THE COLUMN: How We Got Here

The seeds of the conflict in the Ukraine, now the subject of both a shooting war and a ferocious propaganda barrage on both sides—and by "both sides" I mean Russia vs. the West, using Ukraine as its proxy—were sown more than 30 years ago, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union on Boxing Day in 1991. At what seemed almost a single stroke, the goal of American foreign policy for the previous four decades had been achieved. The mother church of Marxism-Leninism had fallen, the Evil Empire destroyed, and the brave new world of "the end of history and the last man" was dawning.

Although Ronald "we win, they lose" Reagan was out of office, this was the Gipper's triumph. Playing poker against the Soviets' aging and disillusioned chess masters, Reagan bet the house on the Strategic Defense Initiative—widely opposed and even mocked by the pro-Russian Leftist press, led by the New York Times (who else?), as "Star Wars"—and essentially bankrupted the Kremlin. Unfamiliar with the concept of a bluff, Mikhail Gorbachev turned over his king and walked away from the board. 

I vividly recall standing outside in the freezing cold of a mid-February day in Dresden, on the 40th anniversary of the firebombing of the city by British and American bombers in 1945. Standing in front of the newly restored Semper Opera House, Erich Honecker, the East German party boss, gave a stemwinder of a speech, inveighing against the very "Star Wars" (that was the term he used: Sternkriege) the Times was mocking stateside. "I think Star Wars is bullshit," whispered a German-speaking American colleague of mine, "but it sure has these guys scared." Within six years, both the German Democratic Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were gone.

Fooled ya.

It took both the Times and the communists (but I repeat myself) to realize the truth of Reagan's game and by then it was too late. The Cold War was over, without a shot being fired. We won, they lost.

Officials in the "Star Wars" project rigged a crucial 1984 test and faked other data in a program of deception that misled Congress as well as the intended target, the Soviet Union, four former Reagan Administration officials said.

The deception program was designed to feed the Kremlin half-truths and lies about the project, the former Administration officials said. It helped persuade the Soviets to spend tens of billions of dollars to counter the American effort to develop a space-based shield against nuclear attack proposed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1983, they said. The test also deceived news organizations, which reported it widely.

Ha ha ha. With the U.S.S.R. prostrate and the former Warsaw Pact nations spinning away into freedom and autonomy, the largest fire sale in history was underway. Canny operators, such as George Soros instantly saw an opportunity, moving quickly into the economic and diplomatic vacuum with such aplomb that he overnight became a powerful figure among the ruins.

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All the United States had to do was be magnanimous in victory. The Germans under Helmut Kohl had already provided a model; Germany was reunited less than a year after the Wall fell and the East German government crumbled. Kohl's boldest decision was to exchange the worthless Ostmark (East mark) for the sound Deutsche mark at a one-for-one rate. While this was expensive for the West Germans, it turned out to be well worth it. There was little or no lingering resentment about the ways things had turned out, and while the Ossis were regarded as poorly dressed bumpkins, there was no trouble.

Magnanimity, however, proved too heavy a lift for the clueless and vengeful George Herbert Walker Bush administration. Widely seen in European capitals at the time as a "safe pair of hands" Bush I immediately squandered the greatest economic, diplomatic and intelligence community success of the modern era. The one-time Director of Central Intelligence could not or would not grasp that the game had changed, that Russia no longer had to be a mortal enemy of capitalism and the West, and that the overthrow of communism would usher in a prolonged period both of disruption and revanchism that could have been properly managed without triumphalism.

Your Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, always wrong.

But the U.S. did... nothing. As Soros knew instinctively, all of eastern Europe and western Russia was now up for grabs. I can attest to the bewilderment and anger of friends and acquaintances in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere at the silence radiating from Washington at the time. 

Rather than extending the hand of friendship to the defeated but still proud Russians and the other "captive peoples," succeeding administrations under Clinton and Bush II added insult to injury by bringing the Central and Eastern European countries into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) starting in 1999—a deliberate provocation and a world-historical blunder of epic proportions matched only by George W. Bush's incomprehensible invasion of Iraq after 9/11. 

Meanwhile, post-Gorbachev, Russia descended into a gangster-driven oligarchy under the drunken Boris Yeltsin. I left the collapsing U.S.S.R. for the last time during the summer of 1991, just before the coup attempt against Gorbachev, and already the gangsters (Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Azerbaijani—everybody but the Slavs) had the run of the place. The Americans who were preaching the virtues of capitalism in a land that had only known empty shelves for 70 years were regarded as thieves out to fleece Russia (and many of them were), but regulated capitalism wasn't going to cut it at a time when it was every man for himself. "Joint venture" was one English phrase that every Russian knew, and Swiss bank accounts were the place to be. It took the firm, bloody hand of Vladimir Putin to restore some semblance of order.

And so the opportunity was lost to turn Russia from an enemy to, if not a friend, at least an adversary with whom we could live and do business. America does have an enemy today, but it's China, not Russia.

Putin, who was a KGB operative based in Dresden during my time in the former DDR (among the Stasi, he had a reputation for ruthlessness and cunning even back then), is not the kind of man into whose eyes you can look and see his soul. The moody Slavic temperament is very poorly understood by sunny Americans, alternating between pride and despair, all laced with centuries of grievance against a West it both passionately wants to belong to and equally passionately wants to reject.

No American has ever had the experience of watching his country vanish before his eyes, and those who think that Putin operates by the same set of "values" as the international atheists who currently populate the upper reaches of the American government, foreign-policy establishment, and bureaucracy have never met a Russian, read a single word of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or heard a note of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin. As Aristotle intimates in the Poetics, culture and politics are the same thing, and it's only Americans who don't seem to be able to understand that. 

The current American fixation on "diversity" (itself the partial result of decades of KGB meddling in the civil-rights movement and inflaming black sensibilities) has no purchase in the rest of the world, which regards it as inexplicable and the very antithesis of social cohesion and the nation-state. The last thing the Ukrainians want right now is diversity: they want a Ukraine for Ukrainians. Meanwhile, for the Russians, the notion of admitting the Ukraine to NATO has proven to be the last straw; the closest American analogy might be turning Texas into an "independent" extension of Mexican hegemony in the southwest. The differences are irreconcilable. 

Bush II's second inaugural address has proven to be spectacularly wrong in its central observations, a woolly wish list of platitudes and bromides that has only worsened America's position on the global stage. After all, a country that doesn't try very hard to maintain its cultural and territorial integrity isn't much of a country and certainly won't last very long. 

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. 

As the war in the breadbasket of Europe rages on, freedom is only secondarily the issue now. It's the hunger in the dark places that we have to worry about. “The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state," wrote the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1795the natural state is one of war." Just 123 years after Kant wrote those words, once-formidable Prussia disappeared from the map. Putin is determined not to let that happen to the Russia of his imagination, the Russia of Peter the Great and of Tsar Alexander I, who saved the Motherland from the existential threat of Napoleon. He may not succeed, but he's willing to die trying—and to kill as many people in the process as he has to.

Muzzling the Climate Debate

Whatever final assessment is made of Donald Trump’s culpability in provoking the Capitol melee – though it was at most, it seems to me, incidental - the speeches by some Democrat congressional representatives, in the lead up to impeachment number two, took hyperbole to a new level -- e.g., “a white supremacist president who incited a white supremacist insurrection.” Little reverence was paid to the truth. In keeping with the times, none to giving the accused right of reply.

Part of the overwrought response to Covid is suppression. Suppression, that is, of questioning views. Big tech plays its part. It has become adept at closing down rather than opening up debate

Muzzling the climate debate is a practiced art. Australia’s taxpayer-funded academic blog site The Conversation sums it up: “That’s why the editorial team in Australia is implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics. Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts.” So much for two sides of a story.

Wherever you look, large sections of today’s society are losing their interest in the truth and, as part of that, in being challenged. Integrity is falling away. Though prosaically, when set against today’s times, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell spotted things going wrong in 1980:

Had this questionnaire [in the nineteen thirties] about what was the problem with teachin in the schools...the biggest problem they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum....sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide...when I say anything about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m getting old...my feeling about that is that anyone that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got.

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is blessed with Sheriff Bell’s homespun commentaries on life and the state of his modern world. To me Bell (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie) was the highlight of the book. It’s a pity only a sprinkling of his wisdom made it to the screen.

The storyline in the book is set in Texas in 1980. I don’t know about you, but without dismissing Bell’s concerns, I look back fondly on the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II were simultaneously strutting their stuff. How much saner was the world then, I think.

Of course, to take a potted excursion back to the start of that decade, there were no flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, the internet and email. I would miss them if they were suddenly taken away. Many people, I understand, would also miss social media and electric cars. Me, not so much. What would Sheriff Bell have thought? Technological developments are part and parcel of human history and his response to them would depend on whether he was parachuted into 2021 from 1980 or had lived throughout the period.

It gets more interesting when social developments are considered. Take trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces, cancel culture, transgender dysphoria, non-binary pronouns, unconscious racism, intersectional wokeness, and the like. To reach the point quickly. I don’t think Bell would have rightly understood them. I say that because I am younger than Bell, he was close to retirement in 1980, and I can’t get a good handle on them.

From chewing gum to drug-taking is a leap, but it’s not one of confounding inexplicability. In contrast, how do you put a 1980’s perspective, or any reasoned perspective at all, on things like trigger warnings and cancel culture? How do you explain their rise?

The short answer is that I don’t exactly know. Some people associate it all with Marxism. I am not sure about that. Of course, the popularity of Marxism, socialism more generally, is on another one of its periodic cyclical upswings among academic and political classes. Socialists are indefatigable in the face of the historical record of socialism’s disastrous failures, whenever and wherever it has been tried. They forever lurk in the shadows, awaiting propitious circumstances to again hawk their bill of goods.

I sometimes look to that old-time socialist George Orwell for answers. I reckon he’d have the same view of these modern social trends as would Sheriff Bell. Here he is in The Road to Wigan Pier: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Different times, different fruit loops.

And not just Goldstein.

Socialists having an irreducibly delusional mindset. This no doubt gives loopy ideas a happy home. But they don’t arise there. They are a broader cultural phenomenon. This time around they have arisen, I suggest, out of post-modernism and its rejection of the oneness of truth.

You might define a man and a woman by their chromosomes. That’s just your truth. Another truth is how they feel about themselves, gender-wise. You might define free speech as, simply, ‘free speech’. Sorry, but not if it offends someone in a minority group. Then it is hate speech. You might think it is discriminatory to favour someone on the basis of their appearance. No, not true, if it produces more ‘equity’ across society. Equality bad, equity good – to borrow a pattern of words again from Orwell.

Old generations always complain about the next one. At least -- so it is said -- since Socrates was supposed to have done so. This is a cautionary warning for any older generation. Nevertheless, Sheriff Bell ventured forth. To him there had been a sea change. Something untoward was happening. Untoward has morphed into strange indeed.

It’s best to remember, civilisations eventually fall apart. Seems likely this has something to do with the way in which succeeding generations live their lives and mould their culture. Robust pursuit of truth is surely the quiddity of a healthy culture. Once that goes who knows where things will end up.

Sheriff Bell thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket. He had no idea what lay in store.