The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
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,…
Mia Jankowicz writes in Business Insider: Putin’s disinformation is so effective that Ukrainians can’t convince their own families in Russia they are under attack… ..[T]he two nations increasingly live in separate realities, brought about by Russia’s vast state media apparatus…
It sometimes seems to me that Putinist propaganda has turned millions of Russians into mindless haters with barely a trace of empathy for other human beings. Since 2014, the Kremlin has depicted patriotic Ukrainians as vicious, quasi-Nazi nationalists – in…
Another first-rate article by Fiona Hill, this time in Politico. The quote below may sound peripheral to Hill’s insight but is it really? And Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about…
Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, more than two years after I posted my “Doomsday thoughts” (also see follow-ups 1 and 2 from 2020). Whether most Russians support the war or not, and whether its supporters are merely ignorant…