Timothy Snyder: The best Russia policy is a good Ukraine policy. This is a kind of Orwellian moment. The philosophy is also the tactics. The philosophy comes first. If you buy into this version of postmodernism, then you are also going to buy into the strategic relativism and then you are going to lose a whole lot of asymmetrical battles, which is a description of what happened in the last year in large measure. Not a description of Ukraine and Russia, the Ukrainians are actually much more savvy about these things than we are of course, having had much more experience with them. Its a description of us. If we buy into this kind of way of seeing the world, which is in part our way of seeing the world, we had a good hand in generating it, then there are certain consequences, that there will be wars, there will be broken orders, there will be chaos. Its a serious and moral intellectual challenge. What concerns me is is the extent to which this event in Ukraine, which is important in all kinds of ways, has given way precisely to this yielding moment in our own culture. Because, after all, if we see whats happened in Ukraine as nothing more than just some little conflict in some far away country, if we see this as just a kind of politics as usual, well then, propaganda has already won and reality has already lost, and the story is already over. youtube/watch?v=foSg6Ch97V4#t=22
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 23:15:04 +0000
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