The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
Mikhail Shishkin, in The Atlantic: The world is surprised at the quiescence of the Russian people, the lack of opposition to the war. But this has been their survival strategy for generations—as the last line of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov puts…
A few years ago, I tried listening to Jordan Peterson debating Marxism with Slavoj Žižek. It soon became clear to me that Peterson was completely unprepared: he knew next to nothing about Marxism. Or, perhaps, he was deliberately playing the…
In the New Statesman, Katie Stallard reviews Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short. Referring to Putin’s tenure as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg under Anatoly Sobchak, the reviewer notes: As Sobchak’s deputy, Putin earned a reputation for discipline,…
Last weekend, Bloomberg published Max Hastings‘s long-term view of the Russo-Ukrainian war: Yet it seems hard to consider Russian President Vladimir Putin as anything other than a force for evil. He is personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths…
From Timothy Snyder‘s opinion column in The New York Times (May 19, 2022): A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist. The rhetoric, the symbolism, and some of the political lexicon would…
Robert Coalson on Twitter: I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. In 20 years, some Russian demagogue will be explaining to Russians that Putin was a CIA plot aimed at bringing the country to its knees. Hear, hear! But…
John Dolan, the author of Pleasant Hell and the creator of Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, once produced an impassioned diatribe against George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens. It is deeply unfair to Orwell but a great read all the same.…
The Eiffel tower during the Nazi occupation (1941). “Germany wins on all fronts.” Was it winning on all the fronts in 1941? Possibly, but it wouldn’t be for much longer. Russian hardware destroyed or damaged in Ukraine (2022). Russia is…
Craig Kennedy, a member of the advisory board at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies, has posted a long read on sanctions against Russia’s oil sector, Russian Oil’s Achilles Heel. It’s the best I’ve read on the subject.…
On February 12, 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: If I were an Englishman I would tremble for the fate of the Empire. Taken out of context, it was a sensible call, although it didn’t take a genius to…
One of Hitler’s recurring tropes was the German empire’s and nation’s “remorseless struggle for existence.” Nazi officials beat that horse to death, and then some: There can be no compromise in Germany’s struggle for its existence, no turning back, no…
Tariq Aziz was Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister in 1983-91 and deputy prime minister in 1979-2003. In 1996, PBS interviewed Aziz for their Frontline series; the transcripts are available here and here. Speaking of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in August 1990,…