Rod Dreher's Blog, page 26

Well, here we go:

President Biden is considering deploying several thousand U.S. troops, as well as warships and aircraft, to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, an expansion of American military involvement amid mounting fears of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, according to administration officials.

The move would signal a major pivot for the Biden administration, which up until recently was taking a restrained stance on Ukraine, out of fear of provoking Russia into invading. But as President Vladimir V. Putin has ramped up his threatening actions toward Ukraine, and talks between American and Russian officials have failed to discourage him, the administration is now moving away from its do-not-provoke strategy.

Today my second son turns 18. My other son is 22. Nothing quite focuses one on the meaning of war like having to face the possibility that one’s flesh and blood might have to fight it. The last time the US faced a major war of choice — Iraq — I had only one son, and he was two years old. I was 100 percent behind that war, because as I have written about many times since then, I was so enraged by 9/11 that I wanted America to lash out at anybody in the Muslim world. I was eager to believe every damn lie the US Government told to convince people like me to support the war.

This time? Where’s the antiwar march — I’ll be there.

What an abstraction war was back then. America had won the Cold War, and spent the 1990s as the world’s only hyperpower. I thought we could do whatever we wanted to do. Make anything happen that suited us. Do you remember that chapter in All Quiet On The Western Front, when the German soldier Paul returned to his hometown on R&R, and goes to the village cafe, where everybody cheers for him and gasses on cheerfully and patriotically? Meanwhile, Paul gets that they will never, ever understand the horrors that he has experienced. Well, at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, and up until 2005, I was like those cafe patrons. Years later, talking to an Iraq War veteran friend, I asked him what it was like to have civilians come over to thank him for his service. He said that he knows they’re doing it out of a good heart, but he was sick and tired of hearing it, because they have no idea what soldiers like him have been through. For example, he was sent home for R&R for a couple of weeks, and in his absence, a battalion colleague who took his place was killed by an IED. What does hearing “thank you for your service” in McDonald’s mean when you have to deal with that kind of memory? I asked my friend, a Rush Limbaugh-listening conservative, what he thought about the war now (this was 2011). He simply said, “What a waste.”

In my hometown, there was a Louisiana National Guardsman who saw some combat. When he came home, he refused to go inside a church. He told his wife that he had done things that God would not forgive. He could not tell her what they were. I remember this man as a child. He was younger than I. I can see him now, in my mind’s eye, as a little boy on the baseball field, attending his brother, who played on my team. Our government sent him to Iraq for no good reason, and ordered him to do things that wrecked him inside. Things he wrongly believes that God cannot forgive. This is what war is.

I’m not a pacifist. Sometimes we have to go to war. It is at times a necessary evil. But even if justified — say, Ukrainians defending their country from invasion, it remains evil in its effects. Timothy Patitsas, an Orthodox Christian ethicist, has this to say about war in an interview about war and personal trauma:

DR. PATITSAS: You can’t do ethics of war with your mind in the first place, nor even with your heart, shall we say. Rather, starting with your body, from your duty to protect your loved ones who are forced by circumstance into combat, you must not deny that they return from war wounded through no fault of their own. They have changed, and some of them will struggle terribly in trying to re-enter society. Everything begins there. Putting the intellectual sins first misses the point of everything, because if on paper you can justify a war, then supposedly these intellectual sins aren’t involved and it won’t hurt you. From our eastern Orthodox perspective, just to witness combat is already a terrible burden on the soul. Whereas the mere fact that a particular war can be proved intellectually to be the lesser of two evils—and therefore unavoidable—doesn’t resolve anything. It is still individuals who kill or at least experience those images and passionate feelings, and it is individuals who have to be cleansed, as St. Basil the Great says when he has soldiers who kill in battle refrain from receiving Holy Communion for three years.

RTE: So you are saying that war remains evil, even when justified. Is killing in war then murder?

DR. PATITSAS: Some early Christians called it that, but St. Basil does not agree, and his penance for a soldier is not the same as the penance for a murderer. So, the motives outlined in the West’s just war theory do apply in the East as well when you are distinguishing types of killing according to logical criteria. Killing in war is ethically distinct from murder. However, the fulfillment of the just war criteria is not sufficient to inoculate us from war’s evil; it still hurts us.

I imagine there are plenty of Russian mothers and fathers who worry about what launching a war on their Ukrainian brothers and sisters will do to their sons. I also imagine that it is much more difficult for them to speak out for peace. But what’s our excuse? Are we Americans simply prepared to accept the leadership of the US national security bureaucracy, both Pentagon and civilian, which has led us so poorly these past twenty years? As Col. Andrew Bacevich recently wrote, we Americans have done nothing to hold the officer class responsible for the Afghanistan debacle responsible. Our politicians and senior generals keep praising the military, but none of these cheerleaders are trying to figure out why its leadership has failed so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and impose consequences for those failures. This same leadership class — Joe Biden has been in the most elite ranks for the past twenty years — is now stumbling towards military confrontation with Russia. Meanwhile, they are busy waging war on political and religious conservatives in their own ranks. I suppose Job One for Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley is to make the Donbass safe for genderqueer furries, or whatever the hell fad they’re following this week.

These are the kind of unaccountable fools who have the power to send our young men and women into a combat zone to risk death for … what? I recall how people like me used to think back in 2002, that fateful year in which the US Government built up for the attack on Iraq. When people like Pat Buchanan said it was folly to expect Iraqis to be able to handle liberal democracy, because they had none of the culture required to sustain liberal democracy, people like me responded with lines like, “So you think that Arabs don’t deserve democracy? Don’t deserve freedom?” It was absurdly disingenuous, and used racial categories to dismiss a vitally important point about the likelihood of US failure in Iraq. And, as it turned out, the Buchananites and other realists were 100 percent correct about that. But it took a decade or so, a trillion dollars, and the cost of thousands of American and Iraqi lives to figure out what was obvious to the realists before the first US soldier landed in Iraq.

These are now the same kind of people who have concluded that the US should send troops to the region to try to intimidate Russia. And if you object, they say that you must hate the Ukrainian people, or hate freedom, or be Putin’s useful idiot. Y’all, this was the same exact strategy they followed twenty years ago to convince us dupes to support this foolish Iraq War plan! But this time, they say, it’s different. I don’t believe it, and I hope you don’t believe it either.

Putin is not a benevolent leader, and Ukraine doesn’t deserve to be invaded and brutalized by Russia (though as Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out five years ago, and reiterated this morning, the Ukrainian state is not a spotless lamb). Note well that the roots of this crisis include the 2008 statement from President George W. Bush saying that Ukraine and Georgia ought to be invited into NATO. The same moralistic crusader and strategic genius who launched the war of choice on Iraq, and set out to build liberal democracy in Afghanistan, also laid the groundwork for the crisis we face today. There is relatively little popular support in the US for involving ourselves in Russia v. Ukraine hostilities — which should surprise exactly no one, given that our country has been at war for two decades, suffered much, spent much, and accomplished little or nothing. Where are the generals who paid a price for their failures? 

I hope and pray that my sons would have the courage to take up arms in defense of their country. I also hope and pray that they both understand that the civilian and military leadership of the US at this moment in time does not have their best interests at heart, and is not worthy of trust and confidence. The last twenty years cannot be memory-holed, no matter how much the natsec class would like us to.

A friend texted me over the weekend to say that is son, around the same age as my boys, is in the Army, and received notification that he is headed to deployment in a NATO country that borders Ukraine. Unlike twenty years ago, I now have the perspective of having raised two boys into adulthood, and have skin in the game, so to speak, that I did not have when I was in my mid-30s, and spouting off about the importance of projecting US power into the Middle East. We were a hyperpower then. We were less powerful than we thought, and in any case, we no longer are. The troops being moved towards the Ukraine theater are no sons of mine, but they are somebody’s boys, and husbands, brothers, even fathers. My own brother-in-law deployed to Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard, and though he came back, he did not come back unscathed. War is evil. Even just wars, necessary wars — I remind you that I am not a pacifist — introduce evil into the hearts of those who fight them. We should only wage war as a last resort. For America, this is folly.

The post Ukraine War: ‘This Time It’s Different’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

A source at Princeton University passed to me two documents sent out by the president of Princeton University Ballet (the student-run recreational ballet club), regarding the club’s diversity, equity, and inclusivity initiatives. I quote them both below, in full. The first was written by the club leaders, who in it affirm that “we are all entering this space with a mindset that what we see as perfect is a white standard” and “we aim to decolonize our practice of ballet, even as ballet remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form.” (Gosh, better not tell these woke dingbats about Alicia Alonso, the Cuban prima ballerina, founder of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, and ardent Castroite.)

The second document is about “Action Plan Guidelines”. I am told that it was not written by the students, but by Princeton alumni who led the “EDI Circuit.” The document was given to all the clubs that participated. The source says, “I don’t think it was mandatory for all the performing arts groups. Still, it was organized by the University’s offices, namely the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.”

The text of the documents is below. Understand that Princeton is one of the top universities not only in this country, but in the world. This is how the American elites are being indoctrinated to think about art, race, their country, and themselves. This is not a passing phase. These people will move into the directorship of institutions that will have a major effect on life in this country. They hate ballet. They hate art. They hate beauty. They hate their predecessors in the dance tradition. They hate freedom of thought. They hate white people (including, below, themselves). They hate America, and they hate the West. Above all, they hate. 

And their class runs the country, and likely will for decades to come. Think about that. And look, if you are a Princeton alumni, ask yourself why you give a single farthing to support this Woke Seminary & Klaus Schwab Finishing School.

Here is the first document. All emphases are in the original.

Ballet is rooted in white supremacy and perfectionism. We are all entering this space with a mindset that what we see as perfect is a white standard. Unlearning that will be difficult but rewarding. Before we begin detailing our action plan, we want to acknowledge that our leadership and those who composed this plan are all white.

Firstly we would like to add land acknowledgement to our shows, in addition to historical context in our programs. We rarely shed light on the problematic history of our art form, and want to bring it to the forefront of our performances.

We aim to decolonize our practice of ballet, even as ballet remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form. We realize our distinct freedoms as a college run dance group, which is that we do not report back to any sort of board or funding programs that would restrict our choices. In selecting new members and cultivating our style, we want to centralize artistry instead of technique, in the hopes of maintaining our core purpose as a ballet company but doing away with some of the stringent and exclusive standards that pervade the art form. As this is particularly important during auditions, we will be prefacing audition discussions with a frank recognition and repudiation of our own biases.

Another actionable item is that we want to explicitly prohibit the use of choreography/ story lines of historically problematic works. Ballet is usually seen as an art form rooted in tradition, but we do not need to uphold the problematic work of historically renowned choreographers. Another change we would like to make is for our shows to have less content. In our recent show we prioritized quantity and length over artistry and collaboration. Instead of having 10 pieces with 5 dancers in each, we want to start experimenting with longer pieces and have more collaboration between choreographer and dancer. We want to give ourselves a time frame, but know what we create is right. Having more dancers in the room promotes company comradery and spirit.

In a similar vein, we want to switch our relationship with guest choreographers. Sometimes working with guest choreographers can cause stress and anxiety for the company, because it was so similar to past ballet experiences. Because of this we want to put down some guidelines for when the guests interact with us. We want to restrict the guest from doing their own casting, and have the artistic team choose. We want the guest to be able to teach a ballet class, but not give too many personal corrections, which tend to promote favoritism. In addition we want to diversify the type of choreographers we bring in, white males are given the opportunity to choreograph constantly, and we realize PUB can offer that opportunity to other types of choreographers.

We hope to take steps to ensure that PUB membership, not just leadership, requires a commitment to EDI work. As such, we have decided that participation in service and outreach to local communities will become a requirement of every company member. We partner with an organization that members can sign up to volunteer with, but there are numerous other opportunities for dance service on campus. Even though we cannot change some of the biases and prejudices that exist in ballet off campus, we can dedicate ourselves to combating that exclusivity in our local communities and for the next generation.

PUB can sometimes feel a little removed from the ballet world at large. To stay up to date specifically on EDI work within the larger ballet community, we will be including links to articles, social media accounts, and other resources that we feel deserve amplification and attention as we work on ourselves internally.

We also want to hold ourselves accountable as leaders, and provide platforms for the company to advocate for themselves and for changes. Consensus building is much more difficult in a virtual space, but we will have a running anonymous google form that is linked in every company email we send and emphasize feedback as an essential part of our leadership and decision making strategy.

As a part of our onboarding process for new members and at the start of every semester, we will hold a mandatory EDI goal setting session, so that our action items remain present and relevant, and then we will follow up on those at the end of the semester.

We would also like to open a conversation about body image and take steps to heal and deconstruct the harmful and racialized ideas about body image that many of PUB’s members enter the company with just by virtue of being a ballet dancer. Historically, PUB has been neutral on this issue, and while body neutrality is something some may strive for individually, it is not realistic or helpful for a group of ballet dancers who have internalized damaging ideas about how they should eat and what they should look like. We are hoping to bring someone in from outside the company to train the officers or the company as a whole on how to talk about body image and how to create an environment where we feel comfortable talking about our struggles with body image while also helping to deconstruct our assumptions about it.

Finally, we’d like to hold monthly workshops for people who are not in PUB to enjoy ballet, because there are more ballet dancers on campus than there are in PUB and we don’t want exclusive membership to be one of the only avenues to participate in ballet at Princeton.

There follows a bullet-pointed summary the above. So, these white women believe that ballet is white supremacist, that technique is bigotry, that performing canonical works, or works by great choreographers, is problematic, and that thinking that ballet dancers shouldn’t be fat makes you History’s Greatest Monster. Say what you will about the Soviets, they never screwed with ballet. If your daughter or son has ballet talent, and a love for dance, better not send them to Princeton, or they will have it pressed out of them by these cultural revolutionaries.

Here is the second document from the arts commissariat:

 

EDI Circuit | Action Plan Student Performing Arts Group Questions

Your EDI Circuit Action Plan will serve as a clarifying series of steps and analyses that gives your student arts group a foundation for culture, identity, anti-racist strategy, and a greater accountability structure for EDI. The framing is presented as an extensive series of questions that we believe will best serve your student arts group as you consider your identity/brand, how you are in relationship with prospective members and Princeton at large, and what actionable policies and practices will lead to a reality of collective liberation in pursuit of your artistry. We want this action tool to be a living, breathing resource that can serve as your group’s true north to thinking about how you advocate for healthy culture, racial diversity, and lead critical conversations that help you remain accountable to your membership.

GROUNDING / LOCATING:

Critical Questions

1. What is your relationship to the land and water? Does your student group have a relationship with the history of the land and water on which it resides?

2. What is your group’s mission?

3. What purpose do you serve on campus?

4. What is your group’s ‘brand’?

5. What is your individual and group understanding of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)? Anti-racism?

6. Do you feel your group has established healthy practices to foster trust and psychological safety?

7. How would you describe inclusion?

8. On a scale from 1-5 how equitable is your group today? Anti-racist?

SECTION 1: Understanding a more equitable, antiracist landscape for Princeton’s arts community

Critical Questions

1. What resources are needed to understand EDI/Anti-racism for students/student groups?

2. How does your group structure and support this critical conversation as part of its own governance?

3. Has your group named commitments or actions that will foster greater EDI?

4. What is holding your group back from taking a more proactive approach to racial equity? (What is lost? What is gained?)

5. How do you intend to address these barriers with current and potential group members?

6. What types of coalition building are possible or needed between arts groups on campus?

7. How does competition affect the life of your student ground and the ecosystem of the arts on campus?

8. Do you have a land acknowledgement practice? How are you building your relationality with living Indigenous people? How are the dynamics of settler colonialism present in your group? How might you decolonize?

SECTION 2: Recruitment / Membership Critical Questions

1. Are you privileged or oppressed in the current recruitment model? Are you satisfied with it? Is it racist?

2. What is the value of racial diversity in your membership?

3. What does success look like?

4. Does recruitment end with membership?

5. Is there space for representation, impact, recognition, leadership for all members?

6. What made you join your student group?

7. What are auditionees/applicants attracted to about your student group (brand, mission, members, etc.?)

8. How does your group interpret and discuss reputation?

9. When you think about whom is represented in your student group…how can you shift the expectation from transactional to relationship building? Are you fostering relationships or filling audition slots?

10. How does competition drive your recruitment efforts specifically?

11. How do group casting and discussions influence your process? Are they equitable processes?

12. What actions or practice sustain a healthy and safe environment for members to be fulfilled within the group during their Princeton careers?

13. How would you rate the retention rate of student involvement from a member’s initiation to a member’s graduation?

SECTION 3: Leadership Critical Questions

1. How has your group’s leadership team been onboarded to the culture of your student group?

2. Where is your leadership in terms of EDI work and commitments?

3. How is leadership accountable to the group with respect to EDI, maintaining a welcoming culture, and ensuring that these values are passed down to future leadership?

4. Is there diversity in your leadership currently? Has there been a history of diverse leadership for your group?

5. How is leadership engaging in these critical conversations with other groups or entities at Princeton?

6. How is your leadership selected?

7. What type of structure or hierarchy has your group chosen to organize leadership and decision making (power)?

8. Are dissenting or conflicting opinions welcomed in your group? How are they addressed? How do you address conflict?

9. How would you describe the communication style of your group?

10. What does transparency mean to your group, and what place does it have in your practice / leadership?

SECTION 4: Artistry / Expression / Repertoire / Collaboration Critical Questions

1. What do you enjoy most about your art form?

2. From your perspective, is your art form inherently inclusive?

3. What does a new member need to audition/apply for your student group?

4. Does privilege/access to resources serve as a predictor in the audition/application process?

5. What role does “talent” play in your group? Does it create an environment that leaves room for “potential”?

6. How do you evaluate the artistry of your group? What are the group’s standards?

7. Is there room to innovate in your group artistically? If so, where? 8. What does your group do that is unique to the Princeton arts scene?

9. How does your group give back to the community?

10. What opportunities for learning or professional development are accessible to your group?

SECTION 5: Building the Anti-Racist Plan

Critical Questions

1. Given the above, what would it look like for your group to be explicitly anti-racist? What would it feel like? Consider all aspects of your student group operation and practice.

2. Consider the current landscape of your group as explored above: the physical and social location, artistic genre, recruitment practices, leadership, and relationship to EDI in your student group.

3. What steps need to be taken to build a bridge between (2) and (1)? Your Anti-Racist Plan should outline the steps needed to get from where your group is today, to becoming a group that is, in every aspect, explicitly anti-racist.

4. What is your accountability structure? It is important to be explicit about the “who” of any actionable steps you are taking as a student group.

5. What are the group’s values that you want to communicate to your stakeholders? How do your antiracist policies signal those values?

6. What is your review process and how will you share/publish this plan? Who will be your objective critics of this plan and how can it be updated? Your antiracist action plan is a living document.

No artist or performer who respects herself, her art, and liberty can possibly submit to the commissars’ questions, and live their creative lives under the yoke of the woke. In the near future, young American artists with talent are going to have to go abroad for training, to countries that have protected their cultural legacies by keeping wokeness out.

The post Hateful Whitey Binds Her Feet appeared first on The American Conservative.

Some readers have the impression that I support Russia in its conflict with Ukraine. That’s not true. I repeat, with emphasis, that I believe Russia should leave Ukraine alone. If Russia invades, I will condemn the invasion, and might well support non-military punitive measures against Moscow. The reason I have taken the line that I have in this space is because so many American elites seem eager to get involved in an actual war, or something close to war, with Russia over Ukraine. This would be madness. I do not understand why people can’t grasp that we Americans do not have the power to stop all the bad things happening in the world. We got rid of Saddam, but could not master Iraq. We drove out the Taliban, but twenty years later, the Taliban once again rules Afghanistan. Yet somehow, with Ukraine and a nuclear-armed Russia, it’s going to be different? The eagerness for war with Russia among Americans — including liberal Americans — after the folly of the past twenty years of American war-making is a testament to the fact that some people are incapable of learning.

We are facing here the consequences of our leaders’ foolishness. Ross Douthat has a good column up now about how we can retreat from Ukraine in a sensible way.  He writes:

The United States in its days as a hyperpower made a series of moves to extend our perimeter of influence deep into Russia’s near-abroad. Some of those moves appear to be sustainable: The expansion of NATO to include countries of the former Warsaw Pact was itself a risk, but at the moment those commitments seem secure. But the attempt to draw Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, the partway-open door to Ukrainians who preferred westward-focused alliances, was a foolish overcommitment even when American power was at its height.

Note that this is not a question of what Ukrainians deserve. Russia is an authoritarian aggressor in the current crisis; Ukraine is a flawed democracy but a more decent regime than Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy. When we gave Ukraine security assurances under Bill Clinton, opened the door to NATO membership under George W. Bush and supported the Maidan protests under Barack Obama, we were in each case acting with better intentions than Moscow in its own machinations.

But in geopolitics good intentions are always downstream from the realities of power. Whatever its desires or ours, the government in Ukraine has simply never been in a position to fully join the West — it’s too economically weak, too internally divided and simply in the wrong place. And the actions of the Bush and Obama administrations — and for all of Trump’s personal sympathies for Putin, some Trump administration acts as well — have left us overstretched, our soft-power embrace of Kyiv ill-equipped to handle hard-power countermoves from Moscow.

Our real strategic challenge is with China, in East Asia. That demands all our focus. We have no realistic choice but to cede to at least some of Russia’s demands — including recognizing the fact that Ukraine will never be part of NATO. As Douthat says, we would be crazy to believe that we should risk of nuclear war over the Donbass. The Americans who say, indignantly, that Ukrainians ought to be able to decide the future of their country, free of outside interference, are like the moralistic naïfs who say that women should be able to walk down the street at night in a bad neighborhood wearing a short skirt, and not be attacked by bad guys. They are right: in a just world, that would be how it would work. But we do not live in that world, and a woman who behaved as if moral imperatives ruled the world would be setting herself up for a world of pain. I mean, look, I lock my door and have an electronic alarm system installed in my house. I should not have to worry about bad guys breaking in at night — but I do, because that is the world we live in, and all the moral indignation about it is not going to keep criminals from breaking in if we are not protected.

To conservatives who are stomping their feet ready to go to war with Putin over Ukraine, let me remind you that we Americans did not allow Nicaragua in the 1980s to do its own thing by allying with the Soviets. You could argue — our left-wing reader Hector St-Clare does argue —  that Nicaragua’s sovereignty ought to have been respected by the US. But in the real world, the US could not permit another Soviet-aligned country in our backyard. Hence the contra war. Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega is once again back in power, and runs the country dictatorially, but the Cold War is over, and a leftist Nicaragua does not pose the strategic threat to the US that it did in the 1980s.

Similarly with Venezuela. The leftist Chavista dictatorship is destroying that poor country, but it is not in America’s interest to go to war to overthrow that government. Nor is it in America’s interest to go to war to overthrow Cuba. If we did, however, decide to attack those countries, it would not be in the interest of Russia or China to come militarily to their aid. Venezuela and Cuba are a long way from Russia and China. Ukraine is a long way from the US. Douthat writes:

Something can be reasonable and still be painful — painful as an acknowledgment of Western weakness, painful to the hopes and ambitions of Ukrainians.

But accepting some pain for the sake of a more sustainable position is simply what happens when you’ve made a generation’s worth of poor decisions, and you’re trying to find a decent and dignified way to a necessary retreat.

Russia seems so hell-bent on invading Ukraine that it may not take a deal in which NATO membership for Ukraine (and EU membership) is taken permanently off the table. But if avoiding a war in which Ukrainians and Russians die, and Ukraine is turned into a country riven with guerrilla war for a generation, is achievable by that concession, then we should make it. Russia would quickly crush Ukraine in conventional warfare, but it will likely find that many Ukrainians are not willing to acquiesce to being a vassal state of Moscow.

Take a look at the realist foreign policy scholar Stephen Walt’s essay explaining why liberal idealists (both left-liberals and right-liberals) have a lot to do with sparking this crisis, via their own naive hubris. Excerpts:

The great tragedy is this entire affair was avoidable. Had the United States and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism and relied instead on realism’s core insights, the present crisis would not have occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today. The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics.

At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.

Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.

Walt goes on to talk about how this theory caused the US-led NATO alliance to push eastward, taking advantage of Russia’s post-collapse weakness. Walt says that any realist could have told you that the idea that NATO would never invade Russia, so Moscow should relax, was never going to fly.

This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered, of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the case.

Putin or no Putin, no Russian leader could allow Ukraine to join NATO, any more than any American leader could allow Mexico to join a defensive alliance formed out of opposition to American power. Every American president since James Monroe has upheld the so-called Monroe Doctrine, which claims the entire Western hemisphere as a zone of American influence. By what crackpot logic can we advance and defend that claim, but expect Russia, another great power, to acquiesce to Ukraine, a border state to Russia, joining NATO?

Walt makes it clear that Putin has been a bad actor in this drama, but that it is flat-out wrong, and dangerous, to heap all the blame for it on him. He adds that in 2008, President George W. Bush, whose crusading for liberal democracy in Iraq committed the US to a disastrous war, screwed up by floating the idea that Ukraine and Georgia could one day join NATO. More:

Realism explains why great powers tend to be extremely sensitive to the security environment in their immediate neighborhoods, but the liberal architects of enlargement simply could not grasp this. It was a monumental failure of empathy with profound strategic consequences.

… Putin is not solely responsible for the ongoing crisis over Ukraine, and moral outrage over his actions or character is not a strategy. Nor are more and tougher sanctions likely to cause him to surrender to Western demands. Unpleasant as it may be, the United States and its allies need to recognize that Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment is a vital interest for Russia—one it is willing to use force to defend—and this is not because Putin happens to be a ruthless autocrat with a nostalgic fondness for the old Soviet past. Great powers are never indifferent to the geostrategic forces arrayed on their borders, and Russia would care deeply about Ukraine’s political alignment even if someone else were in charge. U.S. and European unwillingness to accept this basic reality is a major reason the world is in this mess today.

Read it all. Walt explains how the Russians and the West might yet back down before the shooting starts (accepting Ukraine’s Finlandization, basically) — but it is becoming far less likely with each passing day.

The post US Blunders, Ukraine’s War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here’s a piece from The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, in which Parag Khanna, one of the world’s top experts on migration, says that Scotland’s future is Asian. Excerpts:

Europe should view mass migration not just as a benefit but a lifeline, Khanna believes. The West’s entire discussion around migration is cock-eyed, he feels. We have low birth rates, ageing populations, not enough workers – especially to care for our growing elderly populations – and plenty of space. “Europe should be competing in a cut-throat manner to recruit as many smart Asians as possible.”

Instead, Europe has seen the rise of anti-immigrant nationalist and populist politics. “You cannot simultaneously hold that labour shortages are becoming more acute and also hold that populism remains an immutable force because the truth is that the more painful the demographic and therefore fiscal circumstances become, the more likely it is that populism will have to bend to economic realities,” Khanna says.

“We tend to default towards this view that national identity and anti-immigration postures are the persistent norm and everything will have to hold and wait until a Great Enlightenment transpires. That’s not at all the case. If that were true Germany wouldn’t be the mass-migration country it is today.”

Around one million migrants arrive in Germany each year, and 13.7 million people are first-generation migrants. Recent elections saw Germany swing to the left with an SPD-Green-Liberal coalition, and the collapse of the hard-right anti-migrant AfD. That proves, says Khanna, that “populism is more bark than bite”.

In fact, says Khanna, “populism is complete bull****”. Italy, he points out, “has more migrants than when Matteo Salvini [the right-wing anti-migrant populist leader] was at the peak of his powers”. Khanna notes that after Brexit, demographics and worker shortages now mean “it’s factually easier to migrate to Britain as a young Asian than it was five years ago – and right under Trump’s nose, America became more diverse, more mixed race. We should really view populism for the political blip it is”.

More:

Western democracies need to change their policies for “pragmatic, rational and self-interested” reasons. If the West continues to adopt anti-immigrant policies, despite the economic and demographic pressures, migrants will still come anyway, only in an uncontrolled, dangerous manner, as we’ve seen in the English channel. Economics and demographics mean eventually “Britain is going to wind up reverting to pro-immigration norms”. Canada, with its liberal policies, “says more about the future of the West than Hungary does”.

The media has skewed the conversation on migration, Khanna believes: concentrating more on bogeymen like Hungary’s authoritarian populist Viktor Orban than Canada’s liberal Justin Trudeau.

Focusing on Orban flies in the face “of the nature of reality”. Says Khanna: “Canada absorbs more people in a few years than the entire population of Hungary; Orban is on his way out, and nobody wants to go to Hungary anyway. We put all this attention on a peripheral loser rather than the greatest mass-migration story of the 21st century: Canada. Shame on us for that. We do ourselves a great disservice.”

This is key:

In Singapore, where “there’s practically one Filipino care-giver for every old person”, neglect of the elderly would be scandalous. “Old people are treated with the kind of dignity [the West] can only dream about.” Clearly, though, Singapore is far from a free, democratic society.

With demographic destiny staring the West in face, Europeans, says Khanna, “should actually be the most pro-immigrant people in the world. You should want your parents to have a Filipino nurse in Dresden so you can in good conscience go and be a millennial living in Berlin”.

Read it all.

St. Theresa of Calcutta once said, about abortion: “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”

We could say: It is a poverty to decide that a culture and civilization must die so that you may in good conscience go and be a millennial living in Berlin.”

The reader who sent me that interview from Scotland said that it’s like The Camp of the Saints, except the immigrant invasion is portrayed as a good thing. He’s right about that. You’ll recall that The Camp of the Saints is that dystopian French novel from 1973 depicting a mass invasion of France by Third World migrants, who are welcomed by the French establishment, and resisted with violence by a handful of French normies. It is routinely denounced as racist — and in fact, it is racist. Back in 2015, I read the book, and said that it is, in fact, racist, repugnantly so. Yet it also tells some important truths. Excerpt from that post:

The Camp of the Saints is a bad book, both aesthetically and morally. I was ambivalent about its moral status in the early parts of the book. I thought Raspail expressed himself more crudely than I would have done, but his cultural diagnosis struck me as having more merit than I anticipated, given the book’s notorious reputation. In the novel, a million-man armada of the wretched of the earth decide to sail to Europe from India, more or less daring the West to stop their migration. Most of the narrative focuses on how France prepares itself for the invasion.

Raspail, a traditionalist Catholic and far-rightist, draws in broad strokes a portrait of a France that has given up. All the country’s institutions and leaders across the board decide that it is the moral duty of all Frenchmen to welcome the armada with open arms. Raspail is at his satirical best mocking the sentimental liberal humanitarianism of the political, media, and clerical classes, all of whom look to the armada as a form of salvation, of redemption for the West’s sins. As I wrote here the other day, the scenario reminds me of the exhausted civilization in Cavafy’s poem “Waiting For the Barbarians.” A couple of years ago, Cavafy translator Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in The New Yorker about the poem and the poet’s political vision (Mendelsohn’s translation of the poem is in the article). Excerpt:

Cultural exhaustion, political inertia, the perverse yearning for some violent crisis that might break the deadlock and reinvigorate the state: these themes, so familiar to us right now, were favorites of Cavafy. He was, after all, a citizen of Alexandria, a city that had been an emblem of cultural supremacy—founded by Alexander the Great, seat of the Ptolemies, the literary and intellectual center of the Mediterranean for centuries—and which had devolved to irrelevancy by the time he was born, in 1863. When you’ve seen that much history spool by, that much glory and that much decline, you have very few expectations of history—which is to say, of human nature and political will.

More:

The cardinal sins in Cavafy’s vision of history and politics are complacency, smugness, and a solipsistic inability to see the big picture. What he did admire, extravagantly, were political figures who do the right thing even though they know they have little chance of prevailing: the great “losers” of history, admirable in their fruitless commitment to ethical behavior—or merely sensible enough to know when the game is up.

Raspail blames France’s elites for this too, with reference to the problem of multiculturalism and migration. He even waylays the fictional pope, “Benedict XVI” (remember, the book was written in 1973), a Latin American (Brazilian) who sells all the treasures of the Vatican to give to the Third World poor, and who exhorts Europe to thrown open its doors to the migrant horde.

The reader who sent me the Herald piece puts his finger on a fundamental — and fundamentally dishonest and manipulative — aspect of contemporary dialogue with the Left, and with globalist elites (some of whom are right-wing liberals): that they hold the truth of a claim to be dependent on who is making it, and why. If you are Jean Raspail talking about how Third World migrants are going to overwhelm a European country and fundamentally transform it by replacing the native population, and you believe this is a bad thing, then you are a bigot who deserves to be silence and exiled for making up alarmist, racist myths. If, however, you are Parag Khanna talking about the same thing, but you construe it as a good thing, then you are a hero and a prophet who foresees the glorious future.

It’s a version of the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it. 

The post Willie, Nay. Apu, Aye appeared first on The American Conservative.

Greetings from LaGuardia Airport. I had to make an overnight trip to New York, and am now on my way back to the Great State of Louisiana, which is experiencing its coldest weather of the winter right now. I snort at Louisiana cold, because Your Working Boy stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 27th today, waiting for an Uber, and observed that it was 19 degrees. Sometimes I miss living in New York, but one thing I never, ever miss is a New York City winter. Look at this post-Covid loony driven by the cold to a fugue state. At least I got to wear the ushanka I bought in St. Petersburg in 2019. Not much opportunity to do so in Louisiana, you’ll be shocked to hear.

Anyway, if you don’t subscribe to Bari Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense, you are really missing out. From today’s TGIF news roundup by Nellie Bowles, there was this:

It’s always fun to check up on what’s going on in academia. Here’s an announcement that showed up in the Bard College library newsletter (Bard tuition, $57,498 a year):

In keeping with campus-wide initiatives to ensure that Bard is a place of inclusion, equity, and diversity, the Stevenson Library is conducting a diversity audit of the entire print collection in an effort to begin the process of decanonizing the stacks. Three students, who are funded through the Office of Inclusive Excellence, have begun the process which we expect will take at least a year to complete. The students will be evaluating each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.

So, to paraphrase this library announcement: three Bard students, chosen and paid for by the Office of Inclusive Excellence, are tasked with reviewing every book in the Bard library to evaluate how well it adheres to their moral standards. Facing outrage from library-fans, Bard quickly retracted and rewrote this announcement and clarified that the audit was more high-level analysis of each book and author.

Still I like to imagine these students marching through the stacks, pulling every spine, reading every page to examine for “representations of race, gender, religion, and ability.” Does Charles Dickens dehumanize someone with a limp somewhere? I bet he does. There’s some nasty ableism in Beowulf. Was Aristotle a feminist? This could take a while. Also, I think I kind of want to be on this committee.

The term decanonizemeansexclusion of a person’s name from a list or catalog. It’s a term most commonly associated with the church, who decanonizes to demote a saint who’s on the outs.

There’s of course a whole new intellectual underpinning for all of this. Here’s the librarian Sofia Leung, who offers trainings and workshops on critical race theory in libraries:

“Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks,” she writes, asking her readers to pause and think about that in her essay, Whiteness as Collections. Or watch her talk with the University of Michigan on the “‘Ordinary’ Existence of White Supremacy in Libraries.”

The announcement about decanonization came in a cheery library update. It wasn’t the top item. It’s just there between an alumna to be honored and a local cleanup effort. Decanonization is a casual, business-as-usual sort of activity, hardly anything to pay attention to or ask about.

When I wrote to ask about the announcement, Bard officials explained that this was all a big misunderstanding. Nothing the library newsletter had about this effort should be taken literally, they told me.

“It will help us understand and answer questions about representation in our collections and build a more inclusive collection going forward,” wrote Betsy Cawley, the director of Bard libraries. “Nothing is being removed, recategorized, or replaced.”

Decanonization is not decanonization at all. Judging each book does not mean judging each book (“an earlier brochure entry suggesting that has been revised”). It is just a fact-finding mission to learn more, not to remove anything.

In some cold upstate New York panic, they retracted and rewrote the whole thing. “The erroneous entry has been removed,” the school tells me now.

Regardless, if any Common Sense-readers would like to read books that three Bard students deem offensive, please turn yourself in to the local police station.

This is insane. It’s good that Bard retracted it, but it is a scandal that this kind of anti-intellectual, illiberal lunacy ever saw the light of day in the first place. I know you must be tired of hearing this, but what Bard undertook to do is Totalitarianism 101. Totalitarian regimes always try to control the memory of history and culture, for the sake of manipulating society to affirm its ideology. From Live Not By Lies:

In his 1989 book, How Societies Remember, the late British social anthropologist Paul Connerton explains that there are different kinds of memory. Historical memory is an objective recollection of past events. Social memory is what a people choose to remember—that is, deciding collectively which facts about past events it believes to be important. Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation’s gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

Connerton says that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” Memory of the past conditions how they experience the present—that is, how they grasp its meaning, how they are to understand it, and what they are supposed to do in it.

No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture’s memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

The more totalitarian a regime’s nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Kołakowski, reflects “the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.”

“Let us consider what happens when the ideal has been effectively achieved,” says Kołakowski. “People remember only what they are taught to remember today and the content of their memory changes overnight, if needed.”

As Kolakowski says, no library can contain all books. Some authority has to decide what goes in, and what stays out (or gets thrown out). A college library should be both as broad and as deep as possible. Even the idea that “decanonization” or “decolonization” is something worth considering ought to be forcefully rejected.

It would be worth knowing how many of these gatekeepers — librarians — in institutions and communities around the country are quietly going about the work of censoring their collections to make them conform to a radical Left point of view. The American Library Association is ferocious in defense of LGBT books on library shelves — see this statement — but as far as I can tell, has said nothing at all about “decanonization” of libraries. The ALA said:

We are committed to defending the constitutional rights of all individuals, of all ages, to use the resources and services of libraries.  We champion and defend the freedom to speak, the freedom to publish, and the freedom to read, as promised by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

We stand opposed to censorship and any effort to coerce belief, suppress opinion, or punish those whose expression does not conform to what is deemed to be orthodox in history, politics, or belief. The unfettered exchange of ideas is essential to the preservation of a free and democratic society.

Libraries manifest the promises of the First Amendment by making available the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas, so that every person has the opportunity to freely read and consider information and ideas regardless of their content or the viewpoint of the author.  This requires the professional expertise of librarians who work in partnership with their communities to curate collections that serve the information needs of all their users.

So can we expect to see an ALA statement condemning the decanonization and decolonization of libraries? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Last month, the ALA announced that it is selling through its bookstore a new book advocating decolonization of libraries. Excerpt:

The demand to decolonize the curriculum has moved from a protest movement at the margins to the center of many institutions, as reflected by its inclusion in policies and strategies. Numerous libraries and archives are responding to the call to critically examine their historic legacies and practices to support institutional and societal change. “Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries,” published by Facet Publishing and available through the ALA Store, explores the ways in which academic libraries are working to address the historic legacies of colonialism, in the context of decolonizing the curriculum and the university. It acknowledges and explores the tensions and complexities around the use of the term decolonization, how it relates to other social justice aims and approaches, including critical librarianship, and what makes this work specific to decolonization.

In fact, there are a number of articles on the ALA site pushing decolonization. There are links to two different ALA webinars explaining to librarians how to decolonize. There’s no way around this: the American Library Association favors censorship, but only of non-progressive books, or of books that progressives for whatever reason find to be objectionable.

You cannot argue with these people. What you can do, though, is learn about what these people are doing to libraries, and pressure officials to stop them, including threatening libraries with defunding. Again, I agree that not every book can or should be in every library. A high school library is not the same thing as a college library, for example. We can and should discuss where to draw the lines. But it appears that many library staffers are eager to surrender their responsibility to administer and curate libraries for the entire community, instead turning them over to leftist agitators and propagandists.

It is a shocking, even disgusting, abdication of scholarly responsibility. This is what you get when nearly the entire intellectual class has capitulated to ideology. Jerry Coyne, the prickly atheist scientist who is no friend of the Right, comments:

Bard’s denial is hilarious: if this is not about censorship, what is it about? How can you “build a more inclusive collection going forward” if you don’t pick and choose books for the library based on how “inclusive” they are? I don’t believe their denial at all.  After all, there are 400,000 books to sniff through!

And what bothers me most of all is that, traditionally, librarians have opposed this kind of Pecksniffery, pushing back against people’s wish to keep this and that book out of the library. In the past librarians were the most vigorous and treasured defenders of free speech, blocking the doorway between the censors and the books. That doesn’t hold any more.

By the way, Sofia Leung is not listed as a librarian at Bard College at all, nor does her c.v. does mention that position (perhaps Bowles didn’t mean to imply that). The head librarian at Bard and her email address is here. Bard’s president has an email address here, and I’ll be writing to both of them. …

If anything should anger people, even if they’re woke, it’s this kind of implied censorship. Removing books from libraries is just as bad as burning them: it removes access to the WRONG IDEAS.

Let Bard hear from you if you see this as an especially egregious violation of free speech and academic freedom.

Indeed. If it’s happening at Bard, it’s happening elsewhere, or it soon will. Be vigilant! Publicize this. Take back our libraries from these totalitarians.

UPDATE: A riff on the Bard story appears in the Substack newsletter of journalist David Rieff, a man of the Left whose father, Philip, wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which, as you know, is a canonical text of this blog:

Thus, the radical librarian Sofia Leung writes that what is wrong with libraries is that they are mostly filled with books, archives, paneers, etc. “written by white dudes about white ideas =, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from People of Color and then claimed as white property.

One thing to be said for Leung is that she has the courage of her fanaticism. “Libraries filled with mostly white collections,” she writes, “indicates that we don’t care to hear from People of Color themselves, we don’t consider People of Color to be scholars, we don’t think People of Color are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people.”

This view only coheres if you believe that a scholar writing on physics or geology, say, is not really writing about these subjects but writing out of and in the interests of their race. Libraries, in Leung’s view, are not sites of knowledge, but rather, as she puts it, “sites of whiteness.” She does further: “library collections continue to promote and proliferate white with their very existence and the fact that they are” – I am not making this up – “taking up space in our libraries.”

In this vision, all knowledge is racialized. For Leung libraries as presently constitute are a reifications of White Supremacy. The fact that some of the greatest libraries in the history of the world have been in the Islamic world and in China and Japan does not detain Leung, anymore than the history of private property outside the Euro-American world seems to have detained Harris. Leung even puts “knowledge,” ie the knowledge to be found in US libraries, in inverted commas. The “authoritative” is a bogus category in this view – a way of maintaining White Supremacy.

In short, the binary of white and non white is what really matters, and – one assumes – until there is equity, Leung and those who think as she does will keep insisting that knowledge as a category does indeed need to be kept in quotation marks. Only someone schooled in the therapeutic understanding could possibly believe this. And that’s the problem: the therapeutic is, as I have written before, the lingua franca of contemporary America, and, indeed, of the entire Anglosphere. In this Leung’s view is, as the old saying goes, as American as apple pie.

I am encouraged that actual left-wing intellectuals like David Rieff and Jerry Coyne are speaking out about this atrocity.

The post Totalitarianism At The Bard Library appeared first on The American Conservative.

The US State Department issued today a list of Top Five examples of Russian disinformation narratives. Among them:

Theme #3: “The Collapse of Western Civilization is Imminent”

Russia pushes the false claim that Western civilization is collapsing and has strayed from “traditional values” because it works to ensure the safety and equality of LGBTQI+ people and promotes concepts such as female equality and multiculturalism. The demise of Western civilization is one of Russia’s oldest disinformation tropes, with claims of “the decaying west” documented since the 19th century.

This “values”-based disinformation narrative evokes ill-defined concepts including “tradition,” “family values,” and “spirituality.” Russia argues it is the bastion of so-called “traditional values” and gender roles and serves as a moral counterweight to the “decadence” of the United States and Western countries. For example, President Putin has claimed the West has practically cancelled the concepts of “mother” and “father,” and instead has replaced them with “parent 1 and 2,” while Foreign Minister Lavrov wrote that Western students “learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual.”

Well, I don’t know that Western students are learning at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual, but attendees at a London conference on “queer theology” learned from this Baptist pastor that Jesus self-transgendered:

TIL Jesus was “transgendering himself” when he washed his disciples’ feet pic.twitter.com/MAZWXjHUJz

— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) January 20, 2022

It is certainly true that the USSR was constantly on about the “decadent” West, in its propaganda, and I don’t see that Russia, with its poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, kleptocratic politics, and collapsing population, is any kind of model civilization. That said, you have to be deep in a Blue State bubble not to see the West as truly decadent today.

Religion has collapsed in Europe, and is collapsing in the US. We are raising a generation that doesn’t know what a man and a woman are. Our young men are addicted to porn, and are struggling to form relationships. Our institutions are in the grips of left-wing ideologues who behave like Soviet commissars, and who don’t give a damn about quality and performance, only meeting ideological goals. Drug abuse is soaring. Crime in the cities is out of control. Marriages are declining. Economic inequality is getting worse and worse. People are afraid to say what they think out of fear of being fired or punished. The leaders of our country, in both public and private life, pursue ideological goals that are training Americans to hate their own history, and to loathe and mistrust each other on the basis of race. Even our military is being shot through with woke ideology.

We are a sick, sick society, even if Russia says so. Here’s the final item on the State Department list:

Theme #5:  Reality is Whatever the Kremlin Wants It to Be

The Kremlin frequently tries to create multiple false realities and insert confusions into the information environment when the truth is not in its interests.  Often intentionally confusing, Russian officials make arguments designed to try to shift the blame away from the Russian government’s role, even if some of the narratives contradict one another.  However, in time, presenting multiple conflicting narratives can itself become a technique intended to generate confusion and discourage response. Other elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem, such as the abuse of state-funded disinformation outlets and weaponized social media, help push multiple false narratives.

It was clear to the world, for example, that Russia attempted to assassinate former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England, on March 4, 2018.  In the four weeks following that incident, Russian state-funded and directed outlets RT and Sputnik disseminated 138 separate and contradictory narratives via 735 articles, according to the Policy Institute at King’s College London.

Russia has used the same technique of flooding the information space with many false claims following other events, such as the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, and Russia’s 2008 invasion and ongoing occupation of Georgia, to distract conversations from their role in the events.  Again, the purpose is to confuse and distract others and manipulate the truth to suit Kremlin interests.

They’re right: Russia lies about what it does. But come on, the official ideology of the US Government and all the major institutions in American life requires us all to pretend that a person who possesses male chromosomes and male genitalia is a woman, if that person claims to be. Do I really have to sit here and list all the lies that the US Government and the American establishment expects us all to believe are an accurate representation of reality?

Russia should keep its hands off of Ukraine, but I don’t have to believe the b.s. put out by my own government in order to oppose a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The post Disinformation, Theirs And Ours appeared first on The American Conservative.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Progressive commentator Melissa Harris-Perry, in an MSNBC ad:

“We have to break through this idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families”.

pic.twitter.com/BmDSn3B6Gf

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) January 20, 2022

There’s your bright red line, people. Terry McAuliffe said that parents have no business passing judgment on what their kids are taught at school. This is what so many on the Left believe: that it is their role to liberate children from the troglodytic beliefs of their parents.

They want our kids for themselves. Don’t you get it?

I think this fall, Republican candidates should just run this MSNBC clip over and over, and at the end, just add the slogan: “Had enough? Vote Republican.”

The post The Left: ‘All Your Kids Are Belong To Us’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Fascinating letter from a Canadian-born reader, who gives me permission to publish it. I met him last year in my travels:

I was born in Canada and spent my early years in Canada before moving to the USA in the mid-1990s. I did a political science and law degree in Canada before I moved to the US (where I then got a US law degree). Another interesting “fun fact” about me is that my mom and dad first met at one of the notorious Indian Residential School. They met there and only stayed a few months because they couldn’t stand it, and ended up getting married, etc., etc. We as kids all knew about the Indian residential schools because my parents told us.

Anyway, when I read about this new Canadian law on “conversion therapy” I had two reactions. First, the connection between this new law and Canada’s sordid history with the Indian Residential Schools, and second, the difference in constitutional law protections afforded Canadians and Americans, and how dangerously close the US is to following Canada.

As you may know, the Indian Residential Schools went from the late 1800s through the 1960s. The government wanted to stamp out Indian culture and so forcibly took Indian children and put them into church-run residential schools where they would be westernized and Christianized. Although these were never a secret, they did burst into the public mind sometime around 2008 (though I wasn’t living in Canada at the time and don’t quite remember what led to this).

Then last year, when it was reported that a mass grave was uncovered on the grounds of a former school, it brought the issue up again (see update below). I noted that the Canadian Left, including PM Justin Trudeau, encouraged placing all the blame and anger on the shoulders of the Church. Over the past few years I have more closely followed Canadian sources again and noticed the tremendous hostility last year towards the Church on Canadian discussion forums over this residential school issue. (An aside – Vancouver in the 1990s was more hostile to Christianity than California is today. When I was applying to law firms in Vancouver in 1995, my dad had me meet with a lawyer friend/colleague of his. I had on my resume that I had gone to a religious high school and had a Masters degree from a graduate theological school. This lawyer looked over my resume and told me very frankly “you need to delete anything that identifies you as a Christian on your resume because that will immediately disqualify you from consideration at almost every law firm in town.” Understand that this lawyer was a friendly atheist who knew the legal culture of Vancouver – he wasn’t a Christian imagining persecution around every corner. That was in the 1990s and has gotten far worse today.)

Back to the Canadian response to the residential schools, I have found it interesting that all the blame and anger have been placed exclusively on the Church, and nothing on the government. Someone without any background knowledge would think that the residential school thing was exclusively about the churches kidnapping Indian children, with the government having no role whatsoever. Nobody is wrestling with what the government’s or society’s role in all of this was, and I think that is telling.

I think that in order to really understand the residential school tragedy, you need to understand that the driving impetus behind these policies was progressivism (I refer here to the ideal of Western progress). The role of the churches in all this was to support societal progressivism. If you could map the ideals that led to residential schools to contemporary ideals, they would map to the Woke corporate progressivism of today rather than traditional Christianity. The ideal behind residential schools was to remove children from a traditional society that was resistant to the “progressive Western liberalism” of the time, in an attempt to make them interchangeable cogs in the Western industrial regime. Residential schools were anti-tradition, and pro-progressivism.

The proper lesson that we should learn from the residential schools is the danger of progressives forcibly taking children from traditionalist parents under government fiat, so that the children can be inculcated into progressive ideology. And yet, in the midst of the supposed self-reflection on the residential school tragedy, we have the Canadian Left -both media and government – pushing this law, and others, that empower government progressives to take children away from traditionalist parents so that they can be inculcated into progressive sexual ideology. In my view, this “conversion therapy” law, and other legal developments in Canada, is basically Indian Residential Schools 2.0. So that’s my first point.

I just saw this earlier today after I wrote the above. https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/19/not-one-corpse-has-been-found-in-the-mass-grave-of-indigenous-children-in-canada/ This is a Federalist article and so I would like to see other sources confirm, but I found this to be really interesting. Last year, when the supposed mass grave was first reported, the headlines were about the mass grave that was discovered, that it was expected that many more would be discovered, and this all pointed to genocide, and that it was all the Church’s fault. You and I both know what was meant to be implied here – “mass graves” and “genocide” were meant to whip up an emotional response. But, for those who dug deeper into the story, it was made clear that the “genocide” being referred to was “cultural” genocide, and the “mass graves” were really just graves where students who died from diseases, etc., were buried. Now, I am not suggesting that there weren’t serious problems, BUT you will agree that there is a VAST difference between “cultural genocide” and careless disposed of natural deaths verses physical genocide and mass graves of murdered persons. The Left in Canada (and you need to understand that the CBC in Canada is not only extremely Woke and Leftist, they are also much closer to the governing Liberal party than even CNN or MSNBC is to the Democrats) used a deceptively framed tragedy to whip up hatred against the Church, and so destroy a bastion of tradition in Canada. They have just updated their Indian Residential School playbook – instead of attacking traditional Indian culture as their excuse to capture children, they are attacking traditional Christianity to capture children.

My second point has to do with the different legal environment in Canada, and how their “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” is worse than worthless, and how close the US is to following where Canada has gone. As a background, I did my BA in political science in Canada in the mid-1980’s just after Canada got its new Charter of Rights and Freedoms and I wrote multiple papers arguing AGAINST the Charter. I argued (rather prophetically I might say) that the Charter would actually turn out to be a NEGATIVE development for individual rights in Canada because it would give the APPEARANCE of protecting liberties and freedoms when it would actually do no such thing.

Prior to 1982, Canadians had no constitutional protection of their rights, and the political culture was such that Parliament needed to be carefully watched by the people to ensure rights were protected. In 1982, people were told that they no longer needed to worry because now the courts would protect everyone’s rights. Except that, as I knew, the process for appointing judges in Canada had no checks and balances, and I knew that the judiciary would be solid social liberals. My worst fears were rather quickly proven right when early Charter decisions saw the Canadian Supreme Court judges substitute their own preferences for the text and history of the Charter.

Along these lines, one development in the Canadian courts has been the emergence of the concept of “Charter values” as the true governing principles over and against the actual text of the Charter. You can read a bit about this here: https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/november-2018/the-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms-and-values/. I believe that this was even made explicit in recent Court decisions that pitted actual freedom of speech and association (actually guaranteed by the text of the Charter) against gay rights (not mentioned in the text of the Charter and explicitly left out of the Charter based on legislative history documents). The “Charter values” of gay rights overrode the actual text of the Charter. What are “Charter values”? They are whatever the judges want them to be, and are basically the principles of Wokism.

There is another part of the Charter that says that the rights in it are subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The Courts have simply determined that Wokeness is the measuring stick of what can be so justified. This was made clear in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on whether a Christian university could have a law school (https://www.canadiancharitylaw.ca/blog/trinity_western_university_supreme_court_of_canada_decision/).

And so, because of these two aspects of Canadian constitutional law, if you are looking to see what rights and freedoms are actually protected in Canada, the text of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms won’t tell you. Rather, you need to probe the principles of Wokism, because Woke dogma will always override Constitutional principles. I don’t think that Americans realize how close the US is to this. Another point of interest to me – since COVID I have started following on Twitter a number of former leftist Democrats who have been horrified by the turn to COVID authoritarianism on the part of the Democratic Party. They have suddenly developed a new appreciation for those “wicked and nasty” conservative judges on the Supreme Court.

If you read the recent US Supreme Court decision on Biden’s vaccine mandate, you see the three liberal judges basically adopt the same approach that the Canadian courts have taken. They first decide what policy result they prefer (which is typically guided by Leftist policy preferences), and then rationalize that back into the “Constitution.” As someone who has been in law school and legal academia in both Canada and the US, I can tell you that this is one of the big differences between Leftist judicial/constitutional theory and conservative approaches. The Left always starts with the preferred policy, and then rationalizes that into the Constitution. Thus we see non-existent rights to abortion and gay marriage created out of whole cloth, and the Second Amendment disappeared into a memory hole.

This is why Leftist judges never go off the rails when it matters. In contrast, conservative judges generally (not always, but generally) will look to what the text of the Constitution says and then apply that to the question at hand – leading to situations in which judges uphold “bad” laws, or strike down “good” laws. I don’t think that most Americans realize how absolutely critical it has been to have conservative judges on the Supreme Court, even if we don’t always like the way they rule. And that’s not to say that some “conservative” judges haven’t at times taken the liberal route and created non-existent rights (cough, cough, Kennedy, cough, cough).

One last word on Canada. As a naturally born Canadian, it really grieves me to see how Canada has now turned into one of the most authoritarian and, indeed, totalitarian nation in the West. What is so sad is how docile the population has been. Growing up in Canada, we always looked down on those crazy non-conformist Americans. What a bunch of uncouth rubes we would think. Now that I have lived in the US and transferred my heart’s allegiance to the US, I thank God everyday for these non-conformist American rubes! And I shake my head at how compliant Canadians are.

There is so much to write, but Ben Woodfinden (maybe you follow him on Twitter or Substack) is a religious conservative who writes about Canada (he’s well worth a follow). He has suggested that the Liberal Party in Canada and its House Media (aka the CBC) have successfully established the Canadian “identity” as being “very progressive” in contrast to the “conservatism” that is right-wing America. Canadians like to be polite and to do what they are told. This is very true. And there is no contrary media in Canada — all media sources in Canada are overtly anti-Christian and progressive and hostility to Christianity and progressivism have been deemed to be foundational to Canadian identity.

What is strange to me is how docile Canadian Christians are about this. My parents in Canada are socially conservative Christians. They are elderly now, and not really able mentally to fully analyze this sort of thing now, but they both cling to the idea that Canada is like what it was in the 1980’s. When I discuss politics with my dad, I won’t get any reaction from him about Justin Trudeau’s anti-Christian authoritarianism, but he will go on and on about Trudeau’s personal corruption. My sister is what one would call a “progressive evangelical”, probably very similar to a Tish Harrison Warren (I am sure you know her). My sister would not agree with gender ideology being forced in schools. And yet, that issue and all of these anti-Christian/authoritarianism/totalitarianism issues have ZERO hold on her when she thinks on governments. For her, it’s all about whatever the latest crises or emergencies (i.e. progressive issues) that the CBC has declared to be the ushering in the End of the World, and which necessitate the giving of greater power over to the State.

Canadian readers, what say you?

The post Soft Totalitarian Canada appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jordan Peterson nukes the University of Toronto from orbit, explaining why he has quit his tenured position there. Excerpts:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

He goes on to talk about how this crackpot mentality is destroying our society’s capabilities. More:

And if you think DIE is bad, wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores . Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?

And it’s not just the universities. And the professional colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.

One more quote — a Live Not By Lies point:

Finally, do you know that Vladimir Putin himself is capitalizing on this woke madness? Anna Mahjar-Barducci at MEMRI.org covered his recent speech. I quote from the article’s translation: “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 color 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.”

This, from the head of the former totalitarian enterprise, against whom we fought a five decades’ long Cold War, risking the entire planet (in a very real manner). This, from the head of a country riven in a literally genocidal manner by ideas that Putin himself attributes to the progressives in the West, to the generally accepting audience of his once-burned (once (!)) twice-shy listeners.

Read it all. It is straight, cleansing fire, with a conclusion worthy of Solzhenitsyn.

It is time to take a stand. This ideology — wokeness, DEI (DIE!), whatever you want to call it — is destroying us. As N.S. Lyons wrote earlier this week, it is going to take a long time, and an immense effort, to rid ourselves of it, because it has embedded itself within institutions, and networks of institutions. The only thing we have on our side is Truth, and sanity, and the courage of leaders like Jordan B. Peterson.

Be like JBP. Live not by lies! Resist!

By the way, if you’d rather watch Jordan Peterson reading this article aloud, here you go:

The post Jordan Peterson Nukes Woke U. From Orbit appeared first on The American Conservative.

I don’t have a lot to add to the discussion over what the US should do if Russia attacks Ukraine. My basic beliefs have not changed:

Russia should not launch a war on UkraineRussia’s demand that NATO exclude membership to Ukraine and Georgia is legitimate and sensibleThe US would be foolish to involve itself militarily in any conflict between Russia and Ukraine

Here’s an analysis that flopped across the transom this morning from John Schindler, the former National Security Agency analyst and former Naval War College professor, who published it on his Substack newsletter. I found these excerpts to be especially interesting. Schindler really lays in to Western politicians and national security elites who claim to be flabbergasted by Putin’s hostile moves against Ukraine:

Moreover, the Kremlin strongman has been admirably forthright about his aims regarding Ukraine. For years, Putin’s public statements have indicated that he does not consider Russia’s neighbor to be a bona fide country, rather an extension of Russia, no more than a “region,” while his comments last summer, including a detailed pseudo-historical tract complete with Orthodox mysticism expounding Putin’s view that Russia and Ukraine are inextricably linked, left no doubt to anyone paying attention that the Kremlin was prepared to act by any means necessary to keep Kyiv far away from NATO and the West.

The signs have been there 15 years, flashing brightly. Putin’s anger at NATO and especially the United States over Alliance expansion into the post-Soviet space burst into the public domain at the Munich Security Conference in early 2007 where the Russian leader unleashed a broadside aimed at the West. Putin’s fiery speech attacked NATO expansion, accusing the Alliance of putting “its frontline forces on our borders,” criticizing America’s “unipolar” dominance over the world, while condemning Washington’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations.”

… In September 2013, Putin made his feelings towards the West transparent in his speech to the Valdai Club in Moscow, including the reminder, “Russia’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity are unconditional. These are red lines no one is allowed to cross,” while casting Russia’s rising conflict with the West in spiritual as much as political terms. Putin portrayed himself and his regime as conservatives trying to protect Russia from the West’s progressive cultural pollution. As he stated:

Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.

Putin’s describing the postmodern West as the enemies of God, in league with the Devil, got less attention abroad than it merited, no doubt in part because Western elites are highly secular and feel uncomfortable discussing religious matters of any kind. Western experts, however, could not ignore it when, at virtually the same time as Putin’s unleashed his Valdai Club speech, Obama abandoned his own “red line” in Syria, offering a needless gift to Moscow. It’s never a good idea to show weakness towards a career Chekist, and the Kremlin took Obama’s move as a green light elsewhere, as I predicted at the time, with a colleague. Just a few months later, Putin unleashed his aggressive war against Ukraine, of which the current crisis is merely an extension. Again, Western experts acted shocked and disappointed by such brazen Russian smash-and-grab behavior.

Why on earth such “experts” are surprised, in 2022, after a decade-and a-half of Putin’s angry rhetoric aimed at the West, followed by his repeated acts of aggression against Russia’s neighbors, constitutes an important question. Answering it is relatively simple if you possess the fortitude to face depressing answers.

More:

To such elites, all of whom fall on the spectrum of Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, WEIRD for short, Putin represents an atavism whose motivations they cannot understand. The Kremlin strongman adheres to a distinctly throwback view of international relations where the use of force is normal, and countries protect their national interests unapologetically, with all the instruments of national power. Putin’s wholehearted embrace of religiously-infused nationalism, which boasts a venerable history in Russia, leaves WEIRDs befuddled yet has real resonance among average Russians. Western doubts that the former KGB man has “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” miss the point, but then the West has never understood Russian Orthodoxy very well. No matter what Putin really believes, his public embrace of religiously-grounded national conservatism provides his regime with an ideological anchor, one which happens to view Ukraine’s subservience to Russia as a spiritual as well as geostrategic necessity.

Read it all.

As you know, I am an Orthodox Christian, one with friends from Ukraine, and friends from Russia. I see the Russia-Ukraine crisis as a horrible, and avoidable, fraternal catastrophe. Let me make it clear: I do NOT believe that Russia should invade Ukraine, nor do I believe that Ukraine should be in NATO. But if Russia does invade Ukraine, this is something that we in the West are going to have to live with. Why?

The most obvious answer is because it would be insane to go to war with Russia on behalf of a nation that is on Russia’s border, and has only been an independent country since the collapse of the USSR.

Another reason: because we have depleted ourselves with these foolish wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. What would we fight them with? And where is the popular enthusiasm to wage another war, this one with an actual superpower?

A reason that Schindler gets, but many WEIRD Americans don’t: the religious nationalism angle. Russians see Ukraine as the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. Russia dates its Christianity to the year 988, when Prince Vladimir, the ruler of Kievan Rus, accepted baptism. I cannot think of an analogy from American history, including American religious history, that can convey to American observers the emotional, psychological, and spiritual importance of Ukraine to Russians.

Schindler links to this must-read essay by Nikolas Gvosdev about the role that Russian Orthodoxy plays in Russian geopolitical thinking. Consider:

Yet I remain concerned that the U.S. national security establishment still lacks the comfort level for appreciating the role of religion, especially in its collective aspect, in matters of war and peace. This is nothing new—as this was a problem Robert Jervis identified as one of the principal reasons the U.S. intelligence community was blindsided by the Iranian revolution forty years ago. Academia largely views the question of religion through secularization theory and Marxist thought—religion as a “cover” for other political or economic motives. The American approach to religious matters, best epitomized by the various Evangelical denominations, stresses the primacy of the individual’s choice and relationship to the divine, and assumes that in the absence of individual commitment (e.g. if every Russian officer and scientist does not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior) then there is no religious factor at play—because the notion of adhering to a religious community and tradition as part of communal affiliation even in the absence of personal commitment is alien to the U.S. religious experience. Beyond these two general points, there are further blind spots when it comes to Russian Orthodoxy—and these are usually papered over by assuming that Orthodoxy is Protestantism with icons or Catholicism without the Pope.

Gvosdev discusses how Putin has recapitulated a very old religious-nationalist ideology that regards the State as the protector of Christianity. He concludes:

This pattern fits into the ideological tone of the Putin administration, in which pre-Soviet, imperial and Soviet legacies are all blended into a single narrative, where Reds and Whites, Orthodox and atheist, are all part of the same team, and whose goal is the preservation of the Russian state as a guardian of a critical spiritual and civilizational legacy which cannot be allowed to perish from the earth. The Russian defense establishment now has a clear purpose and a way to motivate its personnel. If we have truly entered a new era of great-power competition, every Russian has been given a clear rationale for why he fights—and if the narrative charted by Adamsky continues to gain strength and resilience, it will provide the Russian state with the justification for why it asks its people to bear new burdens.

This alarms me as an Orthodox believer, for the same reason Christian nationalism in the US does: because I fear it compromises the mission of the Church by making it a handmaiden to state power. Nevertheless, Gvosdev and Schindler are correct that Westerners — WEIRDoes — are incapable of imagining that other peoples are motivated by things that do not motivate them.

Besides, in the passage Schindler cites above, condemning the moral decadence of the West, I agree with Putin, and I am sure a lot of you do too. Yesterday, Military.com reported:

The Defense Department has quietly begun looking into how it can allow troops whose gender identity is nonbinary to serve openly in the military, three advocates familiar with the situation told Military.com.

The Pentagon has asked the Institute for Defense Analyses, or IDA, which operates federally funded research centers, to study the issue, said the advocates, one of whom requested anonymity to disclose a sensitive topic.

Someone who is nonbinary identifies as neither male nor female, often using “they” and “them” as their pronouns and marking their gender as “X” on forms that have that option.

It is unclear exactly how long the research has been going on, but SPARTA, an advocacy group for transgender troops, put researchers in touch with several nonbinary service members this month.

SPARTA President Bree Fram, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, likened the effort to the study the Pentagon asked Rand Corp. to conduct in 2015 before lifting the ban on transgender people serving in the military.

“Speaking with non-binary troops and defense officials to understand what regulation changes may be necessary is a great first step,” Fram said in a statement to Military.com. “We are hopeful this will allow non-binary individuals to serve authentically and realize their full potential in the military.”

Yeah, send those non-binary soldiers in to free Kiev from Russian troops. Good luck with that.

Many Russians, and many people in what we used to call Eastern Europe, look to the West as hopelessly decadent, and collapsing in on itself. They’re right. You don’t have to believe that Vladimir Putin is a good guy, or any kind of savior, or that Russia represents a model for the future, to recognize that Putin has correctly taken the measure of us. Do you want your son to fight to make Kyiv safe for Blue’s Clues Pride Parades? I didn’t think so. This kind of thing is what Western liberal democracy has degenerated into (“Blue’s Clues Pride Parades” being a condensed symbol for what the post-Christian globalist West has become). As Schindler writes:

Putin’s broader aim with the Ukraine crisis isn’t about Kyiv, it’s about showing NATO’s impotence while revealing America’s paralysis and decadence.

America’s elites, in both government and the private sphere, are making war on their own people who are insufficiently woke. Again, talk to conservatives in the military right now, or who have recently left the military, and ask them about their morale. Forgive this diversion, but it’s important: a reader e-mailed me this the other day:

A few days ago, I noticed a disturbing tweet by Representative Dan Crenshaw about preferential treatment and lowered standards in the Air Force Special Tactics selection course. Having sufficient background to be fairly confident in my understanding of the matter, I’ll place links to many of my sources here, here, here, here, and here.

 

The gist of the story is that the Air Force Special Tactics community encountered wokeness, but resistance in the lower ranks sparked a backlash.

 

In 2018, a Female Special Tactics Officer entered training for Special Tactics training, where she quit in the first week of dive training. She was then not selected for continued training.  In 2019, she returned and re-took the course, did not pass again, but higher leadership dictated her selection for Special Tactics Officer training. She then went through more training while continuing to quit. She quit in Dive training, but the leadership had her retake a more relaxed version of the course. She then quit in the solo land navigation portion of her tactical training.

She encountered the physical difference between highly athletic men and women tested to their limits. In one event, “She just physically couldn’t flip the tire,” the instructor said. “The team handed her a kettlebell and she just kind of walked behind the team for the rest of the iteration.” The officer herself reportedly wrote “ I believe the change in standards invalidated me with a majority of my team, . . . the cadre ‘rioted’ when they found out the PT test was changing back to lesser standards.” Despite her repeated desire to quit – Air Force Special Operations leadership would not allow her to find a different career path. Instead, she began working directly for the commander of Air Force Special Operations Command –where she wrote a report and Equal Opportunity Complaint resulting in investigation of everyone who interacted with her. Now, according to the memo, she will return again to re-take the Special Operations Course, with instructions from above, that she will graduate, whether or not she meets standards. As of now, an investigation into this matter is being conducted by the Air Force Inspector General.

 

What I want to elucidate, is how this episode is representative of how Wokeness often works, and how it was resisted.

 

First, the project to bring women into Air Force Special Tactics is a luxury project, not a pressing need. The raids that killed terrorist leaders Bin-Laden and Al-Bagdadi demonstrate the maturity and fine-tuned edge that Special Operations has honed, with countless unheralded missions successfully accomplished in our lifetime. There are no public examples of a failed mission that would only have succeeded had a female Air Force Special Tactics Officer been present. In other words, this is fixing what ain’t broke. That said, there is an argument to be made for women in Special Operations – South Korea has a female unit for low-profile operations, and women were needed to search and question women during raids in Muslim countries. That is not, however, the role of Air Force Special Tactics.

 

Second, this is a top-down project years in the making through both Democrat and Republican administrations. In 2013, the Obama-era Defense Department set a timeline of 2016 for women to join ground special operations forces. A female officer, who was not a special tactics officer, was placed second in command of most Special Tactics airmen. She was placed there “for the first wave of female operators”. The top general for Air Force Special Operations has clearly demonstrated by his actions that he is aware and pushing for this person to pass the special operations course.

 

Third, the project relies on lack of transparency and lies or near-lies about the nature of reality and objective facts. The first lie or obfuscation of reality is that standards will be gender-neutral and will not be lowered to accommodate women. In fact, the physical standards were lowered just before the female officer arrived at the course. Her instructors all knew that her passing scores were failing scores before she arrived. The high physical standards for special operations are based on the objective needs of the mission – the need to carry heavy loads over rough terrain, the need to drag the wounded to safety, the need to swim long distances in rough seas. Lowering the passing scores does not change that. This is analogous to those failing schools where everyone graduates, but half the graduates cannot read – the scores are changed, not the underlying reality. Inherent physical performance differences between men and women mean that a standard lowered enough for sufficient women to pass may not be challenging for men. It risks turning Special Operations into Just Above Average Operations.

 

Fourth, the ramifications of such a project could result in serious damage to the national treasure that is SpecOps. Imagine the small community of rank and file Special Tactics Airmen knowing that their leader cannot physically lead from the front, and that she was willing to charge her instructors with discrimination. In other words, what should be a trusting, close-knit family forged from shared experience will become a unit without trust or mutual respect where it’s best to watch what you say and think. The rank and file must imagine if this is the lengths to which leadership is willing to take to get the demographic results wanted, how much further will this trend go? Will selection mostly be a matter of quota and not a measure of individual character?

 

Most importantly, however, a few people have been willing to not live by lies. The memo writer was willing to blow the whistle, knowing that in all likelihood he would be discovered and his career ended. This story, with its overtones of double standards, favoritism, and wokeness, appeals to a sense of injustice – and more importantly, the discussion is still based in objective reality. It was championed by a politician, Dan Crenshaw, with a stake in that community. News organizations have not stifled the issue – with the Air ForceTimes in particular, being able to find sources and credible information to back up the whistleblower. Quite simply, regardless of the outcome, it is important to stand up for reality.

The WEIRDoes who run the show — including at the Pentagon — believe that America is so strong that it can bend reality to fit WEIRD dogmas. They are about to learn the limits of American and Western power, in Ukraine. I hope and pray that the Russians will stand down, and will not invade Ukraine. I suspect that Finlandization of Ukraine is the best real-world outcome we can hope for: one in which Ukraine maintains most of its independence, but cannot allow itself to be drawn into a pro-NATO, anti-Russia stance.

To wrap up, I find it so difficult to grasp why so many liberals and conservatives are eager to fight with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine. Ukraine, which is adjacent to Russia, vital to the Russian nation’s sense of itself, and which has been part of Greater Russia for centuries. What is our vital national interest in this conflict, such that we risk war with Russia? I cannot stand this idea that if you don’t favor war with Putin’s Russia, then you must be a pro-Putin appeaser (rather than someone who tries to examine soberly American strengths, weaknesses, and interests). Have we Americans learned nothing from the last twenty years?

Do you people not remember how the government and the media manufactured consent for this pointless war on Iraq? I remember what it was like twenty years ago, in January 2022, when the Cathedral was building support for an American war on Iraq. I honestly thought that the only reason anybody would be opposed to that was that they were ignorant, or cowardly. I was a fool. There is no excuse at all for any of us Americans to be fools for war today.

The post Ukraine: Once More, Into The Breach appeared first on The American Conservative.