Again, absolutely outstanding article by Cathy Young. She is indespensable to understand the Ukraine War and to interpret the evolution and reactions from the different factions of the US ideological camps. On the Kremlin manifesto, I think it is an error to call it fascism. It falls into the realm of what the ideological evolution of th…
Again, absolutely outstanding article by Cathy Young. She is indespensable to understand the Ukraine War and to interpret the evolution and reactions from the different factions of the US ideological camps. On the Kremlin manifesto, I think it is an error to call it fascism. It falls into the realm of what the ideological evolution of the old European Communist Parties has become in many places in Europe. As a native from a European country, and as a person who came to age at the time of the Soviet Union collapse, I have seen the evolution of the former communist parties in the different European nations that later formed the United Left into New radical left subparties which question the very existance and right to existance of most modern European nations (colonialism has a lot to do with it, but the reasons given are as diverse and complex as the European history. In each country, they attach the reasoning to a different issue). When I mention this to my own family (my US-born and raised husband, dual citizenship children and US in-laws), they question me and tell me that "I exaggerate and they don't see it." They don't see it because understandably they are not paying attention. Only a few weeks ago my own husband became alarmed when I showed him a op-ed in a major US publication (I can't remember exactly which one) by a US professor and a cadre of cheerleaders in the comment section who repeated all the ideological theories which gave foot to questioning the right to existance of my country, all the theories that they never heard before and thought that I was exaggerating. In every Western European country there's some Bandera-like figure with a questionable past that some radical portion of the left is using to question the right to existance of the liberal order as it is now and to limit access to the system to opposing parties for their real or imagined association to those figures. Let's don't call fascism everything we find despicable. Of course, you will find very troubling right-wing nationalist Oban-like figures in many European countries, but you will also find the right-to-exist deniers on the left, and their speech sounds a lot like the Kremlin Manifesto.
There are people on the right who use "liberal order" as a term of opprobrium, and lately they've sometimes sounded a lot like the far left, especially concerning Ukraine.
They'll give a sort of approval to Xi Jinping's rule in China, on the premise that it "unifies" the nation under a holistic view of society and human life -- in which the human person is reduced to raw material with which the powerful construct their own vision of a perfect society, but never mind that ....
For all their bloviating about national sovereignty and cultural integrity, they seem rather selective about which nations get to be sovereign and have their own culture. Granted, that can be a thorny question when you look at the long history and observe that some nation-states of long standing have separatist movements within their borders. But there's not a lot of thoughtfulness in evidence when the default is basically "Russia has a venerable culture and so who are we to criticize them for wanting to bring wayward pseudo-nations back into the fold?"
Again, absolutely outstanding article by Cathy Young. She is indespensable to understand the Ukraine War and to interpret the evolution and reactions from the different factions of the US ideological camps. On the Kremlin manifesto, I think it is an error to call it fascism. It falls into the realm of what the ideological evolution of the old European Communist Parties has become in many places in Europe. As a native from a European country, and as a person who came to age at the time of the Soviet Union collapse, I have seen the evolution of the former communist parties in the different European nations that later formed the United Left into New radical left subparties which question the very existance and right to existance of most modern European nations (colonialism has a lot to do with it, but the reasons given are as diverse and complex as the European history. In each country, they attach the reasoning to a different issue). When I mention this to my own family (my US-born and raised husband, dual citizenship children and US in-laws), they question me and tell me that "I exaggerate and they don't see it." They don't see it because understandably they are not paying attention. Only a few weeks ago my own husband became alarmed when I showed him a op-ed in a major US publication (I can't remember exactly which one) by a US professor and a cadre of cheerleaders in the comment section who repeated all the ideological theories which gave foot to questioning the right to existance of my country, all the theories that they never heard before and thought that I was exaggerating. In every Western European country there's some Bandera-like figure with a questionable past that some radical portion of the left is using to question the right to existance of the liberal order as it is now and to limit access to the system to opposing parties for their real or imagined association to those figures. Let's don't call fascism everything we find despicable. Of course, you will find very troubling right-wing nationalist Oban-like figures in many European countries, but you will also find the right-to-exist deniers on the left, and their speech sounds a lot like the Kremlin Manifesto.
There are people on the right who use "liberal order" as a term of opprobrium, and lately they've sometimes sounded a lot like the far left, especially concerning Ukraine.
They'll give a sort of approval to Xi Jinping's rule in China, on the premise that it "unifies" the nation under a holistic view of society and human life -- in which the human person is reduced to raw material with which the powerful construct their own vision of a perfect society, but never mind that ....
For all their bloviating about national sovereignty and cultural integrity, they seem rather selective about which nations get to be sovereign and have their own culture. Granted, that can be a thorny question when you look at the long history and observe that some nation-states of long standing have separatist movements within their borders. But there's not a lot of thoughtfulness in evidence when the default is basically "Russia has a venerable culture and so who are we to criticize them for wanting to bring wayward pseudo-nations back into the fold?"