Sadly, by agreeing with two thirds of the statement - "NATO expansion, CIA-backed colour revolutions, Russia a based Christian civilisation" - I confess to being one of those 'midwits with an IQ of 105 whose brain has been melted by social media'.
Although I did happen to visit Kiev shortly after the Maidan (to watch England away) and spent all night drinking with the Azov volunteers in an undergound bar off the square. They were committed, hardcore, articulate and unashamed white-nationalists with (to me) an unfathomably deep hatred of Jews.
The evening ended with a blood spattered bare knuckle fight to submission in the stairwell between two feuding volunteers while all the other punters in the bar had to sit in silence.
That, combined with being robbed and beaten by the police there has somewhat tempered my willingness to lustily 'Slava' the old 'Ukraini'.
Equally, perhaps the lies and failures - the shame - of Iraq war disaster has permanently altered my generations ability to conceive of wars as good and evil any more. Particularly when 'freedom and democracy' is used as a rallying cry.
That said, I respect anyone willing to fight and die for their own land. Naturally. But I remain unpersuaded that the uprising was spontaneous, legal, or 'popular'.
I am even less convinced it has anything at all to do with Britain.
Without wanting to turn that internet meme into an essay, I suspect there is a fourth group that slots in somewhere (or maybe it's just No. 3). This group consists of people who concede that such things as NATO expansion and CIA-backed colour revolutions etc. didn't help, yet those factors still don't add up to 'So Russia was quite within its rights to invade Ukraine'. Like many things in life, two opposing views can be right, it's just a matter of getting them into reasonable proportion.
I sometimes think back to the time when I lived in the Basque Country and two young local ETA activists shot a PP politician from the same village in the head. He had a wife and a daughter. Could I understand why some Basques didn't want Madrid to have even the smallest influence over how the Basque Country was run? Yes. Enough to shoot their neighbour in the head? No.
Wow, you must have been keen to travel to Kiev to watch an England under-21's match! Such devotion makes me want to shake your hand!
Many years ago, while cycling back to Leicester from Wales I passed a sign that said 'Coventry City's Training Ground'. So I cycled into the enclosure and sure enough, there was Gordon Strachan taking a session with about 20 players. The problem was, I didn't really recognise any of the players so I started to wonder if this were the reserves or youth team. I later mentioned all this to my friend who said, 'You didn't recognise any of them? Yep, that would be Coventry's first team'.
I often think about the Metacontrarian or Midwit point when thinking about conflicts. It is sometimes hard to differentiate freedom fighters from terrorists.
But quite often one side is the league of evil, comically villainous figures opposed to almost all principles an outsider observer might have. In African wars you often get the corrupt national army v the pile of skulls and looting side. Some terrorist groups especially in the 1970s and Russia in the 19th century just really liked murder and have weak plans or justification for their attacks.
Lots of people support obviously evil sides because of conspiracy theories rather than any rational argumen, though most pro-Russia or Pro-Iran sentiment seems to be anti-western contrarianism.
Great piece. I’m sure the comments will soon swarm with ‘but but but genocide/Nazis/Crimea/Nuland’. Important not to lose sight of the fact that these are fringe positions in the West.
Nothing here about any possible reasonable solution to the conflict which takes the respective interests of Ukraine and Russia into account. Just endless killing in what is utterly futile for Ukraine as a much smaller nation. Enthusiasm over continuation of this situation seems insane.
I’d like the war to end, and imagine it will end with Russia taking the Donbas and Crimea certainly. The proposal that Ukraine give up the whole southeast of the country would unfortunately leave them vulnerable to further attacks
They will always be vulnerable to further attacks from their much larger neighbor. Probably the only hope for them is to concede the Russian speaking and ethnic portions of the country and moderate their intense nationalism in pursuit of a modus vivendi similar to that followed by Finland vis a vis the Soviet Union. I don't think the Russians have any interest in trying to occupy Western Ukraine which would likely simply be an ongoing guerilla war. Admittedly, after all the sacrifices that have been made, the necessary concessions for peace would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is better than fighting on until there is no one left.
They nevertheless survived after defeating the Soviet attempts and their policy was successful in preventing the whole country from being swallowed up.
I'd be interested in what you know about 2014 and the extent it was orchestrated by Obama via Victoria Nuland. Also to what extent Ukraine had to resist Russia to provide cash for well-connected grifters e.g. Hunter Biden.
I think pretty much everyone in Europe supports Ukraine over the Russian mafia regime, but some of us wonder whether it is wise and a good use of money to fund a distant war when we can't even find a warship to defend our national interests.
with regard to 2014 I don’t doubt the Americans had an interest, although what role they played I can’t say. I also don’t doubt there was widespread popular grassroots support for removing the president and ridding the country of Moscow influence.
Obama was pretty weak in his support, failing to provide lethal weapons - recall how he mocked Romney for warning about Russian aggression - while Trump provided weapons, including javelin missiles.
I’ve read. I don’t doubt the horrific death toll in Gaza. Israel is clearly prepared to commit immense levels of violence to win; it also doesn’t change the fact of the ethical difference with Hamas, who based on previous behaviour would probably kill every Jew in the Holy Land if they could (they just lack the means).
I am genuinely baffled by this kind of response, are you under the impression that Ed West is uninformed about the war and one extra article will change his mind?
it's fine to share these articles. I've cited Noah a few times and always value his fairness and judgement, even when the conclusions argue against his own side's position. I suppose I'm not invested enough in the I/P conflict to spend a huge amount of time thinking about it, because it just feels totally unsolvable. i'd like there to be two states, and think the 1948 line is the fairest compromise, just don't think it will happen.
"Russia a based Christian civilisation." I would hope anyone with an IQ of 105 would investigate Putin and find out he was ex KGB so unlikely to be a Christian.
Ha ha! I had never seen it before but from the photo I just looked at it's like a squashed locker room or a Swiss bank vault. You can almost smell the leftist politics of the people who design such monstrosities.
Evil regimes have the best architecture, it is something about the nature of those regimes. I really want to visit Ashgabat it looks incredibly impressive. Maybe part of the reason is that evil regimes are run by poets, painters and librarians while democracies are run by lawyers and businessmen. Military juntas seem to be bad on both architecture and freedom.
You really can't blame us librarians for evil regimes. Although IF I were running an evil regimes those piles of skulls would be shelved and cataloged.
Mao has let you down, the Cultural Revolution seems the most anti-librarian mass killing in history with book burnings and no cataloguing, maybe he didn't like his old job.
Didn't Pol Pot kill people who wore glasses? That's pretty anti-librarian, but a true bibliophobe would target anyone wearing knit ties and comfortable shoes.
I just looked up Ashgabat because I had never heard of it. The buildings themselves might be fine but it all looks a bit too...intentional, inorganic and planned. Give me the impractical old narrow streets of southern Spain any day.
As for evil regimes having good architecture, I was wondering where to place the Brutalist 1984-style architecture of the Soviets and to a lesser extent of Nazi Germany. It's not really my thing, though I don't detest it in the way I do a 1960's British shopping centre.
I know almost nothing about architecture but I like the sturdy, healthy, strong, dramatic figures of Socialist Realism. Self-doubt seems completely foreign to them. And their bodies! To quote Philip Larkin: The boys all biceps and the girls all chest. If Hitler had ever wanted to illustrate the opposite of the degenerate art he hated, he couldn't have done better than point to Socialist Realism.
Re: As the conflict has dragged on, attention has waned, now competing in the attention economy with the war in Gaza.
Here in the US I still see occasional Ukrainian flags, though not as many as in 2022 when those largely replaced BLM flags. But I rarely see Palestinian flags
Re: I believe that the first mistake was the adoption of the Byzantine-Moscow rite which brought us, the easternmost part of the West, into the East.
What is he talking about? The Liturgy of John Chrysostom is the standard rite of Orthodoxy everywhere, and, in somewhat modified form, also serves as the liturgy of the Byzantine Catholic churches. 17th century Russia was also instrumental in composing the later polyphonic tradition of liturgical music, based on Italian Renaissance musical schemata. It is mainly in Greece that the older Byzantine musical tradition survives.
Re: Our individualistic Western spirit, stamped by despotic Byzantine Orthodoxy, could not free itself from this duality of spirit, a duality that eventually became hypocrisy.
Er, um, it's not like the West didn't have its own share of tyrannical rulers enforcing religious uniformity. Yes, England too had those, to say nothing of Spain, France, and on the Protestant side Calvin in Geneva and the Puritans anywhere they ruled.
My wife spent a weekend in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago. In the small, very affluent all white town she visited she saw several preserved in amber BLM yard signs and while leaving town she witnessed an all white, well heeled BLM rally -- practically a historical reenactment at this point.
I saw a Palestinian flag in Richmond, Virginia and in Marin County but nothing like as many as you see in England. There are still Ukrainian flags all over Whitehall though.
I will post about his book at length. that quote is obviously a simplification, but it perhaps expresses a view among Ukrainians about the influence of Moscow. the book contains quite a lot about how eastern Christendom fell behind a great deal.
A well articulated piece.
Sadly, by agreeing with two thirds of the statement - "NATO expansion, CIA-backed colour revolutions, Russia a based Christian civilisation" - I confess to being one of those 'midwits with an IQ of 105 whose brain has been melted by social media'.
Although I did happen to visit Kiev shortly after the Maidan (to watch England away) and spent all night drinking with the Azov volunteers in an undergound bar off the square. They were committed, hardcore, articulate and unashamed white-nationalists with (to me) an unfathomably deep hatred of Jews.
The evening ended with a blood spattered bare knuckle fight to submission in the stairwell between two feuding volunteers while all the other punters in the bar had to sit in silence.
That, combined with being robbed and beaten by the police there has somewhat tempered my willingness to lustily 'Slava' the old 'Ukraini'.
Equally, perhaps the lies and failures - the shame - of Iraq war disaster has permanently altered my generations ability to conceive of wars as good and evil any more. Particularly when 'freedom and democracy' is used as a rallying cry.
That said, I respect anyone willing to fight and die for their own land. Naturally. But I remain unpersuaded that the uprising was spontaneous, legal, or 'popular'.
I am even less convinced it has anything at all to do with Britain.
I wonder how many of them are dead now, or in captivity.
I have thought that as well.
Without wanting to turn that internet meme into an essay, I suspect there is a fourth group that slots in somewhere (or maybe it's just No. 3). This group consists of people who concede that such things as NATO expansion and CIA-backed colour revolutions etc. didn't help, yet those factors still don't add up to 'So Russia was quite within its rights to invade Ukraine'. Like many things in life, two opposing views can be right, it's just a matter of getting them into reasonable proportion.
I sometimes think back to the time when I lived in the Basque Country and two young local ETA activists shot a PP politician from the same village in the head. He had a wife and a daughter. Could I understand why some Basques didn't want Madrid to have even the smallest influence over how the Basque Country was run? Yes. Enough to shoot their neighbour in the head? No.
Incidentally, did England win?
Yes, what you describe is about my view.
It was actually England U/21's and we won 2:0
The match was in a place called Obolon in Kiev which is where the Russians were stopped 5 years later.
Wow, you must have been keen to travel to Kiev to watch an England under-21's match! Such devotion makes me want to shake your hand!
Many years ago, while cycling back to Leicester from Wales I passed a sign that said 'Coventry City's Training Ground'. So I cycled into the enclosure and sure enough, there was Gordon Strachan taking a session with about 20 players. The problem was, I didn't really recognise any of the players so I started to wonder if this were the reserves or youth team. I later mentioned all this to my friend who said, 'You didn't recognise any of them? Yep, that would be Coventry's first team'.
I think we lost to Italy on penalties
Nice to see I haven't derailed the discussion.
"it is not the 20th century anymore and the Second World War no longer acts as a useful guide to current events." Thanks Ed, my Dad's crying now.
I often think about the Metacontrarian or Midwit point when thinking about conflicts. It is sometimes hard to differentiate freedom fighters from terrorists.
But quite often one side is the league of evil, comically villainous figures opposed to almost all principles an outsider observer might have. In African wars you often get the corrupt national army v the pile of skulls and looting side. Some terrorist groups especially in the 1970s and Russia in the 19th century just really liked murder and have weak plans or justification for their attacks.
Lots of people support obviously evil sides because of conspiracy theories rather than any rational argumen, though most pro-Russia or Pro-Iran sentiment seems to be anti-western contrarianism.
Scott Alexander's Metacontrarian article
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Great piece. I’m sure the comments will soon swarm with ‘but but but genocide/Nazis/Crimea/Nuland’. Important not to lose sight of the fact that these are fringe positions in the West.
thank you!
And let's not forget that Crimea actually belongs to England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_(medieval)
Crimea is the only place to be Byzantine but not part of the Roman Empire (though it was sometimes a client).
Everyone has a bit of a claim to Crimea: Greeks, Byzantines, Goths, Saxons, Mongols, Genoese.
They spoke Gothic in Crimea until the 1700s and there are still some Turkic speaking non-Ashkenazi Jews the Kalmyks.
Nothing here about any possible reasonable solution to the conflict which takes the respective interests of Ukraine and Russia into account. Just endless killing in what is utterly futile for Ukraine as a much smaller nation. Enthusiasm over continuation of this situation seems insane.
I’d like the war to end, and imagine it will end with Russia taking the Donbas and Crimea certainly. The proposal that Ukraine give up the whole southeast of the country would unfortunately leave them vulnerable to further attacks
They will always be vulnerable to further attacks from their much larger neighbor. Probably the only hope for them is to concede the Russian speaking and ethnic portions of the country and moderate their intense nationalism in pursuit of a modus vivendi similar to that followed by Finland vis a vis the Soviet Union. I don't think the Russians have any interest in trying to occupy Western Ukraine which would likely simply be an ongoing guerilla war. Admittedly, after all the sacrifices that have been made, the necessary concessions for peace would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is better than fighting on until there is no one left.
It didn't work for Finland, they gave away various Finnic areas for peace and the USSR still invaded twice.
They nevertheless survived after defeating the Soviet attempts and their policy was successful in preventing the whole country from being swallowed up.
I'd be interested in what you know about 2014 and the extent it was orchestrated by Obama via Victoria Nuland. Also to what extent Ukraine had to resist Russia to provide cash for well-connected grifters e.g. Hunter Biden.
I think pretty much everyone in Europe supports Ukraine over the Russian mafia regime, but some of us wonder whether it is wise and a good use of money to fund a distant war when we can't even find a warship to defend our national interests.
with regard to 2014 I don’t doubt the Americans had an interest, although what role they played I can’t say. I also don’t doubt there was widespread popular grassroots support for removing the president and ridding the country of Moscow influence.
Obama was pretty weak in his support, failing to provide lethal weapons - recall how he mocked Romney for warning about Russian aggression - while Trump provided weapons, including javelin missiles.
“As Dominic Sandbrook once said, everyone talks about the ‘Russian soul’, but they never talk about the ‘Belgian soul’ for some reason.”
“Qui écrasaient ma belgitude”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgitude
ha!
"The side which is militarily stronger, and therefore capable of far greater violence, places more value on human life."
This article may be of interest: https://original.antiwar.com/noah_carl/2026/01/07/is-the-gaza-war-a-genocide/
I’ve read. I don’t doubt the horrific death toll in Gaza. Israel is clearly prepared to commit immense levels of violence to win; it also doesn’t change the fact of the ethical difference with Hamas, who based on previous behaviour would probably kill every Jew in the Holy Land if they could (they just lack the means).
I am genuinely baffled by this kind of response, are you under the impression that Ed West is uninformed about the war and one extra article will change his mind?
it's fine to share these articles. I've cited Noah a few times and always value his fairness and judgement, even when the conclusions argue against his own side's position. I suppose I'm not invested enough in the I/P conflict to spend a huge amount of time thinking about it, because it just feels totally unsolvable. i'd like there to be two states, and think the 1948 line is the fairest compromise, just don't think it will happen.
"Russia a based Christian civilisation." I would hope anyone with an IQ of 105 would investigate Putin and find out he was ex KGB so unlikely to be a Christian.
How come nasty Russians are able to build beautiful cathedrals while nice Brits can nowadays only build ugliness?
how people forget Thanet Parkway Station so soon
Ha ha! I had never seen it before but from the photo I just looked at it's like a squashed locker room or a Swiss bank vault. You can almost smell the leftist politics of the people who design such monstrosities.
Evil regimes have the best architecture, it is something about the nature of those regimes. I really want to visit Ashgabat it looks incredibly impressive. Maybe part of the reason is that evil regimes are run by poets, painters and librarians while democracies are run by lawyers and businessmen. Military juntas seem to be bad on both architecture and freedom.
You really can't blame us librarians for evil regimes. Although IF I were running an evil regimes those piles of skulls would be shelved and cataloged.
lol
Mao has let you down, the Cultural Revolution seems the most anti-librarian mass killing in history with book burnings and no cataloguing, maybe he didn't like his old job.
Didn't Pol Pot kill people who wore glasses? That's pretty anti-librarian, but a true bibliophobe would target anyone wearing knit ties and comfortable shoes.
I just looked up Ashgabat because I had never heard of it. The buildings themselves might be fine but it all looks a bit too...intentional, inorganic and planned. Give me the impractical old narrow streets of southern Spain any day.
As for evil regimes having good architecture, I was wondering where to place the Brutalist 1984-style architecture of the Soviets and to a lesser extent of Nazi Germany. It's not really my thing, though I don't detest it in the way I do a 1960's British shopping centre.
Stalinist architecture is actually quite attractive.
I know almost nothing about architecture but I like the sturdy, healthy, strong, dramatic figures of Socialist Realism. Self-doubt seems completely foreign to them. And their bodies! To quote Philip Larkin: The boys all biceps and the girls all chest. If Hitler had ever wanted to illustrate the opposite of the degenerate art he hated, he couldn't have done better than point to Socialist Realism.
Re: As the conflict has dragged on, attention has waned, now competing in the attention economy with the war in Gaza.
Here in the US I still see occasional Ukrainian flags, though not as many as in 2022 when those largely replaced BLM flags. But I rarely see Palestinian flags
Re: I believe that the first mistake was the adoption of the Byzantine-Moscow rite which brought us, the easternmost part of the West, into the East.
What is he talking about? The Liturgy of John Chrysostom is the standard rite of Orthodoxy everywhere, and, in somewhat modified form, also serves as the liturgy of the Byzantine Catholic churches. 17th century Russia was also instrumental in composing the later polyphonic tradition of liturgical music, based on Italian Renaissance musical schemata. It is mainly in Greece that the older Byzantine musical tradition survives.
Re: Our individualistic Western spirit, stamped by despotic Byzantine Orthodoxy, could not free itself from this duality of spirit, a duality that eventually became hypocrisy.
Er, um, it's not like the West didn't have its own share of tyrannical rulers enforcing religious uniformity. Yes, England too had those, to say nothing of Spain, France, and on the Protestant side Calvin in Geneva and the Puritans anywhere they ruled.
My wife spent a weekend in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago. In the small, very affluent all white town she visited she saw several preserved in amber BLM yard signs and while leaving town she witnessed an all white, well heeled BLM rally -- practically a historical reenactment at this point.
incredible stuff, straight out of 2020. I'd have loved to see that
I saw a Palestinian flag in Richmond, Virginia and in Marin County but nothing like as many as you see in England. There are still Ukrainian flags all over Whitehall though.
I will post about his book at length. that quote is obviously a simplification, but it perhaps expresses a view among Ukrainians about the influence of Moscow. the book contains quite a lot about how eastern Christendom fell behind a great deal.