I was reading a frightening piece today, "The Architects of Our Present Disaster" by Benjamin Braddock, about how we coulda shoulda made peace with Russia after the Cold War. On 9/11, for instance, Condoleezza Rice spoke with Vladimir Putin:
[S]he called President Putin and told him our military would be going on high alert. He told her that he knew and that he had ordered his forces to stand down. Then he asked if there was anything he could do to help. Rice recounted that she had a moment of reflection: “The Cold War really is over.”
Wat! Vlady baby asked if he could do anything to help?
Only Rice and her successors didn't make peace; they didn't write a new Treaty of Westphalia. In fact, it is clear that, all along, Russia has been an opponent. And pretty clearly, Russia right now is an enemy. I've been reading articles in places like Quillette -- "Ukraine and the pro-Putin Right" -- that clearly show that the global ruling class regards conservatives that don't go full-on anti-Putin as traitors.
Braddock goes on to detail all of the meddling we've been up to in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the post Cold War era. And what good has it done?
I would say the same about the domestic politics in the US since the end of the Cold War: what good has it done?
Let's make the problem bigger. What good has politics ever done?
Because politics is always about an enemy. Says Nazi Carl Schmitt. If there isn't an enemy, there isn't any politics.
So if you are a ruling class, what's the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" if you don't have an enemy?
You can see the enemy thing in the COVID experience. The Dem governors were all in on the war against COVID, ordering people around with mask mandates and vaccination mandates.
(I was to a vegetarian restaurant over the weekend -- after WA Gov. Inslee ended his mask mandate -- and the dears at the restaurant still had a mask mandate and still required proof of vaccination. It's funny, isn't it, how our liberal friends, who believe in Peace and all that, just love to be in charge and issuing orders. And following orders.)
I don't think that the Dem Governors were consciously wanting to be little Hitlers. It's just that if you are a liberal you think that politics is the royal road to justice. And so you always think, like the generals in World War I, that one more Big Push should do it. Because once you have made an issue political, you have required that you have an enemy to fight. And once you have an enemy you have to continue the fight until the enemy is defeated. If there wasn't an enemy then you wouldn't need government force and a political life-or-death narrative.
That's why liberals are so into the pejorative thing, calling people racists, sexists, homophobes. If you make an issue political it is because you need to fight for it, and that means you need an enemy. And what is the first thing you so with an enemy? You call them a nasty name. By the way, what's with the liberal thing on Trump's Mean Tweets? Isn't that what you liberals are doing every day of the week? Isn't the slogan on every protest sign the peaceful protest equivalent of a Mean Tweet? You tell me.
Back to Ukraine. I don't like Putin. I don't like his invasion of Ukraine. I don't like all the NATO and EU saber rattling. I don't like the proposed NATO summit.
Why not? Because I think that all the players are fools and knaves, and whatever they do, chances are they will Make Things Worse.
Why do I think that? I've come to this notion gradually over the years, as my reading has given me what I consider to be a greater depth of understanding of human affairs than you get by ingesting the usual narrative.
Maybe it's all just a conceit on my part. But one thing that reading books does for you. It gives you a means of judging the world from a different position than the ruling-class narrative. If you only consume regular media then you will be signed onto one or another of the received wisdoms of the day.
And that's not good.
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