Death by Russia

In December 2021 the Russian government, as represented by its president Vladimir Putin, presented the west with two documents, one to the United States and one to the European Union. They were draft treaties outlining a new security arrangement for Europe and inviting discussion, negotiation, and eventual implementation. In these documents the security of every nation in Europe, including Russia, would be guaranteed a framework of peace and stability, trade and cultural exchange, with every nation participating. Call it a military Marshal plan.

It was rejected. Worse. It was ignored. Rejected items can be picked back up and reconsidered. Ignored ones cease to exist.

Instead, the Ukrainian army, heavily trained and provisioned by NATO, was poised to overrun the Donbas in March of the next year. Two months later Russia ‘invaded’ Ukraine before they could visit genocide on the Russians living there. According to the west, history began on February 22, 2022. There was forced amnesia of everything that led to that terrible necessity. 

At every corner, staring down every dark alley, ominous at the head of every rapids, before every soul-sucking, festering swamp and at the beckoning edge of every snake pit, Russia has attempted to avert a catastrophe by inviting the collective west to participate in a dialog of peace, equality, and mutual respect. 

Two Minsk agreements. A voluntary withdrawal from the gates of Kiev. The Astana Accord. Immediate cease firing at even the hint of a willingness to negotiate. All intended to peacefully end the conflict and begin the process of peace. Instead, we got Angela Merkel admitting that the Minsk agreement was a ruse intended to allow NATO to rearm Ukraine. The death must flow. 

Russia wanted Pushkin, we wanted Pershings. Russia wanted cooperation, we wanted conquest.

It failed.

 Since then, almost two million Ukrainian soldiers are dead. The kill ratio of Ukrainians to Russians now stands at 30 to 1. The Ukraine, the place where my grandfather was born and that I grew up respecting, is experiencing death by Russia. And they are about to collapse. WWIII looms beyond. You made your bed. Now die in it. Is it worth it?

We are getting the consequences of our choices.

And More Pendulums Swing

 

In the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s, it was the swing of Baby Boomer Liberalism after the painful swings of 1950’s plastic culture, WWII and the Great Depression asceticism, and Roaring Twenty’s hedonism. One after another they took their fifteen-minute swings of fame, then fell in disbelief and were supplanted by the Next New (Old) Thing. The air went out of Boomer liberalism, of course. It always does in the end.

Then came the exhausted liberalism of the Lost and Millennial Generations. Politically Correct marked the new swing where the zeitgeist was, “Noone is as intolerant as a liberal!” Every liberal movement eventually tends towards fascism. Just look at the French Jacobins of the 1790’s, the Russian Bolsheviks of the 1920’s, and the Chinese Youth Movement of the 1950’s. Their leaders always lost control, Robespierre, Stalin and Mao.

History can be boringly repetitive.

After that came social justice workers and the woke absurdity where nothing means anything, everybody is suspected of woke heresy, and everything is faux: Faux-men, faux-women, faux-marriages, faux-sexuality, faux-culture, faux-government, faux-self-worth, faux-morality, faux-intellectualism, and faux-religion. The only real thing is the narcissism. And the hypocrisy.

This is very much like the plastic 1950’s, actually. Is there a woke Ricky and Lucy? Really. Then it was McCarthyism, today it’s cancellation. There’s that pendulum again!

Nobody stands for anything and everybody is a suspect. People have more chips on their shoulders than Frito Lay. Everything is an outrage. Duck and cover. The impromptu inquisitions of the woke religion result in cancelling everybody, finally ending in the whole woke movement eating its own tail. Ouroboros is its patron saint. Just ask Robespierre how that works. One can be excommunicated for violating woke religious tenets. Or forced to wear an orange “D” for deplorable. If you are not with us you are anathema. False dichotomies are everywhere.

There are even woke Kristallnachts in our cities now. Woke parents are beating their children into faux-trans people. Tow the party line, comrade. Brotherhood has morphed into alienation. My fellow American is now My trigger warning. The sin of woke is not the hypocrisy, not the double standard. Everyone does that. The single most defining label of humanity is hypocrisy. Everybody says things they don’t mean and means things they don’t say, that’s nothing new. It’s how we are able to live together and not kill each other.

The sin of woke is not listening to the other.

What we are seeing today is the next great generational swing as the pendulum reaches its apex, pauses, and, inevitably, starts back down the arc again, one excruciating swing after another. Generation Z is coming into its own. Much of it appears to be the same as before, poisoned in thought and body. Meet the new generation, same as the old generation. And a lot of it is just a rehash of the same old stale zeitgeist. The Ouroboros takes another bite.

Why not try something different? There’s always another way.

There is a seed. The kernel of a reformation. A remnant. The beginnings of a revival. Not a tent top revival which is a top-down affair. Circus barkers in minister’s garb, crosses in hand, holy water by the canteen full, deceiving the masses and picking their pockets. Are you not amused?

There is a grass roots revival going on. Quiet. Modest. Subdued. Powerful. As much as they try to proselytize them and brainwash them and force them into their molds, they will be their own people. Infuriatingly so.

I remember an old joke: The daughters of feminists grow up to wear pink ribbons and bows and to flirt with the boys. It annoys their mums.

Traditional values are making a comeback. Charlie Kirk may well be its spiritual founding father. Or at the very least its ignition spark. Or its kick in the butt.

TikTok, the Gen-Z watering hole, is seeing an overhaul. The new fad is Trad! Today’s Martha Stewarts revel in arts and crafts, trad wives and trad husbands are coming back. Young women dressed like they came out of a 1950’s sitcom are reveling in their cooking skills. Even religion, the whipping boy of every fascist regime ever, is raising its haloed head. Woke has been traded in for trad.

The woke mob responds like Dracula to light.

The woke call them “MAGA curious.” MAGA curious? Really? That’s the new insulting term for people we’re told not to like by the woke politburo? Strange. I always considered myself left of center and refused to join the woke cult when it jolted to the hard left like a motorist avoiding an armadillo. No, thank you, Woke Church Ladies. I am normal, in other words. And I intend to stay that way.

Oh, well then. So be it! I am curious, MAGA.

Old sacred beliefs, such as the unwarranted devotion to Zionist Apartheid and ‘tolerance’ toward everybody-except the MAGA curious who are unrepentant apostates-are being challenged on its rotting throne. The old order is hypocritizing itself out of existence with a sputtering of self-importance and second-hand piousness that gets shriller and quieter as it washes down the drain, soon to be an echo of disbelief. The Napoleonic (forever) wars of today are getting a jaundiced look. What was old is new again.

Perhaps they are the remnant. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

I believe in every age there is a remnant. A faithful few. The tiny village of Anatevka preserving tradition against waves of fake modernity. A Benedictine monastery copying texts as a meditation of devotion. A tribe beyond the edge of civilization who will not be consumed. And when the empire falls, when the pillars crumble and Ozymandias is overthrown. They come out. And the slow, steady return of sanity begins.

Way to go, Gen-Z!