Why I Fought in Ukraine & Will Fight Harder in America
And other great things I found on the net this week
Why I Fought in Ukraine & Will Fight Harder in America
Some words from someone who sees things pretty simply. I’m hoping he sees things right, though what would I know? His view is certainly informed by proximity and plenty of skin in the game. Anyway, I happened upon it and thought you might like to see it.
From Ukraine’s international brigades. Slava Ukraini!
A month before the war started, I set up in the capitol Kyiv to study the Russian order of battle and observe the avenues of invasion. Yet quickly I found that one thing was missing completely from the news media narrative: The Ukrainian Army.
By mid-February all of the intelligence indicators that showed Ukraine would be invaded by a superior Russian force were unambiguous. I drove the roads the invaders would need to use, examined the key cities and villages and spoke to the top commanders of the Ukrainian army. I also discussed weapons and tactics with the sergeants and soldiers on the front line trenches in Donetsk, one position was just 70 meters from Russian troops. My intelligence experience was revealing a dramatically different picture. The media narrative was all wrong. I became convinced that Russian assault groups were going into the teeth of a hungry lion that was waiting in ambush. A very hungry lion. …
The struggle in Ukraine is also the story of the struggle for the soul of America in the 21st century. Dictators and autocrats now see America as fertile soil for which to plant their horrible images of domination. They are backed publicly by the second richest man in the world. They have control of the largest social media networks that pacifies a large portion of the population with dance videos and pictures of kittens. Americans barely pay attention while their inalienable rights are eliminated and made alien. The autocrats understand that the best way to eliminate democracy is to either buy it outright or normalize the disgraceful and disgusting to the point where atrocities no longer matter so long as the TikTok videos keep playing.
Right now, the western wall of democracy is failing. Yes, it was shored up in the November 2022 midterm election, but it is weak. Even now, Russian-loving fifth columnists are set to hijack the American Congress for the next two years. Their right wing foot soldiers could smash it beyond recognition, all in hopes of putting Donald Trump back in power. Reelecting a man who was impeached for trying to blackmail the same Volodymyr Zelensky with the same Javelin missiles that saved Ukraine from Russia could arguably finish off both countries at the same time.
Ukraine needs to win the war for the soul of democracy and guarantee its national existence. If America and Ukraine wins, you might likely not notice. If we fail? Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin will let you know in no uncertain terms what they expect of you. Our way of life will be changed for the worst. But the second round of fighting for our freedom is just starting, and so long as I have a voice, and, where necessary, my combat rifle, I will live by a new mantra: Fight like a Ukrainian!
Humanism as a Christian heresy
Here’s Tom Holland arguing that Humanism is (just) the radical innovations of Christianity in a secular guise. Listen or read his lecture and you might conclude he makes his case pretty well. I did.
All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Yet how, that being so, were Christians to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that “the use of all things should be common to all”? The solution was arrived at by 1200. … A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to those learned in the Church’s canons, “in accordance with natural law”. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. He was merely taking what was properly owed him. …
That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course as old as Christianity. What noone had argued before, was that that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was their “right”. Yet this doctrine would in time slip the moorings of doctrinal Christianity. Indeed, first in the American Revolution, and then in the French, the claim would be made that human rights owed nothing to the distinctive history of Latin Christendom. A momentous discovery had been made: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.
The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences. Today, as in the 18th century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction. …
Huxley’s conviction that medieval Christendom had been nothing but bigotry and backwardness was one that ultimately descended, not from Voltaire, but from Luther. Agnostics — a term coined by Huxley — have always tended to display, in their attitudes towards Christianity, a marked susceptibility towards Protestant propaganda. He is merely another illustration of the great paradox of our age: that Christianity has no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish.
Fun interview with Dick Cavett
Adam Tooze on America’s departure from the rules-based order
Michael Dillon sent me this article by Adam Tooze on the United States’ departure from playing nice in the WTO. In fact the US has always acted pretty brazenly on trade carving out exceptions to its disciplines — as for instance in the Jones Act which “requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents” (Wikipedia).
But the US was an anchor for the rules-based nature of most WTO rule-making and dispute resolution. But that’s a world in which you’d use a carbon price to reduce carbon emissions. And we don’t do that kind of thing anymore because the elites who were supposed to ensure that we used ‘market-based instruments’ are all too happy to take some fossil fuel money and win elections by attacking such things. (Reminds me of Malcolm Fraser calling for freer markets while denouncing tariff cuts and calling for ‘jobs not dogma’.)
Anyway, in that new world, the US only gets to carbon abatement by combining it with protectionism. As Tooze writes:
In commentary in the Washington Post, Tucker posits a clash between, on the one hand, a rigid adherence to the existing trade regime which goes hand in hand with carbon pricing as the main tool for decarbonization, and, on the other hand, the kind of approach favored by the Biden administration, which focuses on the more “politically attractive” route of national industrial subsidies.
Countries like the United States are trying to fight the climate crisis by offering industries green incentives, rather than simply taxing industrial emissions. That’s likely to require some assurance that the WTO will permit exceptions for what countries deem to be nationally appropriate decarbonization pathways. If WTO trade panelists don’t offer more deference to national policymakers than these two recent cases suggest, we are likely to see greater calls by environmental groups for a substantial paring back of trade rules for the duration of the climate emergency.
Behind phrases such as “politically attractive” and “nationally appropriate decarbonization” there is a complex agenda of coalition-building which sees green industrialism as a better future for the American working-class and American society in general.
And so the rules-based order in trade is under grave threat. As Tooze puts it:
Check out this response from the US Trade Representative to a WTO panel finding on steel and aluminium and tell me that you don’t feel a cold wind blowing.
The WTO now suggests that the United States too must stand idly by. The United States will not cede decision-making over its essential security to WTO panels. The Biden Administration is committed to preserving U.S. national security by ensuring the long-term viability of our steel and aluminum industries, and we do not intend to remove the Section 232 duties as a result of these disputes.”
Michael wanted me to comment on the implications of all this for Australia. I’ll think about it some more, but my main reaction is:
I agree with Tooze and Krugman that in the circumstances it finds itself I understand why the US is doing it. As Krugman puts it, trade is important “but not more important than protecting democracy and saving the planet.”
This is serious for Australia because, as a middle power we’ve got plenty to lose from the EU, China and the US retreating into trading blocks. They have the market muscle to secure their own interests in this bun-fight. We’re in a more vulnerable position.
"Single-handed humiliation" and other skills YOU’LL need for the 21st-century
And handy if you’re trying to get on as a Young Democrat. … Like Victor Shi
Buurtzorg!
Allowing nurses to run nursing services? As Ginger Rogers says to Fred Astaire, “that idea’s so crazy it just might woik”. Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the Dutch service which unpicked New Public Managerialism and made everyone happier while saving lots of money, have a read. It’s a great story.
Within a decade, Buurtzorg was employing more than half the country’s community nurses, and the government had adjusted the payment system to make room for its flat-rate billing. By 2015, two independent audits (by KPMG and EY) had assessed the model’s impact on some of the most chronic problems facing Dutch healthcare — dissatisfied patients, overstretched and disillusioned staff, and a constant pressure on budgets. Those reports were immensely helpful, de Blok says. “When you are able to show that our model is 40 per cent cheaper for society, you get political acceleration.” …
De Blok spent a decade trying to work within the new system. He retrained as a manager, did a master’s degree in innovation and eventually became a managing director. But by 2004 he understood that if he wanted to recover what had been lost — the sacrosanct relationship between patient and nurse — he’d have to start his own organisation, designed and run by nurses. It would deliver only one service, which was helping people in the quality of their daily life.
The idea, de Blok has said, was to “have people around these problems who feel connected to them and can make the choices they think are the best choices… The support systems should be logical and simplified but you should not underestimate the complexity of what’s going on.”
To understand that complexity better, listen to him talking to Richard Atherton on the Being Human podcast about the kinds of decisions nurses make when they’re caring for patients in the last phase of their life. “In our society, we try to make everything explicit, we try to put it into protocol and regulations and so on, but most of the work of nurses is in the heads of people, based on years of doing things and understanding patterns. You need the environment, you need the autonomy, and the space to do these things based on your practical wisdom and intuition.”
The use and abuse of ancient history
Very interesting article tracking the transition from Rome to Greece as the poster boy from antiquity. Mightn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m interested both in the history of democracy and what we make of that history.
For two centuries after Hobbes published his translation, Athenian democracy remained a cautionary tale about the dangers of popular rule. The eighteenth-century English author Temple Stanyan wrote in his history of Greece that in Athens “the people wrested too great a share of the government into their hands,” so that “things were carried by tumult and faction; and they were seldom free from as great or worse disorders than those they complained of under their kings.” Mitford, in his History of Greece, larded his work with warnings about “the evils arising from all the forms of government adopted in the different states of Greece.” Most threatening was Athens, which he described as an “ochlocracy, mob rule,” “that turbulent form of rule” and “a tyranny in the hands of the people,” concluding that “absolute democracy is tyranny.” …
Rome with its mixed regime limiting the collective power of the multitude was more appealing. The very term for the new political system, republic, drew on Latin (res publica), not Greek. Senate, Capitol, Cincinnati all evoked Rome, not those Athenian assemblies vibrating between tyranny and anarchy and becoming “a mob”—even if they were populated by the Socrateses of the world. The Senate would not be an ecclesia; it would meet in the Capitol, a name adopted from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, rather than from the Pnyx, where the ecclesia met. George Washington, resigning his presidency after two terms, modeled himself on the Roman hero Cincinnatus, not Pericles.
Yet in the early 1800s America democratizes. White male suffrage expands, the Democratic Party is founded in the late 1820s, and the pejorative connotations attending democracy wane. As the historian Gordon S. Wood writes, with “the rapid transformation to democracy in the decades following the revolution, ancient Rome lost much of its meaning for Americans,” and Greece replaces Rome. The Greek wars of liberation against the Ottoman Empire of the 1820s abetted this development. Americans saw the Greeks resisting foreign domination, much as they had done several decades earlier, and embassies from Greece seeking financial aid brought images of an ancient Athens more attuned to fighting oppression than the chaos feared by the founders. A “Greek fever,” or philhellenism, spread across America. Edward Everett—a president of Harvard, a senator from Massachusetts, and the “other” speaker at Gettysburg—campaigned throughout America to promote the appreciation of Greek culture and replace the study of Latin with ancient Greek in schools and universities.
John Holbo on lazy denunciations of wokeness
For all my loathing of the woke brigade, as is so often the case, the excesses of the left border on inconsequential compared with the vices of the right. That’s because the right are connected to real power not odious performance art as political action. Anyway, a pet peeve of mine is people on either side of the aisle taking the most extreme and silliest utterances of those they want to disagree with. I mean what’s the point? Who are you trying to persuade? Those who already agree with you that’s who. Anyway, I liked this takedown by John Holbo on the venerable old left of centre academic blog Crooked Timber.
Russell Jacoby has a piece out in “Tablet” that got approvingly retweeted by Richard Dawkins, then by Elon Musk. So maybe it’s worth giving it a read.
I’m sympathetic to Jacoby’s old line: a lot of ‘theory’ silliness got spread about in the humanities in the 80’s-90’s. There were perverse incentives – professional rewards – for doing ‘philosophy’ badly in various ways. This was not good. I’m happy to badmouth bad stuff. But honestly, as Jacoby himself used to acknowledge, it wasn’t threat-to-the-republic-grade.
‘Buzz words are destroying civilization’ is more like a parody of the charge against Socrates, that gadfly, not a serious thesis about ideas. The ease with which one may tag Orwell, rather than make an argument, is itself cautionary: off-the-shelf words in lieu of argument.
So let’s just spit it out:
what indefensible barbarism do these buzz words buzz on behalf of, sez Jacoby?
Orwell targeted language that defended “the indefensible” such as the British rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima. He offered examples of corrupt language. “The Soviet press is the freest in the world.” The use of euphemisms or lies to defend the indefensible has hardly disappeared: Putin called the invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation,” and anyone calling it a “war” or “invasion” has been arrested.
But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable.
So they defend the … defendable. That doesn’t sound SO indefensible.
And so on.
