The Banality of Evil or The Anality of Stupidity?

Banal: Drearily commonplace and often predictable; trite. Anal: Pertaining to assholes.

I’ve been overtaken with an ever-growing sense of existential dread. Not, I should add, dread of your existence, but of some nameless threat to my own existence which, it turns out, even at my advanced age, is still precious to me.

Hence the urge to write, because as I more thoroughly nail down the causes of my existential dread, I find it, as it so often does, turning into existential rage. And rage, at the very least, tends to make me talkative. Especially when I discover that these these nameless dreadfuls actually do have names. So let me, as the protesters like to chant, say their names!

I’ve long maintained there are only two meta personality types, which both mirror and complement each other: The suicidal, and the homicidal. As should be obvious by now to anybody who knows me, I fall into the second classification. Where the first will, when facing a potentially terminal crisis, sigh heavily and say, “Oh, well, there’s nothing I can do, I might as well just ignore it,” or some other such twaddle, I will find myself muttering between clenched teeth, “What do you mean, nothing can be done? Of course something can be done. Burn it down. Kill them. Sow the earth with their bones and blood.”

I suppose that’s why some people call me an extremist. Usually people of the suicidal bent.

The history of mankind has been the chronicle of an unceasing battle between reality and stupidity. Every once in a while stupidity gains an unchallenged upper hand, and the lights go out in Europe for a few centuries, or some Mongol horseman decides to take a few (thousand) of his friends and go visit Prague, laying waste to several ancient civilizations in the process.

Here’s a sentence packed with concepts you probably don’t often think much about: Stupidity is a far greater threat to humanity than evil, and this is true even when stupidity is masquerading as ignorance, which looks like, and often has the same effect as stupidity.

First, keep in mind that all three of these - stupidity, evil, and ignorance - are humanocentric in nature. Evil is a moral concept, or at least it is postulated as such, (usually after the fact) while both ignorance and stupidity are defects affecting the rational processes. Morality, on the other hand, while not necessarily a defect in rationality, per se, generally involves an attempt to dress up human assaults on reality with the draperies of divine mandate, or, at least, divine explanation.

Evil is in the eye of the beholder, which views reality through the lens of morality, which drowns the object of attention in a soup of subjectivism. If you doubt this, check out online forums involving discussions of any term that ends in “ism.” No rational conclusions are ever reached for the simple reason that every participant is wearing his own personal set of moral lenses, and so each of them sees a different version of a personal reality.

One could even assert that morality manufactures reality, but that will have to be a discussion for a different essay, a lengthy discourse involving the notorious intellectual rathole of epistemology - one I’d advise you to avoid unless you enjoy your morning coffee with a heavy dose of masochism.

The dinosaurs, possessing none of these potential debilities, had a run of many millions of years. Apparently having very tiny brains that default to four traits - feeding, fighting, fucking, and fleeing - grants considerable advantages in species survivability. We are, however, thanks to our susceptibility to evil, ignorance, and stupidity, unlikely to match their record.

Which brings us to today, a time which is just jam-packed with all the elements required to produce existential dread in those who are paying even the slightest bit of attention, or existential rage in those who are so inclined and who are paying a great deal more attention to the unfolding repast of stupidity spread before us. Later generations, assuming there are such, will most probably ascribe this feast of the stupid to evil, because later generations are unlikely to be any less stupid than our current variety.

Let me count the ways, and apply their proper classifications.

(This, from The Kiev Independent):

Opinion: Troops in Ukraine? France-Germany spat plays into Putin's hands

France now also officially supports Ukraine’s European Union and NATO membership. Most significantly, he [Macron] repeatedly emphasized that sending NATO troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out. For this last statement, he earned frenetic applause from the EU’s Eastern flank but pretty hard criticism from Germany and French citizens themselves. But that doesn’t change the fact that his insistence on strategic ambiguity as the only way to deter bullies like Putin is absolutely correct.

File this one under stupidity. So, what the hell is exactly meant by “strategic ambiguity?”

Here’s Wikipedia:

Policy of deliberate ambiguity - Wikipedia

In the context of global politics, a policy of deliberate ambiguity (also known as a policy of strategic ambiguity or strategic uncertainty) is the practice by a government or non-state actor of being deliberately ambiguous with regard to all or certain aspects of its operational or positional policies.[1] This is typically a way to avoid direct conflict while maintaining a masked more assertive or threatening position on a subject (broadly, a geopolitical risk aversion strategy).

In this case, the more “threatening position” is for France to send its own troops into Ukraine, with missions that remain deliberately murky and unspecified, so as to leave Russia uncertain and even confused as to what their purpose might be.

And isn’t that what you want in a nation possessing the largest, most modern nuclear arsenal on the face of the planet just a few hundred miles from your own borders? Uncertainty? Confusion about your military intentions regarding them?

Does such a policy seem, oh, I don’t know, just a bit stupid to you? If not, you might want to check your own position on the stupid scale.

In any case, Russia wasted little time in responding to Macron’s veiled threats in a most unambiguous way:

Russia Vows To Kill All French Soldiers Sent To Ukraine

Russian forces will kill all French soldiers who are deployed to fight in Ukraine, a Russian lawmaker has said. Pyotr Tolstoy, the deputy chairman of the lower house of Russia's parliament, made the remarks in an interview with French broadcasting television network BFM TV that aired on Thursday.

"We are going to kill all the French soldiers who are going to come to Ukrainian soil because today, during the conflict in Ukraine, there are 13,000 mercenaries, including 360 French," Tolstoy said. "One hundred and forty-seven have already been killed, so 147 citizens of France were killed in Ukraine."

Consider that one aspect, maybe the most important aspect, of successfully making a policy of veiled, strategically ambiguous threats work, is that your threats must be credible. They must be actually meaningful threats that compel your opponent to take them seriously.

Nobody, least of all Russia, takes such threats from American yapdog lapdog Macron seriously. What Russia is supposed to take seriously is the notion that if Russia follows through and kills every Frenchman sent to Ukraine, France will try to invoke Article Five to bring the U.S. into a direct confrontation with Russia on Ukraine’s territory.

Which brings me to the next area of abject stupidity now on display. One should not be surprised that its most recent example comes from Macron himself:

Emmanuel Macron on Ukraine: "Our duty is to prepare for all scenarios" - Le Parisien

"Putin has a discourse of fear. We must not be intimidated, we are not facing a great power. Russia is a middle power with nuclear weapons, but whose GDP is much lower than that of the Europeans, lower than that of Germany, France.”

This is a variant on one of the favorite western tropes about Russia, that it is little more than “a gas station with nukes,” which was trotted out by John McCain in 2015, and later by others at the beginning of the Ukraine military operation to justify a certain amount of what turned out to be premature triumphalism on the part of the Western financial powers.

Macron is only the most recent of the Europeans to use it, although given the near total failure of the West’s “shock and awe” sanction program to have any more effect against Russia than Ukraine’s “most powerful army in Europe” it’s no surprise to find it no longer has the currency it once did. The World Bank ranks Russia, in 2024, as the number five economy by PPP in the world, ahead of Germany at number six, the UK at number eight, and France at number ten.

In fact, I may no longer be able to credit this claim about Russian economic backwardness to simple stupidity, (or even ignorance) given that those wielding it these days have ample reason to note its undisputable inaccuracy. In which case my assumption would be it is now used for propaganda purposes only, just another tasty nugget of boob bait for the bubbas, or, to put it bluntly, a knowing lie that manipulators of public opinion still find useful. Yes, here conscious evil finally puts in an appearance.

That is, frankly, more comforting than the notion that people like Macron, who can wield, at least to some extent, real power, actually believe it and take it seriously. Because if that is the case, (and one should never doubt the ability and willingness of a True Believer to pull the wool over his own eyes) then we are in for a mindbending shitstorm of existential dread.

Several months back in a post here I alluded obliquely to the problem: We are not frightened enough of real threats, (and I’m not talking about Donald Trump’s second reelection, or White Rural Rage, or, most laughably, the global pandemic of climatological and/or genderfuck mental illness) and that leaves all of us faced with an unacceptably large amount of danger.

Forty Years Ago, This Scared the Hell Out of Everybody

The problem is that even after two generations, more or less, of an ever-growing cult of safetyism, we’ve ended up with a populace that has largely lost a healthy sense of fear. Fear serves a purpose at the individual, social, political, and cultural levels. It is an inherent part of, and reinforcer of, our survival mechanisms on all these levels.

This lack has not gone unnoticed, though I might have wished for a somewhat different reaction than what I am currently seeing.

Among the most significant of those who have noticed America’s shortfall of healthy fear is Russia itself. My solution to the matter proposed a remake of an old but very frightening movie. Some in Russia take an entirely different, and more hard-nosed approach.

Dmitry Trenin: It’s time for Russia to give the West a nuclear reminder — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

The two largest nuclear powers, Russia and the US, are in a state of semi-direct armed conflict. This confrontation is officially regarded in Russia as an existential threat. This situation has become possible as a result of the failure of strategic deterrence (in its geopolitical dimension) in an area where Russia’s vital interests are present. It should be noted that the main cause of the conflict is Washington’s conscious disregard –for three decades now– of Moscow’s clearly and explicitly expressed security interests and concerns. 

Moreover, in the Ukrainian conflict, the US military and political leadership has not only articulated, but has publicly expressed, the mission of using its proxy to inflict a strategic military defeat on Russia, despite its status as a premier nuclear power.

This is a complex undertaking in which the collective economic, industrial, political, military, military-technical, intelligence and informational capacity of the West is integrated with the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces in direct combat against the Russian army. In other words, the US is trying to defeat Russia not only without using nuclear weapons, but even without formally engaging in hostilities. 

It’s almost as if the U.S. believes it has nothing to fear personally from Russia, or from its vast nuclear arsenal, or from its suite of multiple delivery systems that far outpace America’s own. It certainly seems to be employing strategies similar to those it has previously used against non-nuclear antagonists, including proxy opponents, economic warfare, international lawfare, attempted and often successful “color revolutions,” in fact, everything up to but not including direct American military attacks (so far, at least) on the Russian homeland.

It is the increasing possibility of this last occurring, of the U.S. violating a red line it respected throughout the Cold War with the Soviet Union, that has got figures like Trenin sufficiently worried that he proposes a remedy that would have until recently been considered unthinkable in both Moscow and Washington, D.C.

Read it for yourself:

In this context, the declaration by the five nuclear powers on January 3, 2022, that “nuclear war should not be waged” and that “there can be no winners,” seems like a relic of the past. A proxy war between the nuclear powers is already underway; moreover, in the course of this conflict, more and more restrictions are being removed, both in terms of the weapon systems used and the participation of Western troops, as well as the geographical limits of the theater of war. It is possible to pretend that a certain ‘strategic stability’ is being maintained, but only if, like the US, a player sets the task of inflicting a strategic defeat on the enemy at the hands of its client state and expects that the enemy will not dare to use nuclear weapons.

Thus, the concept of strategic stability in its original form – the creation and maintenance of military-technical conditions to prevent a sudden massive nuclear strike – only partially retains its meaning under current conditions.

Let’s get one thing straight: “… the creation and maintenance of military-technical conditions to prevent a sudden massive nuclear strike…” is the policy we both once called Mutually Assured Destruction, otherwise known as MAD. That Trenin seems to think it needs to be created (he’s being polite) - or, more accurately re-created - makes explicit his belief that the initial iteration that held sway, successfully, throughout the Cold War and, in theory, does still today, has been destroyed as a deterrent in the eyes of American leadership. In other words, things have changed, which requires the reestablishment of the status quo ante in order to guarantee the safety of all involved.

MAD:

Under MAD, each side has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other side. Either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate with equal or greater force. The expected result is an immediate, irreversible escalation of hostilities resulting in both combatants' mutual, total, and assured destruction. The doctrine requires that neither side construct shelters on a massive scale.[4] If one side constructed a similar system of shelters, it would violate the MAD doctrine and destabilize the situation, because it would have less to fear from a second strike.[5][6] The same principle is invoked against missile defense.

The doctrine further assumes that neither side will dare to launch a first strike because the other side would launch on warning (also called fail-deadly) or with surviving forces (a second strike), resulting in unacceptable losses for both parties. The payoff of the MAD doctrine was and still is expected to be a tense but stable global peace. However, many have argued that mutually assured destruction is unable to deter conventional war that could later escalate. Emerging domains of cyber-espionage, proxy-state conflict, and high-speed missiles threaten to circumvent MAD as a deterrent strategy.[7]

And herein lies the problem. All of the threats to MAD currently exist and are in play. Cyber-espionage is, and has been, a given for decades, and it only grows more pervasive. The US is flying spy planes over the Black Sea, which it uses to coordinate Ukrainian attacks against various Russian targets. Ukraine itself is the main actor in a proxy war being waged by the US on Russia. Russia itself has a large portfolio of high-speed hypersonic missiles. And France (with pledges of help from other Euro nations) is threatening to wage conventional warfare against the Russian military on the ground in Ukraine.

Nobody in the US seems to find any of this in the least bit threatening.

Trenin wants to change that.

Strengthening nuclear deterrence could be the solution to the real problem of restoring strategic stability, which has been seriously disrupted by the ongoing and escalating conflict. To begin with, it is worth rethinking the concept of deterrence and, in the process, changing its name.

For example, instead of a passive, we should talk about an active form. The adversary should not remain in a state of comfort, believing that the war he is waging with the help of another country will not affect him in any way. In other words, it is necessary to put fear back into the minds and hearts of the enemy’s leaders. The beneficial sort of fear, it’s worth stressing.

Beneficial.

The escalation ladder does not end here. Military-technical steps can be followed by real acts, warnings of which have already been given: for example, attacks on air bases and supply centers on the territory of NATO countries, and so on. There is no need to go further.

There’s this teensy little potential problem, though. This might result in some mild…overreaction.

It is unlikely that the enemy will accept this state of affairs easily and immediately.

You think?

At the very least, they will need to realize that this is our position and draw the appropriate conclusions.

Let me emphasize that we are talking about people who think they are chosen to shepherd the planet into a New World Order, for its own good, of course, and they view Russia as being in the way.

Not that they see this as a major impediment, of course. Seventy years of postwar success have conditioned them into believing that they represent not only the vanguard of the global future, but the pinnacle of human achievement to date. These are not modest people.

They are, however, very stupid people. Very stupid people with their fingers on the triggers of several thousand nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Just like Russia, in fact, although I, (though not they, apparently), hope that, simply because they are stupid, you won’t yourselves be stupid in response.

Unfortunately, hope is not only not a strategy, it has been transmogrified into an active and deadly threat to all Americans, via the magic of an addiction to their own supply of manufactured dopium.

My suggestion, which might avoid the nuclear perils of directly bombing US bases in Guam, the Philippines, Germany, France, and Great Britain, is straightforward: Putin should turn the Ukraine dial up to eleven, but without invoking the atomic boogaloo there.

Take out every power station, transmission facility, military base, training center, and administrative cluster west of the Line of Contact. Level as much of Kiev as is necessary to drive the point home that there are no more alle alle in frees for grifting ronins of Greedistan currently installed as the “government” of “Ukraine.”

Since Zelensky and his top cronies will probably be able to escape the immediate onslaught via the ratlines they’ve already built as exits from their sinking ship, be waiting for them, track them, and kill them where you find them.

Putin has obviously been quite reluctant to pursue any such policy. The reasons given are many, and mostly diametrically opposed: Putin is:

A. Reluctant to kill potential new Russians, since he regards the Ukraine as a historic part of Russia.

B. Has not done it because he cannot do it. His military is insufficient to the task.

C. Does not want the self-created problem of what the hell to do with the western wastelands after he finishes laying waste to them.

D. Is wary of provoking a direct confrontation with the NATO military, which would include the US military.

There are all sorts of variations on this sort of sheet music, and some of them may even be accurate.

But Putin has come to his time of decision. Many, in Russia and beyond it, have claimed that Russia possesses “escalation dominance.” This may even be true. If so, Putin is faced with a stark choice. Use it, or lose it.

Even if he leaves not a blade of grass unburnt, or a mound of smoking rubble unbounced west of the Dnieper, he will still have a viable addition to Russia remaining in the east. And so doing would solve several pressing matters.

First, it would settle the question of whether Russia is merely a “gas station with nukes,” or one of the very few Biggest Boys worthy of complete, if wary, respect from the other two Biggest Boys.

Second, it would end this slaughterhouse of a war in the only way the US understands and truly respects: violently and finally.

Third, it might be shocking and awful enough that it would shatter the Moron Mafia in Washington’s ability to pass off arrant fantasy as smart policy to the normalcy-addled Jingotards.

Fourth, it might - might - scare the crap out of enough of the right people that they would stop dancing down the yellow brick road to nuclear holocaust as if it were nothing more than a stroll in the park on a sunny day.

That’s the outcome I would really hope for.