Rod Dreher's Blog, page 20

War On Our Own Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 11, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

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

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) March 13, 2022

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

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

The Human Face Of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I love the ocean,” she said.

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

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

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

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

How many times in history has something like this happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine: This Year’s BLM

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

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

This is really astonishing. Along those lines:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin’s Islamic Mercenaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Diabolical Moment

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

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

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

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

Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Truth & The Propaganda War

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) March 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against Conservatism Inc’s Grift

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

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

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

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

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

Read it all. 

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

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

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

Anyway, here’s what Schlapp tweeted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grift. Obscene grift. More:

Watch this:

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Russian Orthodoxy’s Tragedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagineering Technological Dependence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a passage that is deeply McGilchristian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crawford:

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Crawford:

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

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

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

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

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

[End of excerpt.]

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

The post Imagineering Technological Dependence appeared first on The American Conservative.

Putin Bombs Baby Hospital

Lord have mercy:

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

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

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

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

There is video of the badly damaged hospital. Look:

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

— Roman Hryshchuk (@grishchukroma) March 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

— Hotaru (@spookgirl19) March 10, 2022

Details:

Additionally, on March 7, Russia’s UN Ambassador said:

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

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

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

The post Putin Bombs Baby Hospital appeared first on The American Conservative.