Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote for my Substack subscribers about Colin Wilson and consciousness, Jim Cornette conservatism, Lex Fridman’s reading list, artistic preciousness, anti-West iconoclasm, ideology and me, the World Economic Forum, my mum and Japan and the future. I thought it was about time for a SPECIAL OFFER so with this link you can get 25% off a year’s subscription to THE ZONE. That makes it $30 for about 100 pieces over the coming year and access to the increasingly voluminous archives. Folks, you simply can’t get a deal like that from any other Substack written by a 6’3” Englishman living in Silesia.
I wrote for The Critic about New Year’s writing resolutions, EDI initiatives, BBC bias, how I hate “influencers”, how the state responds to crime and advice for expats.
Madness in world events. First, the big news of the month: Vince McMahon returning to WWE. McMahon — chairman and majority owner of World Wrestling Entertainment — was convinced to retire after facing about 3781 sexual impropriety allegations. After 5 minutes and 36 seconds of sitting at home, it seems, he couldn’t take the boredom and began to plot his return, which he appears to have pulled off by threatening to block the sale of the company if he wasn’t welcomed back. It’s oddly heartening to see that sheer psychopathology can play a role in world events. He could have sat at home, enjoying himself, and pocketed billions when the sale came, but narcissism and impatience won’t allow him to. Often, reducing phenomena to the mental states of individuals is dull-minded — as if Putin was feeling pissed off and decided to invade Ukraine. But there’s something to those mental states — and there’s something very human in that.
Speaking of Ukraine. I’m one of the people who thinks we should be pushing harder for peace talks before (a) a generation of young Ukrainian men — as well as many thousands of young Russian men — ends up being decimated or (b) war escalates to all-out continental strife. The problem is that this is very easy to say and not as easy to do. “Peace talks” is not some kind of magic spell we can invoke that satisfies all parties and sends them trundling home. Who do we envisage having the upper hand? What concessions could we imagine being made? I’d hope — optimistic as I know it is — that the parties could meet somewhere in the middle: Ukraine re-establishing its pre-2022 borders, for example, but staying put. I’m sure you poke a lot of moral and pragmatic holes in such ideas but I don’t see the alternative “Russia just gives up and Ukrainian tanks roll into Sevastopol on a bed of flowers” plan. That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist. But I don’t see it.
With one’s arms folded. There is of course some extent to which people who intellectualise about such compromises are lesser men than those who march off to war. Gary Saul Morson profiles the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin:
Though opposed to all violence, Garshin responded to the outbreak of war with Turkey by enlisting as a private. He went to war, he explained, thinking not even of killing but only of sharing the common soldiers’ suffering. “Is it more moral,” he asked those who objected to serving in the imperial army, “to stay behind, with one’s arms folded, while that soldier is going to die for us?” The hero of his story “The Coward”—who is not a coward, but a pacifist—asks the same question, enlists, and is pointlessly killed.
Who’s the judge of pointlessness? I’m not sure, but someone has to be.
Britain’s most dangerous job. Last September, in a piece about Chris Kaba, a British rapper who was shot to death by London police in controversial circumstances, I wrote:
When Dazed Digital demands that we defund the police they ignore the many young people who have been killed in gun and knife violence just this summer. Among Kaba’s fellow rap artists alone, Maximillian “M Lo” Kusi-Owusu was shot and Lazar “Hypo” Jackson and Takayo “TKorStretch” Nembhard were stabbed to death. Again, these are just the rappers who have been killed.
In November, the rapper Perm was shot to death, in an incident that also took out a poor delivery driver, and this month the rapper Fdot was killed. Of course, these men are being targeted — just as a lot of their fellow rappers have targeted others — because of gang conflicts rather than their musical leanings but it is eccentric how the media hops around the fact that the two are interlinked.
Ed versus Ed. Ed West considers the downsides of institutional education:
For all that we view with horror the idea of 14-year-olds being sent to work, for many teenagers school is actually quite cruel, an unnecessary and painful ordeal that ruins their best years. We now obsess about mental health, and even have professionals sent into schools to talk about the issue, when perhaps school itself is the problem for some.
The disinformation industry. I avoid linking to Critic articles here too much because I wouldn’t know where to stop but Fred Skulthorp’s two pieces on the ludicrous pretensions of disinformation reporters deserve promotion.
Man loses finger, gains America. I loved Santi Ruiz’s moving piece about his great-grandfather.
Religion and romanticism. An interesting look at the political direction of the Catholic Church from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski.
Literary marriages. Rarely happy, writes Heller McAlpin:
New to me was Elaine Dundy, née Brimberg, who grew up wealthy in Manhattan but was traumatized by her father, a violent bully who set the stage for her turbulent marriage to the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan. His penchant for vicious takedowns unfortunately extended into his personal life—along with his flagellomania and masochism. Initially, the couple were madly in love and much in demand socially, but their already strained marriage took a turn for the worse after Dundy’s first novel, “The Dud Avocado,” was published in 1958 to great acclaim. When Tynan threatened divorce if she wrote another book, Dundy started “The Old Man and Me” immediately.
I suppose she should have been focusing on supporting Tynan as he wrote such classic books as, er — well, erm — I, uh…
Have a lovely month,
Ben
I think the problem with your Ukraine solution is that your proposed "meeting in the middle" is basically allowing Ukraine to win. Returning to the status quo ante would mean Russia withdrawing to the line of control in January 2022, rescinding its claims of ownership of Ukrainian territory made since January 2022, and accepting nothing in return from Ukraine. With the EU having diversified its energy supplies. And with Ukraine free to join the EU and follow Poland along the yellow brick road to prosperity, leaving Russia and the Russian-controlled Ukrainian territories to rot in the grey prison of post-Soviet decay. Until the inevitable return of those territories to Ukraine, once such decay has progressed for another decade or so.
Everyone should be trying to make peace, and if peace can be made on those terms then it should be. But it's not plausible that Putin, or any realistic alternative Russian leader, would accept such terms. The middle ground you propose is absurdly pro-Ukrainian. That you're seen as being pro-Russian for suggesting it just makes clear how difficult it will be to make peace.
Odd phrase, make peace. Suggests superior beings descending from on high to point out the ways in which the foolish combatants have failed to realise that, actually, it's in their interests to stop fighting. And then those gobsmacked combatants realising how foolish they've been, and kissing the feet of their liberators.
Peace isn't made, it's imposed. In certain circumstances, those imposing it allow others to present themselves as wise peace makers. But contemporaries, judging by their actions, don't seem to be fooled.