Friendly Public Service Announcement

To all my friends, especially those on the left, who are still having a difficult time assessing how to evaluate the recent initiation of, to employ Clausewitz's dictum, "politics by other means". This piece offers a valuable perspective. Putin-Versteher and parts of the European intelligentsia continuing to suggest that Russian security concerns which are rooted in an allegedly aggressive NATO stance are "understandable" are merely spewing baseless, unfactual Kremlin propaganda. (Although they seem not to have chosen to lend credence to other kinds of Kremlin propaganda, such as that war in Ukraine is meant to "denazify" the region and that Ukraine is responsible for genocide against ethnic Russians. How noble of them to draw the line at that point.) On most contemporary political issues we're dealing in shades of grey; it accounts, in part, for why there is so much political disagreement in the West. One reason the West is so united in this (for now) is that this is a black-and-white issue. What we're seeing in Ukraine is a war of aggression. Plain and simple. Nothing to parse.