Anne Applebaum is an unusual establishment intellectual. She’s an American Jewish graduate of Yale married to the Polish nobleman and Oxford graduate Radek Sikorski, a Center Right politician who has been Foreign Minister and various other things in post-Soviet Free Poland.

Applebaum consequently is solidly in opposition to the Totalitarian tyranny and mass genocide of the last century in Central Europe, but her Jewish Liberal and American Ivy League Establishmentarian identities are equally strong. She writes for the enthusiastically radical leftist these days Atlantic. She has broken with many former conservative friends over their support for Nationalist Populism in Poland, Hungary, and the United States.

She loudly condemns Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump, but she generally gives the Revolutionary Left and their elite enablers a total pass.

So, it’s interesting to find her, in the Atlantic no less, taking a stand against the current Cancel Culture Reign of Terror.

Her critique is pretty good, though I did think her efforts to dissociate all this from Leftism generally constituted pure Denial in its saddest form, and her studied efforts to identify equivalent speech suppression originating from the Right (Project Veritas!) smelled just a bit of desperation. “In this (relatively trivial) incident (which I for one had never heard of), the storm came from the right, as it surely will in the future: The tools of social-media mob justice are available to partisans of all kinds.”

Except “partisans of all kind” do not control Hollywood, Disney, Amazon, Netflix, CNN, NBC, Time, Newsweek, ESPN, the NFL, the NBA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all the rest of the Establishment Media. “Partisans of all kinds” do not make the policies or conduct the kangaroo courts at Harvard, Yale, and all the rest of the colleges and universities. “Partisans of all kinds” do not get to ban opponents on the Left from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Only the Puritan Left does.

Actually, she needs to be careful herself. The left-wing mob ran Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan out of cushy Establishment positions. There is no reason to suppose that they will not go after her, too.

Students and professors, editorial assistants and editors in chief—all are aware of what kind of society they now inhabit. That’s why they censor themselves…”

“… why they steer clear of certain topics, why they avoid discussing anything too sensitive for fear of being mobbed or ostracized or fired without due process…. Many people have told me they want to change this atmosphere, but don’t know how. Some hope to ride it out, to wait for this moral panic to pass, or for an even younger generation to rebel against it….

Anonymous reports and Twitter mobs, not the reasoned judgments of peers, will shape the fate of individuals. Writers and journalists will fear publication. Universities will no longer be dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge but to the promotion of student comfort and the avoidance of social-media attacks. Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre….

There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us.”

RTWT (Outline.com will fork if you get paywalled.)

Novorossiya

Max Fisher identifies the key term in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric.

Russian President Vladimir Putin just dropped the biggest, scariest dogwhistle of the Ukraine crisis: “Novorossiya.”

The word literally means “new Russia” — it was an old, imperial-era term for southern Ukraine, when it was part of the Russian Empire, and is now a term used by Russia ultra-nationalists who want to re-conquer the area.

Putin has used the word twice during the crisis. First, he used it in April, about a month after Russia had invaded and annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, subtly suggesting that the annexation was justified because Crimea was in Novorossiya and thus inherently part of Russia.

He used it again on Thursday, in an official presidential statement addressed to the eastern Ukrainian rebels that have seized parts of the country — and whom he addressed as “the militia of Novorossiya.”

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Anne Applebaum, who has written a book on the totalitarian genocides committed in Europe’s Eastern Borderlands during the last century, tells us that she suddenly feels as if she is living in the Summer of 1939, and warns, on the basis of familiarity with the kinds of things which appear in the Russian press which the New York Times is never going to report, just how scary the thoughts are that Russia is thinking.

A few days ago, Alexander Dugin, an extreme nationalist whose views have helped shape those of the Russian president, issued an extraordinary statement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote — and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of bastards.”

But Novorossiya will also be hard to sustain if it has opponents in the West. Possible solutions to that problem are also under discussion. Not long ago, Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the Russian member of parliament and court jester who sometimes says things that those in power cannot — argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries — “dwarf states,” he called them — and show the West who really holds power in Europe: “Nothing threatens America, it’s far away. But Eastern European countries will place themselves under the threat of total annihilation,” he declared. Vladimir Putin indulges these comments: Zhirinovsky’s statements are not official policy, the Russian president says, but he always “gets the party going.”

A far more serious person, the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes — perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city — to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.

Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But “Mein Kampf” also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.