This is not an easy time in my life and I am afraid I spoke, or rather wrote, out of irritation and exasperation. Of course it is appropriate to make moral judgments about the behavior of people in their interactions with people from other nations. It is always appropriate to make moral judgments about the behavior of people. But nations are not people, any more than corporations are (the Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding.) I make moral judgments about the actions of Putin, Zelensky, Biden, the uniformed soldiers who give orders, the uniformed soldiers who carry out orders, and everyone involved in the present affair, including television commentators, taxpayers, Doctors without Borders, and anyone else whose behavior in any way affects what is going on, including quite marginally my own. But I do not make moral judgments about states because I do not know what such judgments mean.
Putin is not firing a gun at Ukrainians. Putin is sitting in
Moscow (or wherever) issuing commands to people who are obeying his commands
and in turn are issuing commands to others who are obeying their commands and
so forth. Every one of those people,
starting with Putin, right down to the people actually pulling the triggers, is
an appropriate object of moral judgment (and in the present circumstances, of
moral condemnation.)
But I reject the notion that nations can be thought of, as
it were, as superpeople who make decisions.
I know everyone talks that way. I just think it is fundamentally
incoherent.
For a philosophically-inflected defense of the idea that "nations" (i.e., states, countries etc.) can be treated as "superpeople," see A. Wendt, Social Theory of Int'l Politics.
ReplyDeleteProf. Wolff,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your clarification. We all appreciate that you are going through a difficult time, attending to your wife’s injury and medical needs, and that the stress that involves, exacerbated by watching the news of the Russian invasion and the loss of life which is being inflicted, would affect your ability to communicate as effectively as you have in past posts.
That said, I guess I still have difficulty separating out the right to make moral evaluations and judgments regarding how national leaders, as individuals, make decisions, and how their populations respond to those decisions, from making moral judgements about the actions of nations themselves. Why wouldn’t the moral judgments made by a country’s leaders, and the population’s acceptance or rejection of those decisions, apply as moral judgement regarding the country itself. Those who criticized LBJ’s and Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War, endorsed by the majority of American citizens, with vocal opposition by a minority of its citizens, as immoral, were individual decisions which represented the morality of the nation. People said that LBJ and Nixon acted immorally, and in turn that the U.S. was acting immorally. I see nothing illogical about that. I do not believe that there is some Hegelian Zeitgeist that exists separate and apart from the policies of the nation itself.
I suspect the professor and some of the commentariat will be interested in this recent short piece, incited by the invasion of Ukraine, by Mike Davis on the ruling class's pathological presentist disorientation. I was particularly struck by the following:
ReplyDelete"I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.
In part this is the victory of pathological presentism, making all calculations on the basis of short-term bottom-lines in order to allow the super-rich to consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes. (Michel Aglietta in his recent Capitalisme: Le temps des ruptures emphasises the unprecedented character of the new sacrificial generational divide.) Greed has become radicalized to the extent that it no longer needs political thinkers and organic intellectuals, just Fox News and bandwidth. In the worst-case scenario, Elon Musk will simply lead a billionaire migration off planet."--https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/thanatos-triumphant?fbclid=IwAR3dtK53OOsor7XNKz2fMqP3nDVBBeorsSLkSMiZusJwtx1Jq0snRi55F4U
How unfortunate we all are that we do not have Mike Davis, with all his omniscience and profound wisdom, leading the nations of the world out of the dismal situation that their myopia and commitment to “pathological presentism” have condemned us to. Hail Davis! Hail Davis!
ReplyDeleteThe author of the following, Michael Klare, is likely known to some of you. His remarks seem to align both with Prof. Wolff’s position and with that of Mike Davis. I hope they do not give rise to shallow, pointless, ad hominem sarcasm.
ReplyDeletehttps://mondediplo.com/2022/03/04ukraine-us
Sorry Anonymous, I am unable to oblige you.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of Mike Davis’ article demonstrating his prodigious intellectual sagacity, he writes, “Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Alexksandr Illyich Ulyanov, Alekander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.” I had never heard of any of these “heroes,” so I went to the fount of all contemporary information, Wikipedia, to find out what they did that made them “heroes.” Well, they were all anarchists who assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, a world leader. In the case of Alexksandr Ulyanov, he was the older brother of Vladimir Lenin, who was executed at the tender age of 20 after his failed attempt to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Who knows what great things he might have achieved to avoid our current tragic circumstances had his life not been cut short. These are the kinds of leaders Davis admires and wishes we had more of to lead us out of the disastrous state of affairs our recent and current world leaders have placed us in. That’s the solution to all our problems – assassinate the militaristic, capitalist pigs who are exploiting the rest of us. Sheesh! What a pompous ass.
Okay, Anonymous, I took your bait and read the insightful article written by Michael T. Klare. He writes, “[T]he US’s hasty, disorganize withdrawal from Afghanistan had suggested a great power in retreat, eager to shed its overseas commitment. In contrast, its muscular response to Russia’s military build-up around Ukraine ws that of a more assertive power, prepared to deploy forces abroad. In fact, they are separate facets of one strategy – to restore America’s status as the world’s paramount superpower.”
ReplyDeleteI get it. How clever of the United States to dupe the Russian Federation into executing a false flag invasion of Ukraine just so the United States could appear to come to the aid of the Ukrainian people, when their real motive is to reassert their imperialistic agenda. Where do these liberal thinkers come up with this stuff?
Professor Wolf's point about states not being people invokes nominalism in this form: when it comes to making moral judgments, 'state' names a concept not an entity in the world. To think that 'state' does name an entity in the world commits what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The concept named by 'state' is an abstraction from entities in the world, in this case the people who act in the name of the state. This is standard nominalism that can be found, for example, in Leibniz. For various purposes we create the fiction of a state an entity in the world, e.g., to collect taxes and deposit them in the public treasury or to bring civil or criminal action against individuals or other fictional entities such as corporations.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThe following, written at various times before it became immoral to try to analyse international relations, which presently seems to be the popular notion, is most informative wrt the EU, Russian self-identity, and Ukraine. In places there are discussions of normative vs. power orientations to foreign policy. (Perhaps it also constitutes an at least partial response to McCullough’s point re nominalism for it does suggest how certain sets of social interactions become institutionalised and therefore take on a certain transindividualist solidity?)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ireneusz-Karolewski/publication/348126799_European-Russian_Power_Relations_in_Turbulent_Times/links/608d0fd6299bf1ad8d6c37c6/European-Russian-Power-Relations-in-Turbulent-Times.pdf#page=115
Perhaps because it’s a European product, it emphasises EU-Russian interactions as key.
Be it noted that this book is a collection of studies by different people. It therefore embodies several different perspectives on, primarily, the evolving nature of the EU’s foreign policy formulation and capacity, and the same vis-a-vis Russia. That is to say, it doesn’t present any indubitable points of view, it presents arguments to be debated and evaluated. I, for one, am very uncomfortable with what is one of the last assertions in the Conclusion, that the EU “remains the idealistic actor it has been since its inception.” (p. 279) But that is a whole other matter.
This is interesting (pic says it all):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/07/27/partnership-is-much-better-for-china-than-it-is-for-russia
AA
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the M. Klare piece (and I don't know whether I will), but that's not a very fair gloss on the quoted sentence, imo.
LFC,
ReplyDeleteIMO, it is.
I think that an analysis of "presentism" in policy making has to take into account a major reason for it, if not the only reason: elections. The public seldom takes a collective long term view of things and, therefore, people don't see present pain as something they should endure for long term gain. Many who oppose dealing effectively with climate change fall into this category. Or consider gas prices: right now Biden has succeeded in wrapping them in the flag--something necessary to help the brave Ukrainians and punish Putin. But how will they feel six months from now when the issue still isn't resolved and gas prices are still high? Some Democrats are already worried about that. These are the calculations that lead policy makers--who want to be reelected or reappointed--to focus on the short term. That's where they live.
ReplyDeleteDavid Palmeter,
ReplyDeleteI very much agree with your point about the short-term nature of electoral cycles as a factor in the seeming immovability of 'presentism'. And likewise I agree that this shows up in the inability to deal with climate change; it was in particular reflecting on this point recently that made Davis's piece resonant to me (although, unlike my e-friend Another Anonymous above, I was quite taken with the ethical, if not moral, stature of Sholem Schwarzbald). I can't wholly agree, though, with your suggestion that 'where we live' is in the present and the short-term future; this makes us seem trapped in a down-beat version of Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage. It seems to me rather that (following the line of argument introduced by Samuel Scheffler) our actions lose much of their motivation, point, and even intelligibility without some presupposed conception of how they might contribute to lives of others, even after our deaths. It's a mutilated conception of politics that limits itself to elections and voting.-- I tried to start thinking about how to break out of this latter aspect of presentism with regard to climate change in a more sustained way, and what action one might contribute to demolishing presentism, in a review of Andreas Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline just published on-line in the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (I can't miss an opportunity for self-promotion).--I would also recommend to anyone wishing to reflect on the (alleged) phenomenon of 'presentism' the historian François Hartog's book Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time.
This is disappointing:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-701041
I must confess, I had to look for the term " presentism " first on Wikipedia, because it was known to me so far only as a description of a phenomenon, with which employees feel the increasing pressure to go despite illness to work.
ReplyDeleteBut... take the following as the thoughts of a philosophical idiot (ἰδιώτης), which of course can be ignored.
The arguments for a "presentism"? in view of the physical fact that we "realize" events only when photons have traveled a way in time, seems to me to have at least an input problem.
But if one ignores this imprecision and defines the term in terms of a political ontology, and pretends that there is such a thing as a "window of the present" whose time frame is defined not by the cycle of legislative terms but by the limited ability of the media public to keep its attention at a critical level, then the term could be an interesting tool.
One could ask anthropologically, what mechanisms define this assumed "present window" and ensure that it expands or shrinks until it collapses and a successor enters the scene. Can we perhaps find a metric that indicates how long it takes human individuals and collectives to reframe life-threatening events in such a way that the status quo of comfortable living is restored? Conservatism as a thermodynamic equilibrium of human life?
aaall,
ReplyDeleteAgree, disappointing.
Zelensky should have responded to Bennett that he will take Bennett’s advice when Israel yields to all of the Palestinians’ demands, to avoid further bloodshed of Israelis and Palestinians.
Hypocrisy knows no religious or ethnic boundaries.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/03/11/russia-ukraine-syria-waad-al-kateab-intv-kinkade-tgb-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/russia-ukraine-military-conflict/
Rob, to push what I think you're saying to an absurd limit, do you assert that individual Nazis were evil but Nazi Germany cannot be so characterized?
ReplyDeleteAt what level of aggregation does responsibility cease? If my wife and I and my children are all evil, I suspect people would say my family is evil. When a corporation does something that hurts people because it profits, what is it if not evil?
Perhaps part of the confusion here is akin to the parenting advice not to say "you are a bad child" but rather "you have done a bad thing." Surely nations, like people, can change, or fail to act consistently.
It is of course also clear that not every citizen of a nation supports its actions and shares in guilt for bad ones. There is a famous quote by Abraham Joshua Hershel, that in a free society some are guilty but all are responsible. I would not class Russia as a free society, but it seems clear that so far most of the Russian people support Putzik's war.
There is an extensive philosophical literature on the ontological status of collectives, which bears on the questions raised here about group responsibility and the like.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we should all take a time-out to do some of the relevant reading, rather than just shoot from the hip.
A good place to start is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on collective responsibility.
Roughly 20 years ago there was a debate in the (Anglophone) international-relations literature about the ontological status of the state, set off mostly, I think, by Alexander Wendt's discussion of the state as "corporate actor" in his Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). Probably the debate has continued since then, but I don't follow it.
ReplyDeleteWendt himself doubled down, so to speak, on his philosophical bent, publishing in 2015 a book called Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. My impression is that at least a few social scientists think he has "gone off the deep end," but since I haven't read the book I can't really comment on it.
David,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your reference to the discussion of collective responsibility in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I have printed and reviewed.
However, the article indicates that, as with other philosophical issues, there is no consensus on the question whether such a phenomenon of collective responsibility is valid. Therefore, reading the article is not going to resolve the question for the commenters on this blog. Moreover, the article states, “Almost all of those now writing about collective responsibility agree that collective responsibility would make sense if it were merely an aggregative phenomenon.” But that is precisely how I and most of the commenters remarking on the matter interpret the statement, “Nazi Germany was an immoral nation,” or “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is immoral.” These actions represent the net decisions of the respective nations’ leaders and their aggregate populations. Saying the country is immoral is a shorthand version for saying that the actions endorsed by the country’s leaders and the aggregated cumulative population are immoral. Nor have the commenters just been shooting from the hip. Certainly Lawrence McCullough’s comment, with its refence to nominalism and Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness, was not shot from the hip. And I and Barney Wolff have offered comments in line with the view that claims of collective responsibility are appropriate based on the view that groups can have aggregative responsibility.
Tonight, my wife and I have tickets to attend a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, performed by the Ann Arbor Philharmonic. I considered boycotting the performance, but have rejected doing so on several grounds: Rachmaninoff never knew Stalin or Putin; early in his career, in 1912, he resigned his post as Vice President of the Imperial Russian Musical Society when a musician was dismissed by the Society for being Jewish; he left Russia in 1917, and later emigrated to the United States, where he lived until is death in 1943, and is buried in the Kensico Cemetary in upper state New York; the conductor of tonight’s performance is not Russian; and, finally, the symphony will be a wonderful temporary antidote to the miserable news coming out of Ukraine. Rachmaninoff’s compositions are exquisitely beautiful and musically complex. His Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini is one of the most enchanting musical compositions ever written, with its poignantly beautiful Variation 18.
Below is a link to a performance of the Rhapsody being performed by the Ukrainian pianist, Anna Federova; Her hand movements are amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppJ5uITLECE
Shortly after WWII, Karl Jaspers wrote a small book entitled “The Question of German Guilt.” He had four categories:
ReplyDelete1. Criminal Guilt—crimes or acts capable of objective proof that violate unequivocal laws.
2.Political Guilt—we have to bear the consequences of the deeds of the state whose power governs us and under whose order we live, although we are not criminally responsible for the actions of others.
3.Moral Guilt—We are all morally responsible for our deeds.
4.Metaphysical Guilt—If we fail to do what we could do to prevent crimes then we are guilty.
An Aside.
ReplyDeleteDriving home last night from the Rachmaninoff concert (which was superb), I turned our car radio on to hear Radio Lab, which was in the middle of a discussion about the limits of human insight and understanding. The discussion was with a pair of scientists (I don’t recall what university or institution they were from). They had developed a computer program which fed complicated data into the computer, which the compute then analyzed to find any correlations and patterns. They began the experiment with the movements of a double pendulum – one pendulum connected to the end of another pendulum. While a single pendulum’s movements have been reduced to a formula, a double pendulum’s movements appear much more chaotic and unpredictable. They attached a camera to the computer, began the double pendulum’s movements, and let the computer do its work. After 24 hours, the computer analyzed the double pendulum’s movements as being predicted by the following formula: f=ma! Newton’s first law of movement.
When the scientists reported this result in the literature, they were deluged by requests around the world by other scientists asking if they could use the computer to analyze complicated data that they had been unable to find correlations in. One group of scientists had collected thousands of data relating to single cell organisms – data they had been unable to find the correlations in. The narrator on the program said that biological data are much more complicated than the data in physics and chemistry. So, the one cell biological data were fed into the computer, and waited for days while the computer did its analysis. At the end of several days, the computer spewed out numerous formulae, making predictions about how one-celled organisms would behave. The scientists proceeded to compare the predictions provided by the formulae – e.g., if this protein increases, it would result in such and such changes. To their surprise and astonishment, every prediction provided by the computer turned out to be correct. However, there was a problem. The scientists were unable to come up with an explanation for why any of the formulae were correct, demonstrating, at least at this point in time, the limits of human insight and understanding. I suspect the same limits may apply to our understanding data about human interactions, e.g., the best way to respond to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, to limit the destruction and loss of life.
I listened to the New Yorke radio hour at 6 P.M. today. They had an interview with Stephen Kotkin, professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton. He disagrees with both Kennan and Mearsheimer regarding the role that the NATO has played in causing the invasion of Ukraine. He maintains that there is not credible evidence that this is so, and the Putin would have invaded Ukraine even if there had been no NATO. He even goes further and states that we are in a better position to meet with Putin’s conduct because of the existence and expansion of NATO. He discusses at length the disadvantages which the Soviet Union and Russia have had in competing with the U.S. and the West. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he asserts, is consistent with Russian history going back to Ivan the Terrible. While Russia culture has made great contributions to music, literature dance, cinema and science, it has been unable to breach the gap between the West and Russia in terms of the ability to govern and exert power. Unlike democracies, autocracies are unable to take effective corrective action when their calculations misfire. Putin seriously miscalculated, underestimating both the will of the Ukrainian people to resist and of the U.S. and the West to confront it with a united front.
ReplyDeleteIn sum, he agrees with the several commenters on this blog who have rejected the false narrative offered by Putin’s apologists that the U.S. and the West bear some responsibility for having provoked Putin to invade Ukraine.
You can listen to the podcast here:
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLndueWMub3JnL25ld3lvcmtlcnJhZGlvaG91cg/episode/YWMyOGUyOTItMTg4Yi00MmQ1LWExZWMtZWViZDRiNmE1MDVk?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjg1YzVlcT2AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQEw&hl=en
"Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he asserts, is consistent with Russian history going back to Ivan the Terrible."
ReplyDeleteFrom being the prison-house of nations to some version of oligarchs robbing the nation's wealth this seems to be patterns in Russian history. I see on the TV that, shades of Peter and Joseph, we now have some purging going on. At this point the goal needs to be supplying Ukraine with the ability to inflict maximum damage on the Russian military. Of course, if the likely outcome is passively accepting being purged or actively being shot by a loyal bodyguard - well, that is just a calculation.
Interesting and short WP profile on Putin from 2000:
"Putin's role in the blatantly misleading information issued by the government about the Chechnya offensive also has been criticized. His talent for creating legends has been evident in his explanations about the war. For example, Putin told the writers group that the military had been open with the news media, when the military has in fact hidden information about casualties, combat events, attacks on civilians and its goals and methods."
"Felix Svetov, a writer who spent time in Stalin's prison camps as a child and who lost his father in the purges, was present at the writers meeting. He said Putin's comment 'does not correspond with reality.' Putin is a typical KGB type, he added. 'If the snow is falling, they will calmly tell you, the sun is shining."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/putin.htm
I assume Yeltsin was drunk when he decided to advance a KGB Lt. Col. to head of state security and from there to prime minister.
god damn I love this blog so much. Where else can you get a moral philosopher's perspective on international relations theory?
ReplyDeleteI don't think Realism means you can't make moral judgements, but the judgements have to be abstracted to a systemic perspective. We can say Russia will invade Ukraine because they aren't economically dependent on global trade. They can bear retaliatory sanctions. We can't say Russia is bad for this. We can say it would be good to forge stronger economic co-dependency with Russia in order to prevent this kind of thing though.
"We can't say Russia is bad for this."
ReplyDeleteSure товарищ, we can and do. It would be better for the Russian people to first remember Mussolini and then seek "stronger economic co-dependency."
Mearsheimer lecture 2015 after the invasion of Crimea
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
23:20 - 25:00
Mearsheimer, mutatis mutandis: Putin is smart, he is not that stupid to attack Ukraine.
There are not a few who say that the quality of scientific work consists in making predictions about the probability with which events will or will not occur. If one applies this standard to Mearsheimer's talk he gave in 2015 after the invasion of Crimea about the situation between Russia, Ukraine and the West, one must conclude that he is an ideologue and not a scientist.
Even if you ignore his fatal miscalculation and focus on the structure of his argument, you have to conclude that he interprets scientific facts ideologically.I find it interesting anyway how his (and Chomsky's) argumentation act as a blueprint for the explanations that are heard from the Kremlin.
The lie of Nato not to expand, the expansion of Nato, the threat of Russia by the West, Ukraine as an artificial state entity without historical identity, the infiltration of the Maidan by the US and EU, even the claim that the 2014 Maidan was some kind of Nazi coup is not missing.
Mearsheimer even claims that the annexation of Crimea was not a conquest, because the Russians were already there due to a lease of their naval base.
I recommend:
Stefan Kotkin sub-interview 10 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylaC0MUleZs
aaall,
ReplyDeleteThank you, товарищ.
Major music news.
ReplyDeleteKaty Perry just won a lawsuit in which she was accused of stealing the music of rapper Marcus Gray.
Were he alive, Rachmaninoff would have had a better case of copyright infringement against Eric Carmen, whose melody for the song “Never Gonna Fall In Love Again” was lifted directly from Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Symphony.
Compare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jewWk8k4V5k
with Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Symphony, at 35:23, 39:14 and 40:00:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvuitFzDxDg
A.K.
ReplyDeletePlenty of international relations theorists make wrong predictions about events or fail to predict events. That's because IR theory is predominantly a retrospective rather than a predictive field.
Mearsheimer says
in Tragedy of Great Power Politics that his theory throws light on patterns over time and on certain outcomes but can't predict specific foreign policy decisions and esp not their precise timing. Waltz ditto in Theory of International Politics. That's not what "grand theories" like this are designed to do.
Maybe it's all b.s. and if you want to toss out these kinds of works as not worth your or anyone's time, that's ok w me. (I have no academic job and therefore no professional investment in IR theory as a discipline. I'm not even a member of the Intl Studies Assn anymore.) But the fact that Mearsheimer said in 2015 that Putin would not invade Ukraine has no bearing on the quality (or lack thereof) of his scholarly work. He's not a hard scientist bc IR theory, esp the kind he does, is not a hard science. But what he said in 2015 about Putin is not evidence that he is any more of an ideologue than really anyone else in the field.
P.s. I have no particular interest in defending anything Mearsheimer has said about Ukraine. I'm just saying that IR theory is not, for the most part, a predictive "science."
ReplyDeleteFor any philosopher wanting to help out with the war in Ukraine, here is a link to an active political philosopher named Volodymyr Yermolenko, born 1980. This links to a profile showing who he is and what he is doing:
ReplyDeletehttps://pen.org.ua/en/team/yermolenko-volodymyr/
He is a political philosopher and philosophy of literature. He is doing culture war for Ukraine in this conflict and recording audio podcasts in English to make the rest of the world aware of what is happening inside the war. Here is a link to his online archive and main site for live updates:
https://ukraineworld.org/
March 13 episode 76 from Ukraine World gives a sobering view of what is happening when they are destroying your country and life and can only say: "we are still fighting." Ukrainians are amazed that the rest of the world is afraid of joining them in fighting off Russia. I wonder if these Ukrainian resistance updates will stop if Russians overrun the country and its main cities. Russia is trying to stop the world from watching what it is doing and witnessing its war crimes and we have to continue to watch the horror in order to be politically aware. But it robs you of some of your humanity to watch other humans suffer like this and be able to do nothing or care for them. We are the caring animal not the rational animal, and we bury our dead and remember them, not leaving them to rot in the streets without a care.
Also, here is a short sample essay on Ukrainian identity by Volodymyr Yermolenko published on March 9, 2022:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2022/3/9/putin-is-uniting-ukrainians
He can be contacted through his account on Twitter or by his work for UkraineWorld online. He is a professor at Kyviv Mohyla Academy and specializes in philosophy and literature. But he has been drafted into the war effort and become political to survive the Russian missile onslaught which is now at over 900 missiles fired into Ukraine.
Here is a link to a free book called Ukraine In Histories and Stories: A Book of Essays by Intellectuals (2019) with 16 texts and interviews
ReplyDeleteedited by Volodymyr Yermolenko
https://ukraineworld.org/articles/books/essays-intellectuals
which you can download and read for free. The Ukrainians know who they are fighting for and the rest of the world does not when it expects Ukraine to surrender its freedom and accept conquest by Russia. This book explains why we should not expect them to surrender or lose any war in the long term, they won't give up and don't consider themselves to be Russian at all.
Prof. Couture,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your recommended links.
Chile pic.
ReplyDeletehttps://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
ReplyDeleteHe [i.e. Stephen Kotkin, professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton] maintains that ... Putin would have invaded Ukraine even if there had been no NATO
I see. Following an alternative history, in an alternative universe, where NATO did no exist, Putin would have invaded Ukraine.
How does Prof. Kotkin know? Let's consider the possibilities. He traveled to that alternative universe using a parallel dimension or a "portal"? He's got psychic connections to the three-legged, blue people living in that alternative universe?
Maybe it was the aliens who told him. Or voices in his head.
And the thing is, unless you are pulling anything you can find, no matter how absurd, in a desperate attempt to obfuscate, you actually believe in that crap.
So, what are you? Fool or knave?
- AnonyMouse