I continue to be utterly aghast at the rampant virtue signalling over Ukraine.
The calls for sanctions and even military intervention (!) are growing ever shriller, the insistence that Putin is literally Hitler ever more vehement, the oversimplification ever more infantile.
The day before yesterday someone in my Hebrew class didn’t show up because she was too busy writing a letter calling for sanctions against Belarus. You won’t be surprised to learn that she’s an academic from Ottawa who has spent the last few weeks talking about how ghastly it is to be surrounded by working class men calling for freedom. You may be a little surprised that every single other person in our class applauded her announcement that she couldn’t make class, posting hand clapping emojis in our WhatsApp group and commenting ‘how brave’.
But then again, you may not.
If these people had any idea of how reckless, how potentially suicidal their actions are, one might perhaps be able to call them brave. But they don’t. This is what they think: They believe so much in their own moral superiority, they feel fully entitled to personally tell every single other country on the planet that they must do exactly as they are told at all times or face the consequences, as though other countries are naughty little children and Western citizens are caring but firm parents.
What do these people imagine these sanctions they call for will do? Do they have fantasies that Putin himself will be hurt by them? Or do they simply give it no thought whatsoever? It sounds decent (because sanctions aren’t bombs) and therefore must be the decent thing to call for. The civilised call to arms.
Never mind the millions of Russian citizens who will be impoverished by them. And never mind the millions of Westerners who are already struggling with rising fuel prices and will struggle further. Those deplorables living in flyover country should have bought themselves a hybrid vehicle years ago; if they’re suffering now, well, it serves them right for not doing their bit for the environment. This will bring them into line - so hey, two birds with one stone.
And never mind that the West also bombs. Those are bombs for freedom; those are bombs for democracy. When Black Lives Matter burns down whole cities, that’s arson for justice. That’s totally different, don’t you understand?
These people are so totally insulated from reality they imagine that they are good people, and that as good people, whatever they do is, by definition, good. But it’s worse than that - they believe being good makes them untouchable.
This is the Hollywood version of reality: the good guy can run through a hail of bullets fired from all sides to jump out of a plane with no parachute, and will survive unscathed. The bad guy, on the other hand, well he can be taken out by a single bullet right between the eyes, shot wildly over the shoulder of the good guy without even a glance backwards.
The USA can play wildly with fire in the form of economic sanctions while spending like crazy, and the virtue signallers can call for more sanctions - harder, faster, more more more! Punish Putin! Punish Literally Hitler! We are good, we are brave, they are bad, they are evil; nothing can ever harm us while our enemies will drop like flies, and good riddance to them.
This is insanity.
For a long time now, a few lone voices have been calling for rationality, reason, free speech, and at every step of the way the response from society has been to choose virtue signalling over all other concerns.
When Jordan Peterson was raked over the coals for opposing forced speech on gender pronouns, for example, society asked whether it wouldn’t have been more polite of him to simply comply? Aren’t nice people, well, nice? Isn’t that why we’ve all been wearing masks for the last two years and bumping elbows with a self-depreciating laugh like retarded seals?
But this idiotic slavishness to surface-level politeness and decency has real world consequences. Ordinary people complying with lock-downs caused millions of people to lose jobs, businesses, even loved ones to cancer and other diseases because all had to fall to the mighty Covid. Yet the only people who were demonized were those who dared suggest the potential downsides to anti-Covid measures should also be considered. They were the ones who were silenced and vilified.
And now here again. Bombs the West doesn’t like are dropping, and therefore we must all pretend that this is a case of angelic good v’s abject evil. Anyone who dares suggest that we consider the potential downsides of actions such as sanctions, let alone military intervention, well, they’re the ones who must be silenced.
It will not end well.