Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 25, 2022 · Last modified September 26, 2022
Jordan Peterson appeared on a program hosted by Piers Morgan to discuss Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. He insisted, among other things, that (a) Putin is in no significant way similar to Hitler or Stalin, i.e., not really a tyrant of global expansionist intentions at all, (b) there is no possible way that Ukraine can win the war, (c) even if Putin decides...
Yet again last night, the most popular host on Fox News was joined by his favorite military “expert,” Douglas Macgregor, as the two men continued not only to insist that Russia has effectively already won the war in which it is increasingly obvious to everyone else that Putin’s military has been decimated and humiliated by a tiny foe, but more importantly ramped up...
Six days ago, I wrote of the Russian state media’s calls for Vladimir Putin to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons in response to NATO’s alleged nuclear threats against Russia. At that time, I wrote: In short, Russia, in desperation and about to suffer the most humiliating military defeat since the United States scurried away from the Taliban like the frightened rats...
Russian state television, aka the official propaganda wing of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, is openly “advising” Putin (whose official message this is) that “the time has come for us to hold drills for practising scenarios in which Russian tactical nuclear weapons are used,” on the pretext that “We will soon be issued with a direct nuclear ultimatum from Nato [sic].” In other words, just...
Vladimir Putin is not Russia, nor is he “the Russian people.” He is a ruthless dictator who murders or imprisons his most popular opponents and critics, propagandizes his subjects out of any clear alternative perspectives on life and the global political situation, and exploits the poverty and hopelessness that he himself has fostered to cajole the weak and desperate “masses” into viewing him...
The absolute worst and most immoral thing to do would be to assist Ukraine’s effort in its war of self-defense just enough, and just long enough, to heighten the severity of the conflict and ensure that millions of innocent people will be killed or displaced, and then to get skittish, pull back, and become all prudish and pragmatic about not wanting to disrupt...
You can stop an expansionist tyrant by thwarting all his aims and pushing him back into his hole. Or you can empower and embolden him with completely gratuitous concessions and appeasement — usually at the expense of some convenient victims which you arbitrarily assume the moral authority to use as pawns in your appeasement game — so that the tyrant becomes more dangerous...
I do not always agree with Garry Kasparov on general matters of ordinary politics, but on Putin and the current stage of Putin’s war of conquest against the West, I know of no other popular voice today who speaks with such clarity and uncompromised principle. Of the many appeasing & contrary to history and reality pieces I have read during Putin’s war of...
Desperation will tempt a man to try almost anything. A desperate man who lacks virtue — who “has no conscience” as we moderns are wont to say — is more likely to succumb to the temptations of despair. Nothing infuses a man with desperation more thoroughly than the approach of public humiliation and ignominious defeat. And no one fears public humiliation more intensely...
Everyone knows that a greedy man will never reach the limits of his desire for more, for it is the essence of greed to acknowledge no natural limit to its ambition. Everyone knows totalitarians are intrinsically, definitively, obsessed with totality with respect to control, and that an obsession with totality admits of no inherent restraint or misgivings, for totalism in the quest for...
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