I reached out to her via Etsy to ask about this. She lives in Lviv, and tells me that all the country’s post offices are closed right now, but she encouraged me to order anyway, and she will ship them as soon as it is possible. I’m going to write about her and her work on my blog on Monday, so if you want to order anything from her, get your orders in now before I post big.

I cannot stop looking at them. This young woman, born in 1990 and an Eastern Rite Catholic, is an amazing talent.

 

Here is her Mother of Mercy:

 

It’s as if Mary has absorbed all the pain in the world, symbolized by red, which in traditional iconography is used to convey blood, fire, and passion. She seems to be absorbing it into herself to prevent it from staining the white tunics of the righteous below. Within her is her Son, presented here in the Pantokrator (The Ruler Of The Cosmos) depiction. This image might be saying that she can be the Mother of Mercy because she is the Mother of Christ, who is Mercy itself. She chose to share the pre-eminent role in His passion, through which mercy radiates upon the world.

Here is Ivanka Demchuk’s version of The Annunciation:

I ordered this one too tonight. It speaks to me profoundly, because it reveals what I am trying to do with this book project. Notice the Virgin, sitting inside grey granite walls, expectantly. She hears someone coming from the other side of the wall — from the realm of light and, it seems, fields of wheat. At her foot, the Virgin has a fig sapling — a symbol of Israel, whose Messiah she carries in her womb, unawares. On the windowsill sits a pomegranate, a symbol of fertility and of resurrection: the babe she carries in her womb will be the portal through which humanity will find eternal life, and enter into the realm of harvest abundance. The pillows on the couch bring to mind the coat of many colors of Joseph, son of Jacob, who was sold into slavery by his brothers, but later exalted, and showed the mercy. He is considered by Christians to be a prefigurement of Christ.

Notice how delicate the Archangel Gabriel’s fingers are, hovering above the granite. All it would take is the lightest touch, and the walls would come tumbling down. The tension in the painting is remarkable. Perhaps Gabriel looks a bit sad because he knows that the glad message he carries, symbolized by the lily, will also bring sorrow one day to the Virgin. But for Mary, she is taut with expectation, sensing the presence of the numinous about to make itself manifest. The thick walls have becoming paper thin in this holy moment.

What is she reading, do you think? We know from Scripture (Luke 1: 46-55) what she will say when Gabriel announces the news:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.

It’s as if time past and time future is all concentrated in that single moment. Mary’s eyes are open, as is her heart, to receive the God she will bear.

What can Ivanka Demchuk’s art teach us about how to open our eyes and our hearts to God? I’ve asked her for an interview, though heaven knows we can wait until after her country is no longer under Russian attack.

The post Sacred Beauty From Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.

An op-ed contributor to the NYTimes, Emily Tamkin, writes about “How The American Right Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Russia.” She mentions me in her piece:

Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values. On Wednesday, conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote, “I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants.”

Typical moronic analysis. “Beacons of whiteness” — good grief. Emily Tamkin has an expensive education, but she is an ignoramus. At least she linked to the long post where I made that intentionally hyperbolic comment. Here’s more context from that essay (emphasis in the original):

To repeat myself: I am opposed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I think Russia should leave Ukraine alone, but whatever happens, I am adamantly against following the US leadership into hawkish actions against the Russians. It’s not at all because I support Russia or in any way approve of what it’s doing. (I hope Russian families and Russian soldiers stop to think about what exorbitant cost is extracted from them so that Putin can restore Greater Russia.) It’s rather that I am sick to the point of puking of these people — the American elites — sh*tting all over so many of us, yet expecting us to send our sons (and daughters) to fight its damn wars. Especially when the goal is to extend American political and cultural hegemony over the world, to allow the Western-oriented elites in those countries to ruin the lives of the normal people in those places in the same way they have ruined ours.

Put another way, I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants. If that makes me a reactionary troll, fine, I’ll own that. I love my country and would put my life on the line to fight for her against foreign invaders. But we are not the good guys I used to think we were. We can’t even protect schoolgirls in Louisiana and Alabama from this toxic ideology that is destroying their moral sense, but they expect us to gear up in case we are called to fight for Ukraine?

And, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog these past few days, I repeatedly condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. What you don’t learn from Tamkin about what I wrote in that very post is that in it, I regret falling victim in 2002 to the right-wing warmongers who took us to the bad war in Iraq. Weirdly enough for someone Tamkin accuses of having a thing for whiteness, I mentioned favorably Muhammad Ali’s apocryphal quote that he was refusing to go fight in Vietnam because he did not want to fight foreigners on behalf of a racist regime at home. In fact, the thrust of the entire piece was about how American elites of both right and left expect everybody to jump all aboard their military crusades, despite the fact that that same ruling class despises many of them as deplorable.

None of this context appears in the Tamkin piece. In fact, she not only smears me as pro-Putin, even though my denunciation of Russia’s warmongering appeared in the very same column she quotes, but she also links conservative like Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, and me to stone-cold racists and neofascists like Richard Spencer (who has publicly denounced me in the past) and Matthew Heimbach.

This is why I hate The New York Times, which epitomizes the utter dishonesty of the Left. All Tamkin seems to care about regarding the war is that critics of knee-jerk US militarism like me aren’t onside regarding identity politics. The lives of our kids, I guess, are disposable to her in this potential war between the US and Russia. All she knows is that she hates Putin because he’s a right-winger, so everyone who is not willing to rush idiotically into World War III can only be a bigot — and we know what they deserve, right?

I was talking briefly this morning with an American conservative friend here about how the Left, and maybe even the mainstream Right, is dangerously out of touch with some grassroots conservative feeling about war and culture war. I told him that I heard from a conservative friend this weekend who told me about going to a class reunion, and meeting up with a bunch of his buddies who, like him, had either joined the military or gone into public service in some way immediately after 9/11 (they were in college then), because they wanted to serve their country. Today, not a single one of them would counsel their children to join the military. They no longer trust the US military leadership under this new regime of wokeness, and they think that the US Government, and elite society, hate them and their values.

My friend nodded his head, and agreed with me that wokeness is a national security issue. If we are in a new Cold War with Russia, the American people are going to need to find a way to unify, and be strong. Every single thing about wokeness — Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, all of it — is designed to exacerbate divisions along racial, sexual, and political lines, and demonize those who don’t agree. You may not like political, cultural, and religious conservatives, and you may think white people are what’s wrong with America — believe me, white people and others on the Right are well aware of how y’all think; you think we don’t read you and listen to you? — but there are a lot of us in this country, and you are going to have to depend on us if we get into war. I have no doubt that most Americans would fight like hell against those who would invade this country. But enlist to risk being sent abroad for some stupid nation-building mission, or to spread at gunpoint the American idea of “freedom and democracy” when the same ideology is destroying our country from within? Not no, but hell no.

I know — truly, I do — people who are grateful that they have guns, not because they think they’re going to have to use them one day to fight invading Russians, but because they fear they might have to use them one day to fight Emily Tamkin’s class. I used to think they were paranoid. After the Canadian truckers’ protest, I no longer do.

Let me put it to you liberal readers in a way you might be able to understand. A couple of years ago, when BLM was going strong after George Floyd’s murder, many black football players in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) marched for BLM. I wondered how these older white men who coach SEC teams were going to react. Alabama’s Nick Saban marched with his team; LSU’s Ed Orgeron did not. I have no idea what Saban really thinks of BLM, but he at least had the sense to know that when your team is predominantly black, you cannot take the strong feelings of your black players for granted. Whether or not their cause was righteous, if you want these young men to play for you, you don’t have much of a choice but to show them respect. After Orgeron was fired by LSU after two bad seasons, there was speculation that he lost the respect of black members of his team after equivocating on BLM.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Had I been an SEC coach, I would not have wanted to endorse the BLM organization with my presence at a march. But the purpose of my job is to win football games, and realistic self-interest meant that I would need to show the young men whose labor I depended on to succeed that I respected them (if not their cause). You don’t have to agree with them, but if you want them to help you accomplish your shared mission, you had better respect them.

Same thing here. If the ruling class in the US — not just the government, but business leaders, university leaders, media leaders, military leaders, and the rest — want to be able to count on American men and women to continue to volunteer to serve in the military, it had damn well better start treating all of us with respect. The old-fashioned liberal values that held this country together until the day before yesterday, when wokeness arrived, can do it again. America is not an ethnostate, and is not held together by a common religion. We need civic nationalism — and that civic nationalism has to make room for political, religious, and cultural disagreement within a broader unity.

When Biden took office, he signed a document moving LGBT advocacy to the forefront of US foreign policy goals. When I snarked about sending American troops to queer the Donbass, this is what I was referring to. The US elites have no idea at all how offensive and alienating this stuff is to many cultures around the world. It doesn’t care. It’s just going to roll right over those bigots.

Gay marriage rights is settled law in the US, and that’s something religious and social conservatives like me have to live with. But the war now for transgender rights, waged by the US Government, law, medicine, woke capitalism, the media, and everybody else, is taking the form of a direct assault on children and families. The Hungarian government passed a law last year protecting children here from being propagandized for this stuff, and reserving that right to families. If you want to teach your children about LGBT, nobody’s going to stop you. You just can’t use schools and media to usurp the rights of parents to do so. I wish we had the possibility to pass similar laws in the US. It might not be constitutionally possible, but American conservatives should admire without apology the Hungarian government for taking that step.

None of this makes sense to the Emily Tamkins of the world. Their moralistic narcissism is all-encompassing. She sees no meaningful difference between disgusting neo-Nazis like Spencer and Heimbach, and normal conservatives who have put in a good word for Putin in the past, or at least are not eager to rush into another damn war. I see that she is now writing about American politics and culture for the British magazine New Statesman. I hope the UK lefties who subscribe understand what kind of narrow view of this country they’ll be getting.

The war-and-culture-war problem is much broader and deeper than most of us know, I fear. This morning I had breakfast with a Hungarian friend, a young woman in her mid-twenties. Everybody here is worried about the Ukraine war spreading to Hungary. She told me that over the weekend, at family dinner, her younger brother, who is 21, said that if Hungary was attacked, he would leave the country. Everyone at the table was shocked by this. She told him that she, his sister, had already started looking into what kind of volunteer work she could do for the military in the event of war, and there he was, stating his plans to run away? She said her father came down hard on his son. Finally the young said okay, he would reconsider. But the fact that an able-bodied young Hungarian man, especially one raised in a conservative religious family, would feel that way about an attack on his homeland — that was very hard for them to take.

I told her that a conservative Hungarian friend of mine had told me last summer how shocked and appalled he was to hear his son of the same age say the same thing. How many more Hungarian men of that generation feel the same way? I asked.

My friend had been present a couple of weeks ago when a big group of us met with PM Viktor Orban. She reminded me that Orban said in that meeting that he believed Hungarian culture’s sense of manliness had declined. This from her brother, she said, was evidence that he’s right. Now, you can’t very well accuse wokeness of doing this to Hungarian men — Hungary is not (yet) a woke country — but something has happened here since the generation of 1956, which turned out in the streets to fight the Soviet invaders the same way the Ukrainians are fighting the Russian invaders today. If these two young Hungarian men we discussed at breakfast today aren’t one-offs, but indicative of a broader softening in the younger generation of Hungarian males, then Hungary has a huge culture problem. Their own culture will have become a national security threat. With Russian soldiers rampaging through next-door Ukraine, this is not an abstract issue.

I had to run out a few minutes ago to do an errand. While I was gone, I ran into a Hungarian friend, around age 30 I would say. I told her about the breakfast conversation, and asked her if she thinks this is a common problem. Yes, absolutely, she said, adding  that she observes the same attitude widely among Hungarians of her generation. “The boys are so soft,” she said. “I see it in my brothers. That whole generation, they all have their heads stuck in their smartphones. They don’t know what’s going on in the world, and don’t care. They have had life so easy.”

If I were the US Government, or at least a DC think tank, I would commission a reliable study on if and how wokeness is affecting social cohesion, with special reference to the willingness of young people to join the military. Given the brand new reality that Mr. Putin has frog-marched us all into, this is really important information to have. See, it’s not just alienated conservatives you have to worry about. Wokeness also tells people of color and other minorities that America is a shithole country whose history is nothing but racism, bigotry, and exploitation. Why, exactly, should young people who come to believe that narrative be willing to put their lives on the line to fight for America?

J.D. Vance brought a lot of opprobrium onto himself by saying in an interview a couple of weeks ago, before Russia attacked, that he didn’t care what happened to Ukraine, because he was more concerned with all the people back home in America dying from drug overdoses. It was an unattractive way of making a good point, which was this: that America is rotting from within, and nobody in power in our country, in the government or the private sector, seems to give a damn, especially if those suffering people can be dismissed as backwards bitter-clingers who have the wrong ethnicity, the wrong politics, the wrong religion, and the wrong views about gender fluidity. You can roll your eyes and dump on J.D. all you like, but the man is telling an inconvenient truth. Many people in North America saw how the media and other elites made all kinds of excuses for the BLM riots that burned down parts of cities, and for peaceful BLM protests that violated everything the government advised about Covid social distancing. But when mostly white (but not exclusively white — hello, Sikhs!) Canadian truckers staged their own protest, the state set on them and went after their bank accounts.

You don’t think people notice this stuff? You don’t think they will remember it? Maybe you don’t. But one day, you will.

One more thing: Emily Tamkin graduated from Columbia, and then earned a Master’s degree at Oxford. From what I can find online, she is a New Yorker by birth. There is nothing at all wrong with being a New Yorker with an Ivy League and Oxbridge education, but I would guess that she doesn’t know much at all about life in the rest of the country. Or care. That’s her business, but if you live in that kind of elite professional, cultural, and geographical bubble, you shouldn’t be surprised when the Americans you make a habit of sneering at and calling Nazis because they don’t share your parochial views and priorities don’t have any affection for you, or desire to take up arms to defend your contemptuous self.

I am seeing among many Americans, of both Left and Right, an alarming unwillingness to consider any nuance in this Russia-Ukraine situation, as if to attempt to see the world through the eyes of one’s enemies or opponents is immoral. I cannot say it often enough: this is exactly how I was in 2002, in the year the US prepared itself to go to war in Iraq. I did not want to hear the arguments of anyone who disagreed with my clear beliefs about the evil of Iraq, and the urgent need to launch a war in the Middle East to punish Islamic radicals of all sort. The fact that Saddam was an evil bastard, but the enemy of Islamists, did not matter to me. The claims that liberal democracy would not work in the Arab world, not because the Arabs were evil, but because they were not culturally prepared for liberal democracy, I dismissed as unimportant, and maybe even racist (“So you’re saying that Arab people are incapable of democracy, then?”). The only thing I thought was that Americans and Europeans who opposed the war were either fools or cowards. It felt so good to be so righteous — indeed, on the Right Side of History.

We are setting ourselves up for the same mistakes, only this time, the stakes could mean World War III. Or, if by the grace of God we get out of this situation without a wider war, we will still face years, maybe decades, of an armed standoff with Russia, and perhaps Russia and China both. We cannot afford our self-satisfied incuriosity and bigotry about people not like ourselves. That’s true for all of us, conservatives and liberals alike. If you know anything about the period just before World War I started, European crowds all over the continent, and in the UK, were eager to rush off to fight, certain that war would be good for everybody, and would be over and done with quickly. The media were full of pro-war moralistic agitprop. It was all very jolly … until reality liquidated everyone’s delusions in the trenches.

 

The post War & Culture War appeared first on The American Conservative.

It is interesting to reflect on how the two Central European countries that liberals in the West love to beat up on — Poland and Hungary, both of which are governed by national conservative parties — have become instrumental in the West’s response to the Ukraine crisis.

Poland has taken the lead in a number of ways, which is understandable as it is so much bigger. But Hungary has helped too — at no small cost to itself. This country — I write from Budapest, you’ll recall — gets 80 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been relatively close to Vladimir Putin. But last week, the Hungarian government agreed to the EU’s plan to kick Russian banks out of the SWIFT system. In fact, Hungary — which could have protected Russia from EU sanctions — agreed to go along with Europe’s plans to punish Russia. This is going to cost Hungary a lot, most likely. But they’re doing it out of solidarity with Europe, and with Ukraine, another nation invaded, as they were in 1956, by Russians. It would probably be fair too to say that Orban, who faces re-election next month, can’t afford to be seen as hardline anti-immigrant. But though I have seen no polling, it is also likely that the Hungarian people are more willing to accept refugees from Ukraine than from the Middle East, for reasons I’ll explain below.

A couple of Polish academics have a new syndicated column out in the Anglophone world griping about how awful Poland and Hungary are. Excerpt:

While Hungary and Poland do not have the ethnic or religious fault lines faced by Ukraine, the countries’ strongmen – Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, respectively – have been busy exploiting and deepening the ideological divides between their country’s more progressive urban populations and more conservative rural citizens. Liberal politicians and intellectuals as well as the dwindling number of independent journalists are routinely derided as traitors, foreign agents, or even animals.<

In place of the pro-Western foreign policy consensus of the post-communist decades, Orbán and Kaczyński have ratcheted up anti-Western rhetoric. In Hungary, cities are routinely plastered with billboards warning against malevolent “Brussels” imposing its will on the Hungarian nation.

It is true that here in Hungary, political rhetoric can get quite dirty. Still, American conservatives will recognize how these accusations coming from liberals work. Politicians, parents of schoolchildren, and anyone else who resists whatever new thing that progressives want to do stand accused of homophobia, racism, or some other form of “exploiting and deepening ideological divides.” This is what saying no to liberals looks like to liberals. Don’t want CRT or transgenderism taught to your kid in public school? Bigot! Don’t agree with policies Brussels wishes to impose on your unwilling nation? Shut up, you right-wing troll, and accept what’s good for you. You bigots deserve it.

Prime Minister Orban was at the Hungary-Ukraine border over the weekend, welcoming refugees. Libs cannot understand this at all. In a column about the new war refugee crisis emerging in Central Europe, the Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell says:

In the meantime, Ukrainians will probably flood neighboring countries such as Poland, particularly since the European Union recently announced that Ukrainians would not need a visa to enter the Schengen Area. And, hearteningly, there has already been a show of solidarity from Ukraine’s border states and other European countries.

Even notoriously anti-immigrant leaders in Hungary have said they are standing by to receive Ukrainian refugees. Perhaps that’s because the Ukrainians are mostly White Christians, unlike the predominantly Muslim Syrian refugees in 2015.

Now, why would that be? Why would Hungary wish to receive “White Christians” as opposed to Syrian Muslims? These things are so very difficult to explain to a liberal. I’ll try below, but first, let this tweet from France yesterday give Rampell something of a clue. The French text explains what happens in the video: at the end of Catholic mass in Bordeaux, the priest emerged to bless the square in front of the church, and a Muslim man approached him and spat in his face:

Ce dimanche 27 février, à la sortie de la messe, devant l’église Saint Michel de Bordeaux, un musulman crache sur le prêtre qui est en train de bénir le parvis ! @FrDesouche @diocesebordeaux @SO_Bordeaux @Bordeaux @PoliceNat33 pic.twitter.com/ydh7iCtUMm

— Infos Bordeaux (@InfosBordeaux) February 27, 2022

The migrants coming to Europe from Syria (and other countries, exploiting the Syrian wave) were not coming for temporary asylum, as the Ukrainians likely are. They were coming to stay, having been invited by Angela Merkel. Hungarians understandably did not want to import the same chronic problems with unassimilable Muslim immigrants as France, Germany, and other European countries have. Last summer, there was serious talk in France of civil war over all this. What many Americans simply do not understand is what an outlier US culture is in terms of ease of immigrant assimilation. Ours is a far easier culture to move into, for a variety of reasons. Europe is not like that. The traditions here are much deeper and more rigid. As much as I love France, and even if I improved my French skills to gain fluency, if I became a French citizen, I would never really fit in. People might be nice to me, but they would never see me as French, not in the same way Americans would see a French immigrant who became a naturalized US citizen. This isn’t because they’re worse people in France. It’s just that the cultural differences are profound.

Moreover, Hungary is a difficult place to assimilate to. The language is very difficult to learn. I’ve had a few conservatives from the US ask me about relocating to Hungary, and I tell them that it’s not easy. I mean, I get by in English all day, but I live in the capital, which is pretty international, and even so, if I had to live here, and deal with the kind of paperwork that is part of everyday life no matter where you live, it would be impossible without serious help from Hungarians who could translate it. Hungarian is a notoriously strange language, hard for outsiders to learn because it is unlike any other. If you come to Hungary with no real skills, and don’t know the language, you are going to be in serious trouble in terms of making a living, and just getting by. And this is not a rich country, so it doesn’t have the resources to put a bunch of unemployable refugees on the permanent dole.

But yeah, even if Hungary did have to take a certain number of Ukrainian refugees for resettlement here, why shouldn’t it prefer European Christians who share their general cultural background? Hungary is a mostly secular country in terms of churchgoing, but it’s culturally quite Christian. People from Christian backgrounds would find it much easier to live here than those who don’t have Christian backgrounds. It’s easy to understand why Hungary didn’t open its doors to Muslim asylum seekers in 2015. What is harder to understand — and what none of these liberal journalists seemed to ask — is why the oil-rich Arab Muslim states didn’t take large numbers of their fellow Arab Muslims fleeing war. To many liberals, only white people have moral agency, it seems.

Americans should understand that in 2015, when Orban took the hard line stand he did against Muslim refugees, he had the solid backing of the Hungarian people, who, in 2018, returned him to office. If he has softened his refugee line related to Ukrainian refugees, that’s because he senses that most Hungarians feel differently about these refugees, as opposed to the 2015 refugees. Orban stands for re-election next month, and has to be sensitive to what voters want. He’s a democratically elected leader, and he has to be directly accountable to the Hungarian voters in a matter of weeks. This is how things are supposed to work in a democracy. 

Anyway, it would be nice if European and American liberals would take a break from kicking conservative Hungary and conservative Poland, and recognize how much those two countries are doing for the Ukraine effort, and at what cost. In the same way, now that we find ourselves in the early days of a new Cold War with Russia, it would be great if the woke American Left would quit waging its divisive culture war on dissenting Americans, recognizing that we had better find ways to emphasize what unites us.

It would also be nice if somebody would give me a pony.

 

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