I’m not really all that worried about the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
I’m worried about the next one. Or five.
Everyone likes to pin WWI on the assassination of a single archduke, and act all shocked that things spiraled out of control from there. But that’s the “Michael Bay Theory Of History” version.
I can’t really describe what was really going on any better than I already have:
Pre-WW1 Europe was a powder keg ready to explode at any moment.Basically, almost ever every power in Europe had had some recent embarrassment on the international stage, wherein they’d had to betray a minor ally in order to save some larger objective. And each one’s leaders had vowed to themselves “not next time”. Next time, they would stand tall and redeem their national honor. The opposition would be defeated quickly by this moment of sheer resolve.
When everyone in a bar fight is trying to make up for the embarrassment of losing the previous bar fight, and no one is strong enough to KO the rest in the first punch, you just end up with a bunch of idiots pummeling each other into a bloody pulp for hours.
That’s WW1.
Getting back to Russia-Ukraine, what worries me is that the West will keep embarrassing ourselves until we finally decide to punch back. Although Putin more closely resembles Hitler than any pre-WWI figure in this formulation, the danger is still WWI-like: that this sort of dynamic lulls both sides into a false sense of security. For Putin, it will be that the West is simply not “man enough” to punch back. For the West, it will be that Putin will somehow understand when he’s gone too far, and not get sucked into a conflict by us punching back.On that Charlie Warzel piece I just linked to, I really can’t add much that he didn’t already geniusly say. I totally share his concern about letting ourselves get distracted from the possibility of civil war. It’s always in hindsight that these things seem prescient… but, guys, the warning signs are all right here. Just because it doesn’t fit the Michael Bay Theory Of History, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
My dad would always tell me “beware the true believers” when I was growing up.
I’d like to offer my own contribution to that same genre of sage warning: “Beware the desperate”.
Let me ask you: Without looking it up, what did Tucker Carlson do for the whole decade-plus after his getting royally owned by Jon Stewart led to CNN cancelling Crossfire the next year?
You don’t know, do you? Neither did I. Apparently he did a few stints on MSNBC and PBS, before getting picked up by Fox and being a bit player for 7 whole years until he finally got his break to replace Bill O’Reilly and become what he is now.
Carlson’s story shows you what desperate people are willing to do to get something back once they’ve had it. Time after time, the worst actors tend to arise from the least expected places. Trump was literally the butt of a joke before he ran. Carlson was a washed-up has-been.
When you want to understand where the next major disruption is going to come from, don’t look around and freak yourself out about the Teds Cruz of the world. Look for the people who have lost something — the losers like Carlson and Trump were. They’re the dangerous ones.
Beware the desperate.Mike Duncan had a rare whiff on his Revolutions podcast this week. In discussing the fact that the Communists weren’t really expecting a peasant-driven backlash to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, he mainly focuses on the fact that the backlash was the result of the Left-SRs piggybacking their opposition to the treaty onto what was already widespread dissatisfaction with other Communist reforms.
But I think this gives short shrift to the fact that the peasants would have been perfectly capable of having some very contradictory opinions at the time. Mike made much of the fact that the Communists figured the peasants would be happy with the treaty, since the treaty was fulfilling their promise to get the mostly-peasant military home from a bad war. Which is true!
But the peasantry also would have been the most likely to see Brest-Litovsk as a national insult, and to be sensitive to rhetoric about “national insults” in the first place. It’s not hard to see the Left-SR pitch-line; in fact, it kind of even mirrors the historical pitch that the Nazis made: “You fought hard in a bad war that you didn’t want. The Communists came to power promising you socialism, but then they bungled it with their bad land and grain policies, and gave away half of your empire to boot! This is a national insult that cannot stand.”
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