Contra Cold War Redux: Introduction
I am trying to understand how a war started and how it can be stopped with minimal further loss of life and face to both sides.
‘Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations; just as it is indifferent towards the state itself, so the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so. The nation as an organic entity can neither be increased nor reduced by changes in states; the world as a whole can neither win nor lose from them.’—Ludwig von Mises (1919)
‘In the Liberal Social Philosophy the human mind becomes aware of the overcoming of the principle of violence by the principle of peace. In this philosophy for the first time humanity gives itself an account of its actions. It tears away the romantic nimbus with which the exercise of power had been surrounded. War, it teaches, is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.’—Ludwig von Mises (1922)
War is the enemy of humanity, as in it others whom are no less human than us1 are dehumanised on a mass scale and human life is destroyed on a mass scale. Whilst wars in pre-modern times were fought between professionals, in modern times they have been democratised and fought between populations. ‘Total war’ means indiscriminate violence upon civilians and combatants not just because modern weapons of war are so indiscriminate, but because when the enemy is another nation instead of merely another military the difference between civilians and combatants is no longer coherent.
War is the enemy of morality, as in it we collectively commit acts which individually we would revolt against with our whole being. In war, to quote the American general William T. Sherman, we assert the right to ‘take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper,’ and assert that ‘all who do not aid us are enemies...we will not account to them for our acts.’2 How can this psychopathic rationale be reconciled with, say, the Golden Rule, or any of our other moral intuitions? Because, to quote ‘Cump’ once more, ‘War is hell’? Well, war is indeed hell, but it is hell because of the immoral choices of human beings like Cump, not because of some amoral force called ‘war’ which made them shoot the family dog, steal the family silver, set the family house on fire, and string up any suspected bushwhackers, to say nothing of slaughtering strangers en masse over a flag.
War is the enemy of liberty and justice, as in it the laws which guarantee both are leveled in the name of order, at first on the front lines to fight the enemy and at last on the home front to fight dissent. As one of many potential examples of the latter, consider how many Americans know that the Supreme Court’s famous caveat to the First Amendment from Schenck vs. United States—‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’—was, as a matter of fact, not actually in reference to shouting fire in a crowded theater, whether literally or metaphorically, but merely to anti-draft protestors’ exercise of their First-Amendment rights during the First World War.
Every major war in American history, from the War of 1812 to the War on Terror, has been an anti-constitutional war in which the executive branch of the U.S. government usurped the powers of the other branches and the U.S. government usurped the powers of the States.3 Indeed, these U.S. of A. are in a constant state of emergency, wherein Presidents, prince-like, go to war at will—an outcome which would have been unthinkable to the Founding Fathers, who separated the powers to declare and make war between the legislature and executive, respectively, and were divided on whether a ‘standing army’ should even exist. Without a vigorous political culture of small-r republican virtue and/or small-d democratic vigilance—neither of which apply to we the American people any longer—powers arrogated under exigent circumstances tend not remain exceptions but instead tend to become precedents.
War is the enemy of the family—the most important institution for a culture and civilisation to conserve if it wishes to survive—as well as community. If war is organised mass-murder and the mass-manufacture of corpses, it must be remembered that with the manufacture of each corpse is the manufacture of a widow, an orphan, or a parent who has lost a child (a fate that is quite literally unspeakable as there is no word for it in the English language). ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.’
Whenever I think of the human cost of war, I think of Gone with the Wind. When the women and children of Atlanta are crowding outside the presses for news after the Battle of Gettysburg—adapted so movingly in the film—Scarlett O’Hara, surrounded by bereaved women and children bewailing their husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers, reads the casualty lists, seeing name after name of ‘those boys with whom she had grown up, danced, kissed,’ until she cannot bear to read any more. Or when Scarlett, amidst the Siege of Atlanta, realises that the names of places she had known were ‘never names of places anymore,’ but were now ‘names of graves where friends lay buried, names of tangled underbrush and thick woods where bodies rotted unburied.’ Or, a song that Scarlett sings which the author, Margaret Mitchell, had heard from her mother as a lullaby:
Into a ward of whitewashed walls
Where the dead and dying lay
Wounded with bayonets, shells, and balls
Somebody’s darling was borne one day.
Somebody’s darling! So young and brave!
Wearing still on his pale, sweet face
Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave
The lingering light of his boyhood’s grace.
There are many more examples from that book,4 such as when Scarlett sees Ashley’s father, the silver-haired John Wilkes, summoned with the militia to make a last stand outside the city, riding the strawberry-haired Nellie, ‘Beatrice Tarleton’s treasured darling,’ daintily prancing down the street like a lady. ‘Perhaps I am too old to march, but not to ride and shoot,’ he tells Scarlett. ‘And Mrs. Tarleton so kindly lent me Nellie, so I am well-mounted. I hope nothing happens to Nellie, for if something should happen to her, I could never go home and face Mrs. Tarleton. Nellie was the last horse she had left.’ Shortly thereafter, Uncle Henry, who was also with the militia, tells Scarlett that Mr. Wilkes had been killed. ‘He was a brave man, Scarlett…And a good soldier for all his years. A shell got him. Came right down on him and his horse. Tore the horse’s... I shot the horse myself, poor creature. A fine little mare she was. You’d better write Mrs. Tarleton about that, too. She set a store on that mare.’
War is the enemy of the environment: ‘War is not Green.’ The mass-destruction of modern warfare eradicates entire ecosystems, causes the extinction of indigenous species, and spreads invasive species. War poisons the water, the soil, and the air. Waste-dumping is one of the camp-followers of war. The military-industrial complex, even in peacetime, is one of the single largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and in wartime it is obviously even worse. By now, everyone should know that the planet is unnaturally warming from an excess of these greenhouse gases and that this is destabilising ecosystems around the world in ways that are affecting us and that will continue to affect us. For example, the ‘Arab Spring,’ whence came the devastating civil wars in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt—and wherefore came the diabolical Islamic State and the refugee crisis in Europe—began with a famine. Climate change is predicted to create more of such famines, and thus more of such conflicts and crises. Why, such a famine and such a war are happening right now in Somalia, a country which these U.S. of A. have also been bombing for the past 15 years in violation of its own national law (has Congress declared war on Somalia?) as well as international law (has the UN Security Council authorised the use of force against Somalia?). On the same day that Russia invaded Ukraine, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report, which was forgotten immediately amid the alarmism over ‘World War III.’ Even though the IPCC’s report argued that the effects of climate change are already worse than expected and urged immediate action to prevent further permanent damage to our planet, the USA and its allies have been all but bribing fossil-fuel businesses to drill for even more oil and gas in order to undercut Russia’s economy.
War debases the victorious and the vanquished alike. Defeat is obviously debasing, as blood and treasure are lost for naught, but victory debases with the spoils of the ‘treasury of virtue’—crusading zeal, pietistic cant, and an overweening sense of divine favour. The Romans, to remain humble, ceremoniously reminded themselves of their own mortality upon their military victories: Memento Mori. What, however, have the Yanks been telling themselves upon their military victories: ‘Remember thou art mortal’ or ‘Thou shalt be as gods’? The one war in American history which did not heighten our hubris was Vietnam, whereafter we were humbled (even humiliated) for the better, however briefly. ‘By God,’ exclaimed Pres. H.W. Bush after the successful end of the 1991 Iraq War, ‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!’
War, therefore, is unhealthy for every tradition and institution of civilised society, yet ‘War is the health of the State.’ It is not just that war concentrates more money and more power in the state, although of course it does (‘weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes not need, just feed the war cannibal animal…’) It is that in war the communities that exist apart from the state and are our sources of identity are nationalised and militarised—that is, either remade or replaced. The identities from these communities are authentic, as they are voluntary, but the identity that comes from the state is artificial, as it is derived from coercion. ‘State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters,’ wrote Nietzsche. ‘Coldly it tells lie too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” This is a lie!’ he exclaimed:
It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them ‘state’: they hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them. Where there is still a people, it does not understand the state and hates it as the evil eye and the sign against customs and rights.
This sign I give you: every people speaks its language of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights. But the state tells lies in all the languages of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies—and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites easily. Even its entrails are false. Confusion of tongues of good and evil: this sign I give you as the sign of the state. Verily, this sign signifies the will to death. Verily, it beckons to the preachers of death.
Now, I may be anti-war, but I am a realist, not a pacifist. My philosophy on war is derived from the Aristotelian-Augustinian ‘just war’ theory, which defines ‘justice to war’ (jus ad bellum) and ‘justice in war’ (jus in bello). My senior thesis in college was an application of just-war theory to the Peloponnesian War, which was the first historically documented war in Western history.
For a war to be a just war, it must have a ‘just cause’ (i.e. be defensive or immediately preemptive) and it must only be waged between militaries (not civilians). These ancient philosophers, pagan and patristic alike, knew that war has always and will always be a part of human history, but sought to limit it as much as reasonably possible. Some Christian philosophers whom I respect, such as Erasmus, Leo Tolstoy, and the Protestants Alexander Campbell, Tolbert Fanning, and David Lipscomb, were staunch pacifists, and whilst I have learned much from them, my position is still that force can be used in self-defence as long as it is proportionate to the offensive force. I do not say that it is immoral to be a pacifist (Ron Maxwell’s film ‘Copperhead’ exemplifies the moral and even physical courage of pacifist dissent in wartime), but nor do I say that it is immoral to defend oneself individually or collectively. War is an evil, and whilst ‘necessary evil’ is not an oxymoron so long as we are out of Eden, we must be able to distinguish between a war that is necessary and a war that is just evil.
In modern times, this just-war theory has essentially been codified into international law through the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions.
Neither am I anti-military.5 My grandfather, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who was both a graduate and a professor at West Point, had a painting of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s famous ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ speech at West Point which he left to me. The eponymous virtues of Gen. MacArthur’s speech are necessary in wartime and should be remembered even in peacetime. It must also be remembered, however, that they are neither intrinsically good nor evil. On defence, they are virtues; on offence, they are vices. Indeed, Gen. MacArthur’s enemies in the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese, believed in duty, honour, country as much if not more so than their American enemies did. The Imperial Germans who were Gen. MacArthur’s enemies in the First World War believed in duty, honour, country as well, and who can say who was right and who was wrong in that futile war? Gen. MacArthur, like most contemplative and conscientious military men who have been in combat, was not a ‘warmonger.’ ‘On the contrary,’ he stated in this speech, ‘the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for her must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”’
Enough prologue: I needed to establish and elaborate on my anti-war bona fides because I am about to make an argument that pro-war journos and pols would, without any awareness of the irony, claim is an apologia for a war. The truth is that I am trying to understand how a war started and how it can be stopped with minimal further loss of life and face to both sides.
On 24 February, Russia invaded Ukraine. Is this a violation of jus ad bellum, which defines a just war as one which is defensive or immediately preemptive? Perhaps, but from Russia’s point of view, this war is defensive. Specifically, Russia invaded Ukraine not to start a war but to end a war—the 8-year Ukrainian war on the Russian population in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine which had then killed 14,000 people.
Is Russia's invasion a violation of jus in bello, which defines a just war as one in which civilians are not deliberately targeted and collateral damage is kept to a minimum? (Indeed, have there not been reports of Russian war crimes, such as the bombing of a maternity hospital and theater in Mariupol?) Perhaps, but I would counsel scepticism, as the USA and its proxies have a history of weaponising the ‘war crimes’ of others in order to escalate a war. In some extremely shocking incidents, American proxies (like the most militant ‘Syrian rebels’) have even committed ‘false-flag attacks’ with chemical weapons in an attempt to trigger American intervention (cf. Aaron Maté’s importunate investigation of the OPCW cover-up at The Grayzone). In the Internet age, when social media is a front for information warfare, this tactic is more effective than ever, as know-nothing Americans have knee-jerk reactions to images without ever putting anything into context or following up on the facts. This has already happened in Ukraine, but pro-war American journos and pols have ignored the voices of the ‘unworthy victims’ whom have undermined the official stories about the bombing of the hospital and the theater.
Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a violation of the UN Charter, which mandates that all disputes between member states be settled peacefully (articles 2, 33, and 52) and permits military action only in self-defence or to preempt imminent military action (article 51)? Perhaps, but from Russia’s point of view, this war is just according to international law: Russia is defending duly recognised allies (the peoples’ republics formed by the pro-Russia population in southern and eastern Ukraine after the anti-Russia regime change in 2014) from Ukraine’s imminent military aggression after exhausting attempts at peaceful settlement (Minsk I and II).
Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when in exchange for Ukraine’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty the USA, UK, and Russia agreed ‘to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine’? Perhaps, but from Russia’s point of view, it is absurd to interpret that agreement as binding the parties in perpetuity and in all cases whatsoever, regardless of subsequent events in or involving Ukraine. If Ukraine were a Russian proxy rather than an Anglo-American proxy, which Russia was using to threaten Anglo-American national security as the USA and UK are using Ukraine to threaten Russian national security, is anyone such a simpleton that he/she would believe that the USA and UK would do nothing out of respect for the Budapest Memorandum?
Moreover, the USA also violated the ‘sovereignty and independence’ of Ukraine when in 2014 it helped to finance and direct the Euromaidan regime change—a coup d'état, a pütsch, a revolución—which, whatever else one may call it, effectively removed the duly elected head of state and ministry which was relatively pro-Russia and replaced them with an unelected head of state and ministry that was objectively anti-Russia. The violation of Ukraine’s ‘sovereignty and independence’ through overt and covert American support for the Euromaidan—wherefore the southern and eastern regions of the country broke away from Kiev and asked to be reunited with Russia—effectively violated Ukraine’s ‘existing borders.’
The USA’s interference in the Ukrainian revolution was not just a violation of the Budapest Memorandum, but of the UN Charter itself, which prohibits member states from violating the sovereignty of other member states. The only exception is the ‘responsibility to protect’ in the event of ‘genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.’ Now, whatever one’s opinion of the pre-Euromaidan regime in Kiev, it did not qualify for intervention under these standards of international law. Viktor Yanukovych was no Slobodan Milošević or Saddam Hussein.
The USA, UK, and Russia also agreed in the Budapest Memorandum ‘to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty.’ Was the European Union’s ultimatum to Ukraine that in order to become an ‘associate’ member it must impose draconian austerity measures and isolate itself from its largest and oldest trading partner not a form of ‘economic coercion’ which EU members party to the Budapest Memorandum had foresworn? Was diplomatically isolating and ignoring Viktor Yanukovych when he tried to negotiate with the EU a form of ‘economic coercion’? Not absolute, but arguable, to be sure.
Last, but not least, Ukraine, in not just refusing to recognise the independence of the southern and eastern regions of the country which seceded after the regime change in Kiev, but in actually warring on those regions—with American material and moral support—has also violated the UN Charter, which grants all peoples the right of self-determination (articles 1 and 55). This is the ‘unalienable right’ for which Americans give thanks—nominally, at least—every Fourth of July.
Nevertheless, after years of the USA arming Ukraine to war on its own people (beginning with ‘The Donald’ in 2018) and using the prospect of NATO military expansion into Ukraine to threaten Russia’s national security (beginning with ‘Dubya’ in 2008), Vladimir Putin finally reacted by invading Ukraine to arrest the former and preempt the latter. He may be ‘mad’ in the psychological sense of the word, but not in the psychiatric.
The American-led Western reaction to this invasion has been staggering in its sheer sanctimony. The isolation of Russia politically and economically from the West was predictable, but the thuggish assault on Russian culture (coleslaw and sauerkraut ‘Liberty Cabbage,’ French fries ‘Freedom Fries’ all over again) and Russian foreign nationals is truly totalitarian in how it is voluntarily and spontaneously coordinated across public and private institutions and individuals. Before Pres. Brandon Biden banned Russian vodka—the new Cuban cigars?—stores were already virtue-signaling by de-shelving it themselves.6
You would never suspect that these U.S. of A. have—for the past eight years, through three successive presidential administrations, and in concert with the UK—aided through arms deals and logistical support the Saudi-led coalition’s war on Yemen, which the UN has pronounced ‘the world's worst humanitarian crisis.’ The latest UN report estimates that the death toll in this conflict will rise to 377,000 this year, 60% of which will be children under the age of five whom are most vulnerable to the famine and disease caused by the bombing and embargoing of Yemen (already one of the world’s poorest countries) by the Saudis with American aid. UNICEF puts it even more starkly: Every ten minutes a Yemeni child under the age of five—that is my daughter’s age—dies of preventable causes from the war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already received more coverage and been more consequential for the former than the eight-year Saudi-American bombing campaign of one of the world's poorest countries, where the equivalent of the 2017 Las Vegas mass-shooting ‘happens to us every night.’
How is this possible? Who can stand this? I, for one, cannot. If I may be so bold, how dare Americans point their fingers and shake their fists at the Slavic bogeyman of Vladimir Putin when the representatives whom we have elected continue to perpetrate this atrocity? (The Biden-Harris administration’s announcement that it was ending ‘offensive’ aid in the Saudi-American war on Yemen turned out to be nothing more than an all-too-typically-cynical bureaucratic redefinition of American aid to the Saudis as ‘defensive.’)
A clue to the hypocritical reaction is the fact that Ukrainians, unlike Yemenis, are ‘people who look and live like us,’ as the former head of the Joint Forces of Command put it on the BBC in an appeal for NATO intervention. (Personally, I do not identify with the people from a country the primary exports of which are mail-order brides, e-scammers, and skinheads, even if we do have the same pigmentation of skin, hair, and eye.)
A shower-epiphany from the host of a news show at the Daily Wire revealed more about his ignorance of history than insight into current events: ‘It just occurred to me that this is the first major war between civilized nations in my lifetime.’ Whoa, bro…
A correspondent on ITV News opined, ‘Now the unthinkable has happened, and this is not a developing Third-World nation—this is Europe!’
‘This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, where they’ve seen conflict raging for decades,’ explained a correspondent for CBS News. ‘This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city where you wouldn’t expect that.’
The British host of a news show on Al-Jazeera, commenting on footage of Ukrainian refugees, noted that ‘these are prosperous, middle-class people,’ ‘not, obviously refugees,’ ‘they look like any European family.’
In the British newspaper The Telegraph, a former MP remarked, ‘They seem so like us. That it is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.’ According to the Telegraph writer, this war was ‘an attack on civilisation itself’—unlike our civilised Arab allies’ attacks on barbaric Yemeni weddings, funerals, and schools.
I assume that they mean well, but I must admit that the ignorance and impudence of the average American sickens me. True patriots (who are proud of their country for what it does) hate injustice in their own country more than anywhere else, unlike nationalists (who are proud of their country no matter what it does). Patriotism, like love, is rooted in the personal and the particular; it is the love of one’s own. Nationalism unites the love of oneself with the hatred of the other.
Nationalism is what Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind means when he writes to his wife from the war front, ‘We have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves, believing that one of us could whip a dozen Yankees, believing that King Cotton could rule the world. Betrayed, too, by words and catchphrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered.’ Ashley movingly illustrates the difference between nationalism and patriotism. ‘And so when I lie on my blanket and look up at the stars and say, “What are you fighting for?” I think of States’ rights and cotton and the darkies and the Yankees whom we have been bred up to hate, and I know that none of it is the reason why I am fighting,’ he confesses. ‘Instead, I see Twelve Oaks,’ he continues, referring to his plantation home, tenderly describing the house, the land, and the scenes of life therefrom as ‘symbols of the kind of life I love.’ Ashley distinguishes ‘patriotism, love of home and country’ from ‘love of death or misery or glory,’ avowing that he has ‘no hatred of anyone’ and is ‘fighting for the old days, the old ways I love so much but which, I fear, are now gone forever, no matter how the die may fall.’ Indeed, like a true patriot, Ashley understood that war is a revolutionary state and that ‘win or lose, we lose just the same,’ for ‘if we win this war and have the Cotton Kingdom of our dreams, we still have lost, for we will become a different people and the old quiet ways will go…And if we lose, Melanie, if we lose!’
Americans are not traditional patriots like Ashley, though neither are they garden-variety ethnic nationalists who paganly worship ‘blood and soil’ like the Ukrainians. Americans are, like the Jacobins and the Bolshevists, ideological nationalists who believe that ‘the American idea’ is self-evidently superior and will revolutionise (or, to use the puritanical parlance of the Pilgrims, ‘redeem’) the world. Whilst the Jacobins and the Bolshevists were atheists who believed that ‘God is on the side of the biggest battalions,’ Americans believe that God has chosen them (with the Zionists as grandfathered-in auxiliaries) as the bearers of his will.
All of this is to say nothing of the American invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the ‘dirty wars’ in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan (not one of which was defensive or preemptive, not one of which had the authorisation of the UN Security Council, and not one of which was any less illegal or immoral than Russia’s war in Ukraine). Of course, Americans who have repudiated those wars have every right to their opinion in this case, but I do not detect principled anti-war politics in the American reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the contrary, what I detect is a massive ratcheting up of the irresponsible war-mongering from the same class of Americans who ‘won the Cold War’ but ‘lost the peace.’
For example, Hillary ‘we came, we saw, he died’ Clinton (one of the few Blue-Teamers who has supported every one of the aforementioned illegal American wars) recently appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show (one of the worst peddlers of the RussiaGate conspiracy theory which originated with disinfo/misinfo disseminated by Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign). There, on national television, Ms. Clinton ‘sadly’ called for ‘economic pain’ on ‘the Russian people’ through the American-led sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts. Does Ms. Clinton even know that she just called for ‘collective punishment,’ which is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949? Does she even care?
Moreover, in an astonishing statement which indicates the contempt that she must have for the intelligence and character of MSNBC viewers, Ms. Clinton recommended a policy of supporting a Ukrainian insurgency with ‘arms, advice, and advisors,’ as, according to her, ‘a lot of countries’ did when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan 1979-1989. ‘A very motivated, funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan,’ she said. Of course, Ms. Clinton is not going to acknowledge that the Americans occupied Afghanistan for twice as long as the Soviets and were also driven out by an insurgency, but that is beside the point. The point is that those ‘a lot of countries’ which supported the Afghan insurgency were, in fact, mainly just one country (these United States of America), and that it was those American-backed insurgents which turned into the Taliban and gave Osama bin Laden (who had been one of them during the Soviet-Afghan War) safe haven before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA. This is what Ms. Clinton has learned to repeat from history? Even more astonishingly, the host did not challenge her guest on this glaring omission!
Another example of American foreign-policy amnesia is Condoleezza Rice, the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Pres. George W. Bush (and the first female African-American to be both). ‘When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime,’ FOX News show-host Harris Faulkner proclaimed in an interview with Ms. Rice. Nodding along, Ms. Rice added, ‘It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.’ Of course, the war on Iraq (which Ms. Rice not only supported but also had a leading role in starting) was, whatever else Ms. Rice may wish to say in its defence, the invasion of a sovereign nation and against international law. So, Ms. Rice, when will you and your fellow former members of the Bush Administration be turning yourself in at the International Criminal Court? (Oh, that’s right, the USA—that self-appointed guardian of the liberal international order—does not recognise the authority of the ICC!)
Another example of American hypocrisy is Madeleine Albright, who died of late. I know this because the flags were, rather revoltingly, lowered to half-staff in her honour. Although a Czechoslovakian immigrant and a woman, Ms. Albright assimilated to the puritanical American civic religion derived from the Pilgrims and was as chauvinistic as any man. ‘If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation,’ she said of the impending war with Iraq. ‘We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.’ In her retirement, Ms. Albright not only authored her memoirs but also a pièce de resistance of the liberal ‘Resistance,’ Fascism: A Warning, therein comparing Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to the Fascist dictators who took over most of the European continent and wiped out a large percentage of the human race.7 What Ms. Albright is most infamous for, however, was an interview with Lesley Stahl on the CBS news show ‘60 Minutes’ defending sanctions on Iraq’s water-treatment systems. ‘We have heard that a half a million children have died,’ said Ms. Stahl, referring to a preliminary report from UNICEF on disease from a lack of clean water. ‘Is the price worth it?’ she asked. ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it,’ answered Sec. Albright, notably not denying or even disputing the 500,000 figure.
At Ms. Albright’s funeral, Joe Biden proclaimed that ‘she turned the tide of history,’ that ‘freedom had no greater champion,’ and compared her to the Czech hero Vaclav Havel. Bill Clinton called her ‘the voice of America at its best.’ Hillary Clinton, who was also a former female Secretary of State, warned that Americans ‘must heed the wisdom of her life and the cause of her public service, stand up to dictators and demagogues—from the battlefields of Ukraine to the halls of our own capital; defend democracy at home just as vigorously as we do abroad; live up to the ideals of the country that welcomed an 11 year-old refugee sailing into New York Harbor on a ship called SS America and made her Secretary of State.’
When the Russian academic and adviser Alexander Dugin (‘Putin’s Brain’) proposes the inverse of Ms. Albright’s ‘indispensable nation,’ arguing that a Russia-led Eurasian civilisation has a unique role in world history counter to that of Euro-Atlanticist civilisation, he is banned from entering these U.S. of A., banned from most online services, his books are banned from retailers, and even his English translator is professionally blacklisted.8 Imagine if someone like Prof. Dugin, on the Russian equivalent of CBS News, stated that the death of a half-million Ukrainian children from Russian sanctions was ‘worth it,’ and in response to foreign criticism avowed that Russia ‘stands taller and sees farther’ than other countries! How would American journos and pols respond if Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders eulogised one of their own—someone who had rationalised hundreds of thousands of children dying from dysentery and cholera—as Pres. Biden and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton eulogised Ms. Albright? Americans, the least self-aware people in the history of the world, never ask such questions.
And then there is the rehabilitation of the prig Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney, formerly the Governor of Massachusetts and now a Senator from Utah (where this anti-‘identity politics’ Mormon relocated in order to get elected on the majority-Mormon vote). In 2012, Mr. Romney was the Red Party's candidate in the presidential election running against the incumbent Barack Obama, and when he declared in a debate that Russia ‘is, without question, our number-one geopolitical foe,’ American journos and pols roundly mocked him, rightly so. ‘The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,’ replied Pres. Obama, in his usual uncool phrasing.9 ‘The Cold War has been over for 20 years, but Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policy of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s.’ Now the same journos and pols are issuing mea culpas and hailing Mr. Romney’s supposed grand strategy and high statesmanship.
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Mr. Romney was, in accordance with the Red Party’s scorched-earth strategy of questioning the very loyalty and legitimacy of Barack Obama as an American, exploiting the ‘hot mic’ gaffe between Pres. Obama and Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev (when the former told the latter that he would have more ‘flexibility’ to negotiate on missile defence after the election) to inflame American Russophobia and imply that Pres. Obama was colluding with Russia. ‘And so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, and is of course a massive security power,’ stated Mr. Romney, ‘Russia is the geopolitical foe, and the idea that our president is planning on doing something with them that he's not willing to tell the American people before the election is something that I find very, very alarming.’ Aside from Mr. Romney’s scurrilous implication about Pres. Obama’s allegiance, his assertion that Russia was the USA’s ‘number-one geopolitical foe’ betrays how afraid Americans like him are of other nation-states that have wills and means of their own.
For years, American journos have been misusing the term ‘gaffe’ to defend their favoured pols whenever they say something especially stupid. According to Michael Kinsley, the writer who originally coined the term, ‘A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.’ In his latest autobiography (the third in sixteen years), Barack Obama defined a gaffe as a term ‘used by the press to describe any maladroit phrase by a candidate that reveals ignorance, carelessness, fuzzy thinking, insensitivity, malice, boorishness, falsehood, or hypocrisy—or is simply deemed to veer sufficiently far from the conventional wisdom to make said candidate vulnerable to attack.’ All that needs be said about former US president George W. Bush’s latest gaffe—a museum-quality specimen of a Kinsley gaffe—is that it is astonishing that not even the deranged/no-filter Donald Trump and the senile/no-filter Joe Biden can make Dubya look like less of a dumba—.
Are these Reds and Blues, who can evidently neither think nor so much as even speak coherently, really the best class of leaders that we have in these United States of over 330 million Americans? Wither the American ‘natural aristocracy’?
I think that the war between Ukraine and Russia is far more morally gray than the black-and-white picture which pro-war American journos and pols are presenting to the public. I think that picture is simplistic and, quite frankly, propagandistic. It may be a cliché that ‘those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,’ but it is nonetheless true. What I propose to do, then, is present as much of this history as I can in a single place for the benefit of those Americans who also sense that there is something not quite right about the ‘Russia=autocracy, Ukraine=democracy, Putin=Hitler, Zelensky=Churchill, Biden=FDR’ narrative. For those who have been following the anti-war Right and Left, as I have been since Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012, most of the foregoing will be familiar.
Next: ‘1. The Euromaidan: A Far-Right, Foreign-Backed Regime Change’
Two films which were formative in my anti-war beliefs were Clint Eastwood’s ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima,’ two companion films from 2006 portraying the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the American and Japanese soldiers, respectively. The former tells the stories of the U.S. Marines who were the subjects of one of the most iconic images of the Second World War. The latter is a significant step towards humanising one of the most-dehumanised of American enemies, the Japanese, about whom crude wartime-era propaganda is still widely believed (c.f. the morbid annual recitation every 6th of August of the by-now-exploded justification for mass-destructing with atomic weapons the hundreds of thousands of women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki— ‘Hiroshima et Nagasaki delenda est’).
Whilst the monuments to those whose lives and lands William T. Sherman took have, in the gentrified or ghettoified cities of the nü-South, been torn down, garish monuments to Gen. Sherman still stand tall, including outside the White House and in Central Park. As soon as the War Between the States ended, Gen. Sherman, along with his fellow Union war hero, Philip H. Sheridan, and under his former commanding officer and now commander-in-chief, Pres. Ulysses S. Grant, brought this total warfare to the Native Americans of the Great Plains. Did Sherman, Sheridan, and Grant ‘settle’ the ‘Indian Question’ just as they ‘settled’ the question of secession? If not, I pray thee tell me why.
‘But is war the true remedy? Who will profit by it? Speculators—a few lucky merchants who draw prizes in the lottery—commissaries and contractors. Who must suffer by it? The people. It is their blood, their taxes, that must flow to support it…The Government of the United States was not calculated to wage offensive foreign war—it was instituted for the common defence and general welfare; and whosoever should embark it in a war of offence, would put it to a test which it was by no means calculated to endure…Ask these self-styled patriots where they were during the American war (for they are for the most part old enough to have borne arms), and you strike them dumb—their lips are closed in eternal silence…He called upon those professing to be Republicans [nota bene: Randolph is referring to the Jeffersonian ‘Democratic-Republican’ party of the 1790s-1820s, no relation to the Lincolnian ‘Republican’ party, which was formed at a much later date from very different people] to make good the promises held out by their Republican predecessors when they came into power—promises which for years afterwards they had honestly, faithfully fulfilled. We had vaunted of paying off the national debt, of retrenching useless establishments; and yet had now become as infatuated with standing armies, loans, taxes, navies, and war, as ever were the Essex Junto. What Republicanism is this?’—John Randolph of Roanoke, U.S. House of Representatives, 10th Dec. 1811. (I first encountered this speech in the anti-war anthology We Who Dared to Say No to War, which the leftish pacifist Murray Polner and rightish libertarian Tom Woods co-edited.)
Imagine being such a censorious conformist, not to mention illiterate idiot, that the only thing that you can say about Gone with the Wind—a story comparable in substance, in scale, and in style to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel, or Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government—is ‘that’s racist.’
If anyone represents what I think and how I feel about war, it is the great and the good gentleman Robert E. Lee.
In the winter of 1861 whilst he was stationed at a fort on the Texas frontier, he wrote a letter to one of his cousins in Maryland, Annette Carter, expressing his wish to visit her and her family at their Tidewater plantations. ‘I may have the opportunity soon,’ he added with melancholy, ‘for if the Union is dissolved, I shall return to Virginia & share the fortune of my people. Before so great a calamity befalls the Country, I hope all honourable means of maintaining the Constitution, & the equal rights of the people will be first exhausted.’ He gave Annette a message for her father, Charles Henry Carter, who had married into the Calvert founding family of Maryland: ‘Tell your father,’ he advised, ‘he must not allow Maryland to be tacked on to S. Carolina before the just demands of the South have been fairly presented to the North & rejected. Then if the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are denied us, & the citizens of one portion of the Country are granted privileges not extended to the other, we can with a clear conscience separate.’ If the Southern States seceded from the Union, then they would lose all of their rights in the Union—'our national rights, liberty at home and security abroad, our lands, navy, forts, dockyards, arsenals and institutions of every kind’—and so as he put it, ‘I am for maintaining all our rights, not for abandoning all for the sake of one.’ Lee was certain that disunion under any circumstances doomed the country to civil war. ‘It will result in war, I know—fierce, bloody war,’ he acknowledged of a separation on the terms he had outlined. ‘But so will secession, for it is revolution and war at last and cannot be otherwise. We might as well look at it in its true character.’ He apologised to Annette for such a ‘long’ and ‘grave’ aside in an otherwise sentimental letter, but explained that ‘it is a subject upon which my serious thoughts often turn, for as an American citizen I prize my government and country highly and there is no sacrifice I am not willing to make for their preservation save that of honour. I trust there is wisdom and patriotism enough in the country to save them, for I cannot anticipate so great a calamity to the nation as a dissolution of the Union.’
As much as he was opposed to disunion, he was opposed to a war for reunion even more. After declining the offer from Francis Preston Blair on behalf of the Lincoln Administration to command the troops summoned for the invasion of the Confederate States and resigning his commission in the US Army, he wrote a letter to his sister, Anne Marshall, in Baltimore, Maryland, apologising that he would not be able to visit her for some time. ‘Now we are in a state of war which will yield to nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution,’ he wrote, ‘into which Virginia, after a long struggle, has been drawn, and though I recognize no necessity for this state of things, and would have forbone and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native State.’ He was conflicted, but ultimately his loyalty and love for his people and his place, which were personal and particular, outweighed his allegiance to America, which was impersonal and ideological. ‘With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen,’ he wrote, ‘I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army, and, save in defence of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword.’ Apologising to Anne, Lee wrote, ‘I know that you will blame me, but you must think as kindly as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right,’ and so that she could see ‘the feeling and struggle it has cost me,’ he sent her a copy of his letter of resignation to Winfield Scott. ‘I have no time for more,’ he ended his letter. ‘May God guard and protect you and yours, and shower upon you every blessing, is the prayer of your devoted brother.’
This is jus ad bellum: For Lee, war was a last resort in defence of his country only after every alternative course of action had been exhausted.
For Lee, honourable compromise was preferable to war, but if there must be war, then it must also be waged honourably. Lee’s ‘Proclamation to the People of Maryland’ and ‘General Orders No. 73,’ issued upon his two campaigns in the United States, embody his way of war.
The former was issued in the fall of 1862 from Frederick, Maryland, just over a week before the Battle of Sharpsburg. ‘It is right that you should know the purpose that brought the Army under my command within the limits of your State, so far as that purpose concerns yourselves,’ he began. The Confederates, he explained, ‘have long watched with the deepest sympathy the wrongs and outrages that have been inflicted upon the citizens of a Commonwealth, allied to the States of the South by the strongest social, political, and commercial ties. They have seen with profound indignation their sister State deprived of every right, and reduced to the condition of a conquered Province.’ He reviewed the Lincoln Administration's imposition of martial law in Maryland: ‘Under the pretense of supporting the Constitution, but in violation of its most valuable provisions, your citizens have been arrested and imprisoned upon no charge, and contrary to all forms of law; the faithful and manly protest against this outrage made by the venerable and illustrious Marylanders to whom in better days, no citizen appealed for right in vain, was treated with scorn and contempt; the government of your chief city has been usurped by armed strangers; your legislature has been dissolved by the unlawful arrest of its members; freedom of the press and of speech has been suppressed; words have been declared offences by an arbitrary decree of the Federal Executive, and citizens ordered to be tried by a military commission for what they may dare to speak.’ The Confederates, he continued, believed that Marylanders ‘possessed a spirit too lofty to submit to such a government’ and ‘have long wished to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen, and restore independence and sovereignty to your State,’ wherefore he announced that ‘our Army has come among you, and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regaining the rights of which you have been despoiled.’ He assured the civilians that his army was not their enemy: ‘No constraint upon your free will is intended, no intimidation is allowed. Within the limits of this Army, at least, Marylanders shall once more enjoy their ancient freedom of thought and speech. We know no enemies among you, and will protect all of every opinion. It is for you to decide your destiny, freely and without constraint.’ He concluded, ‘This Army will respect your choice whatever it may be, and while the Southern people will rejoice to welcome you to your natural position among them, they will only welcome you when you come of your own free will.’
The latter was issued in the summer of 1863 from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the week before the Battle of Gettysburg. He praised ‘the conduct of the troops on the march,’ and acknowledged that ‘their conduct in other respects has with few exceptions been in keeping with their character as soldiers,’ but noted his concern that ‘there have however been instances of forgetfulness on the part of some, that they have in keeping the yet unsullied reputation of the army, and that the duties expected of us by civilization and Christianity are not less obligatory in the country of the enemy than in our own.’ He warned that ‘that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the unarmed and defenceless, and the wanton destruction of private property that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country,’ adding that such outrages ‘not only degrade the perpetrators and all connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of our present movement.’ According to Lee, ‘It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.’ He, therefore, ordered Confederate troops ‘to abstain with most scrupulous care from unnecessary or wanton injury to private property,’ and ordered Confederate officers ‘to arrest and bring to summary punishment all who shall in any way offend against the orders on this subject.’ He explained himself to Isaac Trimble, a Confederate general and Baltimorean who desired a more retributive policy. ‘I cannot hope that Heaven will prosper our cause when we are violating its laws,’ he said. ‘I shall, therefore, carry on the war in Pennsylvania without offending the sanctions of a high civilization and of Christianity.’
This is jus in bello: For Lee, war was to be limited by rules which had developed from experience over time and which American gentleman-officers had all been taught, lest war degenerate into a barbarism modernised in its means though no less medieval in its ends.
‘But what a cruel thing is war,’ he wrote to his wife, Mary Anna, on Christmas Day 1862. ‘To separate & destroy families & friends & mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world. To fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbours & to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. I pray that on this day when only “peace & good will” are preached to mankind, that better thoughts will fill the hearts of our enemies & turn them to peace.’ Lee was not just against war sentimentally, however, but from experience. In the moment of victory at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he turned to one of his most trusted commanders, James Longstreet, and said, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.’ Lee wisely recognised the duality of war, that however much ‘my heart bleeds at the death of every one of our gallant men’ as he wrote to his wife a few days later, there is nevertheless something in human nature that is drawn to the drama of war. This, in my opinion, is one of the most profound critiques of war ever made, because it internalises rather than externalises evil. That is, the source of evil is not in ‘war’ itself but in the human heart, whence comes war.
The pacifist critique of war as wholly inglorious has no answer for the eternal glorification of war in human history. If war were nothing but a poison, then humanity would not have kept ingesting it for its whole life. What the pacifist critique of war misses, but what Lee confessed in that moment to Longstreet, is that war is a narcotic. George Orwell became aware of the duality of war during his time fighting in Spanish Civil War with the International Brigade. ‘I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice,’ he wrote unsentimentally in Homage to Catalonia. ‘Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae—every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.’ Despite Orwell’s sarcasm, later in Homage to Catalonia, as he described ‘an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men slowly sliding down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do,’ he admitted that it evoked ‘that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.’
Predictably, as these U.S. of A. have become more ‘despotic at home and aggressive abroad’—as Lee predicted it would after the war in his correspondence with the English historian Lord Acton—Lee has gone down in history as a ‘traitor’ along with other invidious epithets, and his memory has been figuratively and literally defaced, even/especially in his Virginian homeland. A recent biography of Lee by a ‘conservative’ from the Claremont Institute opines in the introduction, ‘How do you write the biography of someone who commits treason?’
Well, let us see.
For one, whenever a room grows stuffy with accusations of ‘treason,’ the true patriot is obliged to let out some of this hot air with Sir John Harington’s famous epigram: ‘Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ A few ‘what ifs’ in the fall of 1862 or the summer of 1863 and Lee would not be a ‘traitor’ but a ‘Father of His Country’ like George Washington. Historians should have more of an understanding that the line between ‘treason’ and ‘revolution’ is a matter not of right but of might. One has to imagine what this neocon critic would be writing about Washington and other American revolutionaries traitors had Great Britain conquered the Thirteen Colonies restored its national sovereignty and territorial integrity before France intervened.
For another, even if Lee met the constitutional definition of ‘treason’ (for which neither he nor any other Confederate were ever tried, let alone convicted, as the President and the Congress were afraid that the Supreme Court would rule that secession was technically constitutional and thus that Americans like Lee had acted loyally), historians should have more of an understanding that treason is oftentimes in the eye of the beholder. Lee did not identify as a traitor any more than George Washington identified as a traitor: For him, the treason would have been to side with the Union against his State, just as for Washington the treason would have been to side with the Crown against the Thirteen Colonies. Far be it from me to disagree with Dante, who cast traitors—‘to their kindred,’ ‘to their country,’ ‘to their guests,’ ‘to their lords’—into the lowest circle of Hell, but to me, a traitor is someone of bad faith whom betrays a trust, not someone of good faith whom is forced to choose between conflicting trusts and chooses the losing side. That is Hegelian tragedy, not treason.
Last, but not least, the notion that a traitor is an unfit subject for a biography is, quite simply, dumbfounding in its ignorance and, indeed, idiocy. ‘It’s a bit of an odd question for a historian to ask,’ wrote a reviewer for the Abbeville Institute. ‘Sure, treason is a terrible crime. But so are lots of other things: spreading violent revolution, engaging in unprovoked wars with other nations, or having one’s wife (or wives) killed. And yet biographies of Marx, Napoleon, and Henry VIII abound. Presumably the authors of these books did not feel the need to anguish in their introductions over their subject matter.’
Sophocles taught us in ‘Antigone’ that even traitors deserve their last rites, wherefore Theban neocon critics put her to death for treason. Gore Vidal wrote a novel of historical fiction from the point of view of one of the most infamous traitors in American history, Aaron Burr, telling his side of the story. Sir Thomas More was executed for high treason to King Henry VIII, yet the play and film ‘A Man for all Seasons’ is a moving tribute to his life and death. (Whom does this neocon critic identify with in that story, Richard Rich?) The original anti-hero and the arch-traitor himself, Lucifer in John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ was the literary creation of a literal Puritan who was somehow able to show more sympathy for the devil than this neocon critic. The author known as Shakespeare wrote a whole cast of ‘traitors,’ from tragic figures like Brutus to outright villains like Lord and Lady Macbeth.
In ‘Macbeth,’ the wife of Macduff (the noble who suspects Macbeth of treason, wherefore he is accused of treason himself) and Macduff’s son have a conversation about treason:
Son: Was my father a traitor, mother?
Lady Macduff: Aye, that he was.
Son: What is a traitor?
Lady Macduff: Why, one that swears and lies.
Son: And be all traitors that do so?
Lady Macduff: Every one that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.
Son: And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?
Lady Macduff: Every one.
Son: Who must hang them?
Lady Macduff: Why, the honest men.
Son: Then the liars and swearers are fools,
For there are liars and swears enow to beat
The honest men and hang them up.
It would be idle to continue to multiply examples. Suffice it to say that ‘how do you write the biography of someone who commits treason’ is an unwitting admission of the intellectual, imaginative, and ideological deficiencies of the author rather than the insolent insult to his subject that he intended. It sounds like something that the Soviet press would have written about Trotsky ca. 1937-38 or that the Nazi press would have written about Röhm ca. 1934.
If such a humane and honourable figure as Lee is a traitor, then I say would that there were more such traitors. If a traitor is the antithesis of a patriot, then a nation of so-called traitors such as Lee would be superior in every way to a nation of so-called patriots such as this neocon critic.
When your local liquor store is clarifying which vodkas with Russian names are actually from ‘NATO countries’ (with large Russian-speaking minorities) or Ukraine itself (where Russian was the majority language until 2014), that is totalitarian. Admittedly, it is a sort of privatised totalitarianism adapted to Western neo-liberalism, but it is totalitarian nonetheless in its tendency to abolish the public/private spheres of life and politicise all of life.
Needless to say, whatever Fascism is—whether it can be reduced to Umberto Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism,’ whether it was a ‘counterrevolutionary imitation of leftist revolution’ as Ernst Nolte argued, whether it is ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’ as Roger Griffin argues, whether it is ‘capitalist society…puking up the undigested barbarism’ as Trotsky argued—whatever it is, Madeleine Albright’s ideologically incoherent emoting is not an intelligent contribution.
I, being a staunch civil libertarian and First-Amendment absolutist who believes that the freedom of speech protects nothing if it does not protect the freedom of those with whom you disagree, found a way to buy some of his books, partly in protest but partly to make up my own mind about someone whom I had only heard about in tendentious second- and third-handed tirades.
How this stuttering, rambling, teleprompter-reading, platitude-reciting man ever earned a reputation for eloquence, I shall never understand.