I called it. A year ago.

I just made this to visualise some things I’ve been tossing around in my head. Kinda speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

Today marks ten years of war in Ukraine and I thought I’d write a commentary piece about that:

→ Eye on The Press: Ten Years of War

Reflecting on ten years of war in Ukraine and our reaction to it in the West

I watched the Putin interview so you don’t have to:

→ Eye on The Press: The Interview

What Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin says about the war in Ukraine, the US government and Putin himself

My writings about the Hopkins case have solicited quite a few reader comments. I felt it was necessary to address some of them:

→ Eye on The Press: A Note to Readers on the C.J. Hopkins Case

Misinterpreting the law, being outraged at prosecution and misunderstanding the criminal courts system

I went to Berlin yesterday to report on the C.J. Hopkins case. Turns out that, aside from The Epoch Times, I was the only journalist writing about the proceedings.

→ Eye on The Press: C.J. Hopkins Acquitted in Berlin

Court finds satirist’s use of a swastika to criticise anti-pandemic measures legally justified

Something quite bizarre happened to me on Substack over the holidays. I’ve written a recap of the incident for Eye on The Press, which also includes what I inted to do about it:

→ Eye on The Press: C.J. Hopkins and the Swastika

How I got called a “fascist German creep” for defending tenets of the German constitution I don’t even like much

So I’ve been watching Taylor Sheridan on The Joe Rogan Experience and those guys say a lot of smart things on that episode. As is usual with Rogan, they also say some dumb shit. But the dumbest thing is something that I’ve heard a lot and it just baffles me.

What is it with Americans saying “our country is a republic, not a democracy”? And it’s always Americans saying this. Is it something about their school system where they’re just not educated about this stuff? Of course your country is a democracy. A republic is a way of running a government, usually a democratic one. Your whole nation was founded on the same ideal than the French Republic, in the same era of revolutional upheaval. And that idea was chiefly that a country should be run by its people instead of a king and a class of privileged individuals that pass on their privilege to their children. So a republic, in contrast to a monarchy, is a government by the people, for the people. And how do you decide who is in that government? Guess what? Democracy.

“Republic” and “democracy” aren’t mutually exclusive terms. On the contrary. One (republic) is a practical means of achieving an idea (democracy). They can theoretically exist without one another, and sometimes do. One example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a democratic state that isn’t a republic. If anything, the US republic is more democratic than the constitutional monarchy in Britain. You can also have a republic that isn’t democratic. The Italian fascist, for example, founded such a state when Mussolini was dismissed by the king.

All this should demonstrate that the terms certainly aren’t exclusive. And why would you think they are? Aside from studying history — the Roman Republic is a good start — you could just look these words up in a dictionary. People saying this just drives me nuts. Especially when they are from a country that has quite often invaded other countries on the pretext of enlightening them about democracy.

The US presidential election is less than a year out. High time to call it, I think. Unless a lot of things change in the next year, you don’t have to be a genius to predict this one, I feel:

→ Eye on The Press: Trump is Going to Win Again

While I don’t agree with the conclusion of this piece — nothing will change, I fear — and some of the more flowery language not withstanding, there’s some very sharp analysis on display here.

Under the direction of our ruling class and the educators who rely on its largesse for their tenure and their grants most recent activism has been confined to the realm of manners, microaggressions, and most of all, an endless litigation of the past. Because nothing can truly be done about it. You can’t free slaves that have been dead for 150 some-odd years, unlike the victims of today’s slave markets, which are far more numerous and also have the benefit of still being savable by virtue of still being alive. But you don’t hear very much about them. To focus on them would create a demand for meaningful action. The kind of action that could upset corporate relationships, manufacturing deals, international geopolitics, the price of labor; in short, profits. Much better to hunt down racism in the human heart, which, like the hunt for sin, can never really be concluded, and like the war on terror, can make its proselytizers a fuck ton of money.

→ It’s Alive! Social Justice Movement Turns On Its Creators, Russell Dobular, Due Dissidence

Over on Substack, I’ve just published my analysis of last night’s explosive local election results here in Germany:

→ Eye on The Press: Our Shit’s All Fucked Up

Getting cancelled on social media, as examined through the lens of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung:

All over America, there are people who wake up, every day, to find themselves transformed into giant bugs – in the view of others, if not themselves. The psychological journey here is a lot like that of someone who has been cancelled innocently. Who, suddenly, is being treated as a monstrous vermin by everybody else in society, and is just trying to go about their lives on the inside.

— Walter Kirn, on America This Week, episode 47

This is a very interesting observation from Walter Kirn on America This Week, episode 45:

You know the one thing [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] and Trump do have in common, genuinely? They’re both peace candidates, to some extend. And, frankly, that seems to be the thing you’re not allowed to be.

I’ve read a lot about what J.K. Rowling has said. People have likewise told me a lot of things that J.K. Rowling has said. But funnily enough, when I then went and listened to J.K. Rowling, she never quite said these things. She said some things that I don’t agree with and others I do very much agree with. But she never said these terrible things people told me about. This leads me to believe that most people actually have no idea what J.K. Rowling actually stands for.

If you want to find out and if you’re not afraid to think for yourself and challenge some of the bullshit people believe and write about, listen to this podcast where she’s interviewed – quite critically, actually – by Megan Phelps-Roper, who’s a remarkable person with a remarkable story in her own right. Believe me, this is an hour worth investing if you care about the truth of things.

I’ve read many stories today, proclaiming this date to be the one year anniversary of the war in Ukraine or of Russia’s invasion of the country. That is so obviously not true by any criteria one could possibly apply with a sane mind, that it actually quite amazed me that everyone was running with it. It also made me angry. So I had to write and talk about it, even though I’m still not completely recovered from this cold.

Here’s a newsletter issue on the topic:

→ The New Age of Militarism — As the war in Ukraine escalates, common sense withers

…and also a podcast episode:

→ The Private Citizen 145: War Never Changes

Today is not the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. That is just one of the propaganda lies by people who are afraid to stand up for peace and fight against murder and injustice.

The stuff that’s being dredged up as part of The Twitter Files reporting is quite astonishing. Here’s people at Twitter debating whether to prompt people to not be afraid of a disease is medical misinformation. The people in charge at Twitter back then really do seem quite insane.

→ How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate, David Zweig

In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy. In his reply, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation.

I’ve updated my map of the Ukraine conflict.

It’s pretty hard to find reliable information on the war in Ukraine that’s not based solely on the propaganda of one of the parties involved. It’s even harder to find a map of the current situation on the ground that’s clearly laid out. Because of this, I’ve done my best to produce such a map, based on the most reliable third party information I could cobble together.

What happened in Ukraine last week was an obvious consequence of The West’s ambitions and goals in the last thirty years. It is also a direct consequence of Obama’s and Merkel’s disastrous foreign policy. This should have been obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about foreign policy and history. A war has been fought in Ukraine for eight years now, anyone who was surprised about WAR IN EUROPE last week hasn’t been paying attention. The people who wrote those headlines and the politicians who claimed something “unthinkable” or “unforeseen” just happened are idiots and should be fired immediately.

The West forced regime change in Ukraine in 2014, the Russians responded, both sides escalated again and again over the last few years and now Russia invaded. This is a tragedy. It is a failure of diplomacy that is as much the fault of Vladimir Putin as it is the fault of us in Germany and the US who elected warmongers and people who know more about gender policy than they know about foreign policy.

Ted Galen Carpenter wrote a great opinion piece in 1945, which was also republished in The Guardian, and which explains exactly what went wrong very concisely:

→ Ignored Warnings: How NATO Expansion Led to the Current Ukraine Tragedy

History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that NATO expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.