As Arestovich said in today’s devastating interview,
The problem isn’t that the West doesn’t know what to do with Russia. The problem is that the West doesn’t know what to do with the West.
The West doesn’t see why it deserves to win. It doesn’t see why civilization is better than barbarity.
I don’t want to believe that. The center of the civilization might move but there are still enough people admiring the Western Civilization and willing even to die to save it.
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Eh. Western Civilization had a lot going for it, and perhaps someone else will take up the banner, but… I don’t see it happening in the US. I think if civilization survives here at all it will be something (more probably several somethings) much more American, for better or worse. I’m not sure any of us knows what that looks like when a lot of the European trappings fall off. There are some elements that have been around all along that I expect will make a roaring comeback in the future (such as gift economies and visiting culture, which have been suppressed by high mobility and atomization)– beyond that I have a hard time even imagining.
After WW2 the East was in ruins. So, the West became a unipolar capitalist hierarchy that exploited the rest of the planet, which meant that the average Westerner enjoyed a very high quality of life, while the average Western elite enjoyed a quality of life unlike anything seen in the world before.
Fast forward to today and the East has recovered, leading to demands that the unipolar world be replaced with a multipolar one, which of course would disadvantage the average Western elite.
Simultaneously, the unipolar capitalist hierarchy of the West centralised and concentrated enormously to the benefit of the elite, so that the average Westerner was practically plundered. Resentment and populism were the result.
So the problem isn’t at all that the West doesn’t know what to do with the West. The problem is that the Western elite is in complete denial and only wants to live in a post WW2 world where they dominate both the East and the public unnaturally.
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” demands that the unipolar world be replaced with a multipolar one”
IME “multi-polar” is code for “Who needs democracy? Dictators are the way to go! Yeay Dictators!!!!!”
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Oh, I think it is definitely over, Western Civ is in its death throes.
Still, who knows, some non-Westerners – brown, black, yellow, any colour – may soon enough pick up from where we left off, too sated and smug and self-flagellating.
I wish them well: the achievements of Western European culture are something to be proud of and stand in worthy comparison with those of most if not all other civilisations, but we, as White people, are done, we are a spent force.
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I think it’s already happened. Ukrainians, Czechs and Poles have picked up the banner of the West and are defending it.
But yes, the insane self-flagellation of people in the traditional West is painful to observe. Look at Just George who has contorted himself into believing that Americans massacred “ethnic Russians” (a concept that doesn’t even exist) in Bucha. It’s truly sad. And I know other poor souls who are willing to believe every ridiculous lie about the West even though they are themselves from the West. I don’t understand what causes it and I haven’t seen a good explanation. Let’s keep thinking about it to see if we alight on the answer.
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“Look at Just George who has contorted himself into believing that Americans massacred “ethnic Russians” (a concept that doesn’t even exist) in Bucha.”
Please point at where I mentioned anyone being massacred in Bucha.
By the way, I didn’t contort myself into anything at all. I see things, I read things, I think, then I talk without prejudice because none of this is really connected to me. Nothing bad happens to me when bad things happen in Ukraine, which in turn means that I don’t interpret things with any kind of bias or wishful thinking.
Meanwhile there are people on this blog coming up with all sorts of crazy excuses to explain why Putin launched this war except for the bleeding obvious, which is what the Russians were repeating over and over again about NATO encroachment being considered to be an existential threat that would definitely provoke a response.
I must say that it is certainly interesting to see, and helps me to understand why things like WW2 happened.
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“what the Russians were repeating over and over again about NATO encroachment”
Except they only really said that occasiionally and only to westerners, the justifications to the Russian public are very different. The most consistent thing they repeated over and over in Russian seemed/seems about empire and making other countries fear Russia (and worse).
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“Except they only really said that occasiionally and only to westerners”
A couple of months ago I wrote on this blog that the Russians viewed NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat and cited a promise made in public by the then US foreign secretary in around 1990 or whatever it was about NATO not expanding a single inch to the East which was important to the Russians.
In response I received a combination of denial, ridicule and scorn before I was unable to make any comment at all on this blog.
Now, you are writing that yes, the Russian view about NATO expansion into Ukraine was viewed as an existential threat and published about, but only a few times, and only to the people who are presently sending guns to Ukraine.
In my view, this kind of grudging acknowledgment of bleedingly obvious things that were flat out denied only weeks ago – which is everywhere, by the way – not only reveals enormous prejudice, but in my opinion is why a great number of people are going to suffer or die as a result of all of this.
From what I can see, people across Europe everywhere from Ukraine Westward and across the ocean are going to tell themselves fairytales about why things are happening even in the face of people saying it to their faces in plain language, and in so doing, will allow things to get worse and worse until we end up with a new world war or nuclear exchange or both.
Just so you all know, I am on another continent and very far away from everything happening in Ukraine. I have no family there and stand to lose nothing at all from hostilities spreading. It isn’t my family or friends who will be shelled or starved gang raped by marauding maniacs on either side who get a kick out of it while profiteers everywhere take advantage.
I don’t like the way people persist in delusion and think that, if you are at all capable, that some of you should step away from things and neutrally reexamine the facts as they are rather than as you wish them to be so that your convictions once again correspond with reality, because form what I can see, right now, some of the people commenting on this blog are outright deluded.
Ukraine cannot win against Russia. The only reasonable option is to stop fighting and negotiate a peace. Anyone who urges Ukrainians onward or says anything at all different is no friend of Ukraine or Ukrainians.
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Please stop spamming and go away. You are not wanted here. Can I make it any clearer? You are not wanted.
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“cited a promise made in public by the then US foreign secretary in around 1990”
Not any kind of written agreement and first only about East Germany… (something like NATO troups wouldn’t be put on former EG territory).
“Russians viewed NATO expansion”
NATO did not “expand” anywhere it was invited by the countries with the support of a large majority of the population because…. Russian militarism is an existential threat to every one of its neighbors.
I do think NATO was in the mix of reasons given for the war but more as a secondary justification the decision was made to invade.
first becasue that’s been Putin’s entire career since he was chosen by a bunch of oligarchs to be a neo-tsar figure (to protect the oligarchs from the public).
Create some kind of military “crisis”
Then “solve it”
Then ramp up the scale for the next time out. (chechnya, georgia, syria, ukraine, ukraine) this is a clear pattern to anyone who pays attention.
This is not a peaceful country pushed into a corner and doing anything it can to survive… it’s an aggressive military expansionist regime that ceases to exist the second it stops invading (or threatening to invade) its neighbors.
And nothing Russia is doing on the ground makes any sense in terms of trying to stop NATO expansion. It makes perfect sense in terms of an aggressively expansionist military regime.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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