Manicheansim is an ancient Persian religion notable for its belief in strict dualism. The world is divided between the good – the spiritual world of light – and the material world of darkness. Thus, there are only two teams, if you will. One good, the other bad.
O, to be on the side of the good! O, to be on the right team!
When war breaks out, the lines are drawn. Not to sound too much like a Putin puppet, but aren’t there at least two sides to every conflict? After all, wars don’t happen in a vacuum. More to the point, is it in any way possible, amidst the fog of war, to engage in sober analysis? To ask questions? To have doubts? Or does entertaining any of these necessarily suggest callous disregard for the victims of war?
Apparently, the only legitimate stance these days is: Stop thinking and go along with the crowd! Get on the bandwagon! Beat the drums of war! Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Get ‘em!
This Manichean approach certainly seems to fit the current conflict in Ukraine. The Western establishment’s liberal internationalism must be seen as being as pure as the wind driven snow. Any opposition to such an unquestioned good can only be the handiwork of primitive savages. After all, these evil subhumans oppose “rationality,” which in this case is defined as conformity to liberal globalist hegemony.
For years, Roger Scruton, the late, estimable British philosopher and teacher, repeatedly visited Eastern Europe (mostly in the former Czechoslovakia) supporting the secret and fragile underground educational networks that had formed during the Soviet occupation.
“As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips,” he discovered “these little pockets of the underground studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.”
His students were “quiet, studious, often deeply religious, attempting to build shrines in the catacombs, around which small circles of marginalized people could gather to venerate the memory of their national culture.”
More than anything, they were yearning for freedom, the kind promised by their European spiritual heritage. So much so, Scruton admits, he believed that after the fall of the Iron Curtain the public spiritedness found in these catacombs of learning would someday govern the state.
“It was not to be,” he laments. “Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts – hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik – without which it is impossible to stay in government.”
“They sat in their offices for a while,” he continues, “pityingly observed by their staff of former secret policemen, while affable and much traveled rivals, of the kind with whom German Social Democrats and French Gaullists could both ‘do business,’ carefully groomed themselves for the next election.”
“The most urgent preoccupation of this new political class was to climb on the European gravy train, which promised rewards of a kind that had been enjoyed, in previous years, only by the inner circles of the secret police.”
“The resistance we have seen to the EU in Eastern Europe,” he judges, “should be understood in this light. Although incomparably more benign than the Communist Party, European institutions involve imposing top-down government, unaccountable offices and a system of elaborate rewards for co-operation on a people who all associate such things with the Soviet past.”
Along the way, their new Western “overlords” imposed legislation as well as values and norms that in many instances ran directly counter to their fundamental beliefs and traditions.
He concludes with this sad refrain: “[These] countries today bear no resemblance to the liberated nations that were dreamt of in the catacombs. For when the stones were lifted, and the air of freedom blew across the underground altars, the flame that had been kept alive on them was instantly blown out.”
British journalist, Peter Hitchens, tells a similar story but from a different angle. As a foreign correspondent living in Moscow before, during, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, he describes the end of Communism as one of the most joyful moments of his life.
“The black beating heart of an evil empire had stopped,” he writes. “A black sun had been removed from the sky.”
At that moment in time, he muses, the West had the perfect opportunity to make Russia “an ally, friend and partner.”
“Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust.”
Unlike the repression witnessed by the world in Tiananmen Square in 1989, after which the West continued seeking friendly relations with the Chinese Communists, Russia had ceded its empire and capitulated to Western demands yet was treated as an enemy and a villain.
Not since 1945, Hitchens argues, had there existed such hopes for transforming Russia. There was no Stalin or the Soviet Communist Party. Its once mighty army was in shambles and its economy even worse off.
“What an opportunity this was for the rich, stable, well-governed West to come to the rescue,” Hitchens writes. “Had not Marshall Plan aid revived and rebuilt a ruined Western Europe after WWII? Had not Britain and the other occupying powers not vowed to bring democracy, freedom and the rule of law to a prostrate Germany? Was this not the moment for an equally unique act of generosity and far sight?”
“No it wasn’t,” he concludes. “What was unleashed instead was an army of carpetbaggers from the West, shouting about the free market, who quickly found their match in the crooks and corruption experts, many of them high Communist officials, who rushed to exploit and fool them.”
“At the same time formal ‘democracy’ was introduced – that is to say, there were some elections, which were of course rigged by big money. And in the minds of the Russians whose savings were vaporized, who were turned out of their homes by thugs, who lost their jobs and pension, democracy became a swear word.”
Then there was the expansion of NATO eastwards across Europe which was executed with an openly anti-Russian cast. Ultimately, he argues, this policy led to a predictable reaction which only strengthened the hardliners and nationalists within the Kremlin.
He cites American diplomat, George F. Kennan, the author of the anti-Soviet Cold War containment policy (not someone who could be accused of being soft on Communism), who reacted strongly to President Clinton’s decision to push NATO eastward.
“I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War,” Kennan warned. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies…I think it was a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else…This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in the graves.”
But Kennan wasn’t done: “I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe…Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime.”
Kennan also suggested what should be obvious, that NATO expansion was an insult to Russian democrats. “We are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”
Hitchens underscores the point: “In hints, in public speeches and private approaches, Russia has begged us for years to show it the most basic respect…Our response has been to react with mistrust and abuse.”
In a country now weakened, its glory days gone, is it all that surprising that paranoia, defensiveness, and even revenge might fill the void?
And don’t get me started on the West’s clandestine operations in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere). I recently watched a top British MI6 officer interviewed at the Oxford Union who said that Putin began as a “reformer” but over the years has become anything but.
Observers report that after the CIA engineered Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004-5) and, later, the Euromaidan Revolution (2013-4), Putin hardened his stance toward the West in general and NATO expansion in particular.
Oxford historian Robert Service recently told the Wall St. Journal of another provocation by the West. “It was the last straw” for Putin, he said, when the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership on Nov. 10 last year (2021), declaring America’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership. After that, he says, Russia began massing troops on the Ukrainian border.
Why this wouldn’t trouble the paranoid leader of Russia seems inconceivable. I still remember, for example, the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. At that time, the Kennedy Administration went to the brink of war to stop Khrushchev’s attempt to transport nuclear missiles to Cuba.
It seems Kennedy believed having these weapons 90 miles from Florida just might be a security threat. Why would an insecure Russian autocrat like Putin welcome Western expansionism, knowing its hostile intent?
Needless to say, stirring up clandestine regime change in the two historical “revolutions” in Ukraine (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa) might not be the best way to convince a despotic Putin to relax his guard.
Consider, for example, how the United States spent several years demonizing Putin and Russia during the phony Russian hoax centered around the 2016 election. How did Americans react when it was believed by some that a foreign agent, Russia, was interfering with our elections? Why would Russia react to actual threats in benign fashion?
Getting back to my original point, the Western Establishment, seemingly disregarding all this, not least Russia’s legitimate security interests, appears to be increasingly ginning up moral outrage and pushing for retaliation.
Writing in UnHerd, Georgetown professor Arta Moeini argues that in a society where “rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst” increasingly exist, “black and white mythologies” are a natural outgrowth.
In our “disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist,” he goes on, we are susceptible to “learned control and information warfare,” where the government and media control the narrative, “marginalizing investigative journalists” and “treating any form of dissent as appeasement of Putin.”
I personally believe Putin is a scary and vicious actor. I’m not a fan. And I condemn his actions in the strongest possible terms. Moreover, I pray for the well-being of his victims, the innocent people of Ukraine (as well as the innocent people of Russia).
Yet I fear, through increasingly tough and irresponsible rhetoric, moralistic bluster, and calls for military interventionism, we risk blundering into a worldwide conflict that could involve nuclear weaponry.
Perhaps it’s time to tone down the rhetoric a bit, refrain from calling for Putin’s assassination, or for regime change in Russia, and approach the situation with uncharacteristic tact, humility, and intelligence.