What a Pickle

Sadly, I was completely wrong and it turns out that Putin is mad, not merely bad - and the results are terrifying. This clip gives us a glimpse of the man (or should that be monster?) as he is right now

A Russian pointed out on Twitter a few days ago that senior Russian military should consider the fact that to fight a war in Ukraine means thousands upon thousands of Russian casualties, whereas to avoid a war in Ukraine requires only one single casualty. Unfortunately, this did not inspire a new Stauffenberg - at least not yet, (I continue to hope and pray that one might come along - and succeed).

To add to the bleakness, in this new appalling situation I cannot see who are the goodies. Putin is both mad and bad, and meanwhile in the West we seem to have lost our bearings. The comparison one sees here between Russian and US recruitment publicity gives an insight into how far we have strayed from commonsense. 

Allister Heath highlighted this with his usual clarity in the Telegraph:

While the West has largely condemned Russia’s move on Ukraine, it too is racked with its own internal ideological rejection of the modern, liberal-conservative order. Communism never really stood a chance in Europe and America, and a capitalist and democratic West thus triumphed in the Cold War; but the woke ideology, best understood as an anti-capitalist, anti-Western secular religion, has already captured much of the intelligentsia in America, Canada, New Zealand and increasingly Britain.

In its extreme form, it represents a rejection of the Enlightenment, of freedom and reason; Western history is reviled as uniquely bad, rather than as a remarkable experiment in self-improvement. Individualism is replaced by collectivism and neo-feudalism, and Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society by balkanised identity politics. Free speech is dismissed as “oppressive”. Dissenters are cancelled, with cultural institutions, capital and corporations happy to help impose this new orthodoxy. The fear is that technology will be used to increase the power of this new ruling class, rather than to liberate the masses. The rise of a related extreme environmentalism – another millenarianist movement, more concerned with self-flagellation than protecting nature – has already encouraged a series of catastrophic errors, not least the abandonment of nuclear and greater dependency on Russian gas."

Meanwhile in the Spectator, Freddy Gray pointed out that, extraordinarily, the West was safer under another unpredictable leader, rather than a bien pensant (which is a nice way of describing Biden): 

"Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognised — an unstable, unpredictable yet potentially decisive actor on the world stage. Rightly or wrongly, he saw in Trump strength whereas in the Democratic leadership he sees only weakness and folly...In its demented ego-driven way, Trump’s view of the way the world works is intriguingly coherent. And painful though it may be for the many experts who have spent years denouncing him as a disastrous monster to admit, he could well be right: if he were in the White House, Putin probably wouldn’t be doing what he is doing."

The consequences for Taiwan are highlighted in this truly fascinating and deeply worrying Tweet thread (the implications for the West's possible retaliatory options of Putin's threat that he might use nuclear weapons are also well laid out there.)

Luckily there is always poetry and a commenter on Unherd has contributed this beautiful translation of an Anna Akhmatova poem which, if not exactly cheering, offers a perspective from above the fray:

Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold’
Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
Cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses –
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

Lovely though that is, there is no escaping the fact that we are in the biggest pickle of my lifetime.