![]() Peterson called Russian President Putin a practicing Christian who “operates in philosophical and theological terms at a level unthinkable for a Western leader”. In the article, Peterson wrote that the Western countries were to blame for the war, which angered Russia with their foreign policy and “degenerate ideas”. It quite surprised many of his fans, especially from Ukraine. Ukraine or civil war in the West? was published in the American magazine The Daily Wire. The career of a public intellectual was quite successful until July 11, 2022, when Jordan Peterson decided to speak out about the war in Ukraine. 12 more rules for life became a bestseller - more than 5 million copies were sold. In 2021, Petersonʼs new book Beyond Order. The main broadcast alone garnered 3.6 million views, excluding translations, segments and individual videos. In 2019, Peterson debated Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. “Babel” tells how conservatives Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, podcaster Joe Rogan and political scientist John Mearsheimer have become useful to the Kremlin. A whole group of intellectuals and opinion leaders has formed in the USA, who are putting more and more pressure on the White House, demanding an agreement with Russia. ![]() Elon Musk is not the only well-known Western figure who publicly doubts that the West should help Ukraine. But the strange tweets didnʼt end there: on October 17, Musk again threatened nuclear war if Russia loses Crimea. In the end, Musk wrote that his company will continue to finance the “Starlink” connection in Ukraine. And in a few days it became clear that in September “SpaceX” demanded money from the Pentagon, and in case of refusal - warned that it could disconnect Ukraine from the Starlink service. At the same time, unconfirmed information appeared that Musk had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin before writing these tweets - thoug the businessman denied this. ![]() Then he explained that he supports Ukraine, but is afraid of a world and nuclear wars. He suggested holding a repeat vote in the annexed regions of Ukraine under the supervision of the UN and called the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine “Khrushchevʼs mistake”. As far as books about culture, history, and politics go, it would hardly have been noticed.A few weeks ago, the founder of the “Tesla” and “SpaceX” companies, Elon Musk, published a series of tweets on his Twitter where he reflected on the war with Russia. At best, it would have been useful perhaps as a text book for a high school Western Civ class, or maybe as an extended bibliography for a Great Books reading course. Had it been published even a generation ago, a 200-page summary of the roots of Western civilization and the calamities that befell it in the 20th century probably would have seemed rather redundant. Not that long ago there would have been no need for a book like this. Shapiro has been thinking about how it has come to this, and a month before the Notre-Dame fire he published The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great-a title that almost seems designed to provoke outrage on the Left.īut Shapiro’s aim isn’t to outrage, it is to educate, and we are obviously in dire need of some remedial education. Sadly, this narrative of the West as an oppressive, racist, misogynistic, violent civilization that must be dismantled and disowned has come to dominate not just the academy but vast swaths of the cultural landscape, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley to professional sports. It would be easy to laugh at this sort of thing if those who espoused it weren’t so serious-and if there weren’t so many of them. (Next we’ll no doubt be hearing about how the Louvre is a monument to income inequality and the Eiffel Tower is an oppressive symbol of toxic masculinity.) But it was liberals who objected to Shapiro’s use of that phrase, “Western civilization,” and later, his invocation of “Judeo-Christian heritage.” Online critics immediately pointed to all the terrible things French Catholics did to Jews in the Middle Ages, as if to argue against the very notion of a unified Judeo-Christian heritage, or to suggest that Western civilization is nothing so much as a series of crimes against oppressed and marginalized peoples.ĭespite its absurdity, the exchange was a perfect manifestation of what’s gone wrong in Western civilization: liberals becoming outraged at the suggestion that Notre-Dame-even as it was engulfed in flames-is anything but a symbol of oppression, and especially outraged that Shapiro, an orthodox Jew, would have the chutzpah to say otherwise. Catholics could have quibbled that Notre-Dame is actually a monument to the Blessed Virgin Mary and her son Jesus Christ, or at least that it is only secondarily a monument to Western civilization.
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