I've tried in recent years to scale back on sharing political articles, because we all have better things to do with our time. But please, read this. Anne Applebaum is a towering historian of Eastern Europe, some people call her conservative (she's not, and by American standards she's left-of-center), but every liberal the world over has to re-examine what is liberal and what is conservative right now, and that re-examination is 50 years overdue. Liberals are nearly 95% right on questions of domestic policy, progressives are 80%, socialists are 60%, but on foreign affairs, you all turn into libertarians, and people who know better have let you without calling you on the fact that you could get us all killed as easily as a neoconservative who wants to nuke every time a foreign leader furrows an eyebrow.
The result of all that is that Putin makes an international network of worldwide far right organizations to defeat democracy in every first world country. And don't think it would end at defeating democracy either - the next step might be 'eliminating threats', including those of us who would like to restore democracy. It seems far-fetched, but he's successfully jeopardized democracy everywhere in the world, and even now, there is barely a response. There's barely even an acknowledgement that a response is necessary. There's barely even an acknowledgement that the democracies we live in are better, safer, freer, more prosperous, than dictatorship; because god forbid anything put even the most regulated capitalism in a flattering light. I know everybody wants to avoid war and anybody sane wants to live in a world without war - unfortunately, no such world exists, it never has and it never will. Whether it's this war, or with China, or resource scarcity after Global Warming, or even domestic civil conflicts in every major country, world war is coming for us all, and the more surprised we are, the more of us will die. We can all either start preparing now and let go of the whole "military force = capitalism = evil" syllogism, or we all can willfully allow ourselves to be stunned when places and people we've known all our lives disappear forever while we're too busy to mourn them.
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