how dare you use dispassionate, intelligent reason and logic to provide context and give an accurate assessment of all factors that led to this moment...u are def an evil fascist nazi white-supremacist bigot ;)
One thing I really liked about Trump in retrospect is that he didn't try to apply a kindergarten "good guys versus bad guys" frame on geopolitics. He created endless controversies with it, but my reading was that he just looked at everything in terms of self-interests and negotiating postures. So despite all of his raging about how we were "getting ripped off" on the world stage, it always came with a degree of explicit respect for how "smart" the leaders of those countries ripping us off were.
I would say the same thing about this situation. It doesn't really do anyone any good to look at geopolitical conflicts in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys"; that's just jingoist propaganda meant to lure us into supporting wars. Better to just try to understand that it's more important to understand geopolitics in terms of a variety of players all acting in their own self-interests, which are in conflict, to an extent existentially, and that other than pure military dominance, which is often impossible or at least more costly than anyone wants to bear, negotiation in the only path to maintaining peace.
And thank you for the link to the Niccolo Soldo article. It's one of the best explanations I've seen, in both thought and organization. It was well worth the read.
Oh, thank goodness, some sanity. I've been questioning my subscriptions to a couple of other substacks today. As thoughtful and nuanced as they've been about COVID and other things, they seem to have lost their minds about this. One just called the readership that didn't agree with him "Putin apologists." Another published a wholly emotional story today that admittedly tugs at the heart strings but is sadly one small blip of horror in a larger horrific world after publishing some ridiculousness about how the US needs to find itself so we once again can become "interested" in war. And everyone, in all these conversations, seems to have forgotten three little words that should be at the front of all our minds: "mutually assured destruction." This isn't going to fight poorly armed "brown" people in the desert. Even if Putin is crazy and Hitler, he's crazy and Hitler with his finger on the button of a whole lot of nukes, and our leaders and the rest of us would be wise to remember that. (Conversely, if he's not crazy and Hitler, we can find a way to peacefully end this with as little death and destruction as possible, and we should be looking for that, or demanding our leaders look for that, rather than slinging insults at each other.)
If you ask any historian what led to German agression in WW2 every single one would point to the Versailles treaty as a singificant cause.
Hardly any would say it justified the rise of Nazism or the horrors that spawned from that monstrosity.
It was important to factor this lesson in the post world war 2 conditions so it wouldn't happen again (and to build up former foes to fight former allies).
Yet somehow this similar desire to understand motives of bad actors is verboten currently.
The lack of this understanding is leading to ever more dangerous posturing. To the point I truly believe we are currently the closest we've ever been to nuclear war.
For me personally, I feel utter sadness for the Ukrainians. They like a toy are being torn apart by two children who neither wants the other to have.
Well, he is a monster; poisoning your opponents with radioactive sweetening of their tea etc. (and managing to kill UK citizens on UK soil) is bad. On the other hand, getting away with it is a pretty good lesson, too.
His psychology? Well, two elder infant brothers died during the siege of Leningrad before his birth may create a certain atmosphere in the bosom of one's family that survival at any cost and fuck anyone who gets in your way is a good life motto.
And everyone in Eastern Europe has pretty stark family memories of what happens when you're not strong enough to protect yourself against outsiders. My parents were born here and I am, as the soldier in the fairytale said, no longer young. My grandma was born 120 years ago and fled Ukraine as a young woman during the chaos of war, and my mother's great-uncle, his wife and four adult children were later murdered by the Nazis in Uman in 1942, during another war, and their blood does indeed still cry out to me from the ground, and I hear it, all the way here in the US where I'm as American as they come and speak none of the ancestral languages.
Those oligarchs learned that lesson fer shure. The only way you save yourself and your family is with power, and power comes from resources, the more the better. None of them are fools. They are all shaped by horrors.
I found the argument against citing one’s bona fides as a Dem voter (or left of center activist) interesting. Because I do do this sometimes in giving perspective or credibility to my argument (or in some cases, sadly, as what seems like a necessary preemptive or corrective). My sense is there are at least two reasons implied in the post why one shouldn’t do this. One, because, at least in a normative sense, whether one has ever voted for any Republicans before shouldn’t matter and has nothing to do with the actual rigor of one’s argument or the quality of the facts one is marshaling in support. Second, I can see how implicitly acceding to the notion that only those with pure enough backgrounds as Dems have standing to be heard or taken seriously, might further exacerbate siloed realities on the left and the sense anyone less pure is alien and solely a bad faith antagonist with nothing of substance to contribute.
On the other hand, it’s distressingly common to see people so blinkered, so invested personally, socially, emotionally, in Team Blue, their discomfort with any cognitive dissonance so great, almost the only way past their initial dismissals is to remind them (or establish) what’s simply the truth: I have literally never once voted for s Republican (or, I’ve helped organize dozens of voter reg trips to urban Philly; or, I’ve spent a Summer inside NYCHA buildings listening to residents and helping to organize support for a reasonable reform DA). Even close friends will situationally try to forget this in dismissing out of hand a sound argument. People who have never met me will think it suffices to just label me a right-winger and spray some drive-by epithets.
Sometimes it helps to be specific and give people a clear idea of what your values are and what experiences have informed them.
I’d prefer we could all let the quality of our arguments stand on their own. But we are so far from that ideal already. And, sometimes, in a more general, quotidian sense as well as re: politics, people simply want to be reassured you get where they’re coming from, have also seen what they’ve seen, and are not merely seeking to import and impose antagonistic views, ignorant or naive of their perspective and experience (or, in this context, laden with all of the opposite biases, blindspots, and assumptions of an ideological conservative or partisan Republican).
I’ve had to contend with plenty of friends and others immediately claiming something I’m saying is merely “a Republican talking point”. Shaddi Hamid put it well when he wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic, about the very real, dangerous, cruel use of race as a major, even dominant factor in rationing limited resources in public health resources: claiming something is just a GOP talking point when that something is true is gaslighting. I also point this out all the time: I don’t care if something is (also) being used somewhere else as a Republican talking point. I only care if it’s true or not (and sometimes add: if you truly think actual right-wing sources are so odious, even dangerous, stop doing and saying things that give them such persuasive talking points!) Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin put it simply but brilliantly: “If a bigot says to me ‘the sun is shining’, I’ll say ‘yes, the sun is shining’, because I want to tell the truth.” No one has had a good rejoinder to this.
So I guess I try to use a hybrid approach: truth, objectively verifiable facts, and the quality of one’s argument are all that really matter. But I find it much easier to land the arguments in the paragraph above (and substantive info about an issue) when I’ve established or reminded someone I’ve never been right-wing partisan or ideologue. And that I’m not some guy whose angle is “at some point in the past I was a Democrat, so please ignore the fact I’m using that to grift or shill for the Republicans now”.
People (even some of your actual friends!) will dismiss and try to ridicule anything you say about politics, if they can get away with it, solely on the basis of trying to lump you in with the tribal out group. I get the distant echos of “are you now or have you ever been a communist?” We don’t want Neo-McCarthyist litmus tests about one’s standing to speak or participate in society. I just think that, when included honestly, adding some context and perspective re: shared values and how you came to a certain argument can be helpful in finding common ground and making a point. Of course I’m also happy to talk in good faith with anyone who does vote Republican or hold more right of center views, to see where we agree and what we have in common. But many people won’t. I’ve also been honest that, had I been a resident of Virginia last Fall, I would’ve voted for the Republican candidates for statewide office. I’ve also told friends I’m now open to considering reasonable Republicans in upcoming elections if I find a Dem candidate unacceptable. That’s sincere - but it’s also an attempt to shock them into realizing how illiberal and intolerant, even hateful and authoritarian the party we’ve poured so much energy into supporting has become.
I'm intra-cognitively fighting tooth & nail to stay outside the emotionality of this war & you just helped with that. Which is why, I guess, you're writing on Substack and not as a staffer on the Guardian or the NYT.
I hate to be the guy pointing this out but you said “motte” more than once when you meant Bailey. To simplify, consider the strawman argument the Bailey, because straw is grown in the bailey. The strong argument rests in the motte, made of stone and surrounded by a MOAT. It a ridiculously easy mistake to make because no one ever uses motte and bailey in normal language.
I don’t have an easy way to copy/paste the examples here but if you read back through your essay I think you’ll see where you made the switch. There aren’t “mottes“ everywhere, there are baileys everywhere.
Anyway, don’t want you getting misquoted or harangued by bad faith nudniks on Twitter.
Is there a link to your argument about unvaccinated people having the right to overwhelm hospitals (if that is your argument)? I was okay with people refusing the vaccine but had trouble when it came to deciding access to intensive care. I thought it equitable that if people refused the vaccine, they should be made to wait for treatment if vaccinated people needed urgent treatment and resources were limited. The really grey area is when it comes to unvaccinated children whose parent had made the decision for them.
“By reducing the entire geopolitical crisis to the story of a Hitler-like dictator conquering a hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism, you can mobilize public opinion behind intervention in a way that an honest accounting of the situation could not.”
The ones who want to use the Hitler-like dictator story with Putin as dictator seem to have the story backwards. Instead of Putin as a Hitler-like dictator, the real dictator was a deep-state team led by VP Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland as they led a coup against a “hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism.” The opportunity in 2014 was adding Ukraine to their long list of their other American colonies around the world. The Hitler-like dictator thing works because the American deep-state, true to form, used actual Nazis to storm the parliament to install Nuland’s hand-picked President. Having a new colony was quite profitable, just ask Hunter Biden as VP Joe was all but running the new regime. They managed to move their Nazis into renegade militias within the Ukraine military plus infiltrate the civilian police force for future muscle. But the larger opportunity here was to bring in NATO, officially or unofficially to place offensive weapons on the Russian border. The NATO weapons would have a travel time to Moscow of 10 minutes or less, the equivalent of the Soviet Union placing their missiles in Cuba.
The Russian speaking people of the Crimea and Donbas knew who the Nazis were as the new Nazi regime banned the Russian language and shut down the Russian speaking media. Crimea people voted to become part of Russia while the Donbas region refused to recognize the American led coup by declaring their independence. The Nazis tried in 2015 to take Donbas by force but failed. The Nazis continued to attack Donbas over the next 8 years killing over 14,000 people. The United States continued pouring weapons and money into Ukraine for years intensifying the fighting. We were and are still arming and training these Nazis. This Nazi story is not from Russia but coming from the West:
Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are on the March in Ukraine
Russia broke the back of Hitler’s Nazi empire but it cost Russia 25 million dead. Now they are forced to fight Nazis again, this time, American funded and trained Nazis, on the Russian border no less. Some red lines have been crossed. Nazis on the Russian border is one of them, NATO weapons pointed at Russia from Ukraine is another.
The United States is a dangerous empire that does not like to be told ‘no’. Russia is the first major power to tell the United States deep-state ‘no’ by using force to de-nazify the CIA’s latest military project along with its US supplied weapons; expect a temper tantrum. So much for the Bailey.
Are you ready to end the world to save the CIA project? Now that’s a real Motte.
I appreciate the explanation of motte and bailey, since this mystified me as well (the rhetorical device; being a keen castle nerd in my teen I am very familiar with the medieval usage).
The rest seems self-evidently obvious to me, or to any other thoughtful person who can stand being honest at least in his private thoughts. I don't like Putin, but given Russia's history he's probably better than we have any reason to expect, and we shouldn't be too surprised when he resorts to armed force to achieve his ends. After all, he's done it before.
As have we, with less excuse and a hell of a lot more tedious moralizing.
Hard not to find you as cynical as the people you criticize. For example, why does your historical perspective begins with Napoleon? Surely, Europe has had to deal with Peter the Great earlier and was also invaded by the Khan from the East. By that standard, it should be justified to want to control Ukraine no?
The contrarian shtick wears thin at moments like this.
The US is not intervening militarily and will not be intervening for the obvious reason that Russia has 3000 nuclear warheads pointed at us. The “consent” that is being “manufactured” is that of a global coalition applying stiff sanctions that are designed to bring Russia to heel, just as they were used against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. These sanctions are not only necessary, they are morally urgent and obligatory in the face of the relentless shelling of a civilian population.
All of the arguments you are making could easily be made in the case of any imperialist regime in history. After all, wasn’t Apartheid itself in the interests of De Clerk and white South Africans? Isn’it it unfair not to take those interests into account? “Sure, I’m not excusing apartheid itself, but the one-sided narrative presents De Clerk as some kind of monster!” Didn’t the Confederacy have vital interests that were being ignored in the Northern media’s rush to war? Didn’t Serbia have vital interests that we ignore when we discuss the ethic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina?”
At a certain point contrarianism lapses into a kind of nihilism. There seems to be a contingent that is so invested in being smarter than their journalistic peers that they race to be the first one to say “well, actually” in the face of what a five-year old child would recognize as an atrocity. The impulse is born of nothing more than professional ressentiment and loathing. Glenn Greenwald was once a great journalist who has been poisoned by hatred for his peers and it has turned him into a toady for oligarchs. I pity him.
Sometimes, the mainstream “narrative” is simple moral decency. Slavery, genocide, mass rape and sterilization, the bombing of civilian populations — these things are not opportunities to show how much smarter you are than the next asshole on Substack. The greatest writers of the 20th century — Orwell, Camus — did not see that century’s atrocities as opportunities to be more clever or contrarian than their peers.
If anything, the Putin-apologist left resembles nothing *more* than the COVID-policing left in its reflexive repudiation of the obvious.
how dare you use dispassionate, intelligent reason and logic to provide context and give an accurate assessment of all factors that led to this moment...u are def an evil fascist nazi white-supremacist bigot ;)
One thing I really liked about Trump in retrospect is that he didn't try to apply a kindergarten "good guys versus bad guys" frame on geopolitics. He created endless controversies with it, but my reading was that he just looked at everything in terms of self-interests and negotiating postures. So despite all of his raging about how we were "getting ripped off" on the world stage, it always came with a degree of explicit respect for how "smart" the leaders of those countries ripping us off were.
I would say the same thing about this situation. It doesn't really do anyone any good to look at geopolitical conflicts in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys"; that's just jingoist propaganda meant to lure us into supporting wars. Better to just try to understand that it's more important to understand geopolitics in terms of a variety of players all acting in their own self-interests, which are in conflict, to an extent existentially, and that other than pure military dominance, which is often impossible or at least more costly than anyone wants to bear, negotiation in the only path to maintaining peace.
And thank you for the link to the Niccolo Soldo article. It's one of the best explanations I've seen, in both thought and organization. It was well worth the read.
Oh, thank goodness, some sanity. I've been questioning my subscriptions to a couple of other substacks today. As thoughtful and nuanced as they've been about COVID and other things, they seem to have lost their minds about this. One just called the readership that didn't agree with him "Putin apologists." Another published a wholly emotional story today that admittedly tugs at the heart strings but is sadly one small blip of horror in a larger horrific world after publishing some ridiculousness about how the US needs to find itself so we once again can become "interested" in war. And everyone, in all these conversations, seems to have forgotten three little words that should be at the front of all our minds: "mutually assured destruction." This isn't going to fight poorly armed "brown" people in the desert. Even if Putin is crazy and Hitler, he's crazy and Hitler with his finger on the button of a whole lot of nukes, and our leaders and the rest of us would be wise to remember that. (Conversely, if he's not crazy and Hitler, we can find a way to peacefully end this with as little death and destruction as possible, and we should be looking for that, or demanding our leaders look for that, rather than slinging insults at each other.)
If you ask any historian what led to German agression in WW2 every single one would point to the Versailles treaty as a singificant cause.
Hardly any would say it justified the rise of Nazism or the horrors that spawned from that monstrosity.
It was important to factor this lesson in the post world war 2 conditions so it wouldn't happen again (and to build up former foes to fight former allies).
Yet somehow this similar desire to understand motives of bad actors is verboten currently.
The lack of this understanding is leading to ever more dangerous posturing. To the point I truly believe we are currently the closest we've ever been to nuclear war.
For me personally, I feel utter sadness for the Ukrainians. They like a toy are being torn apart by two children who neither wants the other to have.
Well, he is a monster; poisoning your opponents with radioactive sweetening of their tea etc. (and managing to kill UK citizens on UK soil) is bad. On the other hand, getting away with it is a pretty good lesson, too.
His psychology? Well, two elder infant brothers died during the siege of Leningrad before his birth may create a certain atmosphere in the bosom of one's family that survival at any cost and fuck anyone who gets in your way is a good life motto.
And everyone in Eastern Europe has pretty stark family memories of what happens when you're not strong enough to protect yourself against outsiders. My parents were born here and I am, as the soldier in the fairytale said, no longer young. My grandma was born 120 years ago and fled Ukraine as a young woman during the chaos of war, and my mother's great-uncle, his wife and four adult children were later murdered by the Nazis in Uman in 1942, during another war, and their blood does indeed still cry out to me from the ground, and I hear it, all the way here in the US where I'm as American as they come and speak none of the ancestral languages.
Those oligarchs learned that lesson fer shure. The only way you save yourself and your family is with power, and power comes from resources, the more the better. None of them are fools. They are all shaped by horrors.
I found the argument against citing one’s bona fides as a Dem voter (or left of center activist) interesting. Because I do do this sometimes in giving perspective or credibility to my argument (or in some cases, sadly, as what seems like a necessary preemptive or corrective). My sense is there are at least two reasons implied in the post why one shouldn’t do this. One, because, at least in a normative sense, whether one has ever voted for any Republicans before shouldn’t matter and has nothing to do with the actual rigor of one’s argument or the quality of the facts one is marshaling in support. Second, I can see how implicitly acceding to the notion that only those with pure enough backgrounds as Dems have standing to be heard or taken seriously, might further exacerbate siloed realities on the left and the sense anyone less pure is alien and solely a bad faith antagonist with nothing of substance to contribute.
On the other hand, it’s distressingly common to see people so blinkered, so invested personally, socially, emotionally, in Team Blue, their discomfort with any cognitive dissonance so great, almost the only way past their initial dismissals is to remind them (or establish) what’s simply the truth: I have literally never once voted for s Republican (or, I’ve helped organize dozens of voter reg trips to urban Philly; or, I’ve spent a Summer inside NYCHA buildings listening to residents and helping to organize support for a reasonable reform DA). Even close friends will situationally try to forget this in dismissing out of hand a sound argument. People who have never met me will think it suffices to just label me a right-winger and spray some drive-by epithets.
Sometimes it helps to be specific and give people a clear idea of what your values are and what experiences have informed them.
I’d prefer we could all let the quality of our arguments stand on their own. But we are so far from that ideal already. And, sometimes, in a more general, quotidian sense as well as re: politics, people simply want to be reassured you get where they’re coming from, have also seen what they’ve seen, and are not merely seeking to import and impose antagonistic views, ignorant or naive of their perspective and experience (or, in this context, laden with all of the opposite biases, blindspots, and assumptions of an ideological conservative or partisan Republican).
I’ve had to contend with plenty of friends and others immediately claiming something I’m saying is merely “a Republican talking point”. Shaddi Hamid put it well when he wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic, about the very real, dangerous, cruel use of race as a major, even dominant factor in rationing limited resources in public health resources: claiming something is just a GOP talking point when that something is true is gaslighting. I also point this out all the time: I don’t care if something is (also) being used somewhere else as a Republican talking point. I only care if it’s true or not (and sometimes add: if you truly think actual right-wing sources are so odious, even dangerous, stop doing and saying things that give them such persuasive talking points!) Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin put it simply but brilliantly: “If a bigot says to me ‘the sun is shining’, I’ll say ‘yes, the sun is shining’, because I want to tell the truth.” No one has had a good rejoinder to this.
So I guess I try to use a hybrid approach: truth, objectively verifiable facts, and the quality of one’s argument are all that really matter. But I find it much easier to land the arguments in the paragraph above (and substantive info about an issue) when I’ve established or reminded someone I’ve never been right-wing partisan or ideologue. And that I’m not some guy whose angle is “at some point in the past I was a Democrat, so please ignore the fact I’m using that to grift or shill for the Republicans now”.
People (even some of your actual friends!) will dismiss and try to ridicule anything you say about politics, if they can get away with it, solely on the basis of trying to lump you in with the tribal out group. I get the distant echos of “are you now or have you ever been a communist?” We don’t want Neo-McCarthyist litmus tests about one’s standing to speak or participate in society. I just think that, when included honestly, adding some context and perspective re: shared values and how you came to a certain argument can be helpful in finding common ground and making a point. Of course I’m also happy to talk in good faith with anyone who does vote Republican or hold more right of center views, to see where we agree and what we have in common. But many people won’t. I’ve also been honest that, had I been a resident of Virginia last Fall, I would’ve voted for the Republican candidates for statewide office. I’ve also told friends I’m now open to considering reasonable Republicans in upcoming elections if I find a Dem candidate unacceptable. That’s sincere - but it’s also an attempt to shock them into realizing how illiberal and intolerant, even hateful and authoritarian the party we’ve poured so much energy into supporting has become.
I'm intra-cognitively fighting tooth & nail to stay outside the emotionality of this war & you just helped with that. Which is why, I guess, you're writing on Substack and not as a staffer on the Guardian or the NYT.
I hate to be the guy pointing this out but you said “motte” more than once when you meant Bailey. To simplify, consider the strawman argument the Bailey, because straw is grown in the bailey. The strong argument rests in the motte, made of stone and surrounded by a MOAT. It a ridiculously easy mistake to make because no one ever uses motte and bailey in normal language.
I don’t have an easy way to copy/paste the examples here but if you read back through your essay I think you’ll see where you made the switch. There aren’t “mottes“ everywhere, there are baileys everywhere.
Anyway, don’t want you getting misquoted or harangued by bad faith nudniks on Twitter.
Thank you for the motte and bailey metaphor!
Appreciate your work.
Is there a link to your argument about unvaccinated people having the right to overwhelm hospitals (if that is your argument)? I was okay with people refusing the vaccine but had trouble when it came to deciding access to intensive care. I thought it equitable that if people refused the vaccine, they should be made to wait for treatment if vaccinated people needed urgent treatment and resources were limited. The really grey area is when it comes to unvaccinated children whose parent had made the decision for them.
“By reducing the entire geopolitical crisis to the story of a Hitler-like dictator conquering a hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism, you can mobilize public opinion behind intervention in a way that an honest accounting of the situation could not.”
The ones who want to use the Hitler-like dictator story with Putin as dictator seem to have the story backwards. Instead of Putin as a Hitler-like dictator, the real dictator was a deep-state team led by VP Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland as they led a coup against a “hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism.” The opportunity in 2014 was adding Ukraine to their long list of their other American colonies around the world. The Hitler-like dictator thing works because the American deep-state, true to form, used actual Nazis to storm the parliament to install Nuland’s hand-picked President. Having a new colony was quite profitable, just ask Hunter Biden as VP Joe was all but running the new regime. They managed to move their Nazis into renegade militias within the Ukraine military plus infiltrate the civilian police force for future muscle. But the larger opportunity here was to bring in NATO, officially or unofficially to place offensive weapons on the Russian border. The NATO weapons would have a travel time to Moscow of 10 minutes or less, the equivalent of the Soviet Union placing their missiles in Cuba.
The Russian speaking people of the Crimea and Donbas knew who the Nazis were as the new Nazi regime banned the Russian language and shut down the Russian speaking media. Crimea people voted to become part of Russia while the Donbas region refused to recognize the American led coup by declaring their independence. The Nazis tried in 2015 to take Donbas by force but failed. The Nazis continued to attack Donbas over the next 8 years killing over 14,000 people. The United States continued pouring weapons and money into Ukraine for years intensifying the fighting. We were and are still arming and training these Nazis. This Nazi story is not from Russia but coming from the West:
Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are on the March in Ukraine
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine/
Russia broke the back of Hitler’s Nazi empire but it cost Russia 25 million dead. Now they are forced to fight Nazis again, this time, American funded and trained Nazis, on the Russian border no less. Some red lines have been crossed. Nazis on the Russian border is one of them, NATO weapons pointed at Russia from Ukraine is another.
The United States is a dangerous empire that does not like to be told ‘no’. Russia is the first major power to tell the United States deep-state ‘no’ by using force to de-nazify the CIA’s latest military project along with its US supplied weapons; expect a temper tantrum. So much for the Bailey.
Are you ready to end the world to save the CIA project? Now that’s a real Motte.
Alayna
You're really very good at this, Leighton.
I appreciate the explanation of motte and bailey, since this mystified me as well (the rhetorical device; being a keen castle nerd in my teen I am very familiar with the medieval usage).
The rest seems self-evidently obvious to me, or to any other thoughtful person who can stand being honest at least in his private thoughts. I don't like Putin, but given Russia's history he's probably better than we have any reason to expect, and we shouldn't be too surprised when he resorts to armed force to achieve his ends. After all, he's done it before.
As have we, with less excuse and a hell of a lot more tedious moralizing.
Great article! Why didn't Europe see this coming, and work to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels?
Hard not to find you as cynical as the people you criticize. For example, why does your historical perspective begins with Napoleon? Surely, Europe has had to deal with Peter the Great earlier and was also invaded by the Khan from the East. By that standard, it should be justified to want to control Ukraine no?
The contrarian shtick wears thin at moments like this.
The US is not intervening militarily and will not be intervening for the obvious reason that Russia has 3000 nuclear warheads pointed at us. The “consent” that is being “manufactured” is that of a global coalition applying stiff sanctions that are designed to bring Russia to heel, just as they were used against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. These sanctions are not only necessary, they are morally urgent and obligatory in the face of the relentless shelling of a civilian population.
All of the arguments you are making could easily be made in the case of any imperialist regime in history. After all, wasn’t Apartheid itself in the interests of De Clerk and white South Africans? Isn’it it unfair not to take those interests into account? “Sure, I’m not excusing apartheid itself, but the one-sided narrative presents De Clerk as some kind of monster!” Didn’t the Confederacy have vital interests that were being ignored in the Northern media’s rush to war? Didn’t Serbia have vital interests that we ignore when we discuss the ethic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina?”
At a certain point contrarianism lapses into a kind of nihilism. There seems to be a contingent that is so invested in being smarter than their journalistic peers that they race to be the first one to say “well, actually” in the face of what a five-year old child would recognize as an atrocity. The impulse is born of nothing more than professional ressentiment and loathing. Glenn Greenwald was once a great journalist who has been poisoned by hatred for his peers and it has turned him into a toady for oligarchs. I pity him.
Sometimes, the mainstream “narrative” is simple moral decency. Slavery, genocide, mass rape and sterilization, the bombing of civilian populations — these things are not opportunities to show how much smarter you are than the next asshole on Substack. The greatest writers of the 20th century — Orwell, Camus — did not see that century’s atrocities as opportunities to be more clever or contrarian than their peers.
If anything, the Putin-apologist left resembles nothing *more* than the COVID-policing left in its reflexive repudiation of the obvious.