An American tourist in Russia
The 1983 Soviet stop-motion animation, Conflict ( Конфликт), presents a simple and pure message. A modern war between two world powers is insanity that would inevitably end in nuclear armageddon. No matter how restrained or polite the conflict, sooner or later one side would be defeated and use their nuclear arsenal in a last-ditch attempt at self-preservation.
The Girl With All the Gifts literally compares black people to flesh-eating zombies who destroy Western civilization, and praises this as a good thing. It might be the most mind-bogglingly evil and racist movie ever made. Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation look tame in comparison. But that’s not the most horrifying aspect of the story. Thousands, maybe even millions, of white liberal elites in Europe and the USA actually believe this and have the political power to make it happen.
Here’s the paradox of building a relationship with the USA. The only way to get Republicans to respect you is to be a macho tough guy – and have a strong military with nuclear weapons. Republicans are schoolyard bullies. They talk lots of trash about Russians, but have given up trying to fight them in any meaningful way. But here’s the paradox – what works on Republicans has the opposite effect on Democrats. Being a macho tough guy will actually make them hate you more. They’ll build even more drones and ships named after gay pedophiles, and want to start a war with you more than ever before.
The more I put aside the propaganda and look at World War II for what it really was, the more I am amazed. We endlessly blame the Soviet Union for everything that went wrong, but we give the Western allies a pass for basically handing Hitler all of Europe with almost no fight. The war would have gone very differently if the Germans had to conquer the West one house at a time in a grinding war of attrition, rather than marching triumphantly into undefended cities.
The last 600 years—the totality of modern history—were an invention of the West. Art, industry, law, music, philosophy, science, and technology—there was no field of consequence we did not dominate. From Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Nietzsche to Newton, Poincaré, and Watson and Crick, almost every thinker and doer of note was a product of Western schools, … Read more