Rod Dreher's Blog, page 20

You wanna know why I’ve been so anxious about Western warmongering, even as I support the Ukrainian resistance to Russia aggression? Check out what US Rep Adam Kinzinger says, and how Douthat responds:

Look, I”m 55 years old. That means I was 24 years old when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I spent my entire youth in the shadow of the Cold War. I remember the day it all suddenly became real to me. I was 12, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had put nuclear conflict in my mind. I remember exactly where I was sitting — in the passenger seat of my dad’s muddy orange Ford Bronco, bucking along over a pasture after a morning of deer hunting — when I pointed out to him a thought I had just had: it would take 19 minutes for Soviet missiles to reach us in Louisiana, so at any given moment, we were only 19 minutes away from fiery annihilation.

He replied with something to the effect of, “Don’t think about it.”

Well, if your dad tells you “don’t think about it,” you bloody well are going to think about it! Along with about half the country, I watched the TV movie The Day After in 1983, as a high school student. It was a movie about what would America be like in the event of nuclear war. It really is impossible to convey to those born after the Cold War, or whose childhood memories of the world beyond themselves began after the Cold War, how ever-present the thought of nuclear death was. It’s not like it paralyzed us — life, obviously, did go on — but it was always there in the back of your mind, the thought that everything we love and everything we know could be vaporized in a flash.

Sting’s melancholy song “Russians” came out in 1985, when I was a senior in high school. Watching it today, it seems kind of … quaint, weirdly enough. But that’s only because I know how the Cold War ended. Back then, none of us did, and this is an accurate reflection of how very many people felt at the time:

And then it was over. It ended in part because of the resolve of Ronald Reagan, a man that everyone on the Left hated at the time, because they believed he was going to cause nuclear war. As grateful as I am to Reagan, it cannot be forgotten that under his leadership, and the radically unstable leadership in the dying Soviet Union, the world got awful damn close. A US government report discovered that in 1983, during the Able Archer exercise, the USSR and the US came a lot closer to nuclear war than we realized at the time. Back then, the Russian leadership, which was in turmoil in the post-Brezhnev era, was genuinely convinced that the US was going to attack them. And Washington wanted to keep them off-guard, as the report showed. Plus, at the time Reagan administration officials were publicly talking about how nuclear war was survivable and winnable. This is the context in which The Day After appeared.

When I read people today saying that the Russians are fools to think that NATO is an offensive alliance, not a defensive one, I think about how the world looked from the Kremlin in the early 1980s. There’s no way the US would have launched a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union — but that’s not the way the Soviets saw it. Similarly, the good intentions of NATO today don’t matter; what matters is what the Russian senior command thinks. It could be quite wrong, but that could still lead to nuclear war.

A few years ago, when I was working with the actor Wendell Pierce on his memoir, he told me about how in the 1980s, his older brother was a US army officer stationed in West Germany, and in charge of a nuclear missile battery of some sort. They would have exercises in which the men manning the launch controls would be tested to see if they would do as they were supposed to do, and fire the missiles when getting the order. To be effective, the exercise could not let the soldiers know it was fake. So Wendell’s brother and his men had to sit in that room and order what they knew could be the launch that would end the world. And they did, obeying orders.

Wendell told me that he spoke to his brother about that when the Cold War was over. His brother told him that to have the courage to make that call, he, the brother, had to have total confidence that the President would not have issued such a command if the Russians hadn’t launched first, and the annihilation of America was already assured. Can you imagine? I mean, seriously, can you imagine the pressure on men like Wendell’s brother — who indeed made that call in the exercise, not knowing if it was fake or real?

We owe our lives to the hesitation of Lt. Col Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who had a similar role in their military as Wendell’s brother had in our own. In 1983, a glitch in the Soviet early warning computer program told him that five US missiles were on their way. He felt that something was wrong, and did not pass the information up the line, because he knew that it would cause his superiors to order a launch that would cause Armageddon. Sure enough, later investigation found the problem. Petrov’s hesitation saved the world that day. Do you understand this? The decision of a single Russian officer likely kept the world from being incinerated on September 26, 1983. It was a Monday. I was in class, having started my junior year of high school. President Reagan was in New York, visiting the dying Terence Cardinal Cooke. This was the No. 1 song in the nation:

That era came to an end on Christmas Day, 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle standard was lowered for the final time over the Kremlin. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated a peaceful end to the conflict. My children have had the blessing of growing up without the fear that their parents had. But the nuclear weapons never went away. We still have them. So does Russia. Have people forgotten this?

Rep. Adam Kinzinger was 13 when the USSR folded — about the same age I was when the reality of what nuclear war would mean dawned on me. He never really knew what that felt like. So when I hear him fatmouthing about how the US ought to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, it chills me to the bone. He’s not the only one on the American scene making this kind of noise. Many of these people sneer at older folks, like me, who remember what that was like, and who are trying to figure out what we need to do to show resolve in the face of Russian military aggression, without pushing things too far. Again, I remind you: NATO would not have launched a first strike on the Soviets back in the day, but that is not how the paranoid Russian leadership saw it. Similarly, if Vladimir Putin, age 70, runs into trouble subduing Ukraine, and faces the prospect of being ousted by an internal coup, don’t you think his paranoia is going to ramp up? And then what?

The discourse among so many belligerent Americans, both liberals and conservatives, about this war is lunatic. I find it so much more realistic to talk to Hungarians. The horror of war is still within living memory here. I happen to live near the Castle in Buda, the hilly half of Budapest on the western side of the Danube. It was where the worst fighting of the 1945 Siege of Budapest took place, between the Red Army and the defending Germans, along with their Hungarian fascist allies. Here is the aftermath of the historic Matthias Church, a short walk from where I sit in my living room typing this:

It is difficult to explain to non-Hungarians the historical and religious significance of this church to the Hungarian people. This is what war did to it. The Matthias church has been restored today. Look:

Hungarians know, however, how quickly all of that could be turned to rubble. They know because in the lifetimes of many of them, it was. Of course that was conventional warfare; nuclear war would annihilate all of it, and all of us. Still, the point is that the Hungarians are so anxious because war is not an abstraction for them. I don’t believe that Rep. Kinzinger’s Illinois hometown has ever been devastated by warfare. Here is his home church, the non-denominational Village Church in Minooka, Illinois:

Not quite the Matthias church, but I’m sure Rep. Kinzinger and the people who worship there love it too, and would grieve if it were destroyed in war. Whatever happens in Ukraine, the Village Church will be safe, unless there’s a nuclear war. The point is, with a war going on in Ukraine, the Christians of Minooka are entitled to feel a lot more secure in their lives than the Christians of Budapest are. Hence, I think, the unreality of Kinzinger’s aggression. It’s too damned easy to sit on your couch in Kankakee and tweet exhortations to start World War III. As Douthat points out, where is the off-ramp for Kinzinger’s policy?

A side note: you know, it’s funny: the two former Soviet bloc nations who are proving most important to the West’s defiance of Putin — Poland (especially) and Hungary — are both led by conservative populist governments despised by right-thinking liberals and conservatives in both the EU and the US. Maybe, in this new Cold War environment, it’s not such a great idea for the West to attempt to destabilize these governments, just like it’s not a good idea back home in the US to alienate the constituencies the country will need to fight if war comes. Hungary’s government in particular is taking massive risks with its pro-Ukraine stance, given that this country gets 80 percent of its natural gas from Russia. But as a member of the EU, Hungary could have protected Russia from being kicked out of the SWIFT banking network. It did not.

Last night I saw a tweet, which I wish I had saved, in which someone pointed out that the Snake Island defenders who all supposedly went to their deaths — I praised them in this space — are all actually alive, and had been captured by the Russians, and pointed out that the Ghost of Kyiv fighter ace legend is untrue. Others responded angrily, saying that OK, so they may not be true, but we shouldn’t say that because believing those lies keeps up the morale of Ukraine supporters. This is a typical example:

Come on! One can recognize the value of propaganda in a war, but at the very least we in the US should be unwilling to believe lies, because they might draw us into a shooting war with Russia that could quickly turn nuclear. What is wrong with people? Have three decades of peace erased common sense? “Do this,” says Kinzinger, urging a NATO attack that would launch World War III. The fool! There is a fine line between insane courage and mere insanity, and Adam Kinzinger’s mouth is on the wrong side of it.

Just now, my laptop dinged, and a friend sent me this:

MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian nuclear deterrent forces on alert amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 27, 2022

I’m going to post this, then walk over to the Matthias church, and pray for Ukraine, pray for peace, and pray that the American people will not listen to warmongers like Adam Kinzinger, whose Strangelove-of-the-Sofa bravado could get a lot of us killed.

UPDATE: The latest from Rep. Turgidson:

“Breathlessness over nukes.”

UPDATE.2: A reader pointed out that I misidentified the photo of the 1945 Matthias church above. It’s actually the former Finance Ministry, which shared the square with the Matthias church, hence my confusion (I thought the church tower had been turned to rubble, hence its absence). He sent a replacement photo of the 1945 view of the Matthias church, which I have embedded above. Apologies.

The post Strangeloves Of The Sofa appeared first on The American Conservative.

Every damn word of this from the Scottish journalist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, who said this in the introduction to his GB News show tonight:

This articulates well why I have been so reluctant to jump on board the simplistic pro-war narrative that has been in the US media all week. Oliver is plainly no admirer of Vladimir Putin, but he questions what we have allowed ourselves in the West to become. To support the valiant Ukrainian patriots fighting the Russian invader is not to say that we believe in what our leaders, political and otherwise, are doing in our countries (or rather, to our countries). Please, watch Oliver’s eight-minute discourse, which led his broadcast in the UK this evening. It’s very powerful stuff.

The post Neil Oliver, Our Braveheart appeared first on The American Conservative.

An American friend who supports Ukraine resistance to the Russians wrote to say there is a US Civil War angle to thinking about it here too:

Think of the people in Appalachia, poor mountain-dwellers, trying to coax a life out of the rocky soil. They didn’t hold slaves. Yet their homes were destroyed, sons and husbands killed, women raped, goods looted. They were patriots who found enemy soldiers on their home territory. All the non-wealthy people in the south who didn’t own slaves. Blacks themselves suffered violence and theft. When crops were burned, it wasn’t like only the wealthy slave-owners went hungry.

It’s hard to think through. How can that injustice be avoided, when seeking a higher justice?

But as far as the cause of the war was the glory of the Union which must never be sundered, as far as it wasn’t about freeing the slaves, it’s pretty similar to Russia saying “don’t draw Ukraine away from us.”

I’ve always had melancholy thoughts about the Southerners who suffered undeservedly from Union troops, and what you wrote triggered that line of reminiscence. I agreed with what you wrote about having the right to defend your home territory.

But they did fight, probably. And were slaughtered. They never could have won. War is hell.

I appreciate the point — and okay, Appalachia, which was more pro-Union than the South in general, might not be the best example, but you get the point — and it’s something we Americans should consider when thinking about our Civil War. As far as I know, none of my ancestors who fought for the South owned slaves. They did it because as they saw it, their country had seceded from the Union, and soldiers of a foreign power were on their land. If you believed that the South had a right to self-determination and sovereignty if that’s what its people chose, and if you didn’t think slavery was wrong, then wouldn’t you have felt duty-bound to attack the invaders? Columbus Simmons, the ancestor on whose grave I place a candle every Christmas Eve, was badly wounded in the Battle of Port Hudson, fighting for the Confederacy, and went back to keep fighting as soon as he had barely healed enough to walk again. He left no writings behind, but when you read accounts by other rebel soldiers like him, they didn’t fight because they were necessarily pro-slavery; they fought because they believed Union soldiers were foreign invaders.

I think that one reason why some of the victorious Union leaders tried to be magnanimous in victory was because they understood that about their enemy: that they were flawed men who did what most men would have done if thrown into that situation. This, incidentally, is why I support the Ukrainians today: because whatever the complicating historical and geopolitical factors in this conflict, the fact is that the Russians chose to invade their land. Under those circumstances, patriots fight. I remember watching Ken Burns’s long documentary series about the Vietnam War, and having the deeply unsettling feeling that I could understand the Viet Cong fighting to get the French, and then the Americans, off of their land. This in no way justifies Communism, but if you can’t understand how an ordinary man thinks and feels under those conditions, you don’t know the human heart.

That’s the tragedy of the American South captured so beautifully in The Band’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. 

I can’t believe I have to say this, but we live in a stupid era, so here goes: I’m not justifying the Confederacy. I’m glad the South lost the war, because holding human beings as slaves is an evil so great that claims of sovereignty can’t possibly outweigh it. But as we look back at that horrible war, we ought to have the humility to grasp that it was not at all clear to Southern people back then, as it is today, that slavery was such a great evil. If you were a white person who had lived in the South back then, all you would have known was a society in which black people were held in bondage. Evil as that was, this would have been normal to you — and this, I believe, is a damnable flaw of the Christian churches of the era (and, in turn, of the Jim Crow period). When confronted by war, even if you were not a slaveholder, or benefited economically in no way from slavery, you would almost certainly have felt the same get off my land sense of instinctive patriotism that Ukrainians rightly feel today.

Hear me clearly: I am not saying that the South was justified back then. What I am saying is that war is a complex phenomenon. If you were a pro-Union, anti-slavery white Southerner at the time, the social and psychological pressure to set aside your convictions and fight to defend your homeland would have been extremely difficult to resist. It is very easy to look back on events 150 years ago with moral clarity, and impute that same moral clarity to the people who fought in the war. But it’s wrong. In the song, the narrator, the Southern farmer Virgil Cain, writes of his brother, “just eighteen, proud and brave,” who “took a rebel stand,” but was “laid in his grave” by a Yankee bullet. The lyric sets that up as a statement of family loyalty, of the narrator being loyal to the memory of his farmer father and his dead soldier brother. The verse ends:

I swear by the mud below my feet
You can’t raise a Cain back up
When he’s in defeat.

It’s a song about a poor Southern farmer trying to make sense of the loss of his brother, his livelihood, and what he considered to be his country. The fact that the lyricist, Robbie Robertson, named the narrator “Cain” indicates that in a war between brothers — which is what a civil war is — the Southern brother was marked by evil — the evil, of course, of slavery. Nevertheless, he is a human being who was caught up in the savage currents of war and history, and is left to make sense of his ruin — and therein lies the pathos.

I wonder about young Russian soldiers who have nothing against Ukrainians, but who were ordered to attack them by Vladimir Putin, the leader to whom they, as soldiers, owe loyalty. I wonder about Ukrainians who have no desire to kill Russians, but who have to defend their land from the invaders. And I wonder how pro-Russian Ukrainians are feeling tonight, seeing what’s happening. As you may know, part of what makes the Ukraine situation so hard to parse is that it has elements of a civil war too. Eastern Ukraine is more inclined to support Russia, and union with Russia. Putin has exploited that for a decade. One can easily imagine that there are Ukrainians who have wanted all along for their country to maintain close ties with Russia, based in shared history, religion, and culture, and who now feel savagely conflicted about what to do. We should resist turning human beings who are faced with this kind of moral choice into mere abstractions.

One of the most evil deeds that Vladimir Putin has done here is to deepen the hatred between Ukrainians, and create what also amounts to civil war. In Live Not By Lies, Father Kirill Kaleda, a Russian Orthodox priest, laments the state media propaganda that was turning Russians against Ukrainians. He told me that in 2019; now we see where that campaign of hatred ended. I fear too that with our blundering since the end of the Cold War, the US may have played a similar role in laying the groundwork for this war. Both sides using the Ukrainians as pawns in the Great Game.

Hear me clearly: I’m not saying there is a moral equivalence. Putin was the one who started this war. It is primarily he who turned brother against brother. But as with the US Civil War, this is not a Hollywood movie, with a tidy black-and-white moral. There are mothers and fathers in both Ukraine and Russia who are mourning their dead sons tonight, or who will have cause to do so, in a war that was chosen by Vladimir Putin.

It’s night here in Central Europe. The papers say they are fighting for Kyiv:

I hope the Ukrainians hold the Russians off, but given the disparity in firepower, it’s hard to be optimistic. A Ukrainian immigrant friend texts today from the US to tell me his brother-in-law, aged 62, quit his job in Warsaw and went back home to Kyiv to fight Russian invaders. (My friend also said that his fellow Americans should look at what’s happening to Ukraine today and never, ever give up the Second Amendment.) Heroes are being made today. Whatever you may think about the roots of this war (who is to blame, to what degree, and so forth), it has become plain that the Ukrainian people’s resistance to the invaders has been incredibly inspiring. Heroes are being made now, including Volodomyr Zelensky, the TV comic turned unlikely president whose courage will probably get him killed, and if so, the Russians will have made a global martyr who will hurt them far more in death than he could do in life. If Russia wins this, I believe it will ultimately prove to have been Putin’s Waterloo — and whether he lives or dies, the spiritual Duke of Wellington will have been Zelensky.

V. Zelensky, front, rallying his people

Kyiv may fall tonight, or if not tonight, tomorrow night. If it does, the Ukrainians who went down fighting for it, unlike US Southerners, will not have to bear the tragic burden of having fought for a bad cause. But then, had the Confederacy prevailed, we probably today wouldn’t think that their cause was bad. Such is the moral contingency of history.

If the Russians do prevail, ultimately, they will set up a puppet government and begin Reconstruction. Many of us Americans — me, for sure — will naturally sympathize with Ukrainians who resist the government of occupation. But let us recall that this is how a lot of ordinary Southerners will have regarded the Reconstruction-era state governments. This is not to say they were right — the South owned slaves, a great moral evil that brought down the righteous judgment of God in the form of war and occupation — but in thinking people, it ought to make us consider the human element in a war that the ideologues have told us can only be regarded according to a simplistic good-and-evil narrative. War really is hell, and its consequences last long after the shooting stops. This is why I have been so fervently against warmongering voices in the United States, eager to jump into this thing on the basis of emotion.

In the same way, as much as I despise what Russia has done, knowing what I do about the role of Kyiv in Russia’s religious consciousness, I can’t see the Russian people as simple villains here. The fact that Putin had to spend a decade propagandizing his people to hate Ukrainians, and even still is seeing antiwar resistance, should tell you something. My friend the great contemporary Russian novelist Evgeny Vodolazkin is a Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, but who was born and raised in a city he grew up calling Kiev (the Russian pronunciation). I just sent him an e-mail assuring him of my prayers. I imagine his heart is shredded tonight. If you are tempted to simplify this war in your mind, think of men and women like him. The Russians aren’t all Vladimir Putin, you know.

UPDATE: Vodolazkin has come out against the war. [UPDATE: Took down most of this update, simply because I don’t want to make life harder for him when he returns to Russia. — RD]

UPDATE.2: My old TAC boss Daniel McCarthy remains, as ever, a principled critic of warmongers. In his new Unherd piece about Putin and Ukraine, McCarthy condemns Putin’s aggression, but warns against the alarmism in the media that could get us into World War III. Excerpts:

Automatically comparing every crisis with the Second World War is a dangerous habit. It’s a reflex that helped stampede the United States into a needless war in the Middle East 20 years ago. Iraq was an “Islamo-fascist” dictatorship with “weapons of mass destruction”, a threat on par with a nuclear Nazi Germany. Most of America’s policy and media elite bought into the idiotic idea, with disastrous consequences — most of all for the people of Iraq.

Putin’s Russia is a much more serious threat than Saddam’s Iraq. But it’s a new menace, not another Nazi Germany. So President Biden deserves credit for refraining from hyperbole in his remarks this week. He rightly noted — with Cold War lessons and perhaps with America’s own rueful experience in Afghanistan in mind — that “history has shown time and again how swift gains and territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of mass civil disobedience, and strategic dead ends”.

He’s right to praise Biden’s handling of this crisis, I think. Biden has been far more measured than some Republicans, and some in his own party, have been. More:

An editorial in the Kansas City Star likewise claimed that Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley “has clearly provided aid and comfort to Putin and hard-liners in Russia”. As the article acknowledged, Hawley has stated that “America has an interest in Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. And we have a strong interest in deterring Russian adventurism.” But because Hawley does not believe Ukraine should be part of NATO or that America should “fight Russia over Ukraine’s future”, he is morally libelled in the language of treason.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, those who doubted the wisdom of George W. Bush’s war were subjected to similar obloquy. Then as now, conservatives counseling restraint were denounced as less than truly American. Today Tucker Carlson is the enemy of all right-thinking votaries of liberal democracy. Twenty years ago conservative columnists like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak were the enemy, branded by David Frum as “unpatriotic conservatives” in the pages of National Review on the eve of the Iraq conflict.

This narrowing of American political discourse did not wind up doing the Iraqis or Afghans any favors two decades ago, and it is not doing the Ukrainians any favours today. Now, as then, there is a need for something other than Washington’s reflexive apocalypticism. Realism, cool-headedness, and scepticism are more important than ever in a time of emergency. This is not the moment for Republicans, in particular, to discard the hard-won wisdom of the last two decades, purchased at great price after the follies of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read it all. You can and should be disgusted by Putin simps like Nick Fuentes and the far-right Groyper dimwits chanting for the warmonger in Moscow ... but whatever you do, resist the urge to demonize all voices against the war. I feel so strongly about this because that was a mistake I made in 2002, and regret it to this very day. In times like this, we need more than ever to listen to dissident voices. They might be wrong, but they might also be telling us something important that we need to know to avoid serious trouble down the road.

Just now I heard from a friend back in the US, a military veteran, who writes:

Someone put on the internet earlier today the question: would we in the US fight invaders like the citizens of Ukraine are at this moment? I’ve thought about it, and the answer is no, not in the same way anyway. Ukrainians share a common history and ethnicity which has helped them build solidarity. Here in the US, we don’t all have the same history or ethnicity and the things that did help us build solidarity—pride in the ideals of our country, a recognition of it as a flawed place that continues to get better, that has been shit on by our elites—especially from the left, so now we are left fragmented, angry and demoralized. Sure some would fight, but they probably would out of self defense for their communities and less out of a belief in the solidarity of the US.

I think he’s on to something. This is what I mean when I talk about the national security threat from wokeness. That view of mine has been caricatured as “he supports Putin because Putin is anti-woke,” which is bullsh*t, and the kind of bullsh*t that is meant to stop people from thinking.

The post The Night They Drove Old Kyiv Down appeared first on The American Conservative.

To recap, here’s I think about this Russia-Ukraine war:

Russia should not have invaded Ukraine.The West played a big role in bringing this about, first by ignoring Russia’s legitimate security concerns, and second by allowing the Ukrainian government to think that NATO accession might be possible.The West should not engage militarily, at all. It’s too risky.Facing the long-term revived Cold War between the US and a Russia-China axis, the US ruling class had better get it straight in its head that its culture war on both conservatives and on American history and tradition is a massive national security concern. Who is going to fight for a country that they have been taught is worthless? Who is going to fight for a government and a social order that despises them and treats them like they’re deplorable?

I still firmly believe all that. But waking up this morning to the news that Russia has widened and intensified its military assault on Ukraine, I want to say — to yell, really — that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin is an utter disgrace for launching this assault on its weaker neighbor. By this act, Putin has brought disgrace and suffering onto his nation and its people, and I hope that it will prove to be his downfall, and that poor Russia can get a better class of leadership. I have defended Russia for many years to my friends, because it is one of the world’s great cultures and civilizations. It still is, and I will still praise what it praiseworthy in all things Russian, despite the fact that Putin has made it far more difficult for people like me, who are admirers of Russian religion and culture, to defend these worthy things to Americans. Please do not associate Russia and the Russian people entirely with the Russian government! Nevertheless, all the virtues of Russia cannot erase the foulness of this imperialistic invasion.

The fact that a number of American talking heads are saying idiotic things about how we need to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and similar belligerencies, requires people like me to keep our focus on not escalating the war. I feel so strongly about this because I’m seeing a lot of the same thoughtless rage driving public discussion that I saw in 2002, in the march-up to the disastrous Iraq War. War with Russia could be incomparably more destructive to the world, and to US interests. But in no case should anything I say here be interpreted as excusing Putin’s aggression. 

Europe a more dangerous place. Aside from brutalizing Ukraine, Putin has forced the countries of Central Europe, as well as Finland and Sweden, to face the necessity of intensified militarization, for the sake of self-defense. Russia has threatened Sweden and Finland with unspecified consequences if they join NATO. This is why NATO must bring both of those countries in as soon as possible.

As I have said all along, for historical and geographical reasons, Russia had, and has, a legitimate reason to demand Ukraine does not join NATO. But dictating terms about Sweden and Finland? Oh, hell no.

I hope the Ukrainians give the invaders hell. It seems to me that whatever the geopolitics of a given situation, when any patriot finds enemy soldiers on his home territory, he is justified in doing whatever it takes to get them off of it.

UPDATE: Just to remind you, the Russians have been sons of bitches to Ukrainians for a long time:

The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest pic.twitter.com/1nKSY5tUGK

— Ed West (@edwest) February 26, 2022

The post Clarity About Russian Brutality appeared first on The American Conservative.

You want to know why I keep banging on about approaching the Ukraine crisis from a foreign-policy realist perspective? Because of things like this:

That was pretty wild, nuts. George Joulwan, ret US Gen and fmr Supreme Allied Commander NATO seemed to just be saying on CNN that NATO should create some sort of no fly zone over Kyiv. I really don’t think we want a direct mil confrontation btw NATO and Russia.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 25, 2022

In case you don’t know, Josh Marshall is a prominent liberal writer and editor. He’s talking plain common sense here, but a number of his Twitter followers call it appeasement, and say we better do something like this, or Putin is going to take over the world. More important than Twitter, though, is for a retired senior general — former NATO supreme Allied commander! — going on TV talking such dangerous idiocy. People are losing their minds. Here is a retired general who used to command all the NATO forces in Europe, actually suggesting that NATO should insert itself into a war on behalf of a non-NATO member, and tell a nuclear-armed great power that NATO will shoot down its planes and helicopters. What do these lunatics think would happen then?!

I heard one prominent analyst say the other day that NATO should establish a “trip wire” in Ukraine to deter Putin. Well, what if Putin kicks over the trip wire? Are we prepared for war with Russia over it? On what planet would that be anything but a suicidal idea?

Eli Lake, who is a Russia hawk, tweets:

Putin alone is to blame for the war he launched on Ukraine. At the same time, there needs to be a recognition that the U.S. and Europe failed to deter him. Now is not the time to be patting ourselves on the back because the White House declassified intel on troop movements.

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) February 25, 2022

To which one of his followers responds:

That line made it click with me why I am so outdone with idealists in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If the world were rightly ordered, all women would be able to walk anywhere they want at night, wearing anything they wanted to wear, and nobody would harm them. But all women with a lick of common sense know that if avoiding rape is important to them, that they will not be able to fully exercise their rights as free women. It should not be that way, but that’s the way of the world. You have to be realistic.

In a perfect world, Ukraine, like every sovereign nation, would have the right and the ability to set its own course. But that is not the way the world works. Russia has a say. You might hate that, but that’s a fact of life. “It’s not faaaaaaaair!” is not a policy, or a serious response.

A New Yorker friend last week told me that since crime has gotten so bad there, and since subway shovers have taken the initiative, she has changed her behavior when she takes the subway. She stands as far away from the edge of the platform as she can. It is awful that she has to do this — that there are evil people in the world, and that the authorities have failed to deter them from doing evil things — but if she wants to reduce the risk that criminals will push her in front of an oncoming train, she can’t afford to stand on principle, but rather stand in the center of the platform.

It’s like the Hungarian told me earlier this week after hearing former Australian PM Tony Abbott’s hawkish speech about Russia and Ukraine, saying the West must stand on “the moral high ground.” She said something like maybe for him, the moral high ground is his Pacific island nation, but the people of Central Europe have to live here in what could easily become a war zone.

Here is a key part of President George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address:

We have seen our vulnerability – and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

Ending tyranny in our world. As if that were possible. Hell, we couldn’t even end tyranny in Afghanistan! And though Saddam Hussein may be gone, Iraq is now a dear friend of neighbor Iran, courtesy of the US military and George W. Bush. Michael Gerson, now a Washington Post columnist, authored that speech. He hasn’t written a column since February 10, but it will be interesting to see what he has to say about this war.

The people saying that Biden has promised no military involvement here are technically correct, but with so many people — including military elites like Gen. Joulwan — agitating for engagement, one has to hope he can hold the line.

Speaking of line-holding, did you know that as of today, you are allowed to praise actual Nazis on Facebook, as long as they are fighting Putin? No kidding:

NEW: Facebook is temporarily permitting users to praise the neo-Nazi Azov regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard if it defends against the Russian invasion https://t.co/mtBmimNvKB Azov forces were previously banned from free discussion under the Dangerous Organizations policy

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) February 24, 2022

So, according to Facebook, some evil people are fine as long as they are anti-Putin. Got it.

Like I said, people are losing their minds, substituting emoting for rational analysis. My line all along has been:

Russia is wrong to have invaded Ukraine. It should not be making war on its brothers.Russia’s demand that Ukraine never enter NATO was a legitimate one from a national security perspective.The West foolishly provoked this war by constantly goading Russia, and by leading Ukraine to think NATO membership was possible.Now that Russia has done the wicked deed, the West needs to figure out how to make Russia pay a price, but under no circumstances should we risk shooting war with Russians.After making a hash of all this with idealistic triumphalism, it is time for the West to return to realism.

This is true too:

 

You don’t need to justify evil in your argument that America shouldn’t get involved. Likewise, you shouldn’t assume someone is justifying evil if they are arguing that America shouldn’t get involved.

The existence of evil in the world is not an imperative for America to act.

— Josh Daws (@JoshDaws) February 25, 2022

Nobody much likes realism. It seems like an accommodation to evil, because, well, it kind of is. But it’s an accommodation to some evils to avoid greater ones, like rape (in the case of the woman who dresses more modestly than she otherwise would, and avoids certain parts of town, so as not to risk an encounter with an evil man) and, in this case, a wider war, even a world war. The West thought it could dictate terms to Russia. But the West also thought it could make Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies. When will we learn that our way of seeing the world is not universally accepted — and that we live in a world with people, not all of them saints, who see things differently, and who are prepared to defend their interests?

I repeat: the retired Supreme Allied Commander for NATO went on CNN today and said that NATO should establish a no-fly zone over Kiev. Don’t tell me that there aren’t Western people eager to start a war with Russia over all this. The Ukrainian ambassador to the UK called on NATO today to establish a no-fly zone over all of Ukraine, and some senior Tory MPs agreed. Thankfully, the British defense minister said that’s not going to happen, because it would mean declaring war on Russia, which would mean war across Europe. But this is the kind of crazy talk we’re hearing now. Time to get a grip.

The post NATO ‘No-Fly Zone’ Nuttery appeared first on The American Conservative.

As this week’s readers know, I have been extremely angry at the role the West has played in bringing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to pass, and am in a real state over the prospect of a new Cold War, which may turn hot in places. Here in Central Europe, in a country that borders Ukraine, everyone I talk to is very, very worried about the future. A Slovenian friend texted me yesterday morning to say, “Welcome to World War III.” I asked him to explain what about this makes it a “world” war. He responded that the Russians will not stop here. Look, he said, for their Serb allies to try once again to reshape the borders of the former Yugoslavia. I met later in the day with a journalist who covers that region, and he predicted the same thing.

There is nothing abstract about this for these people. I had lunch yesterday with a Hungarian friend who told me hair-raising stories of World War II, passed down from her grandparents. It occurred to me after lunch that we had been eating in a restaurant in Krisztinavaros, the hilly district in Buda that was at the heart of the 1945 Siege of Budapest, the last stand of the German army here. The siege, in which the Red Army expelled the Nazis, was some of the most savage fighting of World War II. Some 38,000 Hungarians died, most of them by starvation and disease.

Here is a documentary, with English subtitles, about that siege. I watched it last year when I first came to Hungary. Now that I live in Krisztinavaros (I lived across the river in Pest last year), and walk these same streets, I’m going to watch it again. I urge you to watch this, though I warn you, it’s very tough:

I’m thinking about this documentary now, on Friday morning here in Budapest, as the news reports that the Russians appear to be encircling Kiev. We don’t know whether Kiev will fall without a fight, or what kind of fight the Ukrainians will put up, but it’s obvious that the Russians will win this, due to overwhelming force. Putin will install an occupation government. Meanwhile, I’m watching as I write this, video from Moscow showing Russian anti-war protesters being arrested by police and taken to jail. This is what it means to live under Putin’s government.

What will happen to Kiev today, and over the coming days? Will it be destroyed, or heavily damaged, as Budapest was in the waning days of World War II? The prospect is agonizing to contemplate. And the most important fact to know is that Vladimir Putin chose this.

As you may know, Kiev is uniquely important in Orthodox Christianity and therefore in Russian culture. It is where Christianity was born in Russia in the year 988. The Monastery of the Kiev Caves, nearly 1,000 years old, as a world treasure, and one of the greatest holy sites in all of Orthodoxy. Is that monastery and the many other churches and shrines in Kiev now in danger? How can they not be? I doubt the Russian military would target these sites, but war is not a precision operation.

So we watch, we wait, and we pray. Ukrainian president Zelensky is saying this morning that the West is not doing enough to come to his country’s aid. If Zelensky ever thought that Western countries would militarily engage a nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine, he was seriously deluded — but if we in the West encouraged him to think so, then shame on us.

How can you not be touched, and not admire, the suicidal defiance of the 13 Ukrainian soldiers who refused to surrender their post on Snake Island, and were killed by Russian fire?

A group of Ukrainian border guards were stationed on Snake Island, in the Black Sea south of Odessa, when a Russian warship ordered them to surrender under threat of attack.

Their response: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”

They held their ground. All 13 were killed. pic.twitter.com/GMRsXQRSX0

— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) February 25, 2022

These soldiers were victims of Vladimir Putin. However justifiable his security concerns were vis-à-vis Ukraine and NATO, Putin did not have to do any of this. His was a war of choice. I don’t suppose we will have any way of truly knowing what the Russian people think about this war, but you shouldn’t assume that everyone there is behind the Putin government. Russia is the only former Communist country where there is no contract to translate and publish my Live Not By Lies — a fact that I found strange, until I realized that in the book, there this passage from a 2019 interview I did with Father Kirill Kaleda, a Russian Orthodox priest:

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

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

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

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

I’m thinking of Father Kirill today, and wondering about how many ordinary Russians have been taught by their state-controlled media to hate Ukrainians. Plus, one of my book’s heroes is the Soviet-era dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov, an Orthodox Christian who has made himself a thorn in Putin’s side. The KGB destroyed his marriage, murdered his brother, and killed his secretary. Yet in more recent times, Ogorodnikov has continued to protest corruption under Putin.

I recall from reading Dissident For Life, Koenraad de Wolf’s excellent biography of Ogorodnikov, that one of the things Ogorodnikov struggles against is the chronic impoverishment of Russian life, based in part on endemic corruption and the absence of civic consciousness and Christian values in public life. Putin promotes himself as a guardian of Christian culture, and in some ways he really is. But he is also presiding over a system that, according to Ogorodnikov, is far from Christian in its lack of respect for honesty, justice, and charity towards the weak. Putin’s laudable opposition to the gender ideology that has captivated the West cannot erase those deficits.

Just now I see this tweet:

Moscow is willing to negotiate terms of surrender with kyiv, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov.
In exchange Ukraine would: a guarantee of neutral status and the promise of no weapons on its territory. Per RT.

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) February 24, 2022

If this is true, it is good news, and a way out of this crisis. It suggests that Russia wisely doesn’t want a brutal subjugation of Ukraine and years of low-level civil war, but only the neutrality between Russia and NATO that Putin has been demanding all along. Perhaps, then, further destruction can be avoided — the physical destruction of Ukraine, plus the deepening immiseration of Ukraine and Russia under sanctions brought about by Putin’s bellicosity. Finlandization — the rendering of Ukraine into a neutral state, without requiring it to be re-united to Russia — is probably the best Ukraine can hope for in the real world.

I urge you again to watch the 2015 John Mearsheimer lecture about Ukraine and its crisis. It is a bracing cold splash of realism. Prof. Mearsheimer argues that the West is responsible for all this, because the West’s goal has been “to make Ukraine a Western bulwark of Russia’s border.” Russia cannot accept this, says Mearsheimer (and I think you’d have to be bonkers to think that Russia could ever do this, any more than the United States could accept a heavily armed Russian or Chinese ally in Mexico). Mearsheimer also says that Russia would be crazy to try to conquer Ukraine in the same way that both the USSR and the US tried to conquer Afghanistan (it would “wreck Russia,” he says). Seems right to me … which this new report by Engel indicates.

Mearsheimer says in the prophetic lecture that in the same way that the US insists in the Monroe Doctrine that the Western hemisphere is our backyard, and no great power had better set up a base over here, this is how Russia sees things with Ukraine. If you think what Russia is doing is wrong, you had better apologize to the Cuban government for the Cuban missile crisis, and the Sandinistas for the contra war.

He also says that Washington (by which he means the US foreign policy and national security community) lives in a fantasy world in which old-fashioned balance of power thinking doesn’t matter. This is not the case with the Chinese and the Russians, and until we get that figured out, we’re going to keep getting ourselves into trouble. Plus, says Mearsheimer, our vision is clouded by the illusion that America is always a benign hegemon, and that our motives are always pure, our goals decent.

Mearsheimer goes on to say that we are nuts if we think that the Russians are going to quit on Ukraine if we just inflict enough pain on them. “Ukraine matters to them,” he says, “but Ukraine doesn’t matter to us.”

He’s talking about strategically. To bring Ukraine into NATO would mean granting them the protection of Article V of the NATO treaty, which obligates all members to respond when a single member is attacked. “You only give Article V guarantees to countries that are of vital strategic interest,” he says. Earlier in the lecture, he defined such countries as those where it is worth sending troops to fight and die to defend.

Is Ukraine such a place? To the Ukrainians, it certainly is. But to Americans? No, it is not, no more than Mexico is a country worth sacrificing Russian lives for.

In a part of the lecture that is painful to hear today, in light of what has happened, Mearsheimer warns that the West’s preoccupation with Ukraine — remember, he gave this talk in the wake of the Euromaidan, and the civil war in the Donbass — is blinding it to the very real threat from rising China. China, he says, poses a huge strategic challenge for the US; Russia does not. “We are going to have our hands full in Asia,” he says. “Europe is not going to matter.”

Mearsheimer then predicts that “the Russians will be with us” in lining up against China. “What we are effectively doing is driving the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. There’s a great strategy,” he said, with acid sarcasm.

Well, it has happened. From February 4:

Russia forged new long-term supply deals with China as the Kremlin aims to strengthen ties with the Asian nation amid souring relations with the West.

Energy giants Gazprom PJSC and Rosneft PJSC signed agreements with the world’s largest energy consumer as President Vladimir Putin met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing ahead of the Winter Olympics. The two leaders are drawing their nations closer together, united by political, military and economic frictions with Europe and the U.S.

“Friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation,” the Kremlin said in a statement following the meeting.

In the lecture, Mearsheimer says that the best we can hope for is the neutralization (“Finlandization”) of Ukraine:

This, however, would be a disaster, because it would make NATO and Russian troops face off at the Dnieper River:

Mearsheimer cites these statements as the crux of the crisis:

It has been there since 2008! What happened this week in Ukraine was telegraphed by Putin back then — but we didn’t want to listen. This is why Mearsheimer says in his lecture that the West is “leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and it’s going to get wrecked.” That is, we were encouraging the Ukrainians to play hardball with the Russians, allowing them to think that eventually the West would defeat Putin and get its way.

Some of you are thinking, “Dreher started this post sympathetic to the Ukrainians, but then he pivoted and started restating Russian propaganda points.” Look, I am sympathetic to the Ukrainians. But sympathy doesn’t erase the hard reality of Ukraine’s unfortunate geography, or its historical, cultural, and religious relationship with Russia. Ukraine will never be part of NATO, because no Russian state could allow it. Unless we in the West are willing to go to war over this — and that would be suicidal madness — we are going to have to live with it.

I keep banging on about all this because in reading the US media this week, I’m seeing very little realistic thinking about any of this. Once again, it’s driven by emotion. I’ve said many times here how much I learned in retrospect by allowing my emotions and my idealism to lead me into the pro-war camp after 9/11. Back then, every time I heard someone say that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, or that we were not going to be able to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, I would turn off my mind by reminding myself of the 9/11 dead, and by telling myself that the critics were probably racists by saying (as I falsely construed it) that Arab Muslims were incapable of liberal democracy. Besides, I recall writing back then, even if it’s a roll of the dice regarding liberal democracy in Iraq, we need to try something to shake the region up, because what we’ve been doing isn’t working.

Look how that turned out for us.

All the “how dare you!” and “have you no decency?!” squawking I’m hearing now from idealists of the Left and Right regarding Russia and Ukraine were the same kinds of things we heard back in 2002, when people who advised against the Iraq War raised objections. So, y’all can be mad at me if you want, but I’m going to keep saying these things, even as I also say that Putin should not have invaded Ukraine (though pro-Russian voices can fairly say that, given the West’s refusal, even up to the point of the actual invasion, to give Russia veto power over Ukraine’s NATO bid backed Putin into a corner). We have lived for twenty years with the results of foolish wars and nation-building folly instigated by Washington, wars that have taken the lives of thousands of US service members, even after American generals concluded that they weren’t winnable (as in Afghanistan, years before withdrawal). Do you want to keep doing this? Do you want the Blob to continue to lead us into these deadly crises? Read this fresh piece by Jack Matlock, who was America’s last ambassador to the USSR (1987-91). He explains why this Ukraine war was entirely avoidable — and how we in the West, including every US administration since Clinton, provoked it.

And I’m also going to keep yelling about America’s deep internal divisions making it harder in the long run for the US to keep up its global status in the face of massive challenges from China (and now, from Russia). If you don’t believe that wokeness is a national security threat, you are in la-la land. Half of our young are being taught that America is a racist, sexist, transphobic hellhole whose historic culture is poisoned by “whiteness”; the other half, being demonized like this by the ruling class because of their race, religious convictions, and/or love of American and Western history, is perfectly entitled to wonder why it should risk its collective life to defend a social order that treats it as deplorable.

Here’s how pig-blind these elites are. At a time when they want the West to unite against Russian aggression, a group of elite neocons and neolibs, led by Anne Applebaum and others, are opening a front against Hungary’s government, which at this point is favored to win re-election in next month’s voting.  They declare that Hungary is the “next battleground state in the global fight to defend democracy.” They are driving Hungary towards Russia and China, but that’s okay, I guess, because like the elites who gigged Ukraine to nurture dreams of NATO membership, They Mean Well.

Anyway, if we ignore America’s internal weakness caused by the civil cold war elites are waging on the deplorables like we ignored Russia’s legitimate complaints about the West’s attempts to break Ukraine away from the Russian orbit and move it into the West’s, and we will be in for more shocks like occurred this week — but next time, they will occur with China. Mearsheimer, in that prophetic 2015 talk, said, “China is going to eat our lunch.” He was right about Ukraine then; will he be proved right about China tomorrow?

As I wrap up, the latest reports show that Russian troops have definitely entered Kiev. Let us pray that peace will soon return to that poor suffering land, cursed by being so close to Russia.

The post Kiev Falling: It Did Not Have To Happen appeared first on The American Conservative.

Take a look at this newly relevant 2014 lecture by Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, the legendary foreign policy realist. He was talking about the Euromaidan situation, and explaining how the West was pushing Ukraine to the point of a serious crisis with Russia:

Don’t have time to watch the whole thing? Here:

Analysis & prediction on Ukraine from 6 years ago:

“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path & the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

-John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the U. of Chicago, pic.twitter.com/kPQNH58o7G

— Prodigal Son (@ThePr0diga1S0n) January 24, 2022

I’m getting a lot of blowback in the comments section from people who are appalled that I’m not spending all my time lambasting Putin, but instead complaining about how we in the West helped bring about this situation, or bitching about our own decadence. Fine, complain all you want. As I said, ultimately this war is Putin’s fault. He should not be doing this, and I hope he comes to grief because of it.

However, as uncomfortable as it is for some of you to hear it, you had better stop and think about how we got to this dangerous situation with Russia, and what things we in the West had under our control, that we failed to do right. That Hitler was responsible for World War II doesn’t obviate the role the victorious WWI allies played through the ruinous Versailles Treaty. If our goal in the post Cold War era was to rub Russia’s nose in the dirt, well, we gave it a go. We ought to have instead tried to create peace and stability. There is no possible scenario under which offering to bring Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO, as President G.W. Bush did in 2008, could have led to anything other than what happened today.

What’s more, I know it is unpleasant for some of you to consider the decadence in the US and in the West in general in this context (e.g., “Bombs are falling in Ukraine, and you’re obsessing over trannies?!?”), but you should think twice about this. If we are now facing a renewal of the long struggle with Russia, and probably even a struggle against China too, allied with Putin’s Russia, then the leaders of Western countries had better think about how they are going to meet the demands of this struggle. They have no hope of doing so with a country in which they have abused and alienated a huge number of people for the crime of being white, heterosexual, culturally conservative, or clinging bitterly to their bigoted churches. We saw just the other day that Justin Trudeau actually seized the bank accounts of people supporting the trucker protests, under the guise of fighting domestic terrorism. I have absolutely no doubt that Washington will try the same. The woke left, having marched through the institutions, are weaponizing them against parents, children, families, church people, conservatives, and other deplorables.

You tell many of us that we are racist, fascist, deplorable scum who deserve to be fired, or at least to worry about our livelihoods because we don’t agree with you, and then you expect us to be all on board to risk our kids’ lives to serve a political and social order that despises us? Really, explain how that works.

Who on earth do they think are going to fight their damn wars? Better get Ibram X. Kendi, immigration lobbyists, and that sadomasochist trans freak at the Department of Energy to suit up, because it’s not going to be my sons. They’re not going to be sent out under the command of Pentagon generals who were never held accountable by Congress for their Afghanistan lies (see the Afghanistan Papers) to fight for a declining Empire whose power-holders hate people like us. If you want to be a great power, you had better start treating actual Americans better. The Pentagon’s propaganda (see this recent piece, for example) claims that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a “force multiplier”. Maybe it’s not that the generals want to show their future corporate employers that they get woke capitalist culture, and can be trusted once they retire; maybe they actually believe this. Once all the conservatives drop out of the military or fail to sign up because they do not want to defend an order that treats them like villains, the Pentagon is going to need all the industrial-grade copium it can get its hands on.

Again, I know a lot of you don’t want to hear it, but as you are planning out how the West is going to respond to the monster Putin over the long term, you had better start thinking about those things. The crusading liberals and warmongering, corporate-lackey Republicans have made sure that the America in 2022 is not as strong as America when the Cold War ended. That is a big problem, as we will all discover soon. We cannot control what Putin does to Ukraine, but we can control our ability to respond to it in the long term. Better start thinking hard right now about the national security implications of the culture war the ruling class in America is waging on its own people.

Maybe, just maybe, we will start listening to the Mearsheimers among us.

UPDATE: And think about all the leftist young people who have been educated to think of themselves as inheritors of an evil civilization, one tainted indefensibly by racism, homophobia, and all the rest. When you call on them to defend us, what are they going to do? If what the elites say is true, why should they lift a finger?

UPDATE.2: In his just-published Substack newsletter, John Schindler, former National Security Agency analyst and professor at the Naval War College, explains why Putin’s war on Ukraine is ultimately a religious war. As an Orthodox Christian, I urge you strongly to pay attention to this analysis.

As Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the ROC, explained in early 2019, “Ukraine is not on the periphery of our church. We call Kiev ‘the mother of all Russian cities.’ For us Kiev is what Jerusalem is for many. Russian Orthodoxy began there, so under no circumstances can we abandon this historical and spiritual relationship. The whole unity of our Local Church is based on these spiritual ties.”

What spurred Patriarch Kirill to make that statement was the separation of much of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russia in early 2019 with the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with go-ahead from the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (i.e., Istanbul: who is the not-a-pope of world Orthodoxy, where national churches are self-governing). This involved the transfer of thousands of parishes and millions of believers from the long-existing Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has been under the ROC since the seventeenth century, to the brand-new OCU. The UOC-MP is self-governing under Moscow and there wasn’t much spiritual demand in Ukraine for independence from Russia, what Orthodox term autocephaly.

However, the pressures of the not-quite-frozen conflict with Russia after 2015 made church issues a political football, and Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko made autocephaly his pet project, with backing from Ukrainian nationalists, who found it offensive that the UOC remained under Moscow, where the church is a vehicle for Putinism, Russian nationalism, and anti-Ukrainian aggression. Advocates of the new OCU had a valid point there, and they were also correct that, since autocephaly is the norm in the Orthodox world, why didn’t Ukraine have its own, fully independent national church?

The answer there, that Orthodoxy tends to move on “Orthodox time” which appears glacially slow to secular minds, thinking more in terms of centuries than years or even decades, was unedifying to advocates of the OCU, who got their wish in early January 2019, when the Ecumenical Patriarch granted autocephaly to Ukraine’s new national church. What followed was predictably messy and politicized, with fights across Ukraine over parishes and clergy. This issue is neither simple nor clear-cut: the OCU is considered broadly nationalist (with exceptions) while the UOC, despite its Russian connections, has many laypeople who are Ukrainian patriots who don’t feel they belong to a “foreign” church. Moreover, this issue birthed a schism in global Orthodoxy that has reverberated on several continents, most recently in Africa. The OCU-UOC split has even caused heartburn among American Orthodox believers.

Above all, the schism rendered Moscow white-hot with rage. The ROC viewed this as a direct attack on its “canonical territory” and on world Orthodoxy itself. The Kremlin, too, made no effort to conceal its outrage here. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly denounced the Ecumenical Patriarch as Washington’s puppet: “His mission, obviously, is being prepared by the Americans and they do not hide that they are actively cooperating with him, using the slogan of ‘freedom of religion and belief’…Bartholomew’s mission, obviously, is to bury the influence of Orthodoxy in the modern world.” A few weeks later, Lavrov added fuel to the fire by castigating the OCU as “this travesty of history, and pursuing the objective of sowing discord between Russia and Ukraine in addition to preventing our peoples from being friends are essentially a crime [by the current Ukrainian regime] against their citizens.” A few months after that, Lavrov reiterated that this tragedy was all America’s fault: the ROC “is currently under tremendous pressure from a number of Western countries, primarily the United States, which set itself the goal of destroying the unity of world Orthodox Christianity.”

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

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

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

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

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

Read it all. We are in way over our heads.

The post Mearsheimer Told Us So — In 2014 appeared first on The American Conservative.

I am writing this just as most Americans are waking up to the news that Russia has invaded Ukraine. I wrote earlier this morning, when I awakened here in Budapest to the news, that nothing excuses this outrageous act by Russia.  But in that post, I pointed out that we would be fools not to factor in the West’s blunders, beginning at the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union prostrate. For example, Americans have no idea at all how deep the Trianon Treaty of 1919 traumatized the Hungarian psyche, by dismantling Greater Hungary, removing two-thirds of its historic territories. The Slovaks, the Romanians, and others who benefited from Trianon (they lived in parts of Hungary where their own ethnic group was larger than ethnic Hungarians, prior to World War I) saw it as a victory for national determinism. The Hungarians saw it as a savage wound — and now, a century later, they still regard it as a monumental tragedy.

I had no idea about any of this prior to coming here. Do you know anything about Trianon? You cannot understand anything the Hungarian government does without factoring in Trianon. The Hungarians today are profoundly — profoundly — afraid of foreign domination, mostly because of Trianon. Whether you or I think that Trianon was a good treaty, a bad treaty, or somewhere in the middle, doesn’t matter. What matters is that most Hungarians are so grieved by it, even today, that the emotional and psychological power of that event cannot be overstated. This is why even though they want to be part of the EU, they push back hard against what they regard as unjust violations of their sovereignty by Brussels. It all goes back to Trianon.

So, when I read these days that much-quoted line Vladimir Putin uttered some years back, in which he lamented the tragedy of the USSR’s demise, I think of Trianon and the Hungarians. Though he was a KGB man, I don’t think Putin is a nostalgist for Bolshevism. He’s a nostalgist for Greater Russia — a Russia that was bigger, more powerful, and prouder on the world stage. If I had not come to Hungary last year and learned about Trianon, I am sure I would not have been able to grasp what this means to people whose countries have been dismantled or disempowered by war and historical fate.

Similarly, it has helped me to understand why so many Southerners feel so bitter about the Civil War and its latest iteration — the demonization of Confederate monuments and Southern culture. It’s not because anybody misses slavery. It’s because defeat and humiliation hurts like hell. A wise victor takes into account the pain of defeat, and doesn’t attempt to humiliate him. This is a lesson the victorious World War I allies did not learn in punishing Imperial Germany. Result: Hitler. It is perfectly understandable why the victorious American-led West pushed NATO’s borders so far to the East, taking advantage of Russian weakness — but it was a foolish mistake.

And don’t be under the mistaken impression that the US was a neutral outside broker in any of this. Here is the leaked transcript of the notorious 2014 phone call from senior US diplomat Victoria Nuland (now back in the State Department under Joe Biden) and the then-US ambassador to Ukraine. Nuland and the ambassador are talking about how America is taking advantage of the Color Revolution to select Ukraine’s next leader. If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you know this is going on, what do you think?

Another aspect of today’s news that we Americans should consider, but rarely do: the role of Ukraine, especially Kiev, in the Russian religious imagination. We simply have nothing to compare it to. Giles Fraser writes about it today. Kiev is where Christianity began in Russia, with the baptism of Prince Vladimir, leader of the Kievan Rus, and the formal introduction of Christianity as the religion of the people. Fraser:

Soviet Communism tried to crush all this — but failed. And in the post-Soviet period, thousands of churches have been built and re-built. Though the West thinks of Christianity as something enfeebled and declining, in the East it is thriving. Back in 2019, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, boasted that they were building three churches a day. Last year, they opened a Cathedral to the Armed Forces an hour outside Moscow. Religious imagery merges with military glorification. War medals are set in stained glass, reminding visitors of Russian martyrdom. In a large mosaic, more recent victories — including 2014’s “the return of Crimea” — are celebrated. “Blessed are the peacemakers” this is not.

At the heart of this post-Soviet revival of Christianity is another Vladimir. Vladimir Putin. Many people don’t appreciate the extent to which the invasion of Ukraine is a spiritual quest for him. The Baptism of Rus is the founding event of the formation of the Russian religious psyche, the Russian Orthodox church traces its origins back here. That’s why Putin is not so much interested in a few Russian-leaning districts to the east of Ukraine. His goal, terrifyingly, is Kyev itself.

Fraser writes, with sad (for me, as an Orthodox Christian) accuracy, about the subordination of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Russian state under Putin. American readers should also understand that the Ukrainian state has politicized the Orthodox Church there, leading a breakaway faction into declaring ecclesiological independence from the Moscow Patriarchate. Not all Orthodox believers living in Ukraine follow the new patriarch, but let’s not pretend that the politicization of the Church is a one-sided affair.

Fraser plainly thinks the Ukraine invasion is appalling, but he warns the West not to underestimate the religious dimension of this conflict:

The Western secular imagination doesn’t get this. It looks at Putin’s speech the other evening, and it describes him as mad — which is another way of saying we do not understand what is going on. And we show how little we understand by thinking that a bunch of sanctions is going to make a blind bit of difference. They won’t. “Ukraine is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space” Putin said. That’s what this is all about, “spiritual space” — a terrifying phrase steeped in over a thousand years of Russian religious history.

The US Embassy in Kiev tweeted this the other day, in an attempt to shame the Russians. What the religious and historical illiterates there did instead was make Putin’s point about Kiev as the birthplace of Russian Christianity:

This response is funny:

What a weird thing to post, but OK, I’ll play along. pic.twitter.com/9ijwNwHU3B

— Oneironaut (@Oneironautilus) February 22, 2022

There is another aspect to this war: the cultural one. I addressed that to a great extent in yesterday’s post about “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” The political economist (and my friend) Philip Blond tweeted this morning:

The age of empires has begun again & it will be dated from this day, it means an end of petty nationalisms, a return of the strong state & a need to rebuild & restore the Western project. In this Britain & Europe r indispensable allies & America must be rescued from isolationism

— Phillip Blond (@Phillip_Blond) February 24, 2022

But what about the Western empire today? To my eyes, we are decadent, and ruled by an elite that despises our own history, traditions, and the unwoke deplorables among us. We are ruled by an elite who think of many of us as savages: racist, transphobic bigots who must be brought to heel, even if it means taking over the bank accounts of dissident. Look at what the interior minister of the new left-wing German government says:

While speaking with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung days ago, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD)—who’s previously labeled ‘right-wing extremism’ as the country’s most pressing threat, despite ample evidence which suggests otherwise—claimed that through ‘education’ young children can be inoculated against ideologies that she and her fellow far-left travelers deem to be ‘extreme.’

“We have to smash right-wing extremist networks,” Faeser began. “The rule of law must not accept calls for murder and threats. We are resolutely combating this breeding ground for violence. But the fight against right-wing extremism starts much earlier, namely with good educational work. He has to start in kindergarten.”

Faeser then called on kindergarten teachers to ‘educate’ young children in such a way so as to ensure “that they are not even susceptible to ideologies of exclusion,” adding the country needs “democratic education that makes it clear that it doesn’t matter where a family came from at some point, what skin color someone has, who they believe in or who they love.”

Do you see what’s happening here? Moral traditionalists — Christians, Muslims, anybody — who disagrees with gender ideology is a “right-wing extremist,” according to the German Interior Minister. The propaganda must begin in kindergarten. It’s the same in the US, as we well know. These people well and truly hate us. I talked recently with a European friend, a liberal shocked by the illiberalism of the Left today, who told me a story of a Syrian refugee family that made an epic journey on foot to a Scandinavian country to escape the war, but who is now thinking of getting out, because they fear that their family will be destroyed by the state. The child protection laws in this country are so strict that if a child complains in school that Mom or Dad as much as yelled at them, the state authorities can be there at your door the next morning, seize the children, and put them in foster care. Biological parents will be forbidden to have contact until they are 18.

“That is monstrous!” I said to my friend.

“It is monstrous,” he agreed.

But this is who we are. As you know from Abigail Shrier’s reporting, in the state of Washington, the law permits the state to seize minors 15 years of age and younger, and inject them with cross-sex hormones to facilitate sex change against the will of parents, if this is what those children say they want. Monstrous! But this is what many liberals — and some conservative elites — believe in (and if the conservative elites don’t believe in it, they certainly aren’t going to draw media fire by standing up against it). In a 2015 post about Sam Quinones’ terrific book about American opiate culture, Dreamland, I wrote:

The book is full of sad stories, but the saddest is the tale of Russian Pentecostals in Portland, Oregon. Massive number of these persecuted Christians emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US, and settled mostly on the West Coast. They were religious, conservative, and strict churchgoers. But their kids went to school with other Americans, and came to see church life as boring and too restrictive. They tried OxyContin, and moved into heroin. Hundreds of these Russian Pentecostal kids became addicts. Their parents did not know what to do. In one family’s case:

Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit. … [T]heir American dreamland contained hazards they hadn’t imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth.

Think of it: these Pentecostals were better off in the USSR than in America, because American freedom led to extreme decadence.

Putin is an authoritarian who uses Western decadence in the same way the Soviet regime did: to justify its own repression. Nevertheless, that decadence really is there! Wokeness, if it comes to Hungary (given the ethnic homogeneity here, its primary expression will be gender ideology), is going to tear this society apart, as it is doing in America, by destroying families and alienating young people from their bodies and their instincts. I hear some Hungarians complaining about Viktor Orban’s cultural authoritarianism, and they’re not wrong about all of it. But I tell them that wokeness is so insane, and so intolerant, that if it takes hold here, you will not be allowed to dissent from it without risking your job and status. The choice seems to be increasingly not between classical liberalism and authoritarianism, but what kind of authoritarianism will we live under. I don’t like that choice, but this is where the West is today.

The Catholic friend who sent me the Giles Fraser piece said that conservative Christians (like him) feel uneasy today. “What civilization are we defending?” he said. I pointed out that Fraser is correct to cite the corruption of the Russian Orthodox Church leadership regarding its subservience to state power, and money. But, I pointed out, this is like the Evangelical Christian young Hungarian voter I talked to last year, who told me she plans to vote for Orban despite hating the high tolerance for corruption in his circles. Financial corruption is a familiar thing, she said: bad, but something that can be fixed. The kind of corruption represented by the West, however, is moral and intellectual — a far worse thing, and more difficult to eradicate. (She was talking about race and gender ideology with wokeness.)

My Catholic friend agreed, saying that the theological corruption of Pope Francis is “existential,” because “he puts into question the whole Catholic project.”

“Kirill [the Moscow patriarch] may be corrupt, but does he support pumping ‘transgender’ children full of puberty blockers, and surgically mutilating them like Fr. James Martin, SJ?” my friend asked rhetorically, referencing the American Jesuit and close Francis collaborator who is a high-profile LGBT advocate.

This is a question that liberals find absurd. But believe me, many conservatives do not, and should not. We are not defending the America, and the West, that once was. We find ourselves defending, or asked to defend, this rotten woke tyranny. You will recall Joe Biden’s claim about trans rights:

Well, here is something new from Beto O’Rourke, Democratic candidate for Texas governor:

To every trans kid in Texas:

You're amazing. I'm proud of you.

You belong right here in Texas, and I'll fight for you to live freely as yourself and free from discrimination. pic.twitter.com/rLvxoOHS9F

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) February 23, 2022

Contrast that with a speech Vladimir Putin gave last fall in Sochi, the transcript of which is here. Excerpt:

The importance of a solid support in the sphere of morals, ethics and values is increasing dramatically in the modern fragile world. In point of fact, values are a product, a unique product of cultural and historical development of any nation. The mutual interlacing of nations definitely enriches them, openness expands their horizons and allows them to take a fresh look at their own traditions. But the process must be organic, and it can never be rapid. Any alien elements will be rejected anyway, possibly bluntly. Any attempts to force one’s values on others with an uncertain and unpredictable outcome can only further complicate a dramatic situation and usually produce the opposite reaction and an opposite from the intended result.

We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.

Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, we are keeping out of this. But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society – it would be more correct to put it this way – has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.

The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.” This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there. By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.

In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go – not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there.

Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “’birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times.

Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists – is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.

Well, if someone likes this, let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism. That was a few years ago, when passions on the international arena were not yet running as high as they are now, although, of course, we can say that clouds were gathering even then. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed – precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us.

This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change or a restraining game, much less about withdrawing into our own shell. It is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities, a correlation of necessity and possibility, a prudent formulation of goals, and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method. And frankly, in the impending period of global reconstruction, which may take quite long, with its final design being uncertain, moderate conservatism is the most reasonable line of conduct, as far as I see it. It will inevitably change at some point, but so far, do no harm – the guiding principle in medicine – seems to be the most rational one. Noli nocere, as they say.

Again, for us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history. The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes beyond estimation. Such actions can destroy not only the material, but also the spiritual foundations of human existence, leaving behind moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for a long time.

In that speech, Putin said the exact same thing that emigres fleeing Soviet communism for the West tell me in Live Not By Lies: that the liberal, woke West is creating a tyranny like the very one they fled! Who, conservative reader, has a more sensible take on culture today: Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden? It’s not even close.

That is not to say that Putin is right to have invaded Ukraine! I believe he was very wrong to have done so. I only bring this up to warn my fellow American conservatives that the nature of the grand war upon us now is not what our media and our leaders would have us think.

One more thing. Do you remember the other day the excerpt from a 2017 interview that Klaus Schwab, the Dr. Evil figure who runs the World Economic Forum in Davos and instigator of The Great Reset, gave at Harvard, in which he boasted about how half of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet members (and many other senior figures in national governments) were graduates of his leadership program?

“So we penetrate the cabinets”.

Here is Klaus Schwab in 2017 discussing how the WEF have penetrated governments with its young global leaders – like Justin Trudeau.pic.twitter.com/07M6LDPHot

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) February 1, 2022

Take a look at this photo of the Master in his office:

I mean, really. There it is. That man, Herr Schwab, is one of the most important leaders in the West today. His people are at senior levels in all the world governments. He said in a speech not long ago that Justin Trudeau, the seizer of dissident bank accounts, is the ideal leader of the new world order.

Putin may be a bad man and a Russian imperialist. But he is not the greatest enemy of Western civilization. It’s not even close. The calls, as they say, are coming from inside the house.

The post The Long War Upon Us appeared first on The American Conservative.

I just woke up here in Budapest to news that Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is both extremely sad and utterly contemptible. As much as I think (and have said) both that Russia’s desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO was understandable and just, and that I reject the Blob’s knee-jerk bellicosity towards Russia, under no circumstances is what Russia has done overnight acceptable. There were diplomatic ways out of this impasse, but Putin chose not to take them.

Oddly enough, I bet that a lot of the world back in 2003 felt the way that I do this morning watching Russian troops march into Ukraine: helpless anger at a great power imposing itself on flimsy pretenses in a war of choice on a country that can barely defend itself — all in an attempt to remake the geopolitical order. Yet as angry as I am at Russia today, I am not going to be goaded into supporting US policies that widen the war. Nor does it make US and NATO policy towards Russia prior to now retrospectively correct. Today’s events in Ukraine bring to a definite end the post-Cold War interregnum. Nobody can possibly be pleased with the way things have turned out.

I want to share with you an analysis I found striking. It comes from the right-wing European commentator Niccolo Soldo, from his Substack. Soldo, who filed the piece on the eve of the Russian invasion, believes that what’s happening in Ukraine is a victory for both the US and Russia. It starts like this:

Celebrations have been taking place in the self-declared Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in what is almost universally recognized Ukraine. Having declared independence eight years ago, events have now forced Russia’s hand in which these two nascent entities are now recognized by Moscow, with all the protections that come with it. One cannot help but understand why these people are celebrating.

Another celebration is taking place in the USA. The State Department has achieved its main objective of seeing Nordstream 2 put on ice. American LNG producers are now popping champagne bottles as they can envision huge stacks of cash to be made by overcharging Europeans desperate for gas. The Military-Industrial Complex is chuffed as well, as the arms will continue to pour into Ukraine and into the NATO armies in its periphery.

This passage here explains why I am not at all interested in hearing self-exonerating Western leaders and talking heads acting like Western policy had nothing to do with today’s execrable events:

Despite assurances to the contrary, NATO is not a ‘defensive organization’. Even though American memories are short, people elsewhere remember the bombing campaign against Serbia, and the removal of Gaddafi from power in Libya. What NATO is in fact is the military arm of US hegemony, a hegemony that has seen it expand eastwards through Europe, right up to Russia’s very own borders.

“Don’t individual states reserve the right to enter into alliances with those they see fit, Niccolo?” Of course they do. But not all countries are islands, and most countries have neighbours. And not all neighbouring states are created equal, and they have their own national security concerns and interests. This is the case with Russia.

Russia has been invaded several times from the west since Napoleon first crossed the border to enter Imperial Russian soil in 1812. Every time since, western powers have been forced out, but have left behind devastation in their wake. This explains why Russia has sought buffers to its west ever since, with the largest buffer being its puppet regimes in eastern and central Europe during the Cold War.

NATO, originally set up to counter the USSR’s expansion into Europe, was left without a raison d’etre after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. Nevertheless, it pressed on eastwards, and thanks to the CIA and MI6, effected Colour Revolutions to put into power friendly regimes that sought NATO membership in places like Tbilisi and Kiev. Where Colour Revolutions weren’t necessary due to historical grievances against Russia, NATO missile systems pointed at Russia have been set up (Romania and Poland).

For Russia, the nightmare scenario of dismemberment from the west is now tangible. You may disagree with their perspective, but what is important is HOW they view the situation. If you can’t understand their views, it is therefore impossible to talk to them, unless you are only willing to lecture to them or threaten them.

And lectures on democracy and threats to their economy and existence are all that have come out of the west towards Russia recently.

And:

Ukraine has the right to rule over its territory as it sees fit. This is called sovereignty. Ukraine also has the right to seek alliances to maintain that sovereignty and to protect its own perceived interests.

Theory is great, but it is only theory. Reality does tend to intrude though. In this case, the Ukrainians have made a mess out of their post-Maidan revolution by exacerbating Moscow’s natural paranoia through its constant requests to join NATO. By doing this, Ukraine antagonizes its much more powerful neighbour which sees itself under existential threat from its smaller neighbour’s invitations to host a hostile organization on its soil. It is therefore only natural that Russia would act to neutralize this existential threat, because it can and it showed in 2014 (and again this week) that it will.

Much like how the USA would never tolerate a Chinese client regime in Mexico with nukes pointed at it, the Russians have shown that they won’t tolerate NATO in Ukraine. For the past few months, head Russian diplomat Lavrov has patiently explained to the West that NATO in Ukraine is a non-starter for them, and that they will take actions to ensure that their national security interests are protected. These security interests come at the cost of Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea in 2014, and now over the Donbass as of yesterday.

One more:

The precedent for recognizing these breakaway republics was set by the USA when it detached Kosovo from then Yugoslavia, and recognized its Universal Declaration of Independence a few years later. The 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia is what turned Russia away from the West, famously symbolized by then Premier Primakov ordering his jet to turn back to Moscow. It was at this point that the USA tore up international law. Albanian freedom from Serbian rule in Kosovo has now come at the cost of the loss of Crimea and Donbass to Russia.

It’s good when we do it — Kosovo, Iraq — but evil when they do it. I hope you’ll read the entire Soldo essay, because there’s a lot more there, and it’s the kind of thing you won’t be seeing much of in the US media from now on.

Let me say again: I abhor what Russia has done today. But this did not come from nowhere. Now Europe faces the prospect of a wider war — unlikely, but not at all unthinkable, which explains the anxiety so many Hungarians I meet have — and the opening of a new Cold War with Russia … and China. The historical period that ended last night, when Russian troops crossed the border, began with the US hoping to integrate China and Russia into a liberal democratic world order. It ended with wealthy China the world’s ascendant power; Russia — an historically Christian nation — having abandoned liberal democracy after the shambles that corrupt Russians and US advisors made of the 1990s, pivoting away from the West, and now firmly in the orbit of China; and the United States, a declining empire weakened and humiliated by twenty years of failed Mideast and Asian war, and sharply divided at home by the culture war American elites have waged on half of their own people, left to figure out what the hell to do with itself and its inheritance.

I know I am yelling into a whirlwind here, but please, Americans, do not let your anger over what Russia has done allow you to throw good sense away. Do not let the media whip you up into a pro-war frenzy, as happened to many of us post-9/11, which led America into a disastrous war. This is an extremely dangerous moment, one in which we could easily lose containment of the war to Ukraine. It might seem hard to imagine from the point of view of Americans, sitting on the other side of the ocean, but believe me, here in Hungary, which shares a border with Ukraine and living memory of Russian militarism in action, many people are very worried.

When the dust settles, I want to see some hard reflection on the unwisdom of successive US administrations pushing the outer boundaries of NATO farther to the East in the post-Cold War period. The smartest and most important thing Niccolo Soldo said in his essay was his point about the difference between theory (Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, has the right to set its own security policy), and reality (Russia, like any great power, cannot tolerate a military outpost of its enemies on its border). I’m not engaging in “Blame America First” here — the fault for today is Putin’s — but I am saying that it did not happen in a vacuum, and that the US foreign policy and national security elites, in the post Cold War period, bungled this through hubris, and by getting high on their own End-Of-History supply.

Now, if you think the US can funnel military supplies to the Ukraine resistance without suffering any consequences from Russia, you are being a fool. Russia’s cyberwarriors would devastate American institutions. We are not nearly as strong as we think.

The post Russia’s Shame appeared first on The American Conservative.

[UPDATE: There was some kind of glitch in the previous post that kept most of the text from posting. I am closing out the other one and reposting here — I hope it works. — RD]

The other day, Pat Buchanan warned about the Realpolitik of Russia’s stance towards Ukraine:

Putin does not threaten any vital interest of the United States and does not want war with the United States. But, as a great power, Russia claims a right to secure, peaceful and friendly borders, free of military alliances designed to circumscribe, contain and control it.

And the protests Moscow is making are not without validity?

Now that the Soviet Empire is dead, the Soviet Union is dead. Communism is dormant, and the USSR has devolved into 15 nations; why did we move our Cold War alliance onto Moscow’s front porch?

Would we tolerate this?

For what is “NATO enlargement,” other than a lengthening series of U.S. war guarantees to fight Russia on behalf of nations farther and farther away from us, and of ever-diminishing importance to the United States?

On March 1, 1917, the story broke of a secret cable from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to his minister in Mexico City, to make an offer to the government.

If war erupted between Germany and the U.S., the Zimmermann Telegram read, and Mexico sided with Germany, a victorious Second Reich would support the return of “the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”

Enraged at Germany’s offer to make Mexico its ally and to support the breakup of our country, the U.S., five weeks later, declared war on Germany.

Can we not understand the rising rage in Moscow as we convert all its former Warsaw Pact allies and ex-republics of the USSR into member states of a military alliance established to contain and control Russia?

Well. If you were paying attention in early 2003, on the verge of the Iraq War, you read this cover essay in National Review by David Frum, a Bush White House speechwriter, who advocated for the Iraq War by denouncing as “unpatriotic conservatives” Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and other prominent conservatives who warned against it. Excerpts:

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.”

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

More:

There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

I’m not a paleoconservative, and though I thought at the time that Frum went too far, I agreed back then with the thrust of his essay. But I was a fool — a fool traumatized by 9/11, and willing to believe whatever I was told to justify the vengeance I wanted on the Muslim world. Whatever the manifold faults of the paleocons back then, they were right about the One Big Thing: the war. If we had listened to them, America would be in a much better place now. We wouldn’t have hemorrhaged blood and treasure and authority in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. But people like me in 2003 were willing to believe the David Frums and spite the Pat Buchanans. Now look.

That war was indeed a great clarifier. Which accounts for tweets like this one from TAC cofounder Scott McConnell today. Scott was one of the paleos denounced by name by Frum back in 2003:

I agree of course that Putin is an autocrat who has broken “international norms” (as if George W. Bush didn’t) but I keep thinking about what Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali (not sure when he said it) said about the Viet Cong.

— Scott McConnell (@ScottMcConnell9) February 23, 2022

Ali supposedly said, in defense of his refusal to go fight in Vietnam, “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.” He probably didn’t say it, but even so, the point is a good one. I invite white conservative people who would have blanched (heh) at Ali’s line in the past to watch Errol Morris’s great documentary The Fog Of War, about McNamara and Vietnam, and see what the American ruling class at the time — all “best and brightest” white guys — did to working class Americans of all colors in chasing their folly in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese communists were evil bastards. But the world is full of evil bastards, not all of whom can or should be fought by American soldiers. War is a great clarifier. As I type this, I’m thinking of the gentle kid from my summer baseball league in the 1970s, who grew up to be sent to Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard, and who came home traumatized and unable to set foot inside his family’s church, because he said God could never forgive him for what he did over there. To my knowledge, he has never told a soul what it was (I heard about it from his anguished wife.

This was George W. Bush’s war. This was David Frum’s war. This was, I am ashamed to say, my war too. It wasn’t Pat Buchanan or Scott McConnell’s war. I’m inclined to listen more to them today than to Frum.

We have massive battles here on the home front. I was in a taxi from the train station today when I got a text from a friend in a small Southern town, in a deep Red State. He said his 11-year-old son came home yesterday from their local public school, saying that all the girls in his class say they are either lesbians or bisexual. The boy doesn’t really know what that means. Probably the girls don’t either, and are just being provocative. Even many American conservatives are sitting back pretending this isn’t happening to our country. Maybe some of them are falling back on comforting Cold War certainties. The Russians are uniquely and wholly evil, and we must prepare to fight them. Meanwhile, our own country is being hollowed out from within.

Victor David Hanson wrote the other day:

Our elites like Trudeau and Newsom seem angry they are unfairly underappreciated by their clueless beneficiaries. The latter supposedly never appreciate the needed remedies for climate change, the thought cleansing required to eliminate systemic racism, and the mind reprogramming demanded for true diversity, equity, and inclusion thinking.

Instead, the losers cling to unwoke and incorrect notions that class, not race, remains the real postmodern divide, that printing money does not make us richer, that a nation without a border is an amorphous nothing, that affordable gasoline and diesel fuel (not wind and solar) for now keep the West alive, that a fetus is alive at conception, that biology largely determines gender, that assimilation and integration are the only cures for tribalism, and that the law reflects a natural innate morality, and should not be applied on the basis of perceived victims manipulated by it, or the supposed victimizers manipulating it.

That wound of an imperious but counterfeit elite has suppurated too long beneath a smooth scab. And abruptly, the truckers at least tore some of it off.

What is now following is amplification and clarification of the Western divide. We the public are at the global theater. And we are watching a tragicomedy. On stage, a petulant cast of clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens simply cannot fathom why few anymore are listening to them. More and more North Americans are perplexed why anyone would wish to follow such unimpressive mental and physical figures along with all the toxic hypocrisies they embody and weaponize.

Along those lines, here’s an important thread:

I’ve said this for years, and it’s only getting more true—woke insanity is a national security threat.

As governments in the West are radicalizing, they’re pushing away at least half their populations who are looking for relative traditionalism. They will find champions abroad.

— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) February 23, 2022

He’s right about that. I think they will try electronically to suppress dissent, via a social credit system. It’s one of the reasons I wrote Live Not By Lies: to share advice from Christians and others who lived through Soviet-style totalitarianism, for how we can resist whatever our elites are preparing for us.

Here is the same thread, basically, in meme form:

 

Or, in a shorter form:

There’s a lot to be said about this. The people who need to hear it most are utterly incapable of listening. So I’m going to say it both to lay down a marker for the future (for when the talking heads puzzle over how things got to this disastrous point) and to encourage fellow conservatives who are thinking these thoughts, but are confused by them, because they’re new, and feel strange and even kind of dirty.

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?

Biden has said American troops won’t be fighting for Ukraine. I don’t believe him. It’s not that I think he’s consciously lying, but rather it’s that things could go very bad, very quickly, with US troops in the region. And it’s that my trust in anything anybody in Washington says is about at the level of a synod of bishops.

Last night I gave a talk and conducted a seminar for college students in Debrecen, a small Hungarian city about 8o miles from the border with Ukraine. We talked about Live Not By Lies, which is out now in Hungarian, though none of them had read it. Most of the kids in that room were not religious. Some were conservative, others were liberal. They sat there slack-jawed as I told them some of the things that are actually happening in America. The news had not reached them. This is the first lecture of its kind I’ve given here, and I realize that the next time I do it, I’m going to have to give more background. These Hungarian kids, God bless them, had no idea that things had sunk so far in the US. Even the liberals!

One young man, Balint, came up to me after the talk and asked if it was really true that a friend of forty years had ended our friendship because even though I supported the second impeachment of Trump, I thought Trump had accomplished some good things in office — in other words, because I didn’t oppose Trump with sufficient purity. Yes, for sure, I told him. She brought the friendship to an end after four decades with a text message. He shook his head in disbelief.

“I have a good friend who is on the left. He’s really annoying about it, too. He’s always trying to start arguments,” Balint said. “I’m a conservative, but I would never leave him as a friend. We are friends! That is the most important thing.”

He added that he thinks most people of his generation, whatever their politics, think the same thing. Well, I told him, if that’s true, then you all have a precious thing, and you have to defend it. We have lost in in the US. I thought later about how puzzled the students looked when I told them that it is difficult, and in some places impossible, to have open discussions on campuses and in classrooms about ideas and issues, because of wokeness. Even if the professor permits it, students are now in the habit of self-censoring to avoid reproach by woke militants.

One young man said, during the discussion, “I think it is harder for this thing to come here because we had Communism. Our parents told us what that was like, when everybody had to watch all their words, and to be afraid of saying what they really thought.”

This is great news, I told him (and the group). Listen to your parents. Defend the right to speak freely, especially when it is the right of people who are your political opponents. We have lost that in my country. America is governed now, in both the public and private spheres, by people who think Justin Trudeau is a fine young defender of decency and democracy — but if Viktor Orban did to Hungarian dissidents what Trudeau is doing to Canadian ones, all of Washington would be calling for a color revolution. So who, actually, is our enemy?

Yesterday, before going to Debrecen, I gave a long interview to a French journalist who is in Budapest to find out why certain American conservatives are interested in Hungary now. In light of last night’s meeting with the students, I’m going to write her to add to my comments that Hungary today reminds this conservative of what we had in America thirty years ago, before wokeness took over all our institutions. It’s a place where normal people who believe in normal things that used to be normal in America — belief in God (even if, like most Hungarians, you don’t go to church), the traditional family, basic liberties, being proud of your country and its way of life — still exist in some recognizable form. It’s a country whose conservative leader and his governing party are willing to take risks to defend those things in law and policy, not just rhetorically. And so, when I see the liberal and neocon establishments trashing Hungary while at the same time presiding over the simultaneous demonization of normie conservative Americans, it’s easy to sympathize with Hungary. This is something normie conservatives in western Europe are learning too, by the way.

Anyway, Reaboi is right: the same people who are urging Americans to get onto war footing (cold or hot) against Russia are the ones who are waging culture war against their own fellow Americans. I’ve mentioned in this space before all the e-mails and texts I receive from people who are either in the military now (and planning to get out), or who are recently retired from the armed forces, telling me that it is no longer a place for tradition-minded people. One man I know told me that military service is a tradition on both sides of his family for four generations, but it ends with him: he has told his sons that he cannot support them serving in the US military as it now exists under this woke Pentagon regime. This just about kills him to say, but he has the personal experience to back it up.

How many other conservative, Jacksonian Americans are having the same conversations with their kids? I’ve had it with mine. America is not what we used to be. Defending our homeland is non-negotiable, but why should we put our lives on the line to fight for a regime that hates us and wants to suppress or even destroy the things we cherish? It makes no sense. The meme is correct: they think that we are what’s wrong with America, but they sure as hell want us to fight their stupid wars.

This is not a matter of “you’d better give us our way, or we won’t fight with you.” We live in a pluralistic country, with all kinds of different people. That’s just a fact, and conservatives need to accept it too, and work out a modus vivendi with those not like themselves. But the progressives — at least the ones in power within government and other institutions — have no interest in this. They only want subjugation.

You wonder why I spend so much time here pondering Sam Brinton? Because he is a condensed symbol of our decadent, depraved ruling class. As Carl Trueman writes:

What is interesting, of course, is that this is yet another sign of how the Biden presidency seems not simply mortgaged to the radical extremists of the left but positively committed to promoting their causes. And that raises interesting questions about the #NeverTrump evangelicals.

One of the interesting aspects of #NeverTrump evangelicals was the absolute refusal to allow for any legitimate reason to vote for Donald Trump. Joe Biden, they claimed, was going to restore some dignity to the office of president of the United States. Character counts. And so it does. But when two reprehensible candidates are the only options, character ceases to be a decisive issue, and Biden has more than proved that this was the case in the 2020 presidential election.

When it comes to restoring the office’s dignity, he has done no such thing. He has shown that he is quite capable of being rude and disrespectful of those with whom he disagrees. And now he has appointed Brinton to a government position. Analogies between this present age and the most decadent of Roman emperors are typically overblown and overwrought, but in this situation, they seem sadly appropriate. Perversion and exhibitionism of such a baroque type as that which Brinton represents surely indicates the mainstreaming of behavior previously regarded as a sign of deep mental illness. Now it walks the corridors of Biden’s administration.

There she is…Mx. America (Source)

As Yoram Hazony’s terrific forthcoming book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, makes plain, you cannot have liberal democracy without the moral and cultural preconditions that make it feasible. America today is fast losing that. It’s not just the corruption of our elites, either, but they certainly aren’t helping. C.S. Lewis’s famous passage from The Abolition Of Man is apt:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Along those lines, the ruling class despises non-woke normies, yet expects them to obey. How exactly does that work?

Look, I am aware that I’m writing this in a foreign country, so maybe I need to say that if an agent of another power approached me and invited me to betray my country, I would tell him to go to hell, and then go straight to the US Embassy to tell them about it. I’m still that much of a patriot, despite the fact that every day, the ruling class in America betrays Americans like me. Sooner or later — probably sooner — this is going to have major national security and foreign policy consequences for the United States, as more and more Jacksonian types wonder why the hell they should risk their lives fighting for a ruling class that hates them.

The promise of America used to be that you could be free to speak your mind and worship your god, and raise your family in a stable social order. If you worked hard, studied well, and played by the rules, you could get ahead in life, and your kids would have it better than you would. America never has achieved that fully for all of its people, but those were the ideals, and each generation moved closer to realizing them than the previous one.

That world is over now. We are now a country where the ruling class insists on judging people not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin, and calling that social justice. We are now a country where schools and other institutions try to colonize the minds of little children to alienate them from their bodies and their sexuality, and systematically deceive parents about it. We are a country where big business bigfoots state legislatures to crush local attempts to defend religious liberty. We are a country where the elites are destroying the universities that ought to be the carrier of our cultural traditions, just for the fun of seeing the formerly marginalized triumph within them.

We are a country in which women athletes are being dispossessed by pseudo-men, and are expected to acquiesce in their own dispossession as the cost of being progressive. We are now a country where the sweet old Baptist lady florist (Baronnelle Stutzman) who cannot in good conscience arrange flowers for a gay wedding has her business destroyed by vindictive gays and their allies in the judiciary. We are a country now where a prominent Catholic public intellectual (Ryan T. Anderson) has his book delisted by Amazon.com because he criticizes transgenderism, yet Amazon continues to sell Hitler’s Mein Kampf. We are a country in which everyone who dissents from woke ideology — even liberals! — have to measure every word they say, at the risk of having their careers destroyed by an accusation of bigotry. We are a country now where Hollywood and the media pump our kids’ heads full of propaganda for a bizarro world, and see no reason why half the country deserves any respect or consideration for its moral views. We are a country where, in some places, school districts allow biological males who identify as non-binary to spend the night in cabins, on school trips, with young girls:

This is the social order that Joe Biden and his allies want, and that Republicans have done little or nothing to prevent! But see, you, bigot, are the problem. Russia is the problem. Shut up and do as you’re told.

And on and on. You get the picture. They have turned the entire world upside down, and made enemies and outcasts of the most patriotic, decent, and God-fearing Americans — who they now expect to defend this order. Does Washington understand what it has done? Does New York? Does Los Angeles? Of course not.

But by God, one of these days, they will.

The post ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ 2022 appeared first on The American Conservative.