I really dont understand this assertion....we are in the midst of daily witnessing the consequences of evil being borne by the Palestinian people ...we are appalled ...young people are appalled .. we are not numb to it ...we are instead powerless and helpless because our politicians are spineless and have been bought from early point in their careers and because we no longer have any route to influencing them
Helen, I think you don’t understand the assertion because you and I and Aurelien's readers are a small minority of Western populations. In the US, the average person does NOT follow the events in Gaza. And even if the population *wants* to be informed, they won't find truth on mainstream media. My mother, for example, does not understand that a genocide is occurring. She's not stupid nor immoral, she's just a boomer who can't comprehend that her trusted NBC news is propaganda for corporate interests.
What exactly do you not understand? It seems to me to be a perfectly accurate description of the current events in Gaza (although it omits the disgusting details).
If you want a further elucidation of Aurelians remarks, you can find them at:
Perhaps we feel all the more powerless because we frame it in the Good/Evil framework. If we begun to talk about interests and consequences – what will this lawlessness imply for ourselves, and how can we stop it – there would perhaps be more hope?
'In turn, these preparations, quite impossible to reproduce today, were based on stable communities and extended families, and often organised around churches, trades union branches and men’s and women’s associations. There was a substantial pool of ex-military personnel and ex-police officers, and no lack of volunteers.' Just so.
The 'destruction' of society is a material consequence of changes in the economy and communications - particularly the motor car and latterly digital communications, and the greater 'social mobility' that has bust communities up. We have become atomised and at the same time government at a local level has become hollowed out, a transmission belt for national Government pet projects incapable of providing local leadership. Geographical communities have been weakened and communities of interest (identity politics) have replaced them. The idea of a coherent community response to challenges based on existing social links and geography is now unlikely.
Much of this article chimes with my memories of a much more certain and fixed world.
Todays 'society' is much more vulnerable than that of the 50's and 60's with 'just in time delivery' and the privatisation of everything. People had a much clearer 'sense of place' and solidarity with those who shared it with them. Indeed the notion of society as it used to exist (geographically based with a clear herarchy of social links) has all but gone and now appears only tokenistically in 'fun-days' and 'local fetes' that remind me of those who re-enact hobby battles from the Middle Ages as a form of memory and recreation.
There is no strategic vision at a national level of where Britain is going and we are tumbling into international conflict as 'the west' (rightly) loses its grip as the dominant world hegemon. Climate change is accelerating and traditional 'communities' are fragmenting. The future is dismal. I look at politicians in the west and groan. Putin and Xi are head a shoulders above any of the so-called western politicians : they know where they are going and have substantial social support. And they understand the material forces of fragmentation that really need to be addressed. I can no longer read the national press because critical journalism hardly exists anymore. There are elephants in the room that they refuse to acknowledge. It didn't need to be
Take away the United States, and the uk goes from America's Special Little Buddy to a flavor-challenged has-been that make the french look like cold-eyed realists by comparison.
British policy is simple. Stir up strife in as many places as possible to get the Americans stuck in, so that they can show how loyally they support the Americans.
Those of you who are familiar with the "Looney Tunes" canon may recall the little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog around, singing Spike's praises and getting Spike into fights.
Aurelian writes, "Few accounts by those who survived Assad’s prisons have been widely published,…" as if this were remarkable. The reason is that the people sent to "Assad's prison" were in no way nice people. Syrian society has been battling extreme Islam for generations, takfirois who relish in head-chopping those who are non-believers. We see them now in charge of the Syrian government, chopping away at Allawites, Christian, and Sunni Sufis. This is the fruit of the "Assad must go!" mantra.
Yes. With so much going on it is easy just to accept the media portrayals of various supposed enemies. But there are always at least two sides to any story, especially if one jibes with government output.
"when women feel “threatened” in mixed-sex swimming pools".
No, they feel threatened in mixed changing rooms, with males pretending to be females trying to mix in and likely oogly while being girly and maybe fighting an erection.
In the competing swimming pool they feel cheated.
The present day Anglo-Saxons as others in the west have been very sheltered, intentionally.
British missiles are already flying at Russia. At the same time, the British are furiously discussing this on the Internet, and there are many joyful comments under the video. The English press is also happy about this. That's why I don't understand why you're so worried about Britain's future. In a sense, the future has already arrived. And this has happened to us before. You write that there was a lot of evil in the USSR. But, by the way, Great Britain was treated very well in the Soviet Union. The whole Soviet atmosphere was saturated with English culture. All these Sherlock Holmes and other gentlemen did not come off Soviet television. Now everything has faded into the background - England means little in the eyes of Russians. This is a big cultural SHIFT.
I will also write about Tolkien. He was one of the most beloved writers of my childhood. And not just mine. A wonderful children's book with great illustrations about traveling back and forth was published in the USSR. With the release of the film, everything changed. There's an episode in which the gates of Mordor open and the king of men greets a pathetic bunch of his supporters: "Westerners!" At that moment, in a Moscow cinema where I was watching this movie, there was dead silence. Everyone suddenly realized that modern Britons and Americans perceive Russians as Mordorians. That's when the future began...
"England means little in the eyes of Russians. This is a big cultural SHIFT."
When I lived in Ukraine (2004-2012) there was a fashion to denigrate the West, western things and institutions. The moment that a junior membership in The Club was dangled out, all that was forgotten, all was forgiven!
Maybe. But the majority of Russians have been cured of any such return to infatuation, despite the hold-outs in RIAC, who are also by now curing themselves.
In the Ukraine, they seem to be a bit slower in catching on. They haven't deserted or mutinied en masse, as one would hope, but I'm not in a position to criticise that - it's probably not as easy as it might appear and much more dangerous, even though there have been instances in small numbers.
A truly fascinating read. Thank you. Helen Colhoun makes a very valid point which perhaps threads the needle of Aurelian's essay. The whole world is watching evil take place in live stream but cannot do any more than 'peacefully protest' because "we are instead powerless and helpless because our politicians are spineless and have been bought from early point in their careers and because we no longer have any route to influencing them". We no longer have the society and community of yore, nor the social mechanisms which once held considerable power and influence in our societies. The breakdown of family, community, trade unions, etc. have diminished our nations, emasculating the populations, rendering them incapable of affecting genuine change in their leaderships. Equally, our leaderships have been bought and paid for long before they ever got within the grasp of the levers of power that they too are incapable of rendering any genuine change. Finally, the slow, creep of authoritarianism is best described by the analogy of the frog in the slow-boiling pot of water. By the time authoritarianism becomes predominant enough for all to recognise it, the time to prevent it's manifestation has passed by. We no longer recognise evil despite seeing it everyday on our screens. Watching and actually experiencing are two vastly different things. While we see Palestinians being butchered daily we cannot equate that to our own experience because we have never experienced it ourselves. By the time we do experience it ourselves it will be too late to do anything to stop it. Somewhere, people, evil, malignant, bad intentioned people are counting on that fact to bring their plans to fruition. We simply lack the experience to recognise it because we have never been faced with true evil. Most of us only get to watch it on screens.
"Many went to specially-prepared evacuation centres. It goes without saying that such facilities and even such capabilities no longer exist in western nations".
As an EU epidemiologist friend living in Beijing in early 2020 wrote, "They know Covid was not a threat but they needed cover for a national civil defense drill, and Covid was perfect”.
They shut down a city of 20 million while maintaining or strengthening services to every home-bound citizen. 82% of Chinese approved of Beijing's Covid policy.
Such accurate observations of the Times I grew up in and of my formative years. As to conclusions I would suggest varied Community responses rather than Universal. The Collective, though muted, still lives in disparate communities independent of Central Command and resources provision. Living in Hope is preferable to Killamarsh.
"Whilst there are certainly myths about the public reaction to the outbreak of the War in western countries, as there are myths everywhere, it’s fairly clear that people mostly reacted with the kind of maturity that was then expected of adults, and the kind of social solidarity that is only possible if you first have a society"
Wasn't it because there was nationalism back then, and strong social cohesion due to the cultural homogeneity, rather than good vs evil story which is more appropriate for the modern times?
By the way, even 50 years ago it wasn't such a big deal being a Nazi - 1970-80s Austrian Chancellor Kreisky (who was a Jew and a leftist) strongly supported one of his FPO ministers, who was a literal SS officer and showed no remorse for that? Kreisky even aggressively attacked Simon Wiesenthal for his protests about that, calling him a foreign agent and an enemy of Austria. It's near impossible to imagine something like that these times. It seems like even cold war mentality was much less black and white than of today, despite all the talk of moral relativism...
Moral distinctions exist in the U.S., but only in small communities that are well rooted. I recall an Amish community that suffered a shooting from a deranged boy (I believe in the 90s). Several Amish children were murdered by him before he turned the gun on himself. Yet the community as a whole went to the boy's funeral to forgive and comfort his mother and protect her from other people who showed up, seeking to degrade and insult her in her time of grief.
It is in the local community, the local parish, where moral distinctions (and the ability to distinguish and properly react) still exist. But I agree that, on a national scale, that ability has been lost.
Interesting editorial comment on 'Brave New Europe' where they have re-published this essay.
(The comment is: "It is amazing that Aurelien can write brilliantly about evil and Nazism and its relevance today and not mention Israel even once. Sometimes the angry old white person just as blind to reality as those he criticises, comes to light."
1. Nazis have become normalized, because they fought the Soviet Union and are thus useful in the current War On Russia.
We saw the beginnings of this in the 1950s in Germany, when a cottage industry sprang up, consisting of Wehrmacht generals writing memoirs of the Ostfront and insisting that they never countenanced atrocities, the hands of the Ostheer were clean, it was all Hitler, and besides, we would have won, except for that Hitler and his meddling with the professionals. Hitler, of course, was conveniently dead and therefore a perfect scapegoat.
These histories went largely unchallenged, not because of a lack of evidence (in fact, all the evidence countered the generals' self-serving lies), but because NATO wanted to keep the Good Germans on-side.
2. Even if Russia were to threaten missile strikes on western cities, with missiles that NATO has no way to stop, Russian dithering and indecision have convinced western politicians that Russia does not have the stones to actually follow through, and besides, it's only the peons that will suffer.
The rulers will still be eating fat steaks delivered right to their bunkers, and drinking burgundy from the bunker's cellars.
Rule ethics has gotten out of hand, and consequence ethics has somehow disappeared. We need definitely both. The Good/Evil framework is now dumping us all into a dustbin because it rules singlehanded. Europeans are setting themselves inloggerheads against the whole world with their tribalist moralizing.
> Like a child breaking its toys to punish its parents, our ruling class may just destroy everything in its fury. There are precedents for this, and they lead us back uncomfortably to the Gestapo officers in the film. In Freud’s later years, and in the work of his followers, we see the progressive development of the concept of the “death instinct,” the counterpart to the life-instinct, the “libido” which seeks happiness. (Later Freudians actually christened this the “mortido.”) It reminds us that Nazi Germany was in effect a gigantic Death Cult, with a paranoid psychotic view of the world, vowed to eternal unrelenting warfare with its own extermination one of the possible outcomes. Hitler killed himself, ultimately, after driving his country to destruction, because he thought the German people had failed him, and the Third Reich ended in apocalyptic destruction, as death cults tend to.
When a psyche can no longer believe in love and long-term stability, it resorts to dominance and compulsive status-seeking as a last-resort evolutionary strategy. The moral capitulation of the liberal class results in economic catastrophe, and the desperate turn instead to the right, who present a superficially far more coherent narrative. Narcissism results as a last-ditch defence mechanism. Economic decline and narrative collapse elevate similarly broken figures like Hitler and Trump to power, who typically attempt to maintain whatever is left of symbolic cohesion through hypermasculine militarism. I elaborate more in my essay here: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/telic-convergence-from-ukraine-to
I really dont understand this assertion....we are in the midst of daily witnessing the consequences of evil being borne by the Palestinian people ...we are appalled ...young people are appalled .. we are not numb to it ...we are instead powerless and helpless because our politicians are spineless and have been bought from early point in their careers and because we no longer have any route to influencing them
Helen, I think you don’t understand the assertion because you and I and Aurelien's readers are a small minority of Western populations. In the US, the average person does NOT follow the events in Gaza. And even if the population *wants* to be informed, they won't find truth on mainstream media. My mother, for example, does not understand that a genocide is occurring. She's not stupid nor immoral, she's just a boomer who can't comprehend that her trusted NBC news is propaganda for corporate interests.
What exactly do you not understand? It seems to me to be a perfectly accurate description of the current events in Gaza (although it omits the disgusting details).
If you want a further elucidation of Aurelians remarks, you can find them at:
https://braveneweurope.com/jonathan-cook-greta-thunberg-tried-to-shame-western-leaders-and-found-they-have-no-shame
Perhaps we feel all the more powerless because we frame it in the Good/Evil framework. If we begun to talk about interests and consequences – what will this lawlessness imply for ourselves, and how can we stop it – there would perhaps be more hope?
You never really did. They simply are puppets, with an American hand jammed up their backsides.
'In turn, these preparations, quite impossible to reproduce today, were based on stable communities and extended families, and often organised around churches, trades union branches and men’s and women’s associations. There was a substantial pool of ex-military personnel and ex-police officers, and no lack of volunteers.' Just so.
The 'destruction' of society is a material consequence of changes in the economy and communications - particularly the motor car and latterly digital communications, and the greater 'social mobility' that has bust communities up. We have become atomised and at the same time government at a local level has become hollowed out, a transmission belt for national Government pet projects incapable of providing local leadership. Geographical communities have been weakened and communities of interest (identity politics) have replaced them. The idea of a coherent community response to challenges based on existing social links and geography is now unlikely.
Much of this article chimes with my memories of a much more certain and fixed world.
Todays 'society' is much more vulnerable than that of the 50's and 60's with 'just in time delivery' and the privatisation of everything. People had a much clearer 'sense of place' and solidarity with those who shared it with them. Indeed the notion of society as it used to exist (geographically based with a clear herarchy of social links) has all but gone and now appears only tokenistically in 'fun-days' and 'local fetes' that remind me of those who re-enact hobby battles from the Middle Ages as a form of memory and recreation.
There is no strategic vision at a national level of where Britain is going and we are tumbling into international conflict as 'the west' (rightly) loses its grip as the dominant world hegemon. Climate change is accelerating and traditional 'communities' are fragmenting. The future is dismal. I look at politicians in the west and groan. Putin and Xi are head a shoulders above any of the so-called western politicians : they know where they are going and have substantial social support. And they understand the material forces of fragmentation that really need to be addressed. I can no longer read the national press because critical journalism hardly exists anymore. There are elephants in the room that they refuse to acknowledge. It didn't need to be
like this.
Take away the United States, and the uk goes from America's Special Little Buddy to a flavor-challenged has-been that make the french look like cold-eyed realists by comparison.
British policy is simple. Stir up strife in as many places as possible to get the Americans stuck in, so that they can show how loyally they support the Americans.
Those of you who are familiar with the "Looney Tunes" canon may recall the little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog around, singing Spike's praises and getting Spike into fights.
The uk is that little yappy dog.
"The uk is that little yappy dog."
Yes, but without the charm.
Aurelian writes, "Few accounts by those who survived Assad’s prisons have been widely published,…" as if this were remarkable. The reason is that the people sent to "Assad's prison" were in no way nice people. Syrian society has been battling extreme Islam for generations, takfirois who relish in head-chopping those who are non-believers. We see them now in charge of the Syrian government, chopping away at Allawites, Christian, and Sunni Sufis. This is the fruit of the "Assad must go!" mantra.
Yes. With so much going on it is easy just to accept the media portrayals of various supposed enemies. But there are always at least two sides to any story, especially if one jibes with government output.
"when women feel “threatened” in mixed-sex swimming pools".
No, they feel threatened in mixed changing rooms, with males pretending to be females trying to mix in and likely oogly while being girly and maybe fighting an erection.
In the competing swimming pool they feel cheated.
The present day Anglo-Saxons as others in the west have been very sheltered, intentionally.
British missiles are already flying at Russia. At the same time, the British are furiously discussing this on the Internet, and there are many joyful comments under the video. The English press is also happy about this. That's why I don't understand why you're so worried about Britain's future. In a sense, the future has already arrived. And this has happened to us before. You write that there was a lot of evil in the USSR. But, by the way, Great Britain was treated very well in the Soviet Union. The whole Soviet atmosphere was saturated with English culture. All these Sherlock Holmes and other gentlemen did not come off Soviet television. Now everything has faded into the background - England means little in the eyes of Russians. This is a big cultural SHIFT.
I will also write about Tolkien. He was one of the most beloved writers of my childhood. And not just mine. A wonderful children's book with great illustrations about traveling back and forth was published in the USSR. With the release of the film, everything changed. There's an episode in which the gates of Mordor open and the king of men greets a pathetic bunch of his supporters: "Westerners!" At that moment, in a Moscow cinema where I was watching this movie, there was dead silence. Everyone suddenly realized that modern Britons and Americans perceive Russians as Mordorians. That's when the future began...
"England means little in the eyes of Russians. This is a big cultural SHIFT."
When I lived in Ukraine (2004-2012) there was a fashion to denigrate the West, western things and institutions. The moment that a junior membership in The Club was dangled out, all that was forgotten, all was forgiven!
Maybe. But the majority of Russians have been cured of any such return to infatuation, despite the hold-outs in RIAC, who are also by now curing themselves.
I would have thought so in Ukraine as well.
In the Ukraine, they seem to be a bit slower in catching on. They haven't deserted or mutinied en masse, as one would hope, but I'm not in a position to criticise that - it's probably not as easy as it might appear and much more dangerous, even though there have been instances in small numbers.
They still think that they will get The Goodies.
Only if there is a god, and he accepts misguided sinners.
They also have totally controlled information flows, as do we. Mutiny may become an option, despite the danger, as the controls fall apart.
A truly fascinating read. Thank you. Helen Colhoun makes a very valid point which perhaps threads the needle of Aurelian's essay. The whole world is watching evil take place in live stream but cannot do any more than 'peacefully protest' because "we are instead powerless and helpless because our politicians are spineless and have been bought from early point in their careers and because we no longer have any route to influencing them". We no longer have the society and community of yore, nor the social mechanisms which once held considerable power and influence in our societies. The breakdown of family, community, trade unions, etc. have diminished our nations, emasculating the populations, rendering them incapable of affecting genuine change in their leaderships. Equally, our leaderships have been bought and paid for long before they ever got within the grasp of the levers of power that they too are incapable of rendering any genuine change. Finally, the slow, creep of authoritarianism is best described by the analogy of the frog in the slow-boiling pot of water. By the time authoritarianism becomes predominant enough for all to recognise it, the time to prevent it's manifestation has passed by. We no longer recognise evil despite seeing it everyday on our screens. Watching and actually experiencing are two vastly different things. While we see Palestinians being butchered daily we cannot equate that to our own experience because we have never experienced it ourselves. By the time we do experience it ourselves it will be too late to do anything to stop it. Somewhere, people, evil, malignant, bad intentioned people are counting on that fact to bring their plans to fruition. We simply lack the experience to recognise it because we have never been faced with true evil. Most of us only get to watch it on screens.
"Many went to specially-prepared evacuation centres. It goes without saying that such facilities and even such capabilities no longer exist in western nations".
As an EU epidemiologist friend living in Beijing in early 2020 wrote, "They know Covid was not a threat but they needed cover for a national civil defense drill, and Covid was perfect”.
They shut down a city of 20 million while maintaining or strengthening services to every home-bound citizen. 82% of Chinese approved of Beijing's Covid policy.
Wow, fascinating tidbit!
Such accurate observations of the Times I grew up in and of my formative years. As to conclusions I would suggest varied Community responses rather than Universal. The Collective, though muted, still lives in disparate communities independent of Central Command and resources provision. Living in Hope is preferable to Killamarsh.
"Whilst there are certainly myths about the public reaction to the outbreak of the War in western countries, as there are myths everywhere, it’s fairly clear that people mostly reacted with the kind of maturity that was then expected of adults, and the kind of social solidarity that is only possible if you first have a society"
Wasn't it because there was nationalism back then, and strong social cohesion due to the cultural homogeneity, rather than good vs evil story which is more appropriate for the modern times?
By the way, even 50 years ago it wasn't such a big deal being a Nazi - 1970-80s Austrian Chancellor Kreisky (who was a Jew and a leftist) strongly supported one of his FPO ministers, who was a literal SS officer and showed no remorse for that? Kreisky even aggressively attacked Simon Wiesenthal for his protests about that, calling him a foreign agent and an enemy of Austria. It's near impossible to imagine something like that these times. It seems like even cold war mentality was much less black and white than of today, despite all the talk of moral relativism...
Moral distinctions exist in the U.S., but only in small communities that are well rooted. I recall an Amish community that suffered a shooting from a deranged boy (I believe in the 90s). Several Amish children were murdered by him before he turned the gun on himself. Yet the community as a whole went to the boy's funeral to forgive and comfort his mother and protect her from other people who showed up, seeking to degrade and insult her in her time of grief.
It is in the local community, the local parish, where moral distinctions (and the ability to distinguish and properly react) still exist. But I agree that, on a national scale, that ability has been lost.
Interesting editorial comment on 'Brave New Europe' where they have re-published this essay.
(The comment is: "It is amazing that Aurelien can write brilliantly about evil and Nazism and its relevance today and not mention Israel even once. Sometimes the angry old white person just as blind to reality as those he criticises, comes to light."
1. Nazis have become normalized, because they fought the Soviet Union and are thus useful in the current War On Russia.
We saw the beginnings of this in the 1950s in Germany, when a cottage industry sprang up, consisting of Wehrmacht generals writing memoirs of the Ostfront and insisting that they never countenanced atrocities, the hands of the Ostheer were clean, it was all Hitler, and besides, we would have won, except for that Hitler and his meddling with the professionals. Hitler, of course, was conveniently dead and therefore a perfect scapegoat.
These histories went largely unchallenged, not because of a lack of evidence (in fact, all the evidence countered the generals' self-serving lies), but because NATO wanted to keep the Good Germans on-side.
2. Even if Russia were to threaten missile strikes on western cities, with missiles that NATO has no way to stop, Russian dithering and indecision have convinced western politicians that Russia does not have the stones to actually follow through, and besides, it's only the peons that will suffer.
The rulers will still be eating fat steaks delivered right to their bunkers, and drinking burgundy from the bunker's cellars.
So who cares?
Great writing - thanks very much for sharing it.
Was this infantilization been imposed on society or did we collectively create it? And just how do recreate what we had?
There is, if anything, too much of this Good/Evil framing in the European discourse. And Good is of course Us while Evil is Our competitors.
As Wolfgang Streeck says in an interview, "It seems remarkably easy to convince the younger generation of today that the world is divided in good and evil and that it is our duty to fight evil even at the cost of thousands, if not millions, of human lives – for ‘justice’." See https://www.counterfire.org/article/ukraine-europe-and-its-discontents-interview-with-wolfgang-streeck/
And that is destructive.
Rule ethics has gotten out of hand, and consequence ethics has somehow disappeared. We need definitely both. The Good/Evil framework is now dumping us all into a dustbin because it rules singlehanded. Europeans are setting themselves inloggerheads against the whole world with their tribalist moralizing.
> Like a child breaking its toys to punish its parents, our ruling class may just destroy everything in its fury. There are precedents for this, and they lead us back uncomfortably to the Gestapo officers in the film. In Freud’s later years, and in the work of his followers, we see the progressive development of the concept of the “death instinct,” the counterpart to the life-instinct, the “libido” which seeks happiness. (Later Freudians actually christened this the “mortido.”) It reminds us that Nazi Germany was in effect a gigantic Death Cult, with a paranoid psychotic view of the world, vowed to eternal unrelenting warfare with its own extermination one of the possible outcomes. Hitler killed himself, ultimately, after driving his country to destruction, because he thought the German people had failed him, and the Third Reich ended in apocalyptic destruction, as death cults tend to.
When a psyche can no longer believe in love and long-term stability, it resorts to dominance and compulsive status-seeking as a last-resort evolutionary strategy. The moral capitulation of the liberal class results in economic catastrophe, and the desperate turn instead to the right, who present a superficially far more coherent narrative. Narcissism results as a last-ditch defence mechanism. Economic decline and narrative collapse elevate similarly broken figures like Hitler and Trump to power, who typically attempt to maintain whatever is left of symbolic cohesion through hypermasculine militarism. I elaborate more in my essay here: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/telic-convergence-from-ukraine-to