The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

[Sarah]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

[Niemand]

I don't know if Communists need fake splits. The main enemies of individual Communists are often to found within their own movement. They torture and murder their own as much as their more obvious opponents.

[Sarah]

I don't know if Communists need fake splits. The main enemies of individual Communists are often to found within their own movement. They torture and murder their own as much as their more obvious opponents.

Whether you think they need it or not is not as important as recognizing that this has been their openly stated strategy on numerous occasions. And they've put the strategy into practice. Back when I created those long quoted threads, I quoted a Russian defector that gave a list of examples of how they pulled the strategy off.

[CuriousThinker]

I don't know if Communists need fake splits. The main enemies of individual Communists are often to found within their own movement. They torture and murder their own as much as their more obvious opponents.

I think both fake splits and murder within their own movement are true. Satan and his followers cover as many angles as they can.

[FoxMammaWisdom]

Thought you meant this kind of inversion

[Jonesy]

Rob Smith had some interesting things to say on this.

[Sarah]

Rob Smith had some interesting things to say on this.

Who's Rob Smith???

[Fred]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

That is a whole lot of words to describe why we don't ask a beekeeper's opinion on interstellar travel. For the same reason we don't ask a psychiatrist about politics.

[Jonesy]

Rob Smith had some interesting things to say on this.

Who's Rob Smith???

Just some dude that wrote a post about this.

[InfoWarrior82]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

Let me guess, you have an "I Stand With Ukraine" sign in your front yard?


Ukraine is a country that has been completely taken over by globalist entities. Our own Victoria Nuland (former CIA chief) admitted that they overthrew a duly elected president. They are using the country as a headquarters for money laundering, weapons distribution, and probably even human trafficking of children.

[Sarah]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

That is a whole lot of words to describe why we don't ask a beekeeper's opinion on interstellar travel. For the same reason we don't ask a psychiatrist about politics.

Ha Ha...and who should we ask about politics - a politician? A political science major?

Looks like the author does have his degree and graduate work in political science, government, economics and sociology.

[Sarah]

Rob Smith had some interesting things to say on this.

Who's Rob Smith???

Just some dude that wrote a post about this.

I read what the dude said and there wasn't a lot of substance - just opinion.

[Wolfwoman]

Jordan Peterson was never a conservative. It's just that he and some other common sense liberals did not go off the deep end like many liberals have, so now they are considered "conservative". Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Bret Weinstein to name a few.

[Fred]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

That is a whole lot of words to describe why we don't ask a beekeeper's opinion on interstellar travel. For the same reason we don't ask a psychiatrist about politics.

Ha Ha...and who should we ask about politics - a politician? A political science major?

Looks like the author does have his degree and graduate work in political science, government, economics and sociology.

He's a Canadian.

[Sarah]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

Let me guess, you have an "I Stand With Ukraine" sign in your front yard?


Ukraine is a country that has been completely taken over by globalist entities. Our own Victoria Nuland (former CIA chief) admitted that they overthrew a duly elected president. They are using the country as a headquarters for money laundering, weapons distribution, and probably even human trafficking of children.

"They" are using Ukraine?
(And no I don't have a Ukraine flag or sign - sorry to disappoint you)

The "they" is actually the Kremlin, who is and has been the puppet-master in Ukrainian politics and most of Eastern Europe. They make it appear like US is in charge of all this corruption, so they can give you the narrative they've been feeding you for the last two decades, and have a reason to destroy Ukrainian "Nazis" American liberals and Western Imperialists. It's all a managed drama.

The strategy is to place people in power who are feigning to be anti-Russia, and use them to create the opposition needed to have an excuse to wield more power, which is exactly what happened in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Chechnya, and everywhere else Russia has meddled with. Nuland is half Ukrainian Jew and her husband Robert Kagan is half Lithuanian Jew. This is about placing people in power who have the profile of "bad guy" to Russia or to the world. They are both career politicians and Nuland has been over Soviet/Russian affairs most of her life. She studied Russian literature. She's an actress playing the part of hawk, (just like Kissinger) and is managing Russia's controlled opposition.

[Sarah]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

That is a whole lot of words to describe why we don't ask a beekeeper's opinion on interstellar travel. For the same reason we don't ask a psychiatrist about politics.

Ha Ha...and who should we ask about politics - a politician? A political science major?

Looks like the author does have his degree and graduate work in political science, government, economics and sociology.

He's a Canadian.

Peterson is Canadian right? Nyquist lives in Northern CA. What is your point by saying he's Canadian?

[InfoWarrior82]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

Let me guess, you have an "I Stand With Ukraine" sign in your front yard?


Ukraine is a country that has been completely taken over by globalist entities. Our own Victoria Nuland (former CIA chief) admitted that they overthrew a duly elected president. They are using the country as a headquarters for money laundering, weapons distribution, and probably even human trafficking of children.

"They" are using Ukraine?
(And no I don't have a Ukraine flag or sign - sorry to disappoint you)

The "they" is actually the Kremlin, who is and has been the puppet-master in Ukrainian politics and most of Eastern Europe. They make it appear like US is in charge of all this corruption, so they can give you the narrative they've been feeding you for the last two decades, and have a reason to destroy Ukrainian "Nazis" American liberals and Western Imperialists. It's all a managed drama.

The strategy is to place people in power who are feigning to be anti-Russia, and use them to create the opposition needed to have an excuse to wield more power, which is exactly what happened in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Chechnya, and everywhere else Russia has meddled with. Nuland is half Ukrainian Jew and her husband Robert Kagan is half Lithuanian Jew. This is about placing people in power who have the profile of "bad guy" to Russia or to the world. They are both career politicians and Nuland has been over Soviet/Russian affairs most of her life. She studied Russian literature. She's an actress playing the part of hawk, (just like Kissinger) and is managing Russia's controlled opposition.

So the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that we are sending to Ukraine... are secretly going to.... Putin?

[Sarah]

Ooo...I like this one. I never appreciated or trusted Jordan Peterson, who appeared to be just another "conservative" opportunist who liked to stir up outrage, as people nodded in agreement with him. Likely a tool of Russia.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/07/19/the-i ... -peterson/

Posted on July 19, 2022
The Inversion of Jordan Peterson

We cannot do without the Russians on our side….
Jordan Peterson

The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world.
Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his recent video on “Russia vs. Ukraine,” Jordan Peterson said that the West must join with Russia in order to counterbalance China; but, like most influential celebrities, Peterson has yet to realize that China and Russia have been secretly working together for a long time. He has not awakened to the fact that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China was a strategic blunder, and partnering with Russia at the end of the Cold War was also a blunder. Russia is now the world’s leading nuclear power, bar none. China is now the greatest industrial power in the world, bar none. Power of this kind is not attained by accident, but by policy. And the West, led by the United States, facilitated the strengthening of these hostile regimes.

Listening to Peterson’s video on the Ukraine War, I see that he does not know about a KGB strategy known as the “fake split.” In 1958 KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin gave a lecture on how the KGB’s deception “machinery” could be used to engineer “fake splits” between countries of the communist bloc. The idea was to trick America into helping one communist country against another on the assumption that the two countries really had become enemies.[iii] Not all splits within the communist world have been faked, of course; but in his 1958 lecture Shelepin let slip that communist China was the ideal country for Moscow to have a “fake split” with. If this sort of scheme is thought to be too grandiose to be real, think again. The history of the Soviet Union is littered with grandiose schemes and outlandish deceptions; from Operation Trust in the 1920s, [iv] to the denial of the Ukraine terror famine in the 1930s, the WiN deception of the 1940s, and the perestroika deception of the 1980s. Russian power has continuously engaged in “active measures” to distort and confuse Western thought. The West’s media and intelligence services have been swindled by the communists, again and again.[v] In the short span of 32 years, Lenin’s followers got control of the world’s largest country (Russia) and the world’s most populous country (China). This suggests that communist leaders are gifted deception strategists. Given this history, should the West have taken the Sino-Soviet split at face value? The answer is “no.”

Because Peterson does not have a background in Soviet strategy, and because he is unfamiliar with the deception practices of the Russian special services, he blames the emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow on the West’s “self-aggrandizing” behavior in Ukraine. He thinks we have driven Russia into China’s arms. He suggests that we are treating Vladimir Putin “like a cornered rat.” It is better, says Peterson, to make Putin into our partner. Of course, this was our policy twenty years ago; and it failed.

Many countries are now succumbing to communism because we made Moscow and Beijing our partners more than thirty years ago; and this cannot be a coincidence. Look at Peterson’s own country, Canada, and its slide toward communism under Justin Trudeau. In fact, communists are coming to power all over the Western Hemisphere – in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Communists are entrenched in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Rather than marking the end of communism, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the stealthy acceleration of communist subversion around the world.

If we look at things from a strategic standpoint, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was the proverbial “poison pawn” in a Russian gambit that almost failed. In blaming the West for taking that “poison pawn,” Peterson has forgotten the ABCs of totalitarianism: NATO’s provocation against Russia was not its eastward expansion. NATO has provoked Moscow by being weak and stupid. In fact, nothing exemplifies our weakness and stupidity more than our readiness to form combinations with Moscow and Beijing by turns. For us, the “China card” was a crutch. And now Peterson wants us to play the “Russia card.” As KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote nearly four decades ago, “False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.”[vi]

Contrary to Peterson’s narrative, America and the West took Moscow at its word in December 1991 when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin. And since NATO was no longer Russia’s enemy, why would Moscow mind NATO expansion? Some observers thought Russia was going to join NATO. After all, the West gave Russia credits, technology, and billions in investments and payoffs. At the same time America acted as if the Cold War was over, neglecting or destroying its nuclear weaponry. Yet Russia did the opposite. In fact, Russian pundits have openly bragged that Moscow outwitted the West. For example, a mocking Pravda article from November 2014 completely contradicts Peterson’s narrative of NATO driving Russia into China’s arms:

…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.”[vii]

Dmitry Sudakov, the writer of this article, is not bemoaning Russia’s fate at the hands of an aggressive NATO alliance. He is laughing at the West’s idiocy. “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington,” added Sudakov. “The West, having discarded Russia, had been cutting its tanks and destroying its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia, feeling its own weakness, kept all tanks and tactical nuclear weapons.” Thus: “When the Americans realized that [they had fallen behind], it was too late. In December 2010, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Rose Gottemoeller, sounded the alarm. The Russians had more tactical nuclear systems that the USA, she said.”[viii]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not an act of desperation. It was an act of exploitation. Russia and China are now attempting to shift – or have already shifted – the balance of power in their favor. Some countries have already understood the nature of this shift. Consequently, Russia’s BRICS[ix] alliance is about to expand. It is whispered abroad that Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join BRICS. If Saudi Arabia turns away from America and joins with Russia and China, an oil embargo might be used to break up NATO or force the realignment of Japan.

Of course, Jordan Peterson may not care because he thinks that America and the West are less deserving of survival than “Christian” Russia. At the same time, our fool of a president “fist bumped” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman instead of shaking his hands during a recent Middle East visit. Biden also suggested, however indelicately, that the Crown Prince had murdered journalist Adnan Khashoggi.

While Peterson would make enemies into friends, Biden would make friends into enemies. Here are two sides of the same coin. Russian active measures have successfully disoriented Western leaders and opinion-makers. This disorientation gives significant advantages to Moscow and Beijing. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are, and know who your enemies are. While Biden is a lost cause in this regard, Peterson may be open to changing his mind. Contrary to what Henry Kissinger built his career on, we cannot safely make friends with anyone we please. A cunning enemy will respond to an offer of friendship with false friendship. And what is more dangerous than a false friend? Fifteen years ago, SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told journalist Pete Earley,

I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia is now your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.[x]

A False Moral Tone

Jordan Peterson became a celebrity because he refused to go along with laws enforcing non-binary gender pronouns. He risked his career for the sake of free speech and many of us admired his outspoken and courageous stand. But now, in terms of the moral tone of Peterson’s discourse, his condemnation of Russian military aggression rings hollow. In fact, his analysis of the Ukraine War is riddled with equivocal statements.

According to Peterson, Putin is “a thug,” yet a “practicing Christian.” Peterson says the Ukraine invasion is “unconscionable,” yet Russia is a “bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.” Peterson says Putin collaborates with “a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin,” yet Peterson does not tell us that Dugin’s philosophy calls for the destruction of America and the smashing of liberal civilization. Out of this, a question rises up: What happened to Peterson’s moral discernment?

Here is Peterson’s thesis about the Ukraine War. He begins with the following question: “Are we [the West] degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner?” Peterson thinks the answer to the question “may well be yes.” Pointing to the culture war, he asks: “How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia … would be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?”

To test Peterson’s thesis let us assume America is the prototype of Western degeneracy. Let us then compare America’s per capita drug overdose and abortion rates with Russia’s. After all, who would argue that the less degenerate country would have a higher number of drug overdoses and abortions? By this measure, of course, Russia is more degenerate than the United States. For example, a 2014 RT report states that 100,000 people die from drug overdoses every year in Russia.[xi] The same statistic for Americans in 2014 was 47,055.[xii] But then, America has more than twice as many people as Russia has. In per capita terms, this means Russia has roughly four and a half times the overdose rate as America. If we look at abortion, we find an even more interesting statistic. Despite a large drop in abortions over the past decade, Russia still has the highest per capita abortion rate in the world. The 2022 abortion rate in Russia was 53.7 compared to 20.8 for the United States.[xiii]

Question: Did Peterson give any real thought to his bizarre hypothesis of comparative Western degeneracy before promoting the idea? Quite obviously, it is inconceivable that he took any trouble with it at all. Furthermore, as he is an intellectual superstar, some people will take his malign anti-Western hypothesis as a profound insight. So, the question arises: Why is Peterson doing this? Why is he being so irresponsible with such a serious subject? Why forward pro-Russian/anti-Western bigotry to over 1.4 million online followers?

In his book, Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that our “first reality” is moral. It is Truth. And those who want to evade the Truth end up adopting a false reality which “permits killing” and other horrors. This is the essence of moral degeneracy, according to Voegelin. In the case of Jordon Peterson, we have a professor who once stood against moral degeneracy; but now he inexplicably offers an apologia for killing and other horrors perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine. Voegelin wrote, “this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory.”[xiv]

One becomes an accessory after the fact by providing rhetorical cover for malefactors engaged in mass slaughter. For what else do we call it when a man suggests that the West is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner” thereby compelling Russia “to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine – merely to keep the pathological West out of that country?” This becomes more egregious when accompanied by Peterson’s grotesquely cynical comment that nobody “gives a damn about Ukraine.” And then Peterson conjures up the Holodomor – Stalin’s terror famine against Ukraine, suggesting that Western observers who oppose the invasion of Ukraine are hypocrites because they do not know what the Holodomor is. This insult to Ukraine’s supporters is compounded by the obscenity of a discourse that nowhere admits the validity of the Ukrainian cause or the courage with which Ukrainians are defending their country.

It would have been far more respectable if Peterson had only said, “I believe we should abandon Ukraine because a nuclear war with Russia is not worth the risk.” We could then discuss the merits of appeasement versus confrontation. But Peterson says the West does not have the moral high ground. We have no right to oppose Russian atrocities. He suggests that the West has morally contaminated Ukraine so that Russia has been forced to stem the pestilence. There is only one faux pa in Peterson’s presentation: He failed to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a special military operation.” As noted earlier, Peterson says the West is “self-aggrandizing” – a crime far worse than invading a neighboring country after declaring that it is no country at all; then knocking down its cities, killing and kidnapping tens of thousands of its citizens, and blocking grain shipments to starving countries in Africa.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist. She was brutally assassinated in 2006. Here is what she said about Putin before her death: “I Dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism … for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents that went on through his first term as president.”[xv] Politkovskaya saw where Putin was taking Russia. She wrote, “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars. Because I want no more of that, I dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”[xvi]

These men of power, these bloody dictators, these serial liars and mass murderers have plagued us throughout history. They always sound reasonable on the surface. But deep down, underneath, they are the same. They want power and glory, wealth and immortality. As a schizophrenic once shouted after assaulting a passerby, “They shall know my name!”

At the outset of his invasion of Poland, Hitler said: “I have tried to solve the problem of Danzig, the Corridor, etc., by proposing peaceful discussion…. In my talks with Polish statesmen I discussed the ideas … from my last speech…. There is nothing more modest or loyal than these proposals … [which] have been refused. Not only were they answered first with mobilization, but with increased terror and pressure against our German compatriots….”[xvii]

Fast forward 82 years….

At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic Alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”[xviii]

Is there no similitude here?

Given his previous denunciations of totalitarian dictatorship, Peterson should have been the first to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, he should have recognized this invasion as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Empire; for that is what is being attempted, even as statues of Lenin are being set up in the newly conquered Ukrainian oblasts.[xix] Is Putin evil? Peterson says “no.” He says Putin “is far less terrible than any leader that has preceded him for about a century.” But here, as elsewhere, Peterson sheds his credibility. Is Putin less terrible than Yeltsin, than Gorbachev, than Chernenko? Whatever happened to Peterson’s rules for life? Rule 8 says, “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Why lay down cover for Putin’s crimes? And what about Rule 37 from Peterson’s original 40 rules? – “Don’t let bullies get away with it.”[xx]

Peterson suggests the West should offer Putin the minimum terms Russia will accept for peace. In other words, let us sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? Because, says Peterson, a single Russian missile would be sufficient to “destroy Britain once and for all.”

How is Putin not a bully?

Here is what I cannot understand about Jordon Peterson. Nobody in the West is threatening Russia with nuclear war. The situation is entirely the other way around. Only Russia is making nuclear threats. Does Peterson realize that he is blaming the side being threatened? Does he realize that he is rhetorically supporting a nuclear bully? Peterson nowhere blames Russia for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Only the West – only the prospective victim – is blamed.

When a war is being fought, and nuclear war is being threatened, we ought to be more circumspect. Let us avoid rhetoric calculated to demoralize our own side. Demoralization, under present circumstances, opens the door to the slippery slope of appeasement. Suppose we could stop a nuclear war by feeding Ukraine to Russia. What countries will be fed to Russia next? How far out will Russia’s “sphere of influence” then extend? Will it stop at Poland or France? Spain or Portugal? Peterson hopes, like Chamberlain at Munich, that the dictator will be satisfied with one bite. Yet Russian officials are already suggesting the conquest of Alaska next.[xxi] Where exactly is Russia’s sphere of influence marked on the world Atlas? Does it include Peterson’s country of origin, Canada? How many nations must be sacrificed to the Russian Moloch? Furthermore, scorn should be poured on the idea that NATO has backed Russia into a corner. Consider, if you will, how large Russia’s corner happens to be. Russia has eleven time zones. How many time zones does Ukraine have? Does the largest country in the world really need further enlargement?

Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up her nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had kept that nuclear arsenal instead of trusting to Russian promises, there would be no war in Ukraine. Peterson thinks the West should negotiate with Russia. But Russia does not keep her treaty commitments. What is the point of negotiating when every negotiation is an exercise in self-deception? We ought to hold the Russians to their past promises before believing in further promises.

It is unfortunate that someone of Peterson stature has given rhetorical cover to Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. In terms of strategy and morality, Peterson has hit a false note. Contrary to what he supposes, Ukraine is not some puppet state created by a CIA coup. President Yanukovych was not deposed. Yanukovych abdicated. He fled his country out of shame and guilt, knowing that innocent blood was on his hands.

In closing I should say that the truth matters, especially when naked aggression has been carried out against an otherwise peaceful country. Jordan Peterson says, “All protestations to the contrary, none of us give a damn about Ukraine.” But that is untrue, Dr. Peterson. It is obviously and unequivocally untrue.

Let me guess, you have an "I Stand With Ukraine" sign in your front yard?


Ukraine is a country that has been completely taken over by globalist entities. Our own Victoria Nuland (former CIA chief) admitted that they overthrew a duly elected president. They are using the country as a headquarters for money laundering, weapons distribution, and probably even human trafficking of children.

"They" are using Ukraine?
(And no I don't have a Ukraine flag or sign - sorry to disappoint you)

The "they" is actually the Kremlin, who is and has been the puppet-master in Ukrainian politics and most of Eastern Europe. They make it appear like US is in charge of all this corruption, so they can give you the narrative they've been feeding you for the last two decades, and have a reason to destroy Ukrainian "Nazis" American liberals and Western Imperialists. It's all a managed drama.

The strategy is to place people in power who are feigning to be anti-Russia, and use them to create the opposition needed to have an excuse to wield more power, which is exactly what happened in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Chechnya, and everywhere else Russia has meddled with. Nuland is half Ukrainian Jew and her husband Robert Kagan is half Lithuanian Jew. This is about placing people in power who have the profile of "bad guy" to Russia or to the world. They are both career politicians and Nuland has been over Soviet/Russian affairs most of her life. She studied Russian literature. She's an actress playing the part of hawk, (just like Kissinger) and is managing Russia's controlled opposition.

So the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that we are sending to Ukraine... are secretly going to.... Putin?

Basically, yes, in that he wants this war to occur, (it's also a training ground and weeding out process for his troops). Controlled opposition is what it is, in order for him to have the excuse to invade. In the interviews with the Ukrainian troops on the ground, they all hated the politicians in Ukraine, the higher ups, who seemed content with endless war. This is exactly what Putin wants.

What happens to America by printing off billions, and throwing it at this war? We further cause inflation, devaluing of our currency, piling on more and more debt. And some of those billions are no doubt being funneled into the hands of the Russians or sympathizers in one way or another. He wants America to become weak economically and militarily, so the more and more we waste our own dollars on proxy wars, the weaker we become (thus you see one of the purposes of all these proxy wars against terrorists) If you look at the what the state of our military is in right now, we are no where near what we need to be to take on Russia and China. And our economy is on the brink of collapse.

[Fred]

That is a whole lot of words to describe why we don't ask a beekeeper's opinion on interstellar travel. For the same reason we don't ask a psychiatrist about politics.

Ha Ha...and who should we ask about politics - a politician? A political science major?

Looks like the author does have his degree and graduate work in political science, government, economics and sociology.

He's a Canadian.

Peterson is Canadian right? Nyquist lives in Northern CA. What is your point by saying he's Canadian?

Peterson has grown considerably since nearly dying. But, as a Canadian, he still relates to the Canadian socialist government. He opposes Trudeau, and rightfully so, but until he starts singing the US Constitution, one can not say that he understands freedom.

[Jonesy]

Rob Smith had some interesting things to say on this.

Who's Rob Smith???

Just some dude that wrote a post about this.

I read what the dude said and there wasn't a lot of substance - just opinion.

Here, just post his whole video rather than an-out-of-context quote. I think Peterson makes a compelling argument:

Rob is right about the comments in the video, too.

[Sarah]

Who's Rob Smith???

Just some dude that wrote a post about this.

I read what the dude said and there wasn't a lot of substance - just opinion.

Here, just post his whole video rather than an-out-of-context quote. I think Peterson makes a compelling argument:

Rob is right about the comments in the video, too.

Well, now that I've watched half of it (It is really long) I think even less of the man. What can I say? I've been trying to open people's eyes to the brainwashing being done by compromised opportunists like him for the last year or more. Everything he says has been said before by Russian propagandists, and I could say a lot more but will have to later. That's fine if you want to believe that Putin and Russia are the saviors of Christianity. When they shut off oil to Europe and eventually invade our country beside the Chinese, you can thank them for destroying all the liberals.

[Jonesy]

Just some dude that wrote a post about this.

I read what the dude said and there wasn't a lot of substance - just opinion.

Here, just post his whole video rather than an-out-of-context quote. I think Peterson makes a compelling argument:

Rob is right about the comments in the video, too.

Well, now that I've watched half of it (It is really long) I think even less of the man. What can I say? I've been trying to open people's eyes to the brainwashing being done by compromised opportunists like him for the last year or more. Everything he says has been said before by Russian propagandists, and I could say a lot more but will have to later. That's fine if you want to believe that Putin and Russia are the saviors of Christianity. When they shut off oil to Europe and eventually invade our country beside the Chinese, you can thank them for destroying all the liberals.

That’s not what he’s saying at all, nor is that what I think…

He acknowledges the monstrosity that Russia is right now, as well as our own faults and pride here in the West.

I’m going to say this at the expense of sounding very ignorant and naive, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. I grew up befriending others with no friends, those who are ostracized from their social group, in the hopes that they themselves don’t turn against the majority from bitterness. Many of them turn out to be strong-minded to deal with it anyways. But I really think Peterson is right that we need strong leadership to make this right. People in Moscow are saying there are government planes flying in and out all the time, pointing to possible collusions. Maybe the leadership does not exist, but this will not end well either way backing the bear into a corner. There needs to be the planting of good seeds for the future between higher leadership. But I’m afraid there’s no hope left in the world for this to happen. Too many of the bad seeds spreading to make any difference of the good seeds except maybe for a small minority.

[Niyr]

I read what the dude said and there wasn't a lot of substance - just opinion.

Here, just post his whole video rather than an-out-of-context quote. I think Peterson makes a compelling argument:

Rob is right about the comments in the video, too.

Well, now that I've watched half of it (It is really long) I think even less of the man. What can I say? I've been trying to open people's eyes to the brainwashing being done by compromised opportunists like him for the last year or more. Everything he says has been said before by Russian propagandists, and I could say a lot more but will have to later. That's fine if you want to believe that Putin and Russia are the saviors of Christianity. When they shut off oil to Europe and eventually invade our country beside the Chinese, you can thank them for destroying all the liberals.

That’s not what he’s saying at all, nor is that what I think…

He acknowledges the monstrosity that Russia is right now, as well as our own faults and pride here in the West.

I’m going to say this at the expense of sounding very ignorant and naive, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. I grew up befriending others with no friends, those who are ostracized from their social group, in the hopes that they themselves don’t turn against the majority from bitterness. Many of them turn out to be strong-minded to deal with it anyways. But I really think Peterson is right that we need strong leadership to make this right. People in Moscow are saying there are government planes flying in and out all the time, pointing to possible collusions. Maybe the leadership does not exist, but this will not end well either way backing the bear into a corner. There needs to be the planting of good seeds for the future between higher leadership. But I’m afraid there’s no hope left in the world for this to happen. Too many of the bad seeds spreading to make any difference of the good seeds except maybe for a small minority.

You'll never change the minds of those with thick-headed preconceived notions, especially when they want everyone to think exactly as they do, otherwise you are an agent with a dark agenda.

[Sarah]

I read what the dude said and there wasn't a lot of substance - just opinion.

Here, just post his whole video rather than an-out-of-context quote. I think Peterson makes a compelling argument:

Rob is right about the comments in the video, too.

Well, now that I've watched half of it (It is really long) I think even less of the man. What can I say? I've been trying to open people's eyes to the brainwashing being done by compromised opportunists like him for the last year or more. Everything he says has been said before by Russian propagandists, and I could say a lot more but will have to later. That's fine if you want to believe that Putin and Russia are the saviors of Christianity. When they shut off oil to Europe and eventually invade our country beside the Chinese, you can thank them for destroying all the liberals.

That’s not what he’s saying at all, nor is that what I think…

He acknowledges the monstrosity that Russia is right now, as well as our own faults and pride here in the West.

I’m going to say this at the expense of sounding very ignorant and naive, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. I grew up befriending others with no friends, those who are ostracized from their social group, in the hopes that they themselves don’t turn against the majority from bitterness. Many of them turn out to be strong-minded to deal with it anyways. But I really think Peterson is right that we need strong leadership to make this right. People in Moscow are saying there are government planes flying in and out all the time, pointing to possible collusions. Maybe the leadership does not exist, but this will not end well either way backing the bear into a corner. There needs to be the planting of good seeds for the future between higher leadership. But I’m afraid there’s no hope left in the world for this to happen. Too many of the bad seeds spreading to make any difference of the good seeds except maybe for a small minority.

So are you comparing Putin to the lonely boy who doesn't have any friends? Putin is a calculating, smooth talking, liar who kills anyone that gets in his way. He has worked his way up the mobster ladder in Russia by commiting crimes for those in his sphere who want to work with him, then stabs them in the back in order to rise higher. Good luck trying to persuade him to be humane. How many people have died from his meddling we'll never know.

We are not pinning the bear into a corner, that is just the narrative they've put out there. The Bear and the Tiger are on the attack, lying in wait these many decades to strike. They've used our wealth and our secrets to build the largest military powers in the world so they could take us on. This Ukraine war was supposed to be about NATO trying to dominate. NATO has never been united or strong, and like the UN, they are tools of the communist conspiracy, staffed by non-western thugs who have an agenda to take down the West. They are controlled opposition.