Theme: Governance

(not that I feel like beating on russia these days, but truth is truth)

The west has legitimate problems with Russia:

1) Russia’s history of murdering its own people in vast numbers, and occupying and destroying much of eastern Europe, and then engaging in both the cold war and the expansion of world communism. This history prevents Russia from making a legitimate claim to extension of its borders just as we resist german’s extension of is borders.

2) Absence of rule of law, widespread corruption, use of propaganda and outright lying – which in Russia is heroic and in the west is the very pinnacle of immorality. The Russian sponsorship of a predatory government maintaining the poverty of the people of Ukraine and its agitation over the return of eastern Europe to christendom given its history was and is intolerable both to Westerners and to eastern europeans. The assumption that Russia would add rule of law but retain its conservatism was just fine – as long as Russia joined the west thereby uniting all european peoples and restoring christendom after its destruction by the communists. This would have achieved the long standing goal of uniting german culture and engineering with Russian resources and labor.

3) Russian intellectuals’ fascination with the restoration of an empire responsible for genocides only surpassed by the Chinese, and the tragic victimization and impoverishment of eastern Europe, and even Germany – instead of unity of european peoples. As if power – disappearing people in the night, suppressing speech, and terrorism by secret police – rather than prosperity were somehow something to aspire to.

4) Invasion of Ukraine breaking the postwar consensus on borders – the purpose of which was to prevent another world war. In doing so Russia confirmed both its failure to learn from its past failings, and its willingness to impose harm on ‘our people’. Putin was until then a respected politician in the west who could just have asked the west to negotiate a trade for discounted natural gas in exchange for a full crimean lease including independence on the hong kong model for 200 years – after which it would have been irrelevant. The same for the Donbas since Ukrainians despise that region because it’s the source of Russian influence on the government, source of gangsters supported by Russia, and the source of the drug trade. So Putin confirmed that Russia had learned nothing, and wishes to repeat its past crimes against humanity.

American utopianism is absurd and the neo-conservative movement has been as disastrous as the progressive, neo-puritain, and socialist. Americans are perfectly happy to feel good about themselves by punishing brown and yellow people the world over. America has the luxury of stupidity due to wealth in part gained by their domestic utopianism.

And sure, democracy is done for, republicanism is a luxury of wealthy europeans riding on the accumulated wave of centuries of intellectual, technical and artistic achievement. Yes, women have have used enfranchisement to incrementally destroy the west that alone liberated them, and yes, the left has used the funding provided by women through advertising and expanding education in the the academy and rent seeking that expands the state to convert us into another brazil.

That does not mean that anything Russia desires or does is not more of the same even worse than we have experienced from her before. She rails against the nazis who were half the criminals the russians have been.

That people want strength is a statement of their weakness.