YouTube link here.

Dr. Grande’s YouTube Channel covers topics related to counselor education and supervision including but not limited to mental health, human behavior, relationship dynamics, psychopathology, personality theory, true crime, pop culture, research, statistics, SPSS, Excel, appraisal, and group counseling. Dr. Grande has a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor of Mental Health (LPCMH) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Professional (LCDP).

In this video Dr. Grande recites 12 “word salad” comments made publicly by Kamala Harris in the past few years while trying to keep a straight face. – Natylie

By Lev Golinkin, The Nation, 4/10/24

Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, Amazon’s Debut of the Month, a Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program selection, and winner of the Premio Salerno Libro d’Europa. His writing on the Ukraine crisis, Russia, the far right, and immigrant and refugee identity has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time (online), among others.

America’s largest library association, which annually hands out prestigious literary prizes such as the John Newbery Medal for children’s literature, the Caldecott Medal for picture books for children, the Stonewall Award for LBGTQ+ books for young readers, and the Coretta Scott King award for African American authors and illustrators, has recently honored two authors with a track record of whitewashing Nazi collaborators.

This January, the American Library Association (ALA) published a list of Best Historical Materials for 2023, which includes Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement—Selections from the Secret Police Archives.

This compendium of Soviet documents was edited by Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk. Viatrovych, who is currently a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, is notorious for drafting laws glorifying Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. He’s been condemned by Jewish organizations as well as the governments of Poland and Israel. Luciuk, a professor in Canada’s elite military college, has defended a Third Reich division accused of war crimes.

The ALA’s influence reaches beyond awards: The world’s largest library association plays a key role in lobbying Congress for federal funding, and runs Booklist magazine, which covers soon-to-be published titles; receiving a Booklist review is an important step on the road to successful publication.

This isn’t the ALA’s first scandal over skewing historical narratives. A 2022 panel musing about the legitimacy of books about Holocaust denial necessitated an apology clarifying that Holocaust denial is, indeed, a means of disinformation and therefore not appropriate. The group has since partnered with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on a traveling exhibit for libraries.

Yet the selection of Enemy Archives places any commitment to avoid both-sides-ing WWII in doubt. One of the book’s editors has described soldiers from an SS division as “war victims,” while the other demanded that the Canadian parliament apologize for calling an SS veteran a Nazi.

In 2015, Kyiv triggered international headlines after passing laws declaring two World War II–era paramilitary groups—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its offshoot the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—to be Ukrainian national heroes and making it illegal to deny that heroism. The OUN collaborated with the Nazis in massacring tens of thousands of Jews, while the UPA liquidated thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles.

The laws institutionalizing the OUN/UPA cult across Ukraine were the brainchild of Volodymyr Viatrovych, who at the time headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), a department in the federal government.

The legislation was only the beginning: Viatrovych’s systematic campaign transforming killers of Jews into freedom fighters became so endemic he was mentioned by name in the annual report on global antisemitism issued by Israel. The 2015 laws and the UINM’s whitewashing were condemned by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Articles such as “How Ukraine’s New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation’s Past” in The Nation and “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past” in Foreign Policy exposed a pattern of distortion. In 2017, Viatrovych was barred from entering Poland.

When Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called out Ukraine’s Holocaust revisionism during a 2018 visit, Viatrovych attacked him for “spreading the Soviet myth about the OUN’s participation in the Holocaust,” (the OUN’s involvement is an established historical fact). And when Ukrainian Jewish leader Eduard Dolinsky warned of the institute’s excesses, Viatrovych accused him of claiming antisemitism in order to profit. These smears echoed long-standing racist tropes of Jews carrying water for the Kremlin and concocting false acts of antisemitism to make money.

Viatrovych, who was fired as the head of UINM by President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, is now a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament.

Viatrovych’s coeditor, Luciuk, is a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada—the country’s equivalent of West Point. Last year, he published an edited excerpt from Enemy Archives in the National Post, a major Canadian paper. The article described the OUN as having been maligned by the USSR, which “routinely portrayed members of this Ukrainian nationalist movement as war criminals, Nazi collaborators, fascists and so on, a trope regurgitated regularly by the Russian Federation.”

The piece made it sound as if the OUN’s collaboration with the Third Reich was Soviet propaganda, instead of established historical fact. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) denounced the National Post for providing “space to Lubomyr Luciuk who continues to spread Holocaust distortion and disinformation.”

In responding to SWC, the National Post’s editor in chief admitted that the article “included a paragraph disputing the view that the Second World War era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were Nazi collaborators. However, we recognize that this collaboration has been established by prior scholarship.”

Luciuk has also vociferously defended the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), commonly known as SS Galizien. This was a formation in the SS—the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party and the chief perpetrator of the Holocaust.

SS Galizien was armed, trained, and commanded by German SS officers. Its soldiers, who were overwhelmingly volunteers, swore an oath to Hitler. A video clip from USHMM archives shows the German high command staging elaborate, Nuremberg-style enlistment ceremonies with beaming recruits marching under SS banners. In 1944, the division was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler—the mastermind of the Holocaust—who praised the fighters’ willingness to slaughter Poles. Indeed, prior to Himmler’s visit, SS Galizien subunits distinguished themselves by burning 500–1,000 Polish villagers alive.

Luciuk has written numerous defenses of SS Galizien, stating that “they weren’t pro-Nazi, they weren’t anti-Semitic and they didn’t engage in war crimes.”

Last fall, on the occasion of a visit by Zelensky, the speaker of the Canadian Parliament recognized SS Galizien veteran Yaroslav Hunka, who was present, prompting a standing ovation by parliamentarians. The ensuing scandal led to the speaker’s resignation, an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and condemnation from Canadian Jewish organizations.

Luciuk disagreed. The professor employed by the Canadian military—which lost over 45,000 men in the war against Nazi Germany—claimed that “members of Parliament joined an execrable chorus of zealots and prats who gibbeted Hunka for someone he never was —‘a former Nazi.’ I’d say the House owes our fellow Canadian, and an innocent man, a public apology.”

(It must again be stated that the SS was literally the military wing of the Nazi Party.)

The annual Best Historical Materials list is published by the Reference and User Service Association, an ALA division. The 2023 list contains 12 titles, each with a brief review by a scholar. The Enemy Archives review is signed by University of Southern Mississippi professor Jennifer Brannock. Tellingly, her review states that the documents in the book “cover topics such as the Soviet claim that the Ukrainian underground promoted fascism and collaborated with the Nazis.”

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 7/23/24

The conventional thinking is that Ukraine isn’t interested in resuming peace talks with Russia unless the latter capitulates to its unacceptable ultimatums, otherwise it’ll continue fighting “until the last Ukrainian”, but that might be about to be turned on its head as a result of recent developments. In the span of less than a week: Trump talked to Zelensky about his peace plan; the Vatican’s top diplomat visited Ukraine; and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister is visiting China, the last two for the first time since 2022.

From the looks of it, Ukraine is fretting about Trump’s likely return to power and wants to get ahead of the curve by exploring paths to peace, which are intended to give it a chance to shape the process instead of being completely controlled by it if the US suddenly decides to end its latest “forever war”. The supplementary developments that led up to the three aforementioned ones are Orban’s peace missions and the unveiling of former British Prime Minister Johnson’s peace plan.

Regarding the first of these two, this saw the Hungarian leader travel to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, DC, and Mar-a-Lago, after which he recommended in a report to the EU that their bloc explore the modalities of the next peace conference with China and resume dialogue with Russia. As for the second, this infamous hawk proposed territorial compromises with Russia and Ukraine protecting the rights of Russian speakers. These five developments were also just followed by an unexpected proof of concept.

It was announced on Tuesday that 14 Palestinian factions signed the Beijing Declaration that’ll end the years-long divisions between Hamas and Fatah, thus showing that lightning does indeed strike twice after China brokered the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement last year. For background, it was explained here how China is trying to organize a Brazilian-fronted parallel peace process on Ukraine ahead of and/or during November’s G20 in Rio, which is more realistic than ever now.

To explain, Zelensky read the writing on the wall over the past few weeks about Biden’s inevitable departure from the campaign, especially after Trump’s famous fist-pumping picture that followed his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt earlier this month turned him into a hero. This places his unprecedented proposal of Russia participating in the next round of Swiss-like Ukraine talks in November into context even though he hasn’t yet at this point signaled any willingness to compromise with it.

He suggested this on 15 July, and it was sometime last week that the Vatican’s and Ukraine’s top diplomats finalized their trips, the first to Ukraine and the second to China. 19 July then saw Johnson publish his peace plan, the details of which he likely conveyed to Ukraine and others beforehand, which was the same day as the Trump-Zelensky call. Then the previously mentioned diplomats set off on their respective trips and China coincidentally proved yet again that it can broker game-changing peace deals.

The EU disavowed Orban’s peace mission and associated report, yet the visit of the Vatican’s top diplomat to Ukraine hints that they might be relying on the Holy See as a backchannel for finding out whether the political fallout from Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump changed Zelensky’s views. After all, Orban visited Kiev less than a week afterwards when it wasn’t yet clear what its full implications would be, so it’s sensible to dispatch someone else a few weeks later to follow up on everything.

Zelensky’s unprecedented proposal last week for Russia to participate in the next round of Swiss-like Ukraine talks in November showed the world that he’s becoming more flexible at least in his rhetoric, thus paving the way for the Vatican’s top diplomat to visit Kiev and for his own such one to visit Beijing. Johnson’s peace plan also contained some carrots in it for Russia pertaining to its return to the G7 and the resumption of its partnership with NATO, which Trump may or may not have discussed with Zelensky.

The last part remains unclear since Johnson noted in his op-ed that he talked about the conflict with Trump but clarified that the views expressed therein are his own and claimed that he supposedly doesn’t know how the former American leader might try to resolve this conflict if he’s re-elected. Nevertheless, it’s more likely than not that Johnson sought to informally float at least some of Trump’s proposals in his piece, with the former promoting them before the public and the latter before Zelensky.

Trump considers China to be the US’ systemic rival so he doesn’t want it to play any role in the peace process, yet Zelensky just dispatched his top diplomat to Beijing regardless, which is intended to gain negotiating leverage with the US regardless of whatever November’s outcome may be. That trip is obviously at variance with American interests, which suggests that he’s once again “going rogue” a bit by behaving somewhat independently of his patrons.

Zelensky knows that his maximalist goal of reconquering all of Ukraine’s lost territory is unrealistic no matter what he says for the purpose of keeping morale high. He therefore wants to retake as much as he can before the US either becomes too fatigued with its latest “forever war” or is forced by circumstances into “Pivoting (back) to Asia” before it’s ready. By publicly displaying interest in China’s mediation, he hopes to either keep the US supporting him for longer or to reach a better peace deal with China’s help.

It’s a gamble, but he hopes that the next US President might either become so nervous about him flirting with China that they decide to give him more of what he’s been demanding and remove their restrictions or that China can convince Russia to scale back some of its maximalist demands for peace if they won’t. Nobody can confidently predict how far he’ll go in this regard nor exactly how serious he is, but it’s undeniable that Zelensky is changing tack to an extent, which is remarkable development in this conflict.

I’m posting this article because there’s useful information in it, but the concluding paragraph is garbage. I have included my comments at the end. – Natylie

By Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva, Carnegie Endowment, 5/28/24

The reasons for rising incomes in Russia have been well documented: a labor shortage, hefty payments to soldiers and their families, and an unprecedented level of state spending that has obliged defense sector factories to work around the clock. However, whether standards of living have actually improved is open to debate, given the record military spending, high inflation, Western sanctions, and limits on hydrocarbon exports.

The data that would normally be used to attempt to reach a conclusion should be treated with caution: Russian consumer behavior has changed too radically amid the war in Ukraine, and there are huge differences across Russian society. While the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a major shock for the middle class, it has also channeled wealth to many people who were previously struggling to make ends meet.

The data that are available show that real incomes rose 5.8 percent in 2023 and at the same rate in the first quarter of 2024, according to Russia’s State Statistics Service (Rosstat). On top of that, figures from the Federal Tax Service show that the Russian state’s income tax revenues in 2023 were 40 percent higher than in 2021 (the lion’s share of this increase took place in 2023).

The fifteen fastest growing regions in terms of income tax contribution (excluding the regions Russia claims it has annexed in Ukraine) include hardly any of the traditionally big donors. Instead, the top spots are occupied by regions that before the war were traditionally net recipients from the federal budget. They include the republic of Chuvashia (a rise of 56 percent over two years), Bryansk region (54 percent), Kostroma region (52 percent), Kurgan region (50 percent), Smolensk region (49 percent), and Zabaikalsky region (47 percent). There were only three regions where income tax contribution growth was under 20 percent.

It’s important to remember that using income tax payments to gauge standards of living means excluding a key source of wartime wealth, since soldiers’ wages and payouts in case of injury or death are not subject to income tax. However, given the growth in income tax payments (and that Rosstat assesses that 59 percent of incomes in 2023 derived from wages), it can be said with confidence that real incomes have risen faster than inflation since the full-scale invasion.

How are Russians spending this money? The answer seems to be that they are both spending more and saving more (a trend that the head of Russia’s central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, has described as odd). According to the central bank, the amount of rubles held in Russian bank accounts climbed 19.7 percent to 7.4 trillion in 2023 (nearly three times what it was in 2022), buoyed by high interest rates. In particular, there has been growth in the category of deposits worth between 3 million and 10 million rubles (both in terms of their total value and in the number of people holding such deposits). In other words, a lot of people are prepared to hold sizable sums in the bank, and they appear confident that there will be no disaster in the near future.

When it comes to consumption, the picture is extremely varied. Consumers operate within certain limits: for example, Russians aren’t going to Europe because air transport links were severed at the start of the war, and it’s hard to get a visa. It’s also difficult to buy a car: not everyone wants a Chinese-made vehicle.

However, there are two spending trends that suggest at least some consumers have money to burn. Firstly, demand continues to grow for mortgages (the total value of mortgages held in Russia grew 34.5 percent in 2023). This growth has mostly been driven by state-subsidized mortgage programs. And demand showed no sign of slacking in the first four months of 2024. Many Russians have enough savings to put down a 30 percent deposit on a property (the average initial deposit), and are happy to take on twenty-year mortgages, suggesting they are counting on continued state support.

The second trend is the booming gambling market. The income of legal bookmakers rose 40 percent in 2023, and active gamblers (those who bet at least once a week) numbered some 6.6 million people. In total, more than 15 million people gambled (about one in seven Russians over the age of 18) over the course of the year. At the same time, inflation means the size of the average bet is growing. Current trends have even led to calls to raise the legal limit on a single bet from 600,000 rubles to 1.4 million rubles.

Among those who are “winning” from the current situation are the millions of Russians in blue-collar and gray-collar jobs. Some of the most in-demand wartime professions are: milling machine operator, machinist, welder, weaver, and garment worker. While there are some regional differences, the wages of the men and women working in these professions have more than tripled and in some cases quintupled. Weavers, for instance, were paid between 18,000 and 25,000 rubles per month in December 2021 (about $250–350 back then), whereas now they can get 120,000 rubles ($1,300).

Another good example is couriers and drivers. Long-distance truck drivers now get an average of 180,000 rubles a month (up 38 percent year-on-year), while couriers can earn up to 200,000 rubles a month. For comparison, President Vladimir Putin recently signed a decree raising the monthly payment to members of the Russian Academy of Sciences—the country’s leading academics and researchers—to 200,000 rubles from next year.

From even this brief analysis, it’s clear that the main financial beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine (excluding security officials and soldiers) are those whose professions were long considered low paid and low status. Now they enjoy high salaries and a surfeit of attention from both employers struggling to fill job vacancies, and the state as a whole.

More money in their pockets makes these people—who are not accustomed to self-reflection and who do not have easy access to independent sources of information—even more susceptible to propaganda. Putin’s public image provides them with a comforting feeling of stability, and a sense that their leaders are making the right decisions. It’s unsurprising that the level of support for the Russian regime among these groups is only growing.

[“who are not accustomed to self-reflection and who do not have easy access to independent sources of information” – suggesting that these people don’t ever engage in self-reflection is just plain elitist, same for suggesting that they have no access to smart phones and therefore Telegram, YouTube and the like: elitist and ignorant. Also, it’s normal for working class people anywhere to vote for and support policies that result in concrete improvements to their material lives. Again, suggesting that doing so is merely a result of propaganda is insulting and elitist. This is typical of the kind of people that write for western think tanks about Russia – people who have contempt for their subject. – Natylie]

By Paul Grenier, Landmarks, 6/12/24

Introduction

Americans have a tendency to assume that their opponents are evil.  Bond films and Hollywood blockbusters instantiate, in the final analysis, what is already the common American assumption. It is not simply a matter of America’s opponents doing something bad. The situation is far more dire than that.  The opponent wishes to do evil, because their very will is oriented in that direction.  Given such an assumption, it follows quite naturally that neither diplomacy nor compromise can be considered realistic options. How can one compromise with evil?  The only possible response is to wage a war – perhaps a messianic war – against the enemy of the moment.  

The most recent consequence of this long-standing pattern is America’s intractable and constantly escalating proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.  From the perspective that matters in Washington, the reasons for this war are uncomplicated, having to do with the evil will of the Russian president, who, it is said, initiated a war on his neighbor, wholly unprovoked, in the usual Bond villain pattern. Still today, no compromise is being considered, nor is any diplomacy underway. Quite to the contrary, what we have seen, since the war began, is a constant escalation in the lethality of weapons supplied to Ukraine, and in the risks the US side is willing to take in its unprecedented direct confrontation with the Russian nuclear superpower.   

The result is a strange paradox:  on the one hand, we are confronted with a war which, as any responsible analyst will admit, could easily have been prevented altogether, by the simple expedient of allowing Ukraine to remain neutral. It is also a war that could have almost immediately been stopped, back in March/April 2022, after negotiations between Kiev and Moscow reached a successful compromise in Istanbul – a compromise which the Americans, making use of the good offices of British foreign minister Boris Johnson, saw fit to reject. The upshot of this process, then, is that, for the sake of avoiding a neutral Ukraine, the world now faces the very real risk of a further escalation that could easily end in nuclear war.  

How did we get into such a thoroughly irrational position, which seemingly has reached a dead end?  We have gotten here by viewing reality through the prism of moralism, through the assumptions, just described, that those who oppose us must be motivated by an evil will.  It goes without saying that this moralizing pattern of thought (the word ‘thought’ is being used here in a purely metaphorical sense) nearly always involves a complete distortion of reality.  

The dire consequences of these habitual assumptions make obvious the need for a different approach, one that is both less moralistic and more adequate to reality.  Fortunately, such a perspective exists, and has existed for almost as long as philosophy itself. In the Platonic (Socratic) philosophical tradition, as anyone can see from reading, for example, the dialogue Gorgias or The Republic, the greatest danger we face in our political community is viewed not as the ‘bad will’ of the enemy, but ignorance and illusion, which may exist and usually does exist on all sides.  From Socrates’ perspective, all desire is oriented to what is believed to be the good, even if irrationality, or failure to understand the true needs of the soul, often leads us astray. 

The Platonic tradition, to be sure, does not deny the reality of evil. After all, a stubborn persistence in ignorance and illusion is also a form of evil. All the same, the Platonic perspective allows for a far more subtle understanding of the problem of evil.  “When we do evil,” noted the Christian Platonist Simone Weil, “we do not know it, because evil flees from the light.” The avoidance of thought is the typical form taken by this ‘fleeing from the light.’ Continuing on this same theme, Weil adds: “When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.”  

“When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil but as a necessity or even a duty.   

Messianism: General Considerations

Normally we think of messianism as a proselytizing mania conducted by those who are certain that God is on their side.  The key to any messianism, however, is not the presence of the Absolute, but the conviction that what one values is absolute.  This conviction can be, and regularly is, based on some such value as ‘development,’ or ‘return on investment’ or ‘democracy.’  Hans Morgenthau, in his outline of the four cardinal rules of diplomacy, places in first place the need to banish “the crusading spirit” — another name for messianism.  The ideal vehicle for such a crusading spirit is what Morgenthau refers to as abstract principles, or some suitable ‘catchword’, which is then molded and adapted to suit the needs of the moment. There is no problem with the meaning of the catchword being twisted into variously-shaped pretzels in the process.  That is the beauty of the abstract principle or catchword in the first place. Its very vagueness lends its owners an ever-expanding freedom and power.  Or so it appears at first.  And yet, as Morgenthau notes, citing William Graham Sumner: “If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, the arbiter of your destiny.”  

Democracy today serves as just such a catchword for the American political class, and it has, correspondingly, generated its own species of messianism, that of democracy promotion.  Freedom is another such catchword.  Now, true freedom is, to be sure, among the greatest of values. It becomes a catchword when the meaning of freedom is distorted and misunderstood, as it has in our time, generating thereby freedom as ideology, freedom as a generator of the crusading spirit, of messianism.  We will return below to the crucial question of freedom. 

An additional form of messianism, perhaps the most obvious of all, is the quest to eliminate evil from the world. The American-led Global War on Terror was just such an effort. So too was the communist effort to eliminate from the world all capitalists, thereby supposedly ushering in a secular heaven within history.  

American Messianism

According to Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921 – 1983), the American Protestant spirit has a strong tendency toward sectarianism, and this is a direct result of its rejection of the sacramental order, in other words, its rejection of the religious nature of creation itself.  Inhabiting this de-sacramentalized world are individual believers “obsessed with salvation,” but now their salvation can no longer be rooted in a relationship with the world or with the kingdom of heaven. As a result, a ‘salvation’ so conceived becomes an empty thing, shorn of content—and in this respect, as we will see, it echoes the liberal concept of freedom. At the same time, even a salvation so conceived must find some content, some justification; and so, the “experience of ‘being saved’… is unavoidably filled with any content. The one who is saved must ‘save.’ ” All the activity and all the excitement of life becomes a process of ‘saving,’ a process of struggling against various evils, whatever they happen to be (communism, populism, drugs, and most recently of course, Vladimir Putin). Without an evil to do battle against, there is literally nothing else to do; there is no substance, there are no ‘things’ which warrant loving and valuing for their own sake.   

Freedom from Roots

Schmemann’s perspective on the sectarian origins of American messianism bears a close resemblance to, and provides an added dimension, to Simone Weil’s famous dictum that “whoever is uprooted himself, uproots others” (cf. ‘those who are saved must save’).  Weil’s concept of being rooted overlaps in certain respects with Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit in as much as both presuppose a substantive complex of inherited moral and practical traditions as well as orientations to various ‘treasures’ which must be passed on to the future.  In a rooted community, work (labor) itself is a continuation of the liturgical side of life – or, to use a vocabulary more typical of Weil, labor becomes an expression within the world of the beauty and goodness ‘which lies beyond this world.’  

The process of emptying the world of rich content of this sort is nailed in place, is made all but irretrievable, by the peculiar liberal (mis)understanding of freedom.  American theologian and philosopher D.C. Schindler has, over the course of several books and numerous articles, carefully diagnosed where the liberal concept of freedom, which has been embraced from the beginning by the United States, goes astray. To vastly oversimplify, what D.C. Schindler has outlined is the process whereby the proper meaning of freedom has been narrowed to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a process of willing, a process of choosing; in the final analysis, the reduction of freedom to the possession of a power, full stop. 

…the proper meaning of freedom has been narrowed to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a process of willing, a process of choosing; in the final analysis, the reduction of freedom to the possession of a power, full stop. 

A freedom so understood uproots the whole world.  It is helpful to contrast this innovation with the traditional view of freedom, which Schindler terms ‘symbolical’: 

To say that the will terminates in things – that is, in actual goods outside the soul – is to conceive of freedom in essentially symbolical terms as a ‘joining with,’ a sharing in goodness, by uniting with a reality that evokes desire and at the very same time responsibility. To deny this, as Locke came to see that he must, is to deny that the will connects with reality in any genuine sense; it is to lock the will within its own boundaries, to replace the ontological union of the soul and reality with the power to carry out an activity …  

Modern freedom creates a world that is strangely empty, even as it becomes ever more filled with stuff.  And as we have seen, idle hands become the devil’s playground. 

Conclusion: The Good Will that Destroys Worlds

Paul Robinson, in his article for Landmarks critiquing the proposed new Containment policy, points out that Kiev’s extremely poor prospects for success, and the likelihood that continuing the war will lead to perhaps hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, doesn’t seem to bother ‘the new Cold War’ enthusiasts: 

Convinced that they are ‘helping’ Ukraine, they lead it further into the abyss, just as their predecessors led Vietnamese, Afghans, Angolans, and others into the abyss in decades past … Looking at this from a philosophical point of view, one might complain that the issue here is a failure to follow Kant’s categorical imperative and to view people as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. The end is weakening Russia and China, and if others suffer in the process, we shrug our shoulders and consider it a price worth paying, knowing full well that it is not us but others who are paying the price. I think, though, that this complaint is not entirely accurate because the architects of these policies strike me not so much as cynics who know full well what they are doing but as true believers, who really imagine that their ‘help’ is in fact help, that the United States is a force for good in the world, and that spreading its influence and undermining that of others is thus for the benefit of all humanity.

What is striking here is the chasm between the declared aims — ‘helping this or that other nation’ — and the visibly disastrous effects of that ‘help.’ What is being offered, it is said, and if Paul Robinson is right, is being offered in the sincere belief that what is being offered is something good, is variously termed ‘freedom’ or ‘human rights’ or ‘democratic values.’ What is actually being delivered to Ukraine, as in the other countries he mentioned (and his was a very abbreviated list), is national dismemberment, death on an unimaginable scale (50% of Ukrainians today are said to be suffering from PTSD – the ones who are still alive, of course).  What I am trying to draw attention to here is a certain aspect of the psychology of modern liberalism: there is something here that is so pathologically self-absorbed that its notions of the good are incapable of noticing realities beyond its own ideological construct.

I want to close with an image that greatly impressed me, taken from a recent English novel that to my mind symbolizes the liberal uprooted consciousness. The novel in question, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, takes place in early 19^th century England. The England described therein has all the familiar realism of a Jane Austen novel, until two men with astonishing magical powers make their presence known. What drives the story forward are their efforts to counteract the efforts of yet another magical character, a powerful faerie, called the Man with Thistledown Hair. This faerie uses his power to ensnare and trap victims within his own world, a world which the Man with Thistledown Hair considers utterly delightful. This faerie takes a fancy to certain characters in the novel and sets about, with perfect sincerity, to ‘help’ them.  He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will completely dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the ‘goods’ that he bestows are only those that he himself defines. 

He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will completely dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the ‘goods’ that he bestows are only those that he himself defines.

It is not that he hears, but is indifferent to, the protests of his victims, who do not want any of these ‘gifts.’ What we have in the faerie is a degree of egotistical solipsism that has reached an infinite degree, such that he is simply incapable of noticing anything outside of his own interpretation of the world.  Spoken words that contradict his internal thoughts and wishes ‘to do good’ for others are, in the purely mechanical sense, ‘heard,’ and yet they might as well not be, in as much as they remain to the faerie utterly incomprehensible.  Only what is locked inside his own mind has any meaning for him. 

A Lindsay Graham, a Joe Biden, a Victoria Nuland, and, indeed, most of the liberal foreign policy establishment – an establishment which extends also to Europe –  strike me as analogues of the Man with Thistledown Hair.  As Paul Robinson said in respect to their efforts in such places as Vietnam, or Central America, or Libya, or Syria, or Ukraine, and now Georgia, in all such cases, they believe that they are doing good, that their help is actively desired. That they are saving the world.