I saw this on Twitter but it needs sharing. About men who think they are supportive of women, but only see women as appendages or extensions of themselves. No. They are someones, not someone’s someones. Why this is even an issue in 2024, I do not comprehend.
Yesterday, August 9, 2024 marked the 79th anniversary of the last time nuclear weapons were used in anger. Or to put it another way, today began the 80th year without a nuclear war.
Can we make it through the end of this year, too, without major confrontation?
Russia vs. Ukraine. Iran vs. Israel. China vs. Taiwan. These are just the major flashpoints, but probably because they are on everyone’s front pages, they’re also the least likely ones. Fecal matter tends to encounter propellers in the most unexpected places. After all, who would have thought on June 28, 1914 that a student stepping out of a coffee house just as a car carrying a VIP made a wrong turn in the distant city of Sarajevo will change world history? Who would have thought on July 7, 1937 that a Japanese soldier with a belly ache in faraway Beijing would trigger an incident on a bridge informally named after a European explorer who visited centuries prior, leading to the first shots fired in a global calamity that eventually concluded with the aforementioned last use of a nuclear weapon in anger?
War. War never changes, goes the motto of the Fallout family of computer games. And I am increasingly worried that the Fallout games, just like a text game from the dawn of personal computing, A Mind Forever Voyaging, foreseeing a society with rising inequality, political polarization, authoritarian rule, will be treated not as cautionary tales but as instruction manuals…
Having read comments from some Brits who wish to get rid of the monarchy in order to turn their country into a “democracy”, I despair. It is one thing that, in 2024, most folks are illiterate when it comes to science and technology but apparently, history and the social sciences are also badly neglected subjects.
My point, of course, is that these commenters confuse the form of government with the sources of power and the nature of the state.
A form of government may be a republic (res publica, i.e., governance in the name of the public) or a monarchy (monarkhia, rule of one), among other things.
However, both these forms of government can be autocratic (relying on the might of the state) vs. democratic (relying on the will of the people) insofar as the source of power is concerned.
And neither the form of government nor that source of power determine if the state will be liberal (that is, respecting basic rights and freedoms, such as freedom of conscience, freedom of enterprise, or the rule of law) or illiberal/authoritarian.
Midjourney’s response to the mostly Claude-written prompt, “Three regal anthropomorphic cats sitting on thrones, representing the orthogonal concepts of government. One cat wears a crown (monarchy vs republic), another holds a scepter and a ballot box (autocracy vs democracy), and the third balances scales of justice (liberal vs illiberal). The cats are arranged in a triangle formation against a backdrop of a stylized world map.”
To illustrate, let me offer a few examples. I live in Canada: a liberal, democratic constitutional monarchy. South of us is the United States: Also liberal and democratic, but a republic.
In contrast, the DPRK (North Korea) may serve as an example of a state that is an illiberal, undemocratic republic. Saudi Arabia is an illiberal, undemocratic monarchy.
Examples for other combinations are perhaps harder, but not impossible, to find. Orban’s Hungary, for instance, is rapidly converging on a state that is best described as illiberal, but democratic (the primary source of power is the people, not the might of the state) republic. I think some of the states in the Middle East (maybe Kuwait?) might qualify as relatively liberal, yet undemocratic monarchies.
These categories are not perfect of course, and do not cover all outliers, including theocracies, transitional governments or failed states. Still, I think it’s important to stress that the form of government, the source of power and the nature of the state are three fundamentally orthogonal concepts, and that all combinations are possible and do exist or have existed historically.
Understanding these distinctions is important. For instance, there are plenty of historical examples (e.g., the French Revolution devolving into the Reign of Terror, or the Russian revolution leading to the totalitarianism of the USSR) when the transition from monarchy to republic led to a significantly more autocratic regime. “Republic” is not a synonym for “democracy”.
It’s a civic holiday Monday that feels like a Saturday, reminding me of an old Soviet-era science-fiction novel, Monday begins on Saturday, by the Strugatsky brothers. It’s also a rather gloomy Monday morning, so it’s time for me to grumble about a few things.
For instance, how politics infuses everything these days. I signed up to follow a Facebook group dedicated to brutalist architecture, which for some inexplicable reason, I like. The comments section in one of the first posts I saw rapidly deteriorated into political bickering, as to whether or not it was appropriate to repurpose one of the Nazi-era indestructible flak towers in Hamburg as a luxury hotel. Because you know, politics is everything.
Speaking of which, I saw another post elsewhere about employees of a large US company who, after being told how successful the company was last year, were informed in the same breath that the company will cut their pension plan contributions. Needless to say, there followed comments about the evils of capitalism. Having experienced both capitalism and one of its alternatives, a socialist economy with central planning, all I can say is that capitalism works most of the time until it doesn’t; but when it doesn’t, victims are ever so eager to replace it with something that never works instead.
Then there was this post at an online news site claiming that it is practically impossible to run an ethical AI company. Well, what can I say? If you are telling me that allowing machine learning algorithms to learn from accumulated human knowledge is unethical, then sure, you are absolutely right. Then again, I suspect that what mainly drives such complaints is blatant ignorance of how machine learning works in the first place.
OK, well, never mind that, there’s good news. A fusion energy breakthrough: Neutron impact on tokamak components uncovered. Er… Say again? You are telling me that after 70+ years of research, we are beginning to understand why, or how, a heavy neutron flux rapidly destroys test equipment in the lab? Isn’t that like, say, greeting it as a “steam turbine breakthrough” when a prehistoric tribe manages to draw a spark from slamming together two rocks?
Oh well. On mornings like this, I feel I am beginning to comprehend the mood of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut who once told the CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti to go jump in a lake.
I mentioned this before: A Mind Forever Voyaging, a computer game from the 1980s, one of the text adventures of the legendary Infocom, a game in which you play an AI protagonist, sent to simulations of the future to explore the factors behind the decay and collapse of society.
As you venture further and further into the future, things get worse. Inequality, homelessness, violence.
I was again reminded of this game this morning when I saw the news: New mortgage rules are in effect, allowing borrowers less down payment and longer terms. As a result, the monthly mortgate payment for a $500,000 home is “only” around $2,700, give or take.
Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps the problem is not on the borrowing side but on the supply side? That if we lack affordable housing, making it easier for people to borrow money that they cannot afford to repay is not really a solution?
The same newscast again mentioned an increasingly frequent problem, “renoviction”, when people are evicted from their rent-controlled apartments because the landlord renovates, only to learn that they can no longer find a place of residence that they can afford.
Also on the news: yet another old business (opened 1954) is shutting down at the ByWard Market. In their case, it’s the changing nature of the business post-COVID but for many others, it’s the deteriorating public safety. Increased police presence only pushes the problem elsewhere, like Centretown. I had to drive across town today to our car dealership, for an oil change. I saw panhandlers at every major intersection. Not too long ago, such sights were rare, dare I say even nonexistent here in Ottawa. Now, downtown sidewalks are full of homeless folks.
I have said it before when I lamented about AMFV here in my blog: It’s a piece of (interactive) fiction. Please do not mistake it for an instruction manual. Let’s come back from the brink before it is too late. Unless it is too late already…
As a dual citizen of Canada and Hungary, I am of course delighted to hold an EU passport. Even though I have no plans to do so in the foreseeable future, it is nice to know that I have freedom of movement within the EU, and that in most places I could also claim permanent residence and work.
Unfortunately, as a person firmly committed to the values and interests of our Western alliance, I am increasingly concerned about Viktor Orban’s antics. His coziness with Russia’s dictator, his willingness to embrace undemocratic, “illiberal” policies for the sake of holding on to power, his warm relationship with Trump, his misuse of his position as Hungary holds the rotating EU presidency, exemplified by his rogue visits to Moscow and Beijing… Plain and simple, he is becoming a security threat to the Western alliance.
I have often called Orban in the past a horse trader (a particularly apt expression in the Hungarian language is “lókupec”). The implication, of course, was that even as Orban is deeply corrupt and unscrupulous, he is driven in the end by rational self-interest, and thus remains predictable and reliable.
But lately, I’ve been wondering if that is still true. What we are witnessing, I do not fully comprehend. Is he a Putin asset? Did he simply bet on the wrong horse this time around, now doubling down on a bad bet?
Whatever it is, he is not only doing tangible harm to his own country and, of course, the Western alliance, he is also making amateurish mistakes. The most recent example concerns his journey to Kyiv and Moscow. Parading around as a champion of peace, he forgot to talk to his hosts about the one thing that can severely impact Hungary’s economy: The uninterrupted supply of Russian oil through a pipeline that traverses Ukrainian territory. Oops!
Orban is now widely despised in the West and with good reason. At home, however, he remains firmly in charge. The secret, beyond his “illiberal” concentration of powers and his success at undermining independent media and the independence of the judiciary, is the flawed historical self-assessment of his nation. Many Hungarians still view themselves as victims of the Paris peace treaty of 1919, which they see as massively unfair, robbing the country of roughly two thirds of its historical territory. Which undeniably happened, of course, but context is everything. The last time those historical borders of Hungary existed as the borders of an independent political entity was in 1526, when Hungary suffered a devastating loss fighting the Ottoman Empire (a self-inflicted wound, arguably, as it was Hungary that broke a peace treaty with the Ottomans.) Fast forward to the 20th century: we have a map created by a famous Hungarian cartographer, Károly Kogutowitz who, using data from the last pre-war census of 1910, compiled this ethnographic map of the country:
Although there are clearly visible areas of the map outside the country’s present-day borders that had majority Hungarian populations, the borders are roughly in the right place. We can argue about specific patches of land in the border regions of Slovakia, in northern Transylvania, and a few other locations (hey, my father’s family is from Temesvár, now Timisoara, Romania, and I’ve had friends and relatives from famous, formerly Hungarian towns like Kolozsvár/Cluj or Marosvásárhely/Tirgu Mures, so it’s not like I am unaware of their plight, especially under Ceausescu’s regime), but one thing is clear: most of the territory of the historical Kingdom of Hungary was not dominated by a Hungarian ethnic majority. Should not be surprising: medieval kingdoms were not ethnic nation-states. Whether or not it is wise to base borders on ethnicity is another question, but so long as we accept that premise, the borders speak for themselves: they may not be fair but they certainly represent ethnic realities far more closely than the historical borders many Hungarians still dream about.
Orban of course can whip up nationalist feelings. He can easily explain his stance on Ukraine to his domestic audience by alluding to how badly ethnic Hungarians are supposedly treated in that country. The Orban of the past: the young leader of a youthful movement (Fidesz stands for Alliance of Young Democrats in Hungarian) is long forgotten. Instead, we now have a leader that adores Russia’s dictator. A leader whose actions appear to echo a past when, nearly a century ago, another Hungarian leader, Horthy, maneuvered the country into a foreign policy cul-de-sac. I fear that something similar is going to happen again, and the country will suffer, just as it suffered during that fateful winter of 1944-45 when it was ravaged by war and by brutal Nazi rule, only to be followed by more than four decades of communist oppression.
I heard a rumor: Russia was significantly less affected by the CrowdStrike cyberoutage. Could it be that they were behind it?
Of course not. Never attribute to evil that which you can explain by stupidity. But in this case, backwardness was also on Russia’s side. You might have seen memes about Southwest Airlines, largely unaffected on account of the fact that many of their systems still run on Windows 3.1. Well, it Russia it’s… like that, even more so. As an example, here’s a CrowdStrike-affected display panel from a few days ago at JFK airport in New York City:
In contrast, here’s a departures board from a small Russian airport:
Kind of hard to hack, that one.
Apparently, The Simpsons predicted not just the Trump presidency but also the attire and demeanor Kamala Harris.
OK, so the color is a little bit off. But just like Lisa Simpson, Kamala Harris, if elected, will have to deal with some of Trump’s legacy.
I admit I almost lost it last night.
I was attempting to sign up as an author with a notable scientific journal (who shall remain nameless as I am cowardly and I hope to remain in their good graces.) I was confronted with a questionnaire asking about some personal details.
Okay, so they want to know about my name, e-mail address, office phone and institution. All perfectly reasonable, even though I do not have a formal affiliation which sometimes means going through extra hoops, trying to convince the software that I am nonetheless legit. Then came more personal questions such as my gender and age. But then… race, ethnicity, sexual orientation…
Sexual orientation???
I beg your pardon?
Say what? I apologize for language that’s rude and crude, but what the fuck do my scientific contributions have to do with the privacy of my bedroom and how is that your fucking business?
I generally consider my ideological affiliation left-of-center, which is to say more likely leaning towards a progressive liberal attitude. But this? Granted, there was the option, “prefer not to answer”. Nonetheless, I was beyond offended. In this context, the question is downright creepy. What are they going to ask next from prospective authors? How often do you masturbate? Do you prefer conventional or unconventional positions while copulating? Are you into S&M?
I mean, seriously, all I am trying to do is to submit a physics paper to a scientific publication. Not interrogated about my bedroom habits.
Of course I know the answer. This is checkbox-driven DEI virtue-signaling. Someone, somewhere, will write a report about how well (or how badly) this scientific publication represents various communities. Never mind that the actual science should have absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. They now have checkboxes, and no doubt, folks patting themselves on the back being proud of what they have accomplished, making the world more inclusive and all.
Except that they didn’t. Except that these forms of aggressive, self-serving episodes of virtue signaling achieve the exact opposite: instead of steering the world towards a future in which such superficial characteristics no longer matter, instead of a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character, they not only keep divisions alive, they are actively deepening them.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things anymore.
This is a picture perfect moment. For all the wrong reasons, but this image is destined for the history books.
July 13, 2024. I have the feeling that it will be remembered like a day almost precisely 80 years ago, July 20, 1944, when another defiant leader emerged, mostly unscathed, from an assassination attempt.
Assassinations do not restore or strengthen democracy. We’ve known that at least since the times of ancient Rome, since Marcus Junius Brutus and co-conspirators assassinated Julius Caesar almost two thousand years ago. Rather than saving the Roman Republic, they hastened its demise.
The only thing worse than the assassination of a tyrant (or a would-be tyrant, as some see Trump) is a failed assassination. Which is what happened 80 years ago in the famed Wolf’s Lair. Ironically, Hitler was also injured in his ears. But far from weakening him, the assassination attempt likely played a role in Germany fighting all the way to the bitter end, as Hitler viewed his survival as a divine moment. What the fallout from the attempt on Trump’s life will be is yet an open question, but there is one thing of which I am sure: it’s going to be bad news for his political opponents and, by extension, for all of us who worry about the future of the Western democratic world order.
I thought I remembered once seeing a YouTube video that showed, using excellent graphics, how violence actually declined over the centuries.
And indeed I did: but the video focused primarily on the death toll of World War II. Even so, in the final one third of the presentation, Neil Halloran, the video’s creator, does explore how, when adjusted for the size of the population, wars actually became less devastating over time.
This is also the view if Steven Pinker, who often discussed the “decline in violence” in his work and his talks.
Others, however, are less sure. And indeed, when I explore it myself using raw data from ourworldindata.org [chart 48], courtesy of Max Roser, the picture is decidedly less rosy.
Looking at this logscale plot showing death rates per 100,000 in conflicts since he middle ages actually shows an increase. And while indeed, the past 80 years can be described as the “long peace”, it’s more an anomaly than a trend.
In fact, looking at this chart I can comprehend the optimism of those who greeted the previous turn of the century, 1900 that is, as the start of the “century of reason”. If only…
This morning, I was confronted with examples of both racism and virtue signaling in unexpected ways.
The morning local news told me that Middle Eastern drivers are 2.9 times more likely to be stopped by police, even though it is white drivers who are the most likely to be charged. Unsaid but implied, cops are supposedly racists.
But if you know how people drive in some Middle Eastern locales, perhaps there is a different explanation. Especially considering that when you are driving a police cruiser, chances are you have absolutely no idea who the driver is until they stop, you walk over, and they roll down the driver side window. Imagine you are a cop, stopping someone because he drives like they do in places like Cairo or Baghdad. You walk over, they roll down the window. “Oh damn, another Middle Eastern driver on my record,” you think, and you let them go with a verbal warning, lest you end up being accused of racism.
So which is more likely? That cops have magic eyes and can tell the ethnicity of a driver even from a sillhoutte as their cruiser follows another vehicle, or that perhaps, just perhaps, Middle Eastern drivers who grew up in a very different driving culture have some trouble, at least initially, to adjust their driving habits, so they do in fact end up being stopped more often but that cops also tend to be more lenient in their case?
Or perhaps none of the above. My speculation is not any better than anyone else’s: It’s still speculation. What matters are the data. Just make sure that the sampling and statistical analysis are free of hidden biases.
It is surprisingly hard to convince image generation AI to produce images on this topic without running into dumb (keyword-based) blocks against “harmful” content. This one is from Midjourney.
I was still pondering this when I received an e-mail. Someone asked if, as a scientist, I believe in things like genetic differences between races or policies that take such differences into account. After some thought, I responded with a question myself. I asked if they meant the genetic differences between blondes and brunettes. Or maybe the genetic differences between people with big vs. small noses. After all, we “know” that blondes are supposed to be dumb and people with big, hooked noses are consumed with greed and are disloyal…
In case anyone wonders what we are up against. What Ukraine is defending, beyond their own territorial integrity. Why a compromise peace deal today would be aptly described by words uttered by Winston Churchill in 1938, criticizing Chamberlain’s “peace for our times”: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” Well, just in case anyone has any doubt, take a look at this map from Wikipedia:
Countries in dark blue are the countries that signed the June 2024 joint communiqué of the Ukraine peace summit held in Switzerland. Countries in light blue participated but didn’t sign. The rest were absent, including the ayatollahs’ famous axis of resistance.
Notably, despite their pro-Russian stance, despite their reservations, Orban’s Hungary signed the communiqué. As did Ergodan’s Türkiye, despite their comparatively warm relationship with Moscow.
Yes, this is really shaping itself into a new world order. A struggle between Western democracies vs. authoritarianism. A flawed, but fundamentally decent, mostly peaceful, rules-based world order against a world characterized by territorial conquest and oppression.
The rhetoric is annoyingly familiar. Ukronazis? Well, in 1956, when Hungarians rose up against a totalitarian communist government, Soviet propaganda called them “fascists”. Soviet propaganda blamed American “imperialists” and the “CIA”, their relentless attempt to oppress freedom-loving socialist nations led by governments representing workers and peasants.
Where this will take us, I don’t know. I am not the only one worrying about WW3. Could it be that this time around, we are going to be a tad smarter than in the past? Maybe… but I don’t hold my breath. And when push comes to shove, I know what we are defending. Sigh.
Here, I picked a few countries for comparison on the Migration Policy Institute’s Web site. Specifically, to compare the ratio of migrant population (i.e., ratio of foreign-born residents) in these select lands.
Immigration, of course, is a hot-button issue in the United States, but also in Hungary. Not sure about the UK but here in Canada, despite the fact that immigration represents an extra burden when it comes to, e.g., public health or affordable housing, we here comparatively less.
So how come a populist politician can exploit the immigration issue, never mind in border states of the United States, but also in Hungary where the relative immigrant population is still much lower? How come that the same topic has not become populist fodder here in Canada?
Well, perhaps I am looking at the wrong numbers. Yes, the share of immigrants in Canada is much higher than either in the US or Hungary. In fact, the share of the immigrant population here was already higher in Canada back in the 1960s than it is today in the United States. But look at the growth rate!
In Canada, the numbers went from about 16% back in 1990 to 21% in 2020. That represents a modest 30% increase. In other words, the immigrant situation in Canada today is not that different from the immigrant situation 30 years ago. In contrast, in the United States it went from about 9% to 15%. That is an almost 70% increase! Such an increase in the number of immigrants is certainly noticeable, and that is especially true if the immigrant population is not uniformly distributed across the country but is concentrated at specific locations (e.g., border states, major cities).
And Hungary? The figure went from 3% to 6%. So the relative share of the immigration population doubled in 30 years, in a country that is not used to having many immigrants in the first place. No wonder Mr. Orban can easily exploit the concerns and fears of his country’s citizens, presenting himself as the populist savior of the nation against Brussel’s bureaucrats who, hand-in-hand with the Jew Soros, are engaged in some sinister plan to flood the country with “migrants”.
Warning: Spoilers follow.
I am not what you would call a Trekkie, but I always enjoyed Star Trek. The original series remains my favorite, but TNG had its moments, as did Voyager, even Enterprise, for all its flaws. Picard was good, and Strange New Worlds has a chance of being on par with the original series.
But Discovery? I am presently about two thirds of the way through its penultimate episode and it’s… just painful. The tension is artificial, the writing feels shallow and preachy and… what’s this with, “We’re on a clandestine, dangerous mission, one misstep and we’re dead quite possibly along with the entire Federation, so why don’t we just stop and talk about our emotions?”
Seriously, I can only watch this abomination in five-minute chunks. I’ll suffer through the end now that barely more than an episode remains but… Oh well. I know, I know, another first-world problem.
Perhaps the least unsuccessful attempt by ChatGPT/DALL-E to illustrate the divisiveness of forced wokeness on television
And then there’s Dr. Who. I find that I actually like the latest season. Ruby Sunday is a delightful Companion, and Ncuti Gatwa has a chance to be ranked among the best Doctors. That is… if the series’ writers let him? Take the latest episode, Rogue. Within minutes, the Doctor falls in love. Same-sex love. The Doctor! The same Doctor who, in the past history of the series, almost never engaged in romantic relationships. Romantic teases, maybe… But not much more, except perhaps with River Song. But now? Instant infatuation, which, sadly, felt like little more than a cheap excuse for the writers to engage in dutiful woke virtue signaling, you know, same-sex kiss and all. To their credit, in the end they somewhat redeemed themselves, as Rogue’s (the love interest’s) feelings towards the Doctor and respect for the Doctor’s humanity led him to sacrifice himself… And save the episode from self-inflicted doom.
Even so, I wish television writers dropped the urge to outdo one another when it comes to virtue signaling. It’s just too painful to watch at times, even if I assume that it is about more than just ticking some boxes in a checklist, meeting a quota somewhere; that their intentions are the purest and their hearts are in the right place. Not to mention that it is grossly counterproductive: the only thing such blatant wokeness accomplishes is a knee-jerk trigger response by those on the political right, who are already convinced (in the words of someone I know) that “these are not normal times” anymore.
And you know where that leads. If these are not normal times, that means extraordinary means are justified. The autocrat wins in the end, presenting himself as the sole savior of all that is good and decent, in these abnormal times.
So let’s please just stop the forced, virtue-signaling wokeness. It’s not helping to make the world a better, more tolerant place. If it accomplishes anything, it’s the exact opposite.
I am watching HBO’s recent miniseries, The Regime, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The satire is great. The allusion to historical or present-day political personalities, from Rasputin To Ceausescu, from Orban to Putin, are unmistakeable.
Yet it hits a little too close to home. OK, far too close to home. Which is to say, the world of 2024 resembles the fictitious world of The Regime a little too much. Authoritarians on the rise, wars of conquest, pardon me, “peaceful reunification”, meddling by China, efforts to undermine trust in the fundamental institutions of Western democracy… And frankly, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the “real” CNN vs. its fictitious depiction in The Regime.
Indeed, I was just reading about Argentina’s new head of state, Javier Milei. El Loco, he calls himself, and it’s fitting: if Time’s article is to be believed (and it is certainly consistent with what I’ve been reading elsewhere), what we have here is a delusional conspiracy theorist with a messianic complex. Yikes!
But just in case nutty politicians in a distant land in the southern hemisphere don’t bother us, here’s another piece of news and this really gave me the creeps the other day. Dutch firm ASML, the world’s premier maker of extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment (i.e., machines that can make the highest of the high tech chips) assured us that it has the capability to remotely disable their machines, used by chipmaker TSMC in Taiwan, in case of a Chinese invasion.
I find the fact that ASML even thought it necessary to reassure us that this option exists deeply unsettling. It makes me believe that the question of the next Great War is not if, but when… and the most likely answer is, sooner than we’d like.
Seriously, can’t we just hand the world over to AI-assisted cats to manage? I am seriously inclined to believe that we’d all (cats and humans as well as machines) be better off that way.
Occasionally I chat with people about China, in comparison with Europe. Many view China as a political entity that managed to maintain its unity even as Europe split into a great many competing states, often engaged in warfare.
I think this picture is patently false.
Sure, Europe has sovereign states, separated by borders. And sure, Europe has a multitude of languages, different ethnicities. On the other hand, while the Roman Empire may have officially ceased to exist many centuries ago, its unifying influence did not vanish. On the contrary, Europe’s traditions, customs, institutions, legal systems and religion, languages and writing systems remain dominated by the continent’s Roman heritage. Come to think of it, my own name (Viktor) is a Latin word!
And it’s not like folks in China all speak the same language. Look at this amazing map that I just came across, showing the multitude of languages spoken in different regions of China:
So what about those devastating wars, then? Europe was, after all, at the center of two world wars just in the past century, and there were plenty of conflicts (e.g., Napoleon) in prior centuries as well.
Yet all these conflicts are dwarfed by some of the wars the Chinese waged among themselves in the past. Wars with millions, even tens of millions killed were not uncommon, at a time when there were far fewer people in the world to begin with than in the 20th century. Measured by the death toll relative to the size of the human population, the two world wars of the 20th century were minor skirmishes in comparison with conflicts like the Three Kingdoms War or the An Lushan Rebellion.
So perhaps there are more similarities between China and Europe than at first meets the eye. We must not let the concept of state borders (themselves a relatively modern invention, a product of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that established the modern concept of state sovereignty) mislead us.
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum — Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus in De Re Militari (~400 AD)
The West is full of useful idiots*.
This is nothing new. This was true in the 1920s and the 1930s, with countless Western intellectuals and other activists apologizing, expressing support, even admiration for Lenin, later Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, this continued: Useful idiots proclaimed the West as militarist, imperialist, or worse; the USSR and the Soviet Bloc were presented as a huggable, benign alternative to the evils of capitalism.
And it continues to this day. Ever since the start of the Ukraine war on February 24, 2022 (or, depending on how one is counting, back in 2014 with the occupation of the Crimea and Donbass), “reasonable” Western voices (often amplified, overtly or covertly, by a well-financed Russian propaganda machine) have been advocating negotiation. Peace. Ukraine must accept the inevitable.
Then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel. I won’t go into the prehistory of Palestine. The narrative is long, and depending on where one begins the history, any viewpoint can be justified with a clever twist of the facts. Let’s just say that since 2005, Gaza has been a self-governed territory. Yes, the constraints imposed by Israel were heavy, though Israel (and Egypt!) certainly had their reasons. Anyhow, the point is, none of that, absolutely none of that, justified that attack on October 7, which involved the murder of nearly 700 civilians and the kidnapping of around 250 civilian hostages. An attack that had no military objectives whatsoever, but was designed to impose as much pain on innocent civilians as possible. In other words, a textbook case of a massive terror attack.
I don’t know why anyone in his right mind thinks that a state like Israel would not react to such an attack with a devastating military response, aimed at decapitating, destroying Hamas, even if it entails significant “collateral damage”, which is to say, a large number of civilian injuries and deaths. If I may be brutal about it, that’s what fucking war is like, people. You know how many civilians were killed, for instance, when the Soviet army liberated the city of my birth, Budapest, in 1945? Or how many civilians were killed in places like Dresden or Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And of course it doesn’t take a lot to figure out that this was very much in line with the expectations of Hamas and their Iranian backers: They counted on an Israeli response, in the hope that it interrupts the process of warming relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, turns international opinion against Israel, perhaps even undermines American support for the Jewish state, and thus strengthens the position of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region.
Oh no, in come the useful idiots. “Genocide,” they scream, every time some incident or statistic, often grossly inflated by the Hamas propaganda machine, sees the light of day. Where were you on October 7? All I heard was deafening silence. And where were you in the past two years when Putin systematically attacked civilian targets in Ukraine, his troops (military units often made up of pardoned convicts) murdering civilians wholesale, kidnapping and indoctrinating Ukrainian children? Silent, it seems, except for those among you who were already blaming the West because, you know, NATO or whatever.
Perhaps, if I really want to be charitable about this, it’s simply that they hold the West, they hold Israel, to a higher standard. When Putin targets civilians in Ukraine, when rampaging Hamas militants murder civilians wholesale, there are no sounds of protest because this is how these regimes are expected to behave. When Israel targets an aid convoy or when an Israeli airstrike kills civilians, the protests are loud and clear because the expectation is that they will do everything to protect civilians even if it means fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. I don’t know, but I find the hypocrisy deplorable.
Speaking of NATO, they must be the ineptest organization in human history. I mean, Soviet, and now Russian, propaganda tells us that the sole purpose of NATO is to harm and destroy Russia. Yet in the now 75 years of NATO’s existence, the organization has not managed to launch a single military attack on Russia! What stellar incompetence!
Anyhow, I understand that many of the useful idiots are driven by the purest of intentions. They don’t want to see innocents die. They want to live in a peaceful world.
Well, guess what? So do I. I am no less appalled by civilian deaths in Gaza than in Kharkiv, though I do see a bit of a difference between a military (Russia’s) that purposefully targets civilians vs. a military (Israel’s) that tries, at least half-heartedly, to reduce civilian casualties. And I am not exactly a diehard supporter of that corrupt crook, Netanyahu, who is clinging to power because who knows that once he leaves office, he may very well end up facing criminal prosecution for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.
But unlike the useful idiots, I also remember my history lessons.
Let’s just go back in history less than 90 years, to the years preceding the last global conflict.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler launched his biggest gamble yet: The remilitarization of the Rhineland. Through this step, he risked open conflict with the West, since it was a direct violation of the Versailles peace treaty. His Wehrmacht was under strict orders to retreat if they ran into any significant military resistance.
But they didn’t. The West didn’t want war. Democracies are like that: Contrary to conspiracy theories, war is not good for business, and people prefer good food and great sex over being used as cannon fodder or turned into minced meat by carpet bombings, so they vote for the doves, mostly. But the doves are not always right. When it comes to regimes like Hitler’s, a desire for peace is seen as a sign of weakness, an opportunity waiting to be exploited. Churchill knew this, but he was ostracized as a warmonger.
Then came 1938. Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich, triumphant. “Peace for our times,” he proclaimed, as he stepped off his airplane on September 30 that year, having just signed a treaty with Hitler’s Germany. The Munich Agreement, as it was called, obliged Czechoslovakia (who were not even invited to the conference) to cede their border regions, the Sudetenland, to Germany. The inevitable result followed: Within a few months, a German puppet regime in Slovakia declared its independence, and the rest of Czechia was then invaded by Germany, and turned into a “protectorate”. And then, of course, on September 1, 1939 — just 11 months after Chamberlain returned with “peace for our times” — a World War began in earnest, with Germany’s attack on Poland and the resulting declaration of war on Germany by Western powers.
Is this what you want? Another world war? Then support peace initiatives that demand Ukraine to lay down their arms. Support Hamas by spreading their propaganda about “genocide”. You may even achieve limited goals. You will have the peace and quiet of a graveyard in Ukraine. Hamas may “peacefully” return to Gaza to rebuild its terror infrastructure.
But the message that Hamas or Putin or Xi or Kim or the ayatollahs will see is different. It’s a message of weakness. It’s a message of encouragement, that they can continue doing whatever it is that they are doing, always able to count on help from the West’s “useful idiots”. And trust me on this: If history is any guide, the resulting conflict will be far greater, far more genocidal than your worst fears, and chances are neither you nor I will survive to see its conclusion, along with a large portion of humanity.
I admit I am terrified. This shitshow is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Innocent people will die in large numbers, often at the hands of those that we do, and must, hold to higher standards. But I also worry that thanks to our well-meaning but fatally nearsighted useful idiots and the policies of appeasement they pursue, a lot more death and suffering will follow.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable,
it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory — George Orwell, in Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)
People, including responsible scholars and journalists, have begun to wonder publicly about the possibility that with conflicts (Ukraine, the Middle East, perhaps China-Taiwan) spiraling out of control, perhaps this will lead the world to another devastating World War. (We’ve had global peace for far too long, I guess.)
I suspect future historians will frame it differently. They will know that it’s a world war. They will simply debate if its beginning should be marked by Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula and the Donbass region (February 2014); Russia’s full-scale invasion attempt (February 24, 2022); the Hamas attack on Israel (October 7, 2023); or some other event.
But that’s like debating if WW2 really began with, say, the Spanish Civil War (1936), the Marco Polo Bridge incident in Beijing (July 7, 1937) that marked the start of the Japanese occupation of parts of China, the Anschluss (March 12, 1938), the Sudetenland occupation (October 1, 1938) or Germany’s full-scale attack on Poland on September 1, 1939.
The thing is, people in 1939 did not yet know that it was a “world war”. Eventually, they found out of course. Kind of hard not to, when the world around you lies in ruins.
In recognition of the fact that their journalist, Evan Gershkovich, has been in a Russian jail for a year already, The Wall Street Journal will appear tomorrow with a mostly blank front page, representing all the things Gershkovich might have written, but couldn’t.
I suppose they chose this form of protest because, as a respectable newspaper, they felt compelled to refrain from saying what, I am sure, many of them really wanted to say to that fascist in the Kremlin: Fuck you, Putin.