That’s the heritage of the West. The West jettisoned Christian faith and embraced the facile, ignorant rationalism of Enlightenment. The results have taken a couple of centuries to play out, but here we are. Our domestic policies are utterly disastrous for human flourishing and the common good—and are equaled by our foreign policy. We ignore human nature and historical lessons and plunge into morasses foreign and domestic spouting inane rationalizations and woke incantations that are supposed to magically control and transform reality. With predictable results.
Of course, there is also an element of conscious hypocrisy, and Jeffrey Tucker punctures that bubble with glee today:
Is it a new age, or have we simply reached new depths of the same old liberal rationalist barbarism? Whatever. Here’s an excerpt:
Political leaders in the US, Canada, Germany, and France – all NATO countries – got back on script yesterday. They could not wait to get to the microphones. They all seemed to have new energy and purpose in life. Politicians are made for this moment! They are vastly more talented at dishing out righteous opprobrium directed at foreign beasts, which make far more compelling enemies, than inveighing against invisible viruses.
…, Western leaders – having spent the better part of two years bullying their citizens and quelling protests – spoke in soaring tones about freedom, democracy, peace, and human rights. ... They had a new sense of resolve in their moral superiority as leaders of the free and modern republics that do not invade their neighbors.
...
Away with the appalling mismanagement of the pathogen. Away with public anger toward the lockdowns and mandates. Forget the collapse in children’s literacy, the rise in cancer, the waves of depression, the trucker protests, the collapsing polls of many elected leaders, and forget too the inflation, the federal debt, supply-chain snarls and goods shortages. Forget all the astonishing botches of everything.
Life was never as good in living memory as when we had a solid foreign enemy named Russia with a leader with a name and a face. Everything wrong with the world could be personalized, and with storybook thematics: good vs evil, freedom vs despotism, democracy vs dictatorship. ...
...
There is some powerful symbolism here with Putin’s outright military invasion. ... He has finally pushed back against NATO expansionism into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, and caused the opening of a new chapter in world affairs. He has made it clear to the world that the American century is over.
As if our travesty of a constitutional order hadn’t made that plane enough over the past decade or more. Putin—no dummy he—at least has been paying attention. And Putin has been able to juxtapose free demonstrations in Russia with the repression of the woke West.
Even more extraordinary, he has a clean path to retaining that power at home. Anti-war protests broke out in many cities in Russia. God bless these protestors, their resolve, their courage, their love of peace.
If Putin is looking for a way to deal with them, he need only look at how Justin Trudeau dealt with the protests in Ottawa. Dox them, seize their bank accounts, tow their trucks and cars, and send in heavy armed military-style cops without badges and faces to clear the streets. Use facial recognition technology to follow up with people later, inquiring about their political loyalties.
The “free world” has lost the moral high ground to preach to the “unfree” world about rights, liberties, and democracy. For two years, most every government in the West experimented with new forms of servitude in the name of public health. They showed how emergency powers can be deployed to lock people in their homes, shut businesses, cancel church, close parks, ban travel, censor speech – massive attacks on essential freedoms all justified simply because the people in power said it was justified.
What’s so disturbing is to wake up this morning, glance at conservative interwebs, and see “conservatives” predictably taking the bait. Sadly, leading the pack and setting the tone was Trump himself. But Lindsey! and the rest of the pack were yapping away. Commenters and pundits at conservative sites filled the internet with the most transparent idiocies—libertarian and neocon ideology in place of historical and geopolitical insight and information or cultural understanding. Not to mention insight into human nature. Thank God for Tucker and Ann Coulter, but for the most part it was blather about the brave, freedom loving Ukies v. the Red Menace of the Russkis—Cold War forever! Wall to wall globalist and neocon propaganda. These knuckleheads seem only too glad to forget what’s going on around them and pretend that we still live in a free country. They’d rather worry about a far off land than their own.
Ray So-Cal linked an article this morning that punctures some of that stupidity at a single blow:
Biden throws Putin into Xi’s briar patch
US has pushed Putin into an alliance with China that could rank as America’s biggest strategic blunder of the century
This is the sort of move that gives “Pyrrhic victory” a bad name.
Washington has backed Putin into a corner, forcing him to take drastic measures to protect Russian minorities in Ukraine. That in turn forced Europe’s leaders into Washington’s camp, and within 48 hours, the European discourse has shifted away from economic cooperation with Russia to a possible boycott of Russian gas.
Putin will sell the gas to China, which last month proposed to construct a pipeline that would increase Russia’s deliveries tenfold. More importantly, Russia’s considerable scientific and engineering resources—by some measure on par with those of the United States—will be put in the service of China’s high-tech industry.
Washington maneuvered Russia into the crisis. Putin was willing to negotiate the status of the Russophone districts of Eastern Ukraine under the 2015 Minsk protocols brokered by the French and Germans, and signed by Ukraine, Germany, France, Russia and representatives of Luhansk and Donetsk, the rebel provinces.
The Ukraine government—with American instigation—abandoned an agreement that would have guaranteed the rights of the Russian minority within a sovereign Ukraine, as Steve Bryen reported in these pages on February 21.
Washington and London, Bryen emphasized, “think a Minsk-based deal would lead to the ‘Finlandization’ of Ukraine. Behind the scenes, it is quite clear, by omission and commission, that Washington has let the Ukrainians believe that Minsk II is off the table – although the US was never a party to Minsk II.”
After Kiev, goaded by Washington, rejected a limited autonomy for the Russian districts within a sovereign Ukraine, Putin recognized their independence.
There is a history behind this which Western governments and the media find it convenient to forget.
…
Putin wanted Russia to join NATO. He wanted to be part of the West. His most effective opposition comes not from the sort of liberals who play well on the American speaking circuit, but rather from “Eurasian” reactionaries like Aleksandr Dugin of the “National Bolshevik Party,” whose politics are consistent with its historically allusive name.
But the West has pushed Putin into an alliance with China. It is perhaps the dumbest thing the Western powers have ever done. It could be the last.
There’s much, much more between those two excerpts. I urge everyone to read it and share it.
I finally took the trouble to look up Ann Coulter's remarks, supposedly so superior to those of Trump. All I found was the same old, same old fixation on her pet problems, to the exclusion of everything else.
"What Republicans should be doing: talking about the issues Democrats are trying to avoid. What Republicans are doing: talking about Ukraine. Whenever you see any media talking about Ukraine, your Pavlovian response should be, Oh, I see. They don’t want me to think about immigration or crime."
When Trump was President she couldn't understand why, with his pen and his phone, he couldn't ignore all the formalities and solve these problems. Get real. A president has to deal with whatever is going on in the world as it affects America, and given the opposition he faced what President Trump did accomplish was miraculous. I stick by my remarks in my previous comment. "I never cease to be astonished at how little President Trump is appreciated. His every remark is denigrated by people who do not take the trouble to understand what he is saying."
I never cease to be astonished at how little President Trump is appreciated. His every remark is denigrated by people who do not take the trouble to understand what he is saying. Of course one would expect this from Rich Lowry in the NY Post, with his "Self-obsessed Trump’s Putin praise is morally bankrupt", but everybody seems to be joining on the bandwagon this time. Instead of saying "Putin is a brutal killer...Trump couldn’t muster one remotely appropriate sentiment." Correct, Mr. Lowry, but he did come up with the correct analysis, from the point of view of Russia, that 'This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine....Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful... And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper.No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”
President Trump also said: “By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable,”
Lowry further states: "Trump’s comments were clearly driven, in large part, by his disdain for Joe Biden and his abiding belief that the election was stolen from him." And again Lowry is shocked by the statement "We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen." There are those of us who hold both statements to be true, and assume that if Trump were recognized as President today our lives would be so much better off. Rather than expressing mushy moral sentiments it would be better if what happened in the Ukraine, or for that matter Afghanistan, had never happened, and we wouldn't have to be concerned about Taiwan...or our southern border, crime, inflation, our supply chain, etc,etc,etc.