Succinct.
So much of what we imagine to be new is old; so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago. Autocrats have risen before; they have used mass violence before; they have broken the laws of war before. In 1950, in the preface she wrote to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, knowing that what had just passed could repeat itself, described the scant half decade that had elapsed since the end of the Second World War as an era of great unease: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”Read the entire article.
The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.
She was wrong, or partly so. Although much of the world would remain, for the rest of the 20th century, in thrall to violent and aggressive dictatorships, in 1950 North America and Western Europe were in fact just at the beginning of an era of growth and prosperity that would carry them to new heights of wealth and power. The French would remember this era as Les Trente Glorieuses; the Italians would speak of the boom economico, the Germans of the Wirtschaftswunder. In this same era, liberal democracy, a political system that had failed spectacularly in 1930s Europe, finally flourished. So did international integration. The Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the eventual European Union—all of these institutions not only supported the liberal democracies but knit them together more tightly than ever before. The result was certainly not a utopia—by the 1970s, growth had slowed; unemployment and inflation soared—but it nevertheless seemed, at least to those who lived inside the secure Western bubble, that the forces of what Arendt had called “sheer insanity” had been kept at bay.
Now we live in a different era, one in which growth at those 1950s levels is impossible to imagine. Inequality has grown exponentially, creating huge divides between a tiny billionaire class and everyone else. International integration is failing; declining birth rates, combined with a wave of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, have created an angry rise of nostalgia and xenophobia. Worse, some of the elements that made the postwar Western world so prosperous—some of the elements that Arendt’s pessimistic analysis missed—are fading away. The American security guarantee that underlies the stability of Europe and North America is more uncertain than it has ever been. America’s own democracy, which served as a role model for so many others, is challenged as it has not been in decades, including by those who no longer accept the results of American elections. At the same time, the world’s autocracies have now accumulated enough wealth and influence to challenge the liberal democracies, ideologically as well as economically. The leaders of China, Russia, Iran, Belarus, and Cuba often work together, supporting one another, drawing on kleptocratic resources—money, property, business influence—at a level Hitler or Stalin could never have imagined. Russia has defied the entire postwar European order by invading Ukraine…
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Acutely toxic to Democracy. Existentially exigent.
See also
UKRAINE INVASION UPDATE:
ANNIE LOWRY ON INFLATION
...One of the world’s biggest energy exporters is engaged in an unprovoked assault on one of Europe’s largest agricultural exporters. This means higher prices for commodities, which means higher prices for manufacturers, which means higher prices for retailers, which means higher prices for families in a brief matter of time. Much higher, perhaps: One barometer of the price of raw materials jumped 16 percent in the first week of March, the sharpest increase in half a century…"For years?" Let's just hope we have "years."
At the same time, the invasion has cut Europe off from its bread basket: Ukrainian wheat, corn, and sunflower oil are no longer leaving its Black Sea ports. As a result, wheat futures listed on the Chicago Board of Trade jumped the maximum allowed each of the first five days of March; they are now up about 40 percent from before the invasion. Even if Russia were to withdraw from Ukraine shortly, those price increases would probably persist. The war is disrupting the harvest cycle and damaging Ukraine’s shipping infrastructure, and the West is likely to maintain sanctions on Russia for years…
UPDATE: STEVE COLL
It has become common to describe Russia’s invasion as a watershed in history comparable to 9/11 or to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The war in Ukraine marks a turning point for our continent and our generation,” President Emmanuel Macron, of France, said earlier this month. Perhaps, but some of this speculation about Europe’s destiny and the future of Great Power competition may be premature. Certainly, the war has already produced a humanitarian disaster of shocking and destabilizing dimensions. Three million Ukrainians have fled their country. The 1.8 million of them who have gone to Poland constitute a population roughly the size of Warsaw’s. If the fighting drags on and Ukraine implodes, the country will export many more destitute people, and, as happened in the former Yugoslavia during the nineteen-nineties, it may also draw in opportunists, including mercenaries and extremists.UPDATE FROM CNN
Meanwhile, Russia’s economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, could shrink by thirty-five per cent this year under the weight of Western sanctions. Putin’s oligarchs and enablers can endure the loss of super-yachts and private jets, but a sudden economic contraction on that scale would crush ordinary Russians and inevitably cost lives. (“Our economy will need deep structural changes,” Putin acknowledged last week, adding, “They won’t be easy.”) Russia’s isolation from large swaths of global banking and trade, and its loss of access to advanced U.S. technologies, could last a long time, too: democracies often find it easier to impose sanctions than to remove them, even when the original cause of a conflict subsides. (Ask Cuba.) “When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger,” Biden said in his recent State of the Union address.
Still, some introspection may be in order. In his address, the President also declared that, “in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment.” But Europe is troubled by illiberal populism, including in Poland. And Donald Trump—who, just two days before Russia rolled into Ukraine, called Putin’s preparatory moves “genius”—retains a firm hold on the Republican Party, and appears to be all in for a reëlection campaign in 2024. As long as Trump’s return to the White House is a possibility, Biden’s declarations will require some asterisks...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday he is ready to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but warned that if any negotiation attempts fail, it could mean the fight between the two countries would lead to "a third World War."I think the probability of Putin agreeing to meet with President Zelenskyy is about zero. Vladimir is interested in one thing: Ukrainian capitulation. If it requires burning the entire nation down and killing everyone, so be it.
“I’m ready for negotiations with him. I was ready for the last two years. And I think that without negotiations, we cannot end this war,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an exclusive interview Sunday morning.
“If there’s just 1% chance for us to stop this war, I think that we need to take this chance. We need to do that. I can tell you about the result of this negotiations — in any case, we are losing people on a daily basis, innocent people on the ground," he said.
He continued, “Russian forces have come to exterminate us, to kill us. And we can demonstrate that the dignity of our people and our army that we are able to deal a powerful blow, we are able to strike back. But, unfortunately, our dignity is not going to preserve the lives. So, I think we have to use any format, any chance in order to have a possibility of negotiating, possibility of talking to Putin. But if these attempts fail, that would mean that this is a third World War.”
CODA
You might want to read up on Aleksandr Dugin. Putin's Jim Jones. Seriously bad news, this guy. The Putin Whisperer. And, then there's this swell guy.
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