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| Dictator currently threatening to invade the Ukraine |
[I]t’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”
Thomas Homer-Dixon, "The American Polity Is Cracked, and Might Collapse. Canada and the World Must Prepare" 18 Jan. 2022
A couple of comments. First, read the Homer-Dixon article. It's sobering. He advises the Canadian government to contemplate the collapse of responsible government in the U.S. (By the way, Homer-Dixon is an MIT-trained political scientist and a "scholar of violent conflict. . . . I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide," as well as an expert on the repercussions of climate change & other forms of ecological degradation. Note also that this Muratov spoke his words in early December. Americans should ask themselves, do we want our own Putin?
There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.
What, then, is attention? Is it really just another ‘cognitive function’ of that supposed ‘machine’, the brain? It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know. Is it a thing? Hardly. Is it something we do? Nearer, but not exactly. Perhaps a manner of doing? Or even a manner of being?
The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.
Instead of harmonizing socially mediated interests, an increasingly industrialized economy created class antagonisms and gross inequalities – an outcome that none of the salon philosophes could have anticipated in their own pre-industrial age.
Any policy of withdrawal would have required what critics—and the troops in the field—would call meaningless sacrifice and needless deaths. There was no “correct” or “just” policy, only bad choices.
N.B. This is written about Viet Nam, but it no doubt applies to Afghanistan as well. In both, we lost long before we left, making for a messy end. (Although to be fair, while Kabul looked in many ways like Saigon in 1975, on the whole, the exit was much less blotched & traumatic for the U.S. and to the locals.
“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
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