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Woo, but still, This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Leave the song aside, the Age of Aquarius is traditionally associated not with love and peace, but with the veil being lifted, with the lies of society being revealed and shamed, with new facts viewed in the cold light of day. That's how reading different commentators on the Ukraine war has felt to me, like I'm seeing a lot of people in a new light. The tide is going out and we're all seeing who was skinny dipping. The Ukraine war has revealed to us that so many intellectuals who seemed such brilliant thinkers and contrarians in the easy view of times without consequences are infested with the diseases of identity politics, even as so many of them decry identity politics themselves. We're seeing who had real ideological convictions, and who just played team sports with politics. Who opposed the mainstream because they had intellectual disagreements with how things ought to be, and who were just sour embittered losers, feeling a constant need to oppose anything that mainstream culture tells them to support.
A million trads/manosphere blogs/alt-righters love to talk about masculinity and decry the lack of it. They point back to our history to leaders like Teddy Roosevelt ("I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one") who would probably be raising a detachment of volunteers to fight in Ukraine himself; they point back to the American Revolution fought by Lafayette and Pulaski, won by the French and by men trained by Von Steuben; they ask whether modern men would have the guts to defend their homes. Well here, in Ukraine, you can watch men defending their homes! Whatever the greater geopolitical yadda yadda, if you're all about traditional masculine strength and duty, and you aren't admiring this, then your ideological prattle has no meaning. It is just Green and Blue to you, your enemies like Ukraine so you have to hate Ukraine. Somehow men defending their homes are the bad guys because something something globohomo.
Tens of millions of leftists have beclowned themselves falling over backward to announce that the Ukrainians are honorary PoC or something like that. A single swastika at any anti-Lockdown protest makes it a Nazi rally; a whole semi-autonomous regiment of avowed Nazis is just a bit of fun in Ukraine, or the Wagner Group depending which side they happen to be rooting for. Not that most of them will actually do anything about it anyway, other than whine.
BlackLivesMatter, preceded by Covid and followed by January 6th, felt very similar to me. Libertarians I thought I respected turned out to only hate cops when cops did certain things to certain people. The people have a right to protest, but only when they're protesting things I care about in the prescribed manner, not if they step out of line and disobey a law and protest against something I agree with. ACAB, except the brave defenders of democracy holding back the fascist hordes they're heroes. The federal government is a shadowy cabal of tyrants, but we Back the Blue when they fight leftists. I write essays online about civil rights and police overreach, but when there is a massive protest march against police overreach I'm just going to complain and call them LARPers instead of going AFK to actually do anything about it. I call the Congress a racist tyranny, but I feel for them when they have to hide under their desks, so traumatic!
Sadly, Porn, I've concluded that for a lot of would-be internet deep-contrarians their ideological front is just an excuse, it keeps them from ever having to actually do anything in real life. The perfect is always the enemy of the good, that protest is just LARPing because it doesn't rigidly conform to all the tenets of [ideological view held by less than 1% of the population]. I can't back that war, not every single soldier is perfectly moral and not every enemy soldier is a subhuman rat. When a real crisis happen it shows us who is interested in acting in real life, and who isn't.
Their primary enemy is the US government, NATO and so on. Russia is opposing these forces. Therefore, they are on Russia's side.
During WW2, the Western Allies were happy to enlist the Soviet Union in their 'fight for freedom'. You had all these puff pieces in the press about how Uncle Joe Stalin was a really nice guy. Stalin was fighting their primary enemy - he was their friend.
Being principled in your alliances is not an effective way to achieve your goals. Imagine if the Western Allies had declared war on Russia in 1939 (since they did indeed invade Poland along with Germany, along with the Baltics and Finland). That would be in accordance with their principle of defending countries from invasion against totalitarian, genocidal powers. But it would've decisively lost them the war. There was no way they were going to defeat the German and Russian armies working together!
"Yes, you were consistent in your principles while we compromised with evil. But we won the war and used that victory to push liberal democracy as far as Ukraine. You lost the war and the entire Eurasian world-island is ruled by dictatorships. So which of us is more true to our ideology?"
For the Western leftist, Azov is good when it's fighting Russians. When the campaign is over, they can be discarded and LGBT multiculturalism introduced. The Azovites think the same thing, presumably.
While the former is plausible, the latter is... I can't think how they can hope that.
Yeah, it's bizarre. I don't think these guys are the best and brightest.
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