The Russian war on Ukraine has broken the post-Soviet order

Mary Sarotte

The Financial Times published an essay by historian Mary Elise Sarotte (Professor, Johns Hopkins University) about how we got to the Russia-Ukraine war, some of what was probably on Putin’s mind, and what it all means. 

Pre-war history

Sarotte starts by asserting that the Ukraine war broke the post-cold-war order. That will be followed soon by redrawing the same line of division between Moscow-centric and Washington-centric countries that existed before 1989. She asserts that it is beyond question that Vladimir Putin’s insistence on eliminating Ukraine’s independence is the cause. Putin sees Ukraine independence as forcing nations and people to choose between Russia and the West. That is the core reason why Putin started the war. 

Sarotte argues that Putin became unwilling to tolerate Ukraine’s sovereignty due to its significant role in the the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin considers that as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. Thirty years ago, Ukraine broke from the Soviet Union and that made the break-up of the USSR irreversible. Putin’s decision to start his war ended the post-cold-war peace that  was already fading. The Ukraine war proved false the prevailing belief that a major land war would not happen again in Europe.

Sarotte's analysis of the current situation did not rely on long past history or current Russian and Ukrainian identity. Instead, she relied on declassified and other relevant materials dating back to the 1990s. The goal of Western leaders was to help create an independent Ukraine as part of a goal to insure long-term peace in Europe. Their efforts failed.

The GHW Bush administration was deeply divided about what to do. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a radical right hawk and ideologue, wanted to help foment the breakup of the USSR. Secretary of State James Baker strongly disagreed and argued the US needed to try to keep the USSR intact as a means to keep its arsenal of ~35,000 nuclear weapons under professional control.

While the Bush administration bickered itself into gridlock, Ukraine mooted the debate by holding a referendum on independence in 1991. The people overwhelmingly voted to become an independent country. Turnout was 84% and the overall vote for independence was 90%. Clearly, the Ukrainian people wanted to get away from the USSR. In the Russia sympathetic Eastern districts of Donetsk, Luhansk, the vote for independence was more than 80%. The vote for independence was only 54% in Crimea, which Russia under Putin annexed by force in 2014.

The 1991 Ukraine vote was psychologically catastrophic for Moscow. Most Russians believed that Ukraine was an integral part of Russia. Rejection by Ukraine was unthinkable until the shock happened. As an independent nation, Ukraine would be the world's third-largest nuclear power. Baker fought hard to make sure that Russia would inherit all the nukes. The thought of a nuclear armed, unstable new nation terrified Baker. Baker's efforts ended with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

Clinton wanted NATO to expand to all the subjugated USSR colonies such as Poland and Lithuania. He hoped to make Ukraine feel secure enough to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. The Clinton administration established the Partnership for Peace (PfP), where potential NATO countries gained experience in peacekeeping and joint military operations with the West. The idea of PfP was that over time new nations could become full NATO member states. This incremental approach did not require Washington to (i) draw a new line through post-cold-war Europe, or (ii) leave most post-Soviet republics to their own devices. Although the PfP was not very appealing, the idea of joining NATO was. The old Soviet vassal states wanted to get away from the Russians. NATO looked like a good way out, so most of them grudgingly supported PfP. Importantly, both Russia and Ukraine supported PfP. For Russia, PfP was minimally acceptable but better than redrawing lines when NATO expanded. PfP thus provided a place for Ukraine, and was (barely) tolerable to Russia.

That nice plan blew up in 1994 when Yeltsin attacked Chechnya and Clinton's political priorities started to change his policy preferences. The Russian war terrified central and eastern Europeans. They saw the old Soviet tactics in the Chechen war. They reasonably feared they might be attacked next. Tensions between the US and Russia intensified, in part by the Republican party’s win in the 1994 midterm congressional elections. That landslide win was significantly based on the Republican vaporware document called the “Contract with America.” It called for faster NATO enlargement. That vote showed Clinton the NATO expansion issue was popular, especially in states that he needed to win in 1996 to get a second term in office. 

In addition, Ukraine was finally convinced to give up its nuclear weapons in return for assurances its on territorial integrity that were codified in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under the Memorandum, Kyiv agreed either to destroy its nuclear weapons or to relocate them to Russia. That made Kyiv less important to the west. Russia, the UK and the US signed the agreement. Thus, Russia guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity in writing in 1994.

All of that convinced Clinton to redraw a line across Europe that was closer to Russia. Instead of a large number of nations in the PfP, a small number of nations would be added as full members to NATO. One practical effect of this was that created some former USSR states who were in NATO and protected by it, while others were not, including Ukraine. The other effect of this was to foreclose the flexibility that had PfP afforded. NATO became a matter of all or nothing.

At this time when Western options for dealing with the former Soviet states by way of NATO became limited, Putin was rising through the ranks in Russia. He started working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, one of Putin’s former college professors. There, Putin managed relations between elected authorities, local crime bosses and what was left of the KGB. He distinguished himself through unwavering loyalty. That loyalty trait caught the eye of Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, Alexei Kudrin. Putin joined the Yeltsin administration, where he displayed unquestioning loyalty to president Yeltsin. 

By August of 1999, Putin became Russia’s prime minister, and in March of 2000, he was elected president. Past experiences had hardened Putin. In 2000, he said “only one thing works in such circumstances [when there is a threat and help may not come] — to go on the offensive. You must hit first, and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet. .... we would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from eastern Europe.” 

Putin also opposed the idea of self-declared nationhood for former Soviet republics. In 2014 he commented that self-declaration of independence and separation from Russia meant that “millions of people [ethnic Russians] went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities.” In Putin’s mind, ethnic Russians were the largest minority in most of the former Soviet Republics and independence meant that those Russians were “the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders”. At this point, Sarotte wryly comments that “left out of his account was the role of Joseph Stalin’s forced deportations and resettlements in creating that reality.” 

One can guess that the progeny of some of those exiled from Russia by Stalin might not feel all that sympathetic to Russia or being Russian. 

Recent war history: The last year

That background leads up to the last year. Sarotte argues that Putin recently decided to attack the Ukraine claiming, among other things, that he was defending ethnic Russians from Nazis and other kinds of genocidal non-Russian people. His goal in this war is to permanently stop Ukraine’s capacity to move toward the West in its sympathies and alliances. In making this decision, she asserts that Putin (i) correctly understood that the West left Ukraine out of the post-cold-war security order, and (ii) because of that, it would have few options if Russia were to invade. She speculates that in addition to that analysis, Putin probably also took into account deep political and social discord in the US (the toxic politics I keep complaining about), Britain entangled with Boris and Brexit, France in elections and Germany without Angela Merkel. Sarotte notes this about Merkel, “who, having grown up in East Germany and speaking fluent Russian, had far too good an understanding of Putin for his own comfort.”

Sarotte cites as mistakes of the West, (i) rejoicing over the people who escaped Russia’s iron grip, while mostly ignoring all the people who had lost out, especially including Putin himself, (ii) downplaying or ignoring how seriously Putin was taking the Ukraine conflict with the West, and (iii) misunderstanding the intensity of Putin’s desire to recreate Moscow’s Soviet empire and control.

Sarotte ends her essay with these comments:

The outbreak of war in Ukraine means, among many other consequences, that we need to view the cold war’s end through a new lens. Its most lasting consequence, tragically, may not be the optimism that it inspired in the many, but the damage that it did to the one: Vladimir Putin. To assuage his grievance about the loss of Soviet status and above all Ukraine, he has commenced a major land war in Europe — and written the requiem for the post-Soviet peace.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this fascinating article to my attention.

The importance and danger of constant propaganda over years

Phrases like “decades of relentless radical right propaganda,” “decades of Republican dark free speech” and variations thereon (always with “decades” in there somewhere) are pretty common here at Dissident Politics. I use them a lot, or at least it seems that way. 

My understanding of human cognitive biology, such as it is, led me to instinctively intuit that the alt-inconvenient world, alt-inconvenient reality, alt-inconvenient facts and alt-inconvenient reasoning that American fascist propaganda has created and made to look real took decades of trial and error, expertise and discipline to construct. The tens of millions of minds that are now trapped in that alt-everything inconvenient faux world did not get trapped overnight. It took time, expertise, endless repetition and literally billions of dollars to build and keep the radical right’s dark arts machine running and fine-tuned.

An interesting interview the Washington Post published makes the point about the importance of years of propaganda continuity in the context of Russia. The WaPo writes:

Few Americans have parsed Russian propaganda on its various platforms like Maxim Pozdorovkin.

The Russian-born, Harvard-educated filmmaker and thinker is behind several works on the subject, most notably “Our New President” from 2018, an award-winning documentary deconstruction of the Russian media’s portrayal of Donald Trump’s election that was, as he puts it, “a movie based entirely on actual footage without a single true statement in it.”

Far from just an attempt to negate discontent over its Ukraine invasion, Russia’s current state-media approach is, in Pozdorovkin’s view, a continuation of a decade-long campaign to warp Russian citizens’ view of the West. He argues the country’s population has been long primed for this moment — seriously lowering the odds for any tech company or foreign outlet hoping to poke through the veil.

Q: You’ve been very vocal in your work that there’s been a whole narrative about America playing out in Russian media that most Americans aren’t aware of. What exactly has been happening?

A: I don’t think Americans fully understand what’s been fed to Russians about the U.S. and the West for literally the past decade. It’s been an information war — a totally one-sided information war — and it has been waged so fully and artfully that it’s made a lot of what’s happening now preemptively possible. What this information war boils down to is this: “The West is completely against us and trying to stifle and destroy our way of life.” It’s a simple message. But people are told this over and over, in so many different ways.

Q: Like how?

A: The Western sanctions back in 2014 over the war in the Donbas? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. The backlash to the Russian disinformation campaign in the 2016 U.S. election? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. Russian-doping punishments at the Olympics? Same thing. You name it, if it has involved Russia and the West, it was the West trying to destroy the Russian way of life. When in reality, of course, most Americans don’t typically spend much time thinking about Russia at all.

Q: And Trump fits neatly into this —

A: Trump fits neatly into this because Trump was the one American leader who wasn’t trying to destroy the Russian way of life.

Q: And in their eyes that’s what caused the U.S. backlash to him.

A: That was the one and only reason.

Q: What effect does this have? Like you said, it’s not like the U.S. or Europe has done much to really feed this narrative.

A: It’s true, the Russian media has been totally shadowboxing for years; no one was fighting back. But that doesn’t really matter. If you ingrain this message of victimhood so completely, what it does is when there’s any kind of [President Vladimir] Putin aggressive action, as there is now, a lot of people in Russia don’t see it as aggressive — they just see it as standing up for their way of life. That’s why the nuclear threat computes. 

Q: Because it’s not viewed as much as saber-rattling as “look at what you made me do.” 

A: Exactly. “We don’t want to take the nuclear option. But what choice do we have? You tried to destroy our way of life.”

Note that last bit about “the nuclear option.” I think he refers to nuclear weapons possibly happening in Ukraine. The New York Times commented on that awful possibility in an article entitled, The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone: 

“Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. Concern about these smaller arms has soared as Vladimir V. Putin, in the Ukraine war, has warned of his nuclear might, has put his atomic forces on alert and has had his military carry out risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The fear is that if Mr. Putin feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his lesser nuclear arms — breaking the taboo set 76 years ago after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. .... For Russia, military analysts note, edgy displays of the less destructive arms have let Mr. Putin polish his reputation for deadly brinkmanship and expand the zone of intimidation he needs to fight a bloody conventional war.”

The victimhood card

Also note the bit about a completely ingrained message of victimhood. Who else endlessly and constantly screams victimhood in their/its propaganda? The Republican Party, including its donors, elites, politicians, professional propagandists (Fox News, etc.) and now its rank and file too. GOP messaging is disciplined and professional. Claiming victimhood works so it is used, whether it’s true or not.

Some recent commentary on conservative and Republican victimhood:
Republicans make Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearing all about their own victimhood

How White Victimhood Fuels Republican Politics 

Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks

White Male Conservatives Think They’re America’s Real Victims

Of course, it should be clearly noted that victimhood is claimed by more than just conservatives and Republicans. Some liberal snowflakes claim it, warranted or not. It is a fairly common rhetorical tactic. Sometimes there is more truth than hyperbole and deceit in a particular claim of victimhood. It can be real. 

The importance of statictical power in experimental protocols

In 2016, the book, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, was published. It was edited by bioethicist S.M. Liao (book review here). The book was a summary of the current neuroscience of morality as described by leading researchers. Their work was critiqued by philosophers who understood the science and the data analysis. 

A concern the philosophers raised was caution about over interpreting brain scan data. Their concern was that the sample size (number of people in the experiments) of most brain scan experiments was too small, due in part to the high cost of such research. That opened the possibility that results could be misleading. Small sample sizes can lead to insufficient statistical power, leading to irreproducible and thus probably inaccurate results. 

The philosophers' concern appears to have been right. The New York Times writes on a study that analyzed brain scan results from three huge brain scan studies. Based on results from those three, the researchers concluded that sample size in typical studies in the past was usually too small for the conclusions to be reliable. This was not just about studies on morality, but it includes essentially all brain scan research and possibly other areas of research, including cancer research. The NYT writes:

For two decades, researchers have used brain-imaging technology to try to identify how the structure and function of a person’s brain connects to a range of mental-health ailments, from anxiety and depression to suicidal tendencies.

But a new paper, published Wednesday in Nature, calls into question whether much of this research is actually yielding valid findings. Many such studies, the paper’s authors found, tend to include fewer than two dozen participants, far shy of the number needed to generate reliable results.

“You need thousands of individuals,” said Scott Marek, a psychiatric researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and an author of the paper. He described the finding as a “gut punch” for the typical studies that use imaging to try to better understand mental health.

Studies that use magnetic-resonance imaging technology commonly temper their conclusions with a cautionary statement noting the small sample size. .... The median number of subjects in mental-health-related studies that use brain imaging is around 23, he added.

But the Nature paper demonstrates that the data drawn from just two dozen subjects is generally insufficient to be reliable and can in fact yield “massively inflated” findings,” Dr. Dosenbach said.

The authors ran millions of calculations by using different sample sizes and the hundreds of brain regions explored in the various major studies. Time and again, the researchers found that subsets of data from fewer than several thousand people did not produce results consistent with those of the full data set.

Dr. Marek said that the paper’s findings “absolutely” applied beyond mental health. Other fields, like genomics and cancer research, have had their own reckonings with the limits of small sample sizes and have tried to correct course, he noted.

“My hunch this is much more about population science than it is about any one of those fields,” he said.

Another source commented on this research:

Scientists rely on brain-wide association studies to measure brain structure and function -; using MRI brain scans -; and link them to complex characteristics such as personality, behavior, cognition, neurological conditions, and mental illness. But a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota, published March 16 in Nature, shows that most published brain-wide association studies are performed with too few participants to yield reliable findings.

Such so-called underpowered studies are susceptible to uncovering strong but spurious associations by chance while missing real but weaker associations. Routinely underpowered brain-wide association studies result in a glut of astonishingly strong yet irreproducible findings that slow progress toward understanding how the brain works, the researchers said.

A 2011 article commented: Since its inception in 1990, fMRI has been used in an exceptionally large number of studies in the cognitive neurosciences, clinical psychiatry/ psychology, and presurgical planning (between 100,000 and 250,000 entries in PubMed, depending on keywords).

Looks like it's going to take some more time to figure the brain out. Guess that's no surprise. Heck, it took ~42 years and several hundred thousand experiments just to figure out that sample size was too small. It's slow going when one is slogging through the great Grimpen Mire of Dartmoore in Devon, location of Baskerville Hall, in the middle of the night. 

Sigh. Gotta listen to them philosophers more carefully. 

The machine colors in areas of increased or decreased 

brain activity in response to a physical or mental task

Thoughts on Putin's war on Ukraine and American influence

Map of Eurasia

By now, it is clear that I know little about relevant Russian and Ukraine history. So, I have to stick with the bits and pieces I come across and know that extrapolating from that to US involvement in Putin's war on Ukraine is a fraught proposition. That caveat in place, a fact-intense opinion The Guardian published raised some interesting recent history and thoughts about the American presence:

This weekend, British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr said on Twitter, “We failed to acknowledge Russia had staged a military attack on the West. We called it ‘meddling.’ We used words like ‘interference.’ It wasn’t. It was warfare. We’ve been under military attack for eight years now.” 

Of course the most striking role of the Russian government in the 2016 US election was its many, many ties with the Trump campaign, including with Trump himself, who spent the campaign and the four years of his presidency groveling before Putin, denying the reality of Russian interference, and changing first the Republican platform and then US policy to serve Putin’s agendas. 

A stunning number of Trump’s closest associates had deep ties to the Russian government. They included Paul Manafort, who during his years in Ukraine worked to build Russian influence there and served as a consultant to the Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president who was driven out of the country – and into Russia by popular protest in 2014 (the Russian line is that this was an illegitimate coup and thus a justification for invasion is still widely repeated). Manafort was, during his time in the campaign, sharing data with Russian intelligence agent Konstantin V Kilimnik, while campaign advisor Jeff Sessions was sharing information with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Manafort, Donald Trump Jr and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner held an illegal meeting in Trump Tower with a Kremlin-linked lawyer on 9 June 2016, where they were promised damaging material on the Clinton campaign.

Various other bits and pieces that evince the ex-president's and at least tacit Republican support for Putin[1]:

After Putin seized Crimea, Obama put sanctions on Russia. Trump got rid of those sanctions and declared that Crimea belonged to Russia, recognizing the legitimacy of their invasion. Trump Told G7 Leaders That Crimea Is Russian 

Belarus, is run by Putin's puppet dictator Lukashenko. Lukashenko won a clearly rigged election in 2020, leading to mass protests. A similar situation happened in Ukraine during Obama's administration, and we backed the protests and they ousted Yanukovych, and Ukraine was able to elect a free government that wasn't Putins puppet. So when a similar situation arises while Trump was president, guess what we did? The Trump administration was AWOL on Belarus.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates ran Putin's puppet, Yanukovych's political campaign in Ukraine. Trump made them his campaign manager and deputy campaign manager. Paul Manafort Helped Elect Russia's Man in Ukraine

In 2019, Manafort plead guilty to "Conspiracy against the United States." Trump's campaign manager, a Putin-puppet enabler in Ukraine, came to America, helped Trump get elected, but was then imprisoned for conspiracy against the United States for collaborating with Russia. Trump pardoned him.

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador (it was later learned the US had to extract one of their assets for their safety due to this).

Trump Pushed CIA to Give Intelligence to Kremlin, While Taking No Action Against Russia Arming Taliban

Trump team knew Flynn was being investigated (for lying about discussions with Russia), report says

Trump officials altered intel to downplay threats from Russia, White supremacists, DHS whistleblower says: A former acting undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security accused top officials there of ordering him to stop sharing intelligence assessments on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the U.S. election because they “made the President look bad.”

Trump followed this up with the criminal conspiracy to steal the US 2020 election for which the investigation committee has now submitted a 61 page court filing.

And then there's the heaps of highly classified documents Trump stole and stashed in Mar-a-Lago, containing information too sensitive to announce, it's assumption so far but it's not too much of a stretch to think they were probably destined for Russia, they have the largest interest."

What about the Republican Party?

What about the Republican Party, including its donors, propagandists (Fox News, etc.) and political leadership? What is their culpability, if any? The Guardian opinion essay ends with this:

The Republican party met its new leader by matching his corruption, and by covering up his crimes and protecting him from consequences, including two impeachments. The second impeachment was for a violent invasion of Congress, not by a foreign power, but by right-wingers inflamed by lies instigated by Trump and amplified by many in the party. They have become willing collaborators in an attempt to sabotage free and fair elections, the rule of law, and truth itself.

In my opinion, it is evidence-based and rational to attribute the same level of support for Russia and Putin, including the current war in Ukraine, that Trump showed. One can reasonably say that there is no significant difference, despite some recent Republican elite rhetoric about Russia being bad and Ukraine being good. One can defensibly believe and argue that is just pure propaganda and lies necessitated by the American public's siding with Ukraine and democracy (flawed as it was) over Putin and his kleptocratic dictatorship. 

The evidence is clear and convincing that the sympathy of Republican Party elites is with Putin and the kleptocrats, not Ukraine and the democrats. Right now, they just have to act otherwise or maybe face some opposition in the 2022 elections that they can subvert now simply by pretending to be democratic. The Republican rank and file can be subverted and kept loyal by this simple ruse because they have been taught to hate and distrust Democrats with serious intensity.

 

Question: Is arguing that there is major Republican Party elite culpability here (i) irrational, and/or (ii) not supported by significant evidence?

Footnote: 

1. For context about the current Russian geopolitical mindset, here is some commentary on an influential Russian book The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, by Aleksandr Dugin. Wikipedia writes: 

In Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin calls for the United States and Atlanticism to lose their influence in Eurasia, and for Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances.

The book declares that "the battle for the world rule of Russians" has not ended and Russia remains "the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution". The Eurasian Empire will be constructed "on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us."

Military operations play relatively little role. The textbook advocates a sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services. The operations should be assisted by a tough, hard-headed utilization of Russia's gas, oil, and natural resources to bully and pressure other countries.

The book states that "the maximum task [of the future] is the 'Finlandization' of all of Europe". 

In Europe: 

• Germany should be offered the de facto political dominance over most Protestant and Catholic states located within Central and Eastern Europe. Kaliningrad Oblast could be given back to Germany. The book uses the term "Moscow–Berlin axis".  

• France should be encouraged to form a bloc with Germany, as they both have a "firm anti-Atlanticist tradition".

• The United Kingdom, merely described as an "extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.", should be cut off from Europe. 

• Finland should be absorbed into Russia. Southern Finland will be combined with the Republic of Karelia and northern Finland will be "donated to Murmansk Oblast". 

• Romania, North Macedonia, Serbia, "Serbian Bosnia" and Greece – "Orthodox collectivist East" – will unite with "Moscow the Third Rome" and reject the "rational-individualistic West". 

• Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire [ideologically contained, i.e., a pro-Russia puppet regime is installed], which would be inadmissible.

The mental toll of climate change

One of the most common propaganda tactics that interests and individuals who deny or downplay climate change employ is ignoring or denying damage. Evidence of economic damage is accumulating and has been tracked in recent years. A few reports of psychological damage are starting to appear. The New York Times writes:

Experts and psychologists are racing to understand how the torments of a volatile, unpredictable planet shape our minds and mental health. In February, a major new study highlighted the mental health effects of climate change for the first time, saying that anxiety and stress from a changing climate were likely to increase in coming years.

In addition to those who have lost their homes to floods and megafires, millions have endured record-breaking heat waves. The crisis also hits home in subtle, personal ways — withered gardens, receding lakeshores and quiet walks without the birdsong that once accompanied them.

Some people grieve the loss of serene hiking trails that have been engulfed by wildfire smoke while others no longer find the same joy or release from nature. Some are seeking counseling. Others are harnessing their anxiety by protesting for change or working to slow the damage.

“This is becoming a No. 1 threat to mental health,” said Britt Wray, a Stanford University researcher and author of “Generation Dread,” a forthcoming book about grappling with climate distress. “It can make day-to-day life incredibly hard to go on.”

A survey of people 16 to 25 in 10 countries published in The Lancet found that three-quarters were frightened of the future. More than half said humanity was doomed. Some feel betrayed by older generations and leaders. They say they feel angry but helpless as they watch people in power fail to act swiftly.

Almost 40 percent of young people say they are hesitant about having children. If nature feels this unmoored today, some ask, why bring children into an even grimmer future?

The NYT quoted one woman saying “I feel hopeless all the time and none of my actions seem to make any positive impact. I just want to give up.” Another woman who moved with her husband from Oregon to Virginia to escape fires and drought said “We are climate change refugees. I am 68 years old and too tired to start over. What has happened to my world?”

One can easily and rationally relate to those sentiments. What has happened to our world? Corrupt, incompetent two-party politics as usual is what has happened.

The political and social forces that stand firmly opposed to seriously trying to deal with climate change are powerful and wealthy. They have been effectively blocking major government action for decades. Specifically, the pro-pollution and pro-climate change forces[1] include the Republican Party, most libertarian government haters and powerful business interests that profit from making and selling products that pollute. 

There is damn good reason for individuals to feel hopeless all the time. It is because they are powerless, as this 6 minute video discusses. 

Research: Public opinion has zero impact on policy,

but wealth does affect policy

Footnote: 

1. By “pro-pollution and pro-climate change forces”, I do not mean people, businesses and ideologies that necessarily want to pollute and climate change. I mean ones that protect profit above doing anything major to reduce climate change. Regardless of what their contrary propaganda and lies may assert, their main actions speak louder than their rhetoric or symbolic support of climate change opponents to score public relations points. That callous disregard for the environment reflects the heart and soul of unregulated capitalism. I presume that most pro-pollution people would prefer not to wreck the environment, but the profit motive just sweeps those concerns away.

Dirty politics & dirty tricks

James O'Keefe, the sleazemaster of Project Veritas

The New York Times writes on how the radical right lies and sleaze group, Project Veritas, aggressively intrudes into private lives to find dirt for Republican political advantage:

Ashley Biden’s Diary Was Shown at Trump Fund-Raiser. Weeks Later, 

Project Veritas Called Her.

The right-wing group’s deceptive call to the president’s daughter a month before Election Day is among the new details that show how the organization worked to expose personal information about the Biden family.

A month before the 2020 election, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s daughter, Ashley, received a call from a man offering help. Striking a friendly tone, the man said that he had found a diary that he believed belonged to Ms. Biden and that he wanted to return it to her.

Ms. Biden had in fact kept a diary the previous year as she recovered from addiction and had stored it and some other belongings at a friend’s home in Florida where she had been living until a few months earlier. The diary’s highly personal contents, if publicly disclosed, could prove an embarrassment or a distraction to her father at a critical moment in the campaign.

She agreed with the caller to send someone to retrieve the diary the next day.

But Ms. Biden was not dealing with a good Samaritan.

The man on the other end of the phone worked for Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of President Donald J. Trump, according to interviews with people familiar with the sequence of events. From a conference room at the group’s headquarters in Westchester County, N.Y., surrounded by other top members of the group, the caller was seeking to trick Ms. Biden into confirming the authenticity of the diary, which Project Veritas was about to purchase from two intermediaries for $40,000.

The caller did not identify himself as being affiliated with Project Veritas, according to accounts from two people with knowledge of the conversation. By the end of the call, several of the group’s operatives who had either listened in, heard recordings of the call or been told of it believed that Ms. Biden had said more than enough to confirm that it was hers.

Drawn from interviews, court filings and other documents, the new information adds further texture to what is known about an episode that has led to a criminal investigation of Project Veritas by federal prosecutors who have suggested they have evidence that the group was complicit in stealing Ms. Biden’s property and in transporting stolen goods across state lines.

And by showing that Project Veritas employed deception rather than traditional journalistic techniques in the way it approached Ms. Biden — the caller identified himself with a fake name — the new accounts could further complicate the organization’s assertions in court filings that it should be treated as a publisher and granted First Amendment protections. Project Veritas regularly carries out undercover stings, surveillance operations and ambush interviews, mostly against liberal groups and journalists.

At the same time, new information about the case suggests that the effort to make the diary public reached deeper into Mr. Trump’s circle than previously known.

A month before the call to Ms. Biden, the diary had been passed around a Trump fund-raiser in Florida at the home of a donor who helped steer the diary to Project Veritas and was later nominated by Mr. Trump to the National Cancer Advisory Board. 

Project Veritas — which is suing The New York Times for defamation in an unrelated case — has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge that the belongings had been stolen. It has portrayed itself as a media organization that is being unfairly investigated for simply doing journalism and has assailed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for their handling of the case.

Prosecutors have signaled that they view the circumstances very differently, all but dismissing in one court filing the group’s defense that it was acting as a news organization, saying that “there is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property.”

In response to a request to Project Veritas for comment, Mr. O’Keefe sent an email criticizing The Times. “Imagine writing so thoroughly divergent from reality and so mendacious with innuendo that there is literally no utterance that won’t make it worse,” he said.

At this point, I now firmly believe that: 

• America's radical right and in particular the Republican Party and its major donors and propagandists do not speak or act in good faith or with good will; 
• Relentless ill-will and bad faith come from a recognition that because their ideologies, morals and policy preferences are out of synch with an apparent permanent majority in America, the radical right minority has to resort to staunch anti-democratic authoritarianism in a desperate attempt to not lose the concentrated power and wealth the elites have long enjoyed; and
• Due to the desperate situation that radical right extremist elites find themselves, mostly laissez-faire capitalists and aggressive, vengeful Christian fundamentalists, the ends justify all means that might be feasible and practical, legal or not, moral or not, deadly or not, and dirty or not.  

So, is it time to unleash the dogs of dirty politics to look into the dirty laundry of Don Jr, Ivanka, Eric, Barron, Melania and the children, spouse and/or close relatives of Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Marjory Taylor Greene, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, William Barr and all the rest of the morally rotted GOP leadership? We are in an all-out war of corruption, deceit, lies and American fascism against honesty, transparency, truth and American democracy. Maybe the ends do justify the means. 

Questions: Do political ends justify dirty politics and tricks means, e.g., since they are just legal dark free speech? Does it make any difference if democracy falls if its defenders do not adopt dirty politics and dirty tricks tactics? 

He's so sure of himself