Some Problems Have No Solution. Some Conflicts Don’t Have A Good Guy.
In one way I envy the neocon entranced normiecons. They don’t have to think much or at all about geopolitical issues. If some neocon pseudo-intellectual like Ben Shapiro tells them Side A is good and Side B is bad, that is all they need to know. For those of us who fall under the broad umbrella of the “dissident right”, it is a bit trickier. Rarely is a major geopolitical conflict simple, black and white. The best example for me is World War II. WW II is considered to be the “good war”, and is often held up by conservative Christians as epitomizing a “just war”.
I bought into that for a long time until I started to do some thinking for myself on an issue that is usually framed as “Pearl Harbor plus Holocaust equals America was right”. Was the side that was allied with Joseph Stalin, and the victory they won condemning tens of millions of people to death and even more to half a century of brutal repression under Communism, really “the good guys”? Not to mention the internment of the Japanese in America, the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, the underhanded way that FDR manipulated us into war, the treatment of German POWs and civilians after the war, the way the West looked the other way while Stalin’s hordes raped their way across Eastern Europe and Germany and of course the atomic bombs dropped on civilians in Japan as an act of terror intended to be so horrific that it would force Japan to surrender. 78 years later and only one nation has ever employed nuclear weapons in warfare: the goodest of the good guys.
If WW II isn’t as cut-and-dried as it is made out to be, what about other conflicts around the world?
Recognizing this is what I consider to be the The Essence Of Dissident Politics: a worldview based in realism. I wrote:
The essence of being a political dissident in 2021 and beyond is this:
We are a movement based in realism, and we respond to the world as it really is rather than reacting to the world as we wish it was.
Being a dissident means being a realist. It would be nice if the flowery rhetoric of “all men are created equal” really meant that all men were equal in every respect, rather than all men have certain rights, but my inability to dunk a basketball or do math is evidence this is not true, never has been true and furthermore never will be true.
How this applies to The Current Thing is pretty straightforward.
When I examine the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, I see lots of ugliness on both sides. Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine but not without cause. Whether you consider their reason just or not isn’t really relevant. Ukraine is a corrupt nation run by a corrupt little leader who came into power after a U.S. organized coup. Putin is an autocrat for sure but one that seems to actually care about Russia and the Russian people. Zelenskyy is a weasel that would happily see Ukraine razed to the ground and everyone killed if it lined his pockets. There isn’t really a “good guy” in that conflict, just one you might dislike a little less.
Or the new Current Thing. Because I am a big boy, I can say that Hamas is a terrorist outfit that murdered hundreds of innocent people in order to draw Israel into a conflict that will lead to thousands of Palestinians being killed. I can also say that Israel is all too eager, perhaps gleeful, to play along and kill those thousands of Palestinians. Adults can hold those two positions at the same time because they understand that this isn’t a movie with rigid and clear lines of right and wrong. Unfortunately most legal adults in America are emotional and intellectual children who seek to neatly divide people into Good Guys and Bad Guys to avoid the inconvenience of thinking.
Israel is in fact an apartheid ethnostate, something I don’t have a problem with as such, but I do have a problem with most people who are Jews decrying my desire for the same thing for my people as “racist” and “xenophobic”. The secular ethnostate calling itself “Israel” only exists because guilty Western nations decided to make it into a state following World War II. As for Hamas, it is just one in a long line of Islamist terrorist groups who are willing to engage in unimaginable brutality in order to advance their vision of their primitive, violent religion. There isn’t a “good guys” in this conflict either and as is often the case lots of innocent people that just want to be left alone are suffering and dying as pawns.
Americans like to “fix” things and so we are endlessly tinkering around in a conflict that has been going on for centuries longer than the United States has even existed. Warring desert tribes have been fighting over the Middle East forever and nothing America can do will stop that, although there is plenty we can do that makes it worse (see: Middle East, American Foreign Policy for the last century). It is a problem we cannot solve and that sticks in the craw of the endlessly meddlesome American psyche.
The question of race is another of these “no solution” problems. We have tried to find a way to make blacks into Americans since freeing the slaves and making the fatal error of not shipping them all back to Africa. It hasn’t worked and with each passing year it is working less. American blacks have gone from being a regional headache to a national one, and since the “Civil Rights” movement, the descendants of Africa slaves have degenerated into a violent perpetually dependent underclass. There isn’t a solution to this apart from something so radical that few people would even consider it. It isn’t a matter of getting blacks back to church or jobs programs or simply making better arguments to explain why changing their behavior would benefit blacks and society as a whole. That might be a deeply unsatisfying position but it is one grounded in evidence and reality. It also explains why efforts to “fix” places like Detroit, Haiti and Africa have all failed and will continue to fail as the underlying problem in all three is not political, economic or theological. It is biological.
This is the way to think for political dissidents and why so many former conservatives and libertarians have come across what the Zman calls The Great Divide to /ourside/. Libertarians and conservatives love to talk about these grand theories while ignoring the reality of human nature and biological realism. People that are willing to kill children because both sides think that some deity gave them a divine right to some shitty desert real estate cannot be reasoned with. People that lack the basic minimum intelligence to function in a White society are never going to fit into that society and trying to force them to has been and continues to be a disaster.
Some problems can’t be fixed. Some conflicts, probably most in fact, are not Good Guys vs Bad Guys but instead are Bad Guys vs Worse Guys. Understanding this is incredibly freeing but as we can see, very few people are willing to see things as they are and prefer to pick sides like a sportsball contest.