Majorityrights Central > Category: European Nationalism

... has been running nightly for a fortnight and I’ve only just woken up to it.  But here is the programme.  Here are the podcasts to date.  Here is the trailer:

... and the prologue to this years event.  Which seems bigger and more comprehensive than ever.  I don’t know how he does it!

As usual, the final guest will be on 30th December, and it will be Morgoth - usually a five-hour event in itself.

This fourth (long and rather detailed) essay in the series is both a conclusion to Part Three’s examination of the causalities of human being and an introduction of the role of attention.  Whilst this is not an essay on epistemology, it runs an epistemological course from, in biblical terms, Eden to the Fall to salvation, which correlates with the ontological one from the Primary to the Secondary Structure of causality.  It needs to be understood that there are two distinct processes here, one of those at the very foundation of the brain, and the other in a declined quality of cognition.  The latter explains all the sorrows of life which are of Man’s wilful error.  It is eminently ameliorable, as the next essay, exploring the accidental effects of NSDAP on German peoplehood, will endeavour to demonstrate.

BETWEEN DASEIN AND DARWIN

The twice lost garden, a place not only of confusion, but of lethargy and passivity.

In an age of official hostility, coercion, hypocrisy and lies, and the fear and dread which these inculcate in the innocent, the truth is at a very great premium, for it is the sole means of deliverance.  Let us begin this perfectly non-religious essay, then, with some political as well as ontological truth from St Paul, KJV, 1 Corinthians 13:12 ...

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

We will now think with - and past – Paul, and do so ontologically but always with one eye on the political.  For this is, in part, an essay about power and powerlessness, and although it begins in matters far from worldly concerns, ultimately the ontology must show us where power truly abides.

Each one of us stands raw and constantly renewing within this immediate world in all its own raw and constantly renewing wholeness, which encompasses us as it encompasses all things organic and inorganic, and from which neither we nor anything else can except itself.  “For now” in this hyper-material, primordial reality, this singular congruence no wider than a razor’s edge, we do not stand with any cognition of ourselves as beings separated out by self-hood and by the fateful time-lapse of our own thinking, or even that of our feeling or sensing in any form.  We are naïve as we are raw, and both of these only while cognition trails but a few milliseconds adrift.  Once we join with it everything changes.

This, then, is the biblical Garden of Eden, and although the holy scribes and seers of the ancient world understood that, by the serpentine order of things, processing information about it expels us from it (ie, it cannot be experienced indirectly as information in the mind), they only had poetry and myth to represent the fact.  They did not have the benefit of modern science or evolutionary theory or even Western epistemology to know why or to explicate the totality of the caesura.  They could not know that Mind emerges first from the enzyme catalysis, light- and heat-seeking, and quorum sensing of simple cells which they never saw and never suspected to exist.  They could not know, therefore, that such a defining and constitutive origin renders our cognitive process today, with all its dissonant temporality, as imminent and inextinguishable as any tribal god they might cook up.  They could not know that Mind and divine truth, should such a thing exist, rightfully have contrary dynamics.  If there are truths in the paradisal garden which are divine, they are forever beyond Mind’s necessary, disjunctive filter.

Put another way, even the most intense and elevated liberational event by which mystics self-verify Union with the All ... even that remains informational for us.  Yes, the thinking mind’s relentless, drenching chatter can be stilled, at least for a brief while.  If the subject is a serious individual, fifteen years or so tanning himself on a Californian beach while, of course, bent in the regulation lotus posture, and following every breath into and out of the body (in other words, actual prayer, not the church pew thing), then a certain equilibrium might restore itself for a time and a certain detachment might yield real profundity.  But the totality that is the cognitive Mind remains operative and absolute, and in the final analysis such efforts represent no more than a reaching towards the unreachable.  So it is that one of the two great causes of every religion - Union with the All – remains a literal impossibility in this life at least (and we need not let eternal salvation in the next detain us).  What, then, is actually taking place?  How are we to bring this entire dispensation into the ontological daylight, and order it?

As ever, there is some clearing away, some housekeeping to be done.

READ MORE...

In July and August of 2021, James Bowery and I became embroiled in a productive debate about, as James eventually titled it, the causal structure of Dasein.  I am returning to that subject now, because I find I cannot proceed with my Part Two NSDAP essay without doing so.  My thanks to James for his participation and commentary on that thread, which was to his film review here .

With apologies to abstract artists everywhere.  I can’t title this “The Burnt Orange Heresy, which is taken.  But maybe
“The Burnt Orange Reflex” will do.

THE CAUSALITIES OF HUMAN BEING

Let us begin this essay by reminding ourselves why such abstract and theoretical subject matter, which attends to a primordial aspect of human existence of surpassing irrelevance to those contesting the politics of the day, is nevertheless necessary and meaningful for us as nationalists.

How we came to the point of needing new thinking

For the reason, in brief, that since the Greeks, Western thinking has been overly concentrated on the technical question of how can we know truth and not the existential who are we …

For the reason that Christianity’s idiosyncratic model of the sinner seeking a personal salvation post-mortem by the grace of God does not, in fact, tend to Man’s relational truth but moves him in a manner wholly consistent with the Judaic End-Time ...

For the like reason, following on from Christianity’s universalist dictum that all men are equally made in the image of God, an entire eco-system of narratives of injustice and oppression has been politicked into being, every type of it, every detail, targeting the white sexually-normal male as a bearer of an original sin of some kind, most usually racism ...

For the reason that liberalism’s unfettering will - the guiding idea of our epoch and the secular child of Christianity - is a non-real and non-possible desideratum, the pursuit of which can only consume our lives and distance us from our innate truth ...

For the reason in consequence that Western metaphysics has not been able to centre itself on the human principle but has surrendered it to science and technology, reducing the lived life to mere utility filled with economism, materialism, and consumption-as-progress ...

For the reason that investment, banking, corporate, media and tech elites, and the internationalist institutions, hold sway over the liberal democratic system, and thus over the parties and governments of the West also, imposing their agendas on national politics and reducing it everywhere to a ritual of deception and betrayal …

For the reason that since the middle of the 19th century the Jewish ethno-religious paradigm has accommodated itself, via the leading Jewish intellectuals and activists, in the development of Western philosophical, political and cultural life, colouring political decision to the profound exclusion of our own interests and freedom …

For the reason that we have no recourse to an active politics of those interests and of the truth of our person, indeed a war of false morality is waged against these even while our ancestral homelands are deliberately and wickedly flooded with foreign populations (which are no less wickedly presented to us as “oppressed peoples” and “ethnic minorities”) ...

… for such reasons, great and small, we are not only subject to the soft-genocidal power play of global elites but to an acquired inner condition of estrangement and confusion.  The modern life so ceaselessly and seamlessly manufactures artifice, the stranger within us reacts to the mortal danger to our kind not with love and commitment to putting things straight but with perfect insouciance.  “What does it matter to me?” the stranger may ask.  Because, of course, in artifice and its detachments lies self-referentialism and nihilism.  So we all sleep on while, to borrow from Enoch Powell, our elites and others hostie to us heap up the European demographic funeral pyre, and drag the European man and woman and the European family through their neo-Marxist sewer.

In such a compromised condition, from whence is the capacity to defend our life and being to come?  If it comes only from the anti-globalist and traditionalist right as represented by the phenomenon that is Giorgia Meloni, and by the rise of Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats, and AfD in Germany, by the revitalisation of Marine Le Pen, perhaps even in the person of Donald Trump, then we will see gestures in the direction of recovery, for sure.  But none of these will ever sweep away modernity and the mass man, or the Money Power, never mind the more subtly enworlding powers of the West’s deep religious and ethical, philosophical, social, economic and cultural forms … its very models of Life and Man and their complete possession by the Jewish spirit.  Likewise, none of our own discursive efforts to this point … on race and immigration, on the JQ, on cultural Marxism, on Islam, and latterly on globalism and the Money Power … will ever measure up to this world-making task.  Reaction might reform to one or another degree.  But it does not replace the system which is formative to us, which abides within us, and which we effortlessly communicate to our children.  Yet any measure less than replacement of that formative system and the cut will be too shallow.  The default characteristic of the system will prevail, and its DNA will carry over to confound, limit, frustrate, outlast, and swallow all the forces of reaction.  All that was before reaction will be after it.

Preparatory notes for a critical Heideggerian

So we return to this question of the abstract, the theoretical, because that is the language in which the formative is re-conceptualised and brought anew to the world.  Only thus could a new and complete philosophy for life and truth, emerging from the human fundamentals, be brought forth.  Only thus could nationalists properly defy our historical trajectory, change it and become the driving force of a revolution for existence.

READ MORE...

One of the prime events of the calendar for Anglosphere nationalism is also its year-end event.  That is Millenniyule, the unique and engrossing series of twenty plus live-streams conducted by the cultural critic and content creator Millenialwoes (Woes for short).  This year was the eighth in the series.

I have not listened to everything, though I have visited every stream to get a sense of the interview subject.  Many are well-known on the dissident podcast scene.  They are an eclectic mix, which only adds to the immense task Woes sets himself each December (and handles so expertly).  Some of them our host engages for 45 minutes, some for a couple of hours.  The two marathon streams, though, are several hours apiece.  Of these, the longest by far, at one minute longer than seven hours, was the final stream of Millenniyule 2022, with Morgoth:

Next for sheer expansiveness, at four hours nineteen minutes, was the stream with Academic Agent:

AA’s analysis, it must be said, is that of Schmittian reductionism, placing power before idealism.  But there is a lot of interest in the conversation, as there is, as ever, in the Morgoth stream.  It seems to me that one can just as profitably start the year with such material as end it.

Here is the central difficulty with Heideggerian philosophy - the being of a thing does not, in itself, supply a cause for the thing to be.  This is not quite an example of the Naturalistic Fallacy, because there is a difference between ethical choice as a construct of the higher emotions and thought, and sheer instinctual survival.  It is a qualitative difference, obviously, but it is also an operative difference.  For example, as the flame burns the hand, the nervous system signals the brain and the brain signals the muscles to tense and contract. The whole action is completed an eternity of microseconds before the emotions of fear and alarm well up.  The intellectual faculty ... the considering mind ... lumbers into view only much later still.  Considering is redundant.  So, in this case “must” is operative, not “ought”.  We don’t have a problem with Hume and Moore.  We have a problem elsewhere, in the categorical separateness of being-there-then and the animus.  Being (for example, being at the point of acquiring a burnt hand) never leaves its own site of reference.  The animus has another site, in the organism’s primordial defence mechanism.  If we hold that essence precedes existence (and we “ought”) we might consider that the animus is the cosmic will-to-be of the organism, while being is the consequent action of the organism in Time and Place.

This separateness is the reason that nationalist folks often see folkish-ness and traditionalism as tainted by a solipsistic “shire” mentality devoid of the politically necessary, hard cutting edge.  That may or may not always be fair.  But in the matter of a people’s existence there is a relatively small number of positive forces which supply, or contribute to supplying, such a cutting edge.  Survival and continuity, identity, home are the stuff of the naturalistic, nativist pole of the nationalist axis, which just might array like this:

Interestingly, these causes are also the stuff of jus bellum.  Heidegger is in them but he is not them.

These few thoughts follow from a hearing of a conversation, distinctively Heideggerian in parts, conducted by a very interesting nationalist, a thinking nationalist, named Scott Mannion with my old friend, the cultural critic, essentialist, and speaker of truths, Morgoth.  Indeed it is titled, “Morgoth – How to find trad meaning in modernist hell”:

It is clear that Scott is a genuine intellectual, possibly an academic, who has journeyed into Heidegger, arriving at experience, or re-experience, of what, I suppose, we must call our cultural heritage and tradition as signifier of our shared, particular and ethnic being.  It is clear that Morgoth’s celebrated practise of rural walking in search of the permanent and authentic in his native north-east England holds a particular significance for Scott.  I very much liked the easy overlap of their worldviews, and the courtesy with which Scott granted Morgoth time to speak of his.  The whole conversation had a positive and hopeful mein.

Scott repeatedly referred to our being as a tangible permanence which the estrangements and machine-living of modernity can never banish or besmirch, and this is true enough.  Of course, when listening to the thoughts of friends there are still always a few points of divergence.  I am primarily interested in the ontology of racial awakening rather than in cultural archeaology.  But it would be churlish to make too much of that now.  It is enough just to encounter another intellectual realist in the impoverished home of English nationalism.

Yes to childbirth.
Yes to state support for motherhood.
Yes, therefore, to family.
Yes to the Italian people, the Italian identity, Italian patriotism.
Yes to restoring Italian legal supremacy over the EU.
No to abortion.
No to illegal immigration and to demographic change.
No to “the violence of Islam”.
No to the trans attack on womanhood.
Indeed, no to all the desiderata of progressivism, to its barriers to the human norm, to its dictates and “cancelations”.
No to Establishment politics, and to Mafia parasitism thereon.
No to financial speculators, and government run for financial speculators.
No to the global corporations’ model of Man as “perfect consumer”.

And so forth.  That pretty much sums up the ground on which Georgia Meloni, after yesterday’s election Italy’s first female prime minister, currently stands.  As a nationalist myself, I would not categorise it as nationalism because it is not developed out of a philosophy of kind and home.  It is, though, adjacent in parts.  But her politics are almost entirely reactionary, and are, ultimately, articulated from a conception of human being which is Catholic and naturalistic, and thus socially conservative.

Of course, in today’s progressive dominion that is radical and alarming to all those who have come to regard neo-Marxist imposts as the norm, even politically centrist.  The Italian political Establishment has particularly good reason for such alarm.  Meloni, 45, is a natural-born change agent.  She does not come from their privileged world.  She comes from the post-WW1 garden suburb of Garbatella in Rome, and something of the place flows in her veins.  She speaks not of euros and the financing of Italy’s vast sovereign debt but of the things of the instinct and, as she says, “common sense”.  In support of that she is passionate and combative, populist and brave.  Occasionally at the dais when her voice rises and her tone hardens, she can sound demagogic; and doubtless that plays into the Establishment’s frequent association of her and her party Brothers of Italy with fascism and, of course, the r-word.  Not unlike Marine Le Pen, she has reacted by removing people who have praised Mussolini or said something somewhere that could be construed as racism.  Many party members might prefer a sturdy and unashamed line of attack to that.  But she’s not trying to placate the Establishment but to reassure the voters, and evidently that strategy has paid off.

We shall now see how the entitled political class and technocrats and the sclerotic governmental machine within Italy respond to her election.  In Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen has already threatened “consequences” and spoken of “tools” to bring the Meloni government to heel if required.  Much attention will be paid in Brussels as to who Meloni appoints as minister of finance.  But it will also be interesting to see how Matteo Salvini and that great lover of partying with unclothed young ladies, the octagenarian Silvio Berlusconi, will be rewarded for their parties’ participation in the governing alliance.  Both are displaying sympathies for Vladimir Putin, probably in Salvini’s case because the Russian autocrat extended banking facilities to his party.  But Meloni, a staunch supporter of NAT0 and the Ukrainian people, speaks instead of responsibility.  For all her ringing hostility to the deeds of globalism she isn’t buying the anti-Western argument.  I hope we learn more about that.  As for Salvini, if he is back at the Interior Ministry he might have the pleasure of aborting his own trial for blocking NGO vessels full of North and Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the salad days of the 5-Star/League coalition.  He would also have the pleasure of testing von der Leyen as he reduces the immigrant quota the Draghi government agreed upon to nil.

Italian politics promises to be more entertaining than ever.

To the surprise of no one, Marine Le Pen has failed for the second time to make even a close-run thing of the second round of a French presidential election.  She won 41.4% of votes to her opponent’s 58.6%, on a turnout of 72% (against 74.6% in 2017).  The popular vote was 13,297,760 to 18,779,641.  The result does represent a long step forward from 2017, when Le Pen won only a third of the second-round ballot. 

On that calculation she cut the deficit very nearly in half (the easier half to persuade, of course).  The reality is a little worse than that.  Billed as an election for those one least dislikes, we now have definite proof that, allowing for a share of those who voted in 2017 but not this time, no more than four in ten French voters can be persuaded to support Le Pen.  Only 13% of non-nationalists (“nationalist” in this context meaning those who had voted a fortnight ago for Le Pen + Zemmour) felt able to switch to her.  And this after all the enormous efforts she has made to explain herself as something other than the Establishment media’s hate-object.  Even as the EU-neutral, Islam-accepting cat-lady of French politics she could not threaten a totally unloved sitting president.  It is another reminder for nationalists, were any reminder needed, how very difficult it is to break through in any systemically liberal polity.

One should also note that Le Pen did not always help herself during her campaign.  In the presidential debate last week she took the bad decision to focus on policy detail, which is Macron’s managerialist strength, not hers, and let him off the hook of his own unpopularity.  Obviously, she wanted to project competence.  But she projected his competence.  She also confused the voters by suddenly declaring that the lovable and by no means toxic cat-lady would ban the Muslim veil in public.  It didn’t need saying.  Mixed-messaging is never a good thing.  Then, too, she had bad luck in her timing with the war in Ukraine and her past approval of Vladimir Putin (basically tended for consenting to provide RN with banking facilities when no French bank would do so).  Finally, there was the very odd timing from Brussels of the launch of an investigation into fraud dating back before the last presidential election.  I don’t know how damaging that really was.  As an attempt to manipulate the election it could hardly have been more blatant.  Perhaps Brussels was more damaged by it than Le Pen.  Perhaps she actually gained votes just on the basis of the general disgust.  But all that said, these issues are petty and narrowly political.  It is difficult to believe that any of them could have made the difference for Macron.  His advantage was always secure.

Rather, the constant electoral problem for nationalism is that its grand cause is national and existential but the concerns of the majority of voters are stubbornly personal and economic; and here Le Pen really tried to break the mould.  She alighted on the rapidly rising cost of living at the beginning of her campaign, and pushed it throughout.  Many commentators praised her political shrewdness, acknowledging that any treasure trove of votes was going to be found on the left.  They obviously expected to see a pay-off for her at the polling station.  She obviously expected to see it.  But nothing very much was forthcoming.  One wonders whether something more than a me-too expression of solidarité with the policy-goals of the left and some communitarian empathie with those left behind by Macron is required.  In the absence of a complete economic vision will such offerings always be seen as opportunistic?  In the end, do voters look to nationalism for a bit of tax relief?

All this raises the vexing question of where French nationalism goes from here.  There will very likely need to be a self-critical assessment of the performance of Rassemblement National in the legislative elections scheduled for 12th and 19th June.  OK, Zemmour’s alternative Reconquête!, even with Marion Maréchal on board, may be unlikely to achieve much of an impact itself seat-wise.  But it could make the always problematic task of election difficult for RN candidates, and not just this June.  How can nationalism cut through if it is outflanked on the issue of Islam on the right by an essentially conservative party and out-flanked on economic issues on the left by an essentially Corbynist party?
.
Personally, I suspect that, after his creditable performance in the first round of the presidential election, the old-left ideological warrior Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) will harvest much of the anti-Macron sentiment in June.  There is a strong possibility that the French, having elected the little man because they thought they had to, will delight in denying him the capacity to form a government in the legislature.  La France Insoumise is not a formal party, and is a classic vessel for temporary political protest.  It is a broad church of the narrow left consisting of supporters’ groups and small committees campaigning for “ecosocialism”.  One assumes that this oddity is for unhinged CO2 obsessives whose interest in the environment very oddly and abruptly curtails itself when the subject of population growth due to immigration pops up.  The égalité of Africans and Arabs is obviously much too pressing to allow ideological consistency to get in the way.

Accordingly, Mélenchon greeted Le Pen’s defeat (rather than Macron’s victory) with the words, “It’s very good news for the unity of our people,” which, naturally, demonstrates the customary pig-headed refusal to acknowledge who the French are and who they are not.  Over 7 million people - a fifth of the total vote - actually put a cross against Mélenchon’s name in the first round of the presidentials.  La France Incurable might have been more accurate.

As for Le Pen, she seems set on fighting on.  But what can she do that she has not already done to untie the gossamer bindings of her supposed toxicity?  Five years ago she was able to respond to other presidential candidate’s tough election-talk on immigration by saying, “Why vote for a fake when you can vote for the real thing.”  Now she has come to the point where her opponents can invert that and say the same of her centrism.  Of course, it’s true that ordinarily the centre is the ground an election winner must occupy.  It is where the most votes are.  It is where the most floating votes are. In addition, in France the traditional parties of power - the Gaullists and the Socialists - are dying.  The latter is effectively dead already.  The centre is eminently contestable.  But the gods of political change do not seem to be with Le Pen.  She sacrificed her authenticity to be their beneficiary.  It is difficult to see any real identity now, or much creative energy, in RN.  Perhaps Le Pen and her party have simply been around too long.  Perhaps RN will now fall victim to the same malaise as the Gaullists and the Socialists, and Marion will inherit the tricolour of Delacroix’ revolutionary Marianne.

Yesterday the UN General Council voted by the required two-thirds majority to exclude the Russian Federation from the UN Human Rights Council.  This morning the Kremlin’s reply landed at a train station in the Donbas - not one missile but two, and not a single-warhead but cluster munitions.  Initial reports say thirty people were killed on the spot, and a further hundred injured.  It is totally apparent from the personal items and clothing strewn about the place that this was not a military target.  The local mayor has stated that there were some 4,000 civilians at the station at the time.  The strikes were a perfectly clear statement to the effect that the Kremlin doesn’t give a damn about the safety and human rights of the people of the Donbas, never gave a damn about the safety and human rights of the people of the Donbas, and will break any and every moral boundary it pleases.  Even to make a bitchy political point.

One awaits the first Western nationalist to explain that if only the UN General Council hadn’t been so aggressive in pushing Putin to the limits, those refugees might still be alive.

Well, three days ago the Spectator carried a piece on the massacre in Bucha.  It referred to a remarkable article which had appeared in the state-owned, Russian-language news service RIA Novosti.  The Spectator article was written by one-time resident in Putin’s fiefdom Christopher Booth.  It set out the future of endless de-Nazification for Ukrainians in the Donbas and the south who cannot free themselves from Russian occupation and control.  Of the Novosti article it says:

It speaks in detail of how Russia might achieve the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine – the first stated aim of the invasion.

The piece comes just as the Kremlin would have us believe that the goals of the so-called ‘special military operation’ have been recalibrated, and perhaps all will end in some sort of queasy compromise in the east of the country. In case you have fallen for this idea, here’s a quote from the RIA Novosti article in question:

“Apart from the Ukrainian leadership, a substantial part of the population is also guilty of being passively Nazi, and facilitators of Nazism. They supported the Nazi regime and urged it forward… The further denazification of the population will require re-training through ideological repression and fierce censorship, not only in the political sphere but also in the sphere of culture and education.”

The author goes on to say: ‘History teaches us that Ukraine cannot exist as a nation state’. Note – this was written less than a week ago. He recommends further that Ukrainian school textbooks be confiscated; that the population should be compelled to denounce one another for the greater good; that memorials to Russian soldiers should be erected to commemorate the war against Ukrainian fascism; and that ‘anti-Nazi’ commissions should be established in what remains of the country for at least 25 years.

So, a Russian propagandist writing in a state-owned Russian publication, giving advice that cannot be at odds with Kremlin thinking, is seeking a “de-Nazification” that is not at all restricted to the Azov Battalions but is code for a population-wide cleansing of “guilt”.  This is precisely how the horrors of the Soviet Union proceeded.  It explains what a survivor of Bucha told the Western media, namely, that the Russian soldiers were demanding where “the Nazis” were and, in some cases, stripping villagers in search of incriminating tattoos.  Some of this behaviour has been ascribed to Chechens.  But it is also ordinary Russian soldiers ordinarily brutalising and murdering people of their own accord, because such behaviour is, if not ordered, more or less given licence from above.  Russian military operations have been that way in Chechnya and in Syria.

So we come to the matter of support among Western nationalists for Putin and the Russian military.  For years now I’ve been referring to the borderline personality types who populate our world.  These are people who are unable to “fit in” with the general Mind.  But they are perfectly able to withstand all the hatreds that are visited upon nationalism, rather like bacteria in hospitals that survive the action of chemical cleaners.  Our politics, therefore, is a natural home for these people.  On the Spectator thread there was an explanatory comment by someone named Venk (evidently not a nationalist himself) which I found relevant:

It puzzled me too until I realized that their hatred for western elites has twisted their worldview. They loathe our leadership class and they admire Putin because he’s a strong-man alternative to woke green-obsessed liberal western elites. Unfortunately, they lack common sense and moderation, so they adopt a “see no evil” approach.

If the western media says it; it must be a lie. If Putin’s propagandists say it; it must be true. If Putin’s forces do something obviously evil, it must be a western lie or a justified action given the circumstances. It’s a bit like the trait psychologists call splitting in people with Borderline Personality Disorder.

They remind me a little of the Cambridge Five, upper class communists who hated our system so much they sided with the enemy. They managed to convince themselves that the USSR was the solution to Western shortcomings, and they either ignored evidence to the contrary or explained it away as a necessary evil on the path to the greater good.

I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that can be attributed to the left or the right, but to certain personality types who can’t process complex realities or balance the good and bad in any scenario.

One would hope that the missile strikes on Kramatorsk train station might cause some of these folk to think again.  But for many, I think, the itch to attack “the West” and “the Jews” will be just too powerful, and they will go on, like the Russian propagandist who apparently wants the gulags back for the next twenty-five years, giving voice to the same certainties in fulfilment of the same emotional needs.