Category Archives: Nihilism

Another summer has come and gone, and so it is time for one of lifes greatest comforts: video games. While it can be sad to lament the loss of summer, I find it comforting to lean into fall and even the dreariness that comes from shorter days. So for this week, I found works in progress that had some darker and creepier vibes.

We have atmospheric games and more in Cool WIP, Polygons roundup of eye-catching clips and screenshots of works in progress. In this column, the Polygon staff scours the internet for the most interesting games still under construction to give you a sampler of the coolest up-and-coming projects.

This week we have a cosmic horror driving game, a Metroidvania where a grappling hook is your best friend, a lily pad platformer, a touching game about visiting hospital patients, and a bug-filled adventure from Annapurna Interactive.

The developers of Dead Static Drive describe the game as an anti-Nihilism simulator where you absolutely have to trust others to survive in its world. As far as gameplay goes, it appears to feature intense driving and walking around abandoned spaces. It sports this dreamy, misty look that sets it apart from other horror games. Its developer, Reuben, hasnt announced a release date, but you can check out more info on its Steam page.

Developers of Rusted Moss describe it as a bullet-helly Metroidvania where the main way you get around is using an elastic grappling hook. In the game, you travel around with a little companion who then can transform into this grappling hook. A clip of it in action shows the player using it to swing around the other side of hanging stalactites before grabbing a power-up. Traversal and exploration are key in a Metroidvania game, so it looks like the concept fits the genre nicely. Rusted Moss has a demo available for Windows PC via Steam.

Bramble: The Mountain King is an adventure inspired by Nordic fables. The developer, Dimfrost Studio, posted a clip of a character named Olle running away from a zombie-like beast chasing him in the water. As Olle jumps from lily pad to lily pad, he almost doesnt make it, since they are so floppy and unstable. Even from this short clip, the game looks like itll have a somber, haunting tone. Bramble is set to be released sometime in 2023.

Wayward Strand is the exception to the creepy theme of this list. The game follows one character as they board a floating ship that also functions as a hospital. It appears to be very character-focused, and largely entails exploring its cel-shaded world by talking and getting to know the various patients and workers. It looks like a cheery but emotional game. The best part is that it just came out. Wayward Strand launched on Windows PC Thursday.

I havent seen a whole lot of folks talking about it, but Annapurna Interactive is publishing a creepy game called Cocoon. We dont know a whole lot about it yet, but it looks like it uses a concept similar to Russian nesting dolls where you will explore worlds within other worlds. True to the title of the game, the developers draw on various bug motifs throughout, so the game certainly wont be short of creepy crawlies. Geometric Interactives Cocoon is set to release sometime in 2023.

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This cosmic horror game will force you to trust characters to survive - Polygon

Have you ever wondered if life has a purpose?

Although we live at a time of unparalleled safety, comfort and opportunity, the cultural air that we breathe is heavy with the musk of emptiness and flatness. Weve even had to give it a name: ennui. These are symptoms of a deeper problem: a spiritual crisis of meaninglessness.

Our secular society has discovered the hard way that a world without God is a world without purpose. Were no longer pilgrims on the road to a destination, but wanderers on a never ending journey. Were still avid consumers of stories, but weve stopped believing that there is a divine Author who brings significance to the story of our lives. Thats why atheist Noah Yuval Harari can write in his best-selling book Sapiens that life has no meaning; there are only the stories that we invent to make sense of our otherwise meaningless existence.

Nevertheless, a former sceptic turned Christian, C.S. Lewis once reflected: If the whole universe has no meaning, we should have never found out it has no meaning: just as, if there was no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. If it were true that the universe came from nothing for no purpose, then its a curious thing that we so intensely yearn for purpose. The fact is that all of us desire our lives to be part of something that is bigger than ourselves. And that desire makes better sense in light of the Bibles story that everything came from nothing because it was created with a purpose by Someone. At the centre of history and Gods story is the divine person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is good news for our world teetering on the edge of the abyss of nihilism. The human race struggles with meaninglessness because we have a problem of sinfulness. And sin is demanding to be the author of your own story and destiny.

Humanity attempted to find life by stepping out of Gods story of paradise, only to step into a nightmare of nihilism. Imagine that Harry Potter decides that hes fed up with JK Rowling: his mum and dad were murdered, his uncle, aunt and cousin are abusive; hes been attacked by two-faced teachers, giant snakes, and soul sucking dementors. Harrys now so fed up with Rowlings dramatic story that he decides he wants to write his own comedy script instead. However when he tries to step off the edge of the page, he discovers that it means stepping into oblivion there can be no independent life for the character disconnected from the Author. Thats why sin leads to death. Thats why life in this world appears meaningless, because everyone we know and everything we do will be undone by death. All our self-made stories end up as tragedies!

Nevertheless, God has done something to make it possible for each of our stories to have a happy ending. Whereas sin is our attempt to step out of God's story, salvation is God the author stepping into history, entering into this world and becoming one of us, to rescue us from the tragedy of despair and death. Jesus has suffered the penalty for our sins and conquered the power of death. Jesus invites us into relationship with Himself: to surrender the pen - to make His story our story to share in His happily ever after ending.

Only in Gods story can our lives become truly meaningful and we find the purpose that we were created to fulfil.Rev David J Nixon, Solas

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Belief in God can help us find a purpose in life that we are currently lacking - David J Nixon - The Scotsman

When the members convened in their hometown of Vancouver in 2017 to begin work with longtime producer Jesse Gander on their fifth and final album Premonition, they had no idea what kind of changes were in store for them. Frontwoman Mish Barber-Way was in the studio preparing to record vocals when she realized she was pregnant with her first child. A pandemic followed, then another baby, then the series of massive societal meltdowns that weve all come to call everything thats been going on.

The albums lead single, Date Night, Mish imagines God as a nihilistic bad boy drunk-driving her through a blazing Los Angeles on the way out of town, and between Kenneths riffs and Anne-Maries backbeat, it sounds like exactly what you want playing as you set fire to your old life and hit the highway.

I felt like that part of my life was expiring, so I was projecting those angry and scared feelings out onto the city of L.A. because its safe and comfortable to live in your anger instead of being self-reflective. Mish reveals.

Premonition is about birth and rebirth. Its about leaving behind nihilism while refusing to give up the freedom that it offers. Its about raging against the world while still finding space within it for hope and love. Its about growingand growing olderwithout losing the furious energy of youth. Its about a group of artists whove held it together for a decade and a half of surprising, sometimes shocking ups and downs. Its the last album well be getting from one of the best bands to ever do it.

White LungPremonitionTrack ListingDomino Records

1. Hysteric2. Date Night3. Tomorrow4. Under Glass5. Mountain6. If Youre Gone7. Girl8. Bird9. One Day10. Winter

Premonition is out December 2 via Domino Recording Company across all digital platforms, CD and vinyl. Variants include standard black vinyl and limited edition orange crush.

Pre order Premonition by White Lung HERE

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"Date Night" by White Lung - Northern Transmissions

Bob Dylan is nothing if not obscure. As Paul Simon once said, [With]Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. Hes telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. His textured poetry has depth untold and hidden amid the myriad of swirling images is a cascade of meaning, some of which washes over you, and some you catch as it goes by. This truth has kept his tales constantly evolving, keeping them as fresh as the wind so that decades later you can still derive new meaning.

One track that contains more multitudes than most is his classic and oft-covered anthem All Along the Watchtower. There is something biblical about this timeless tune, but what exactly does that entail? Who is the joker, and who is the thief? Where do they sit in our modern lives? These arent easy questions to answer, but the beauty of Dylan is that even though the truth might escape us, the pursuit is always worthwhile.

Well, crammed in much of Dylans work is the Bible itself. As he once said of Rainy Day Woman #12 and #35, I have never and never will write a drug song. These are people that arent familiar with the Book of Acts. All Along the Watchtower is no differentDylan places biblical tales of old in the context of counterculture to colour his piety with an air of eternity. The search for meaning rambles on in every sense.

The scene that Dylan conjures from the outset is a desolate one. Riders approaching from afar invoke an image akin toGame of Thrones,where a kingdom is soon to be beset with more bad news from nowhere. There is no relief from this bombardment the joker proclaims, and in the modern world where we are greeted with ten grim news stories a day, that sentiment suddenly seems very prescient. The joker seems to plead: How do you rise above this dower malaise?

Well, the thief has a profound answer. He has been privy to this approaching darkness for a long time, it would seemlong enough to invoke the biblical notion of the hour getting late and the sense of salvation that comes with that. Dont get excitable and caught up in this dark storm, he seems to say, you only lose your way down that route, youve got to move on through it. Then you will also be ready to accept Godspeed and good tidings.

This belief comes from a thief no less. Why did Dylan choose to put such wise words in an unreliable mouth? Once more, this is also plucked straight from the Bible and the good thief who was crucified next to Jesus. Therefore, it stands to reason that perhaps the parties chatting in All Along the Watchtower are the pair crucified alongside Christ on the hill of Golgotha. In Catholicism, this was not a moment of despair, but one of salvationthe two riders brought good news.

The fact that a thief can see this is symbolic of the virtue of forgiveness. In the context of the society that Dylan released the song into, this provided an important message. The times were tough, but withAll Along the Watchtower he provided a message that usurped spiritual vapidness and despondent nihilism that pervaded an era of despair in America. In favour, he presented a note of fullness and forgiveness through an attitude of hope and the joyous sequestering of cynicism that comes from looking for solace beyond the despairing insular world of the watchtower.

You cant just stand on your guarded watchtower and look out at the world with a cynical glare expecting only darkness to blight your walls. You have to draw on your own experiences and know that things arent truly as terrible if you grace them with a virtuous disposition. Or at least that is how it seems? Maybe its about something else entirely, but the force is unmistakeably there to behold. A song is anything that can walk by itself, Dylan once said; All Along the Watchtower doesnt walk, it gallops.

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Lyrically Speaking: What is Bob Dylans All Along the Watchtower actually about? - Far Out Magazine

0/5 stars

Pinocchio (2022) is Available Now on Disney+. Despite how significant Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was to animation, I prefer Disneys sophomore attempt with Pinocchio as the film that finally defined Disney. Compared to Snow White, Pinocchio makes improvements on the characters, musical numbers, set design, and especially the story. Pinocchio was the film that made Walt Disney Animation a legitimate figure of Hollywood and established that their debut film was far from beginners luck: The Lion King of its time. But just like The Lion King, modern-day Disney doesnt really care about the sanctity of Pinocchio. Instead, they actively choose to skin the nostalgia off of the film and wear it over something disgustingly different, and from this botched surgery, we get the 2022 live-action remake of the titular wooden boy.

The film follows a similar story to the original. Jiminy Cricket (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) is a drifter who drops in on a clock shop owned by Geppetto (Tom Hanks). As we are introduced to them, Geppetto is doing finishing touches on a marionette puppet that he decides to call Pinocchio. Before he goes to bed, Geppetto wishes to a blue star that his puppet will become a real boy. That star happens to be the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Ervino), who grants that wish and turns Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) into a living wooden boy. From that, Jiminy is hired as Pinocchios conscience, and they now have to trek the dangerous world that includes the conman fox Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key), the greedy ringleader Stromboli (Luke Evans), the childish tourist trap Pleasure Island, and behemoth whale Monstro.

Another similar thing about Pinocchio and The Lion King is that their remakes are tied for one of the worst films to be ever made in the entire history of cinema. I cannot find any joy in this film, even as a guilty pleasure. I find nothing but pure unadulterated nihilism, like I did from The Lion King (2019).

I have a love-hate relationship with Robert Zemeckis. On one hand, hes the director that made stellar blockbuster films like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, moving masterpieces like Contact and Castaway, as well as some projects that came from totally out of left field, like The Polar Express and Welcome to Marwen. On the other hand, theres Pinocchio. The film, for the worse, neuters all of Zemeckis dynamic directorial style, with most of his frames in extreme-wide master shots that seem so detached to the characters and lack an emphasis on the delightful and cartoonish appeal that the original pulled off. This film feels wrong from a man who is often described as an apprentice of Steven Spielberg.

The only noticeable aspect of Zemeckis that is found within this sterile film is the obviously bad visual effects. Sometimes it can be great, like in Forrest Gump, Contact, and even most recently 2015s The Walk. However, Zemeckis is also responsible for his hand in uncanny valley-like motion capture-based films such as Welcome to Marwen. Visually speaking, this film makes The Polar Express look like Avatar just a massive drug-induced fever dream that makes the scene where Lampwick becomes a literal jackass feel underwhelming. All the VFX shots are equally offensive I could talk about that alone all day and night but all Ill say here is that the froth on the root beers is distractingly fake.

The overabundant CGI that replaces practical sets makes the real-life Tom Hanks stick out like a sore thumb. Hanks trying to perform to someone or something that obviously isnt there makes each scene feel awkward and as wooden as the son that is also not actually on set with him. Benjamin Evan Ainsworth sounds very uncomfortable in his voice acting, as he seems to deliver his dialogue as if he were being threatened with the prospect of being turned into an actual wooden boy. Joseph Gordon-Levitt falls flat at being a loveable and innocent sidekick, and his attempt to sound like the original cricket sounds like Pennywise doing a voice-over in a childs closet.

The 600-800 word limit placed on all articles in the Campus Times doesnt allow me to fully explain everything that I find artistically offensive and grotesque with this remake. These main points should really tell you how I feel about this travesty. I watched the movie on my phone, and when the film ended, I saw the disgusted face I made from this experience mirrored on the darkened screen.

The main conclusion I have from this film is: I want to step on Jiminy Cricket. His design is so horrifying.

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Pinocchio (2022): Disney wished on another wrong star - Campus Times

Few things captivate the attention of Gen Z and the later-born millennials as effectively as Adult Swims smash hit Rick and Morty. If you have eyes, you have undoubtedly seen its characters adorning T-shirts, backpacks, and bongs. If you have ears, you have heard co-creator Justin Roiland lending his voice to an animated character of some kind.

As the show enters its sixth season and its popularity continues to grow while its creators branch out to work on other projects, it is important to recognize the effects it has had on popular culture and why it has ultimately been a negative influence.

To be fair, the shows immense popularity is largely warranted. Adult animation, a genre primarily characterized by cartoon situational comedy, is saturated with mediocrity, thus Rick and Morty is consistently funny in an increasingly unfunny field.

Rick and Morty is also unique in that it is able to revel in vulgarity while exploring complex themes. Frequently, the show explores the unfulfilling nature of amoral nihilism, and younger adults who increasingly have concepts like moral subjectivity forced upon them likely find comfort in the fact that other people animated or otherwise are adrift in nebulous meaninglessness alongside them.

This is further emphasized in how the shows creators Dan Harmon and the aforementioned Roiland are able to combine both razor-sharp wit and shockingly lowbrow humor with a genuine and unique capacity for introspection. It isnt uncommon for the show to provide thoughtfully crafted social commentary and then follow it up with over-the-top violence or a string of incredibly grotesque jokes.

For instance, in a post-credits scene in the shows fifth season finale, its unofficial mascot, Mr. Poopybutthole, reveals that his fear of intimacy led to him driving away his wife and child as he asks viewers if they ever think about how horrified the people we love would be if they found out who we truly are.

This wedding of lowbrow humor and seemingly intellectual existential dread plays a considerable role in why the show is so popular among younger adults, but it is also why its leaving behind a problematic legacy.

When something is successful, people copy it hoping to similarly cash in and edge out their competition. This is an immutable law of industry; the world of animation is not immune.

Thus, Rick and Morty is frequently imitated but has yet to be duplicated, which is partly why its field is over-saturated. For every stand-out show like Rick and Morty, there are a dozen more like Hoops, which is exceedingly trite with its overreliance on autofellatio jokes, and Big Mouth, which is performatively grotesque in its unrelenting portrayal of childhood sexuality.

In hopes of creating the next Rick and Morty, streaming services and cable networks have greenlit dozens of similarly styled and structured shows. But in the pursuit of making quick returns on their investments, they became heavy-handed on the vulgarity while incorporating an insufficient amount of heart or wit to balance it out.

For instance, the entire premise of Netflixs Big Mouth is that young children going through puberty act out in strange and uncomfortable ways. After all, teenagers tend to be strange and uncomfortable people. But the show delivers on this premise by explicitly portraying how these young kids explore their developing bodies and even, at times, shows the cartoon genitals of these children. There is even a recurring gag where one kid develops an emotional attachment to the anthropomorphized couch cushion he uses to pleasure himself.

The whole joke is that children, who are not sexual beings, are being sexualized.

Shows like Big Mouth began to rapidly appear after it became clear that Rick and Morty was incredibly popular, but neither it nor any of the other copycat series spawned in the wake of Rick and Morty has been able to replicate what Roiland and Harmon have done.

The success of Rick and Morty has enabled its creators to cash in and produce several advertisements for big-dollar corporate sponsors, and this is perfectly fine. After all, its not like anyone faults the team behind The Simpsons for producing a slew of commercials for Nestle in the late 90s. One of the many reasons people want to make it big in show business is so they can sell out.

But the shows success has also given them the opportunity to branch out and work on several other creative projects. However, Roiland and Harmons collaborative prowess on Rick and Morty doesnt carry over into their individual projects. Instead, they tend to suffer from the same issues that their imitators experience.

Two current examples of this are Little Demon, a show currently being executive-produced by Harmon, and High on Life, a soon-to-be-released video game developed by Roilands production company.

Little Demon is the story of a 13-year-old girl who discovers she is the illegitimate child of Satan after starting puberty. And since the shows protagonist is the antichrist, its only natural that it glamorizes the occult while disparaging Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Per the Parents Television and Media Council, the first episode of Little Demon features at least 38 f-words, 35 s-words, and animated female frontal nudity. This is pretty indicative of how the rest of the show has thus far been.

In the shows second episode, Chrissy, the daughter of Satan, debuts her new catchphrase, peepee poopoo, while possessing and manipulating people she interacts with in her daily life. And in its third episode, the main characters mother narrowly escapes the clutches of a demon who is subdued through cruel and demeaning dirty talk. Neither of these scenarios is particularly intelligent or particularly funny.

Little Demon is able to make people laugh by making them uncomfortable with an abundance of gore and vulgarity, not because its actually funny.

According to its trailer, High on Life puts players in a situation where they have to take out the entire alien drug cartel to stop its members from trafficking humans. The game is a science fiction first-person shooter, and despite being far more visually impressive than Little Demon, it still appears to suffer from many of the same issues.

Granted, the game is yet to be released, but its promotional materials make clear that its sense of humor relies on excrement jokes, aggressive nonchalance toward violence, and overutilization of the word f-ck.

Both Little Demon and High on Life, despite being crafted by the creators of Rick and Morty, experience a similar phenomenon to that of Rick and Mortys copycats. They over-rely on vulgarity while insufficiently probing the depths of the human spirit or coming close to offering intellectual stimulation.

But this is par for the course for an era whose entertainment uses Rick and Morty as the blueprint for lucrative content. And considering that Rick and Mortys success shows no signs of slowing down, there is no reason to believe its copycats will either.

Thus, there will continue to be a proliferation of unfunny animated comedies that serve no purpose other than generating ad revenue for cable networks and clogging the algorithms of streaming services.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.

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The Complicated Legacy Of 'Rick And Morty' - The Federalist

I often found myself on a lonely highway, Soul picked me up and helped me balance a two way street.

I had to learn that Soul for me was not a pink Cadillac or any other type of coon cage.

Instead Soul was the sonic wave voyaging the black Atlantic that continuously blasted my consciousness throughout the years.

In the early years of my life, I heard the melodies of my people in the foreground and background.

Day after day, James Brown shocked my system by getting me on up out of the bed and on to the good foot.

There were surreal times when my soul soaked super mornings resembled the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.

Soulful late nights repeated by homework illuminated moon lit thoughts such as Chocolate doctor that doctored the document.

Happy feelings were distant even if I am close to Maze.

Equations had got me going in circles, trying to figure out the radius of Soul.

Realizing the distance to any goal was a circle of struggle where times were good and bad.

Trying to stay together brought no pleasure facing inevitable pressure.

Perpetuating my perseverance by balancing the act in stormy weather.

In the rain I found myself often trying to find something that is meaningful on the inside.

The rain combined with strain caused pain in my eyes causing darkness to overflow.

Blind now with no alliances I had to figure out my self reliance.

Still I had trust in Soul, because it was always a guide, even when hope would subside, even if it was pulled away by the rising tide.

I was not sure if my faith would endure because distractions were going on everywhere.

Continuing to take footsteps in the dark being led by Soul that sparked the light in me.

Emerging from the caverns coated with crystals of nihilism I found sublime sunshine.

With new light I now had meaning which I could define.

Soul had brought me into the divine where from then on I was always on cloud nine.

From there my ears were like flowers where the song of the bee would pollinate anytime.

Oftentimes I had been stung by the song ending for a fleeting moment.

Like the tail of a comet that would become the new beginning for more pollination from one flower to the next song.

Even busy bees and playlists come to an eventual end that will be repeated.

Not defeated or conceded, rather energized, this high is temporary.

It seemingly lasts forever until I realize I am not in the garden, but in a concrete world of rhythmless commodities that contain no nectar.

Soul is always around as my protector.

Soul for me was my vector guiding me from my origin with direction and magnitude to destiny.

Soul acted like white blood cells taking out negativity in an experiment of immunochemistry.

My chemistry resides in muddy waters concealed somewhere between a double helix of The Stylistics and the double consciousness of The Delfonics and Isley Brothers.

The music of these groups are always on loop in my mind and adjacent to my spirit with Garveys ghost.

Soul sirens guide my life because their chorus compliments my spiritual compass. This kind of Soul has helped me navigate toward the rhizomes of Soul.

Baltimore Beat is running poems from participants in the group Writers in Baltimore Schools, which offers programming that builds skills in literacy and communication while creating a community of support for young writers.

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"Soul and Things" - Baltimore Beat

Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete. Should Russia continue its illegal blockade of the Black Sea, it could starve Africans and Asians, who depend on Ukrainian grain, precipitating a durable international crisis that will make it all but impossible to deal with common threats such as climate change. A Russian victory would strengthen fascists and other tyrants, as well as nihilists who see politics as nothing more than a spectacle designed by oligarchs to distract ordinary citizens from the destruction of the world. This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.

Discussions of democracy often begin with the ancient city-states of Greece. According to the Athenian legend of origin, the deities Poseidon and Athena offered gifts to the citizens to win the status of patron. Poseidon, the god of the sea, struck the ground with his trident, causing the earth to tremble and saltwater to spring forth. He was offering Athenians the power of the sea and strength in war, but they blanched at the taste of brine. Then Athena planted an olive seed, which sprouted into an olive tree. It offered shade for contemplation, olives for eating, and oil for cooking. Athenas gift was deemed superior, and the city took her name and patronage.

The Greek legend suggests a vision of democracy as tranquility, a life of thoughtful deliberation and consumption. Yet Athens had to win wars to survive. The most famous defense of democracy, the funeral oration of Pericles, is about the harmony of risk and freedom. Poseidon had a point about war: sometimes the trident must be brought down. He was also making a case for interdependence. Prosperity, and sometimes survival, depends on sea trade. How, after all, could a small city-state such as Athens afford to devote its limited soil to olives? Ancient Athenians were nourished by grain brought from the north coast of the Black Sea, grown in the black earth of what is now southern Ukraine. Alongside the Jews, the Greeks are the longest known continuous inhabitants of Ukraine. Mariupol was their city, until the Russians destroyed it. The southern region of Kherson, where combat is now underway, bears a Greek name borrowed from a Greek city. In April, the Ukrainians sank the Russian flagship, the Moskva, with Neptune missilesNeptune being the Roman name for Poseidon.

As it happens, Ukraines national symbol is the trident. It can be found among relics of the state that Vikings founded at Kyiv about a thousand years ago. After receiving Christianity from Byzantium, the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire, Kyivs rulers established secular law. The economy shifted from slavery to agriculture as the people became subject to taxation rather than capture. In subsequent centuries, after the fall of the Kyiv state, Ukrainian peasants were enserfed by Poles and then by Russians. When Ukrainian leaders founded a republic in 1918, they revived the trident as the national symbol. Independence meant not only freedom from bondage but the liberty to use the land as they saw fit. Yet the Ukrainian National Republic was short lived. Like several other young republics established after the end of the Russian empire in 1917, it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, and its lands were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Seeking to control Ukraines fertile soil, Joseph Stalin brought about a political famine that killed about four million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Ukrainians were overrepresented in the Soviet concentration camps known as the gulag. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitlers goal was control of Ukrainian agriculture. Ukrainians were again overrepresented among the civilian victimsthis time of the German occupiers and the Red Army soldiers who defeated the Germans. After World War II, Soviet Ukraine was nevertheless subjected to a slow process of Russification in which its culture was degraded.

When the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, Ukrainians again seized on the trident as their national symbol. In the three decades since, Ukraine has moved, haltingly but unmistakably, in the direction of functional democracy. The generation that now runs the country knows the Soviet and pre-Soviet history but understands self-rule as self-evident. At a time when democracy is in decline around the world and threatened in the United States, Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression provides a surprising (to many) affirmation of faith in democracys principles and its future. In this sense, Ukraine is a challenge to those in the West who have forgotten the ethical basis of democracy and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, ceded the field to oligarchy and empire at home and abroad. Ukrainian resistance is a welcome challenge, and a needed one.

The history of twentieth-century democracy offers a reminder of what happens when this challenge is not met. Like the period after 1991, the period after 1918 saw the rise and fall of democracy. Today, the turning point (one way or the other) is likely Ukraine; in interwar Europe, it was Czechoslovakia. Like Ukraine in 2022, Czechoslovakia in 1938 was an imperfect multilingual republic in a tough neighborhood. In 1938 and 1939, after European powers chose to appease Nazi Germany at Munich, Hitlers regime suppressed Czechoslovak democracy through intimidation, unresisted invasion, partition, and annexation. What actually happened in Czechoslovakia was similar to what Russia seems to have planned for Ukraine. Putins rhetoric resembles Hitlers to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical, both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade, both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.

In 1938, Czechoslovakia had decent armed forces, the best arms industry in Europe, and natural defenses improved by fortifications. Nazi Germany might not have bested Czechoslovakia in an open war and certainly would not have done so quickly and easily. Yet Czechoslovakias allies abandoned it, and its leaders fatefully chose exile over resistance. The defeat was, in a crucial sense, a moral one. And it enabled the physical transformation of a continent by war, creating some of the preconditions for the Holocaust of European Jews.

By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II, Czechoslovakia no longer existed, and its territories and resources had been reassigned according to German preferences. Germany now had a longer border with Poland, a larger population, Czechoslovak tanks, and tens of thousands of Slovak soldiers. Hitler also now had a powerful ally in the Soviet Union, which joined in the destruction of Poland after invading from the east. During Germanys invasion of France and the Low Countries in 1940 and during the Battle of Britain later that year, German vehicles were fueled by Soviet oil and German soldiers fed by Soviet grain, almost all of which was extracted from Ukraine.

This sequence of events started with the easy German absorption of Czechoslovakia. World War II, at least in the form that it took, would have been impossible had the Czechoslovaks fought back. No one can know what would have happened had the Germans been bogged down in Bohemia in 1938. But we can be confident that Hitler would not have had the sense of irresistible momentum that gained him allies and frightened his foes. It would certainly have been harder for the Soviet leadership to justify an alliance. Hitler would not have been able to use Czechoslovak arms in his assault on Poland, which would have begun later, if at all. The United Kingdom and France would have had more time to prepare for war and perhaps to help Poland. By 1938, Europe was emerging from the Great Depression, which was the main force attracting people to the political extremes. Had Hitlers nose been bloodied in his first campaign, the appeal of the far right might have declined.

Unlike Czechoslovak leaders, Ukrainian leaders chose to fight and were supported, at least in some measure, by other democracies. In resisting, Ukrainians have staved off a number of very dark scenarios and bought European and North American democracies valuable time to think and prepare. The full significance of the Ukrainian resistance of 2022, as with the appeasement of 1938, can be grasped only when one considers the futures it opens or forecloses. And to do that, one needs the past to make sense of the present.

The classical notion of tyranny and the modern concept of fascism are both helpful in understanding the Putin regime, but neither is sufficient. The basic weaknesses of tyrannies are generic and long knownrecorded, for example, by Plato in his Republic. Tyrants resist good advice, become obsessive as they age and fall ill, and wish to leave an undying legacy. All of this is certainly evident in Putins decision to invade Ukraine. Fascism, a specific form of tyranny, also helps to explain todays Russia, which is characterized by a cult of personality, a de facto single party, mass propaganda, the privileging of will over reason, and a politics of us-versus-them. Because fascism places violence over reason, it can be defeated only by force. Fascism was quite popularand not just in fascist countriesuntil the end of World War II. It was discredited only because Germany and Italy lost the war.

Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia, January 2020

Although Russia is fascist at the top, it is not fascist through and through. A specific emptiness lies at the center of Putins regime. It is the emptiness in the eyes of Russian officials in photographs as they look into a vacant middle distance, a habit they believe projects masculine imperturbability. Putins regime functions not by mobilizing society with the help of a single grand vision, as fascist Germany and Italy did, but by demobilizing individuals, assuring them that there are no certainties and no institutions that can be trusted. This habit of demobilization has been a problem for Russian leaders during the war in Ukraine because they have educated their citizens to watch television rather than take up arms. Even so, the nihilism that undergirds demobilization poses a direct threat to democracy.

The Putin regime is imperialist and oligarchic, dependent for its existence on propaganda that claims that all the world is ever such. While Russias support of fascism, white nationalism, and chaos brings it a certain kind of supporter, its bottomless nihilism is what attracts citizens of democracies who are not sure where to find ethical landmarkswho have been taught, on the right, that democracy is a natural consequence of capitalism or, on the left, that all opinions are equally valid. The gift of Russian propagandists has been to take things apart, to peel away the layers of the onion until nothing is left but the tears of others and their own cynical laughter. Russia won the propaganda war the last time it invaded Ukraine, in 2014, targeting vulnerable Europeans and Americans on social media with tales of Ukrainians as Nazis, Jews, feminists, and gays. But much has changed since then: a generation of younger Ukrainians has come to power that communicates better than the older Russians in the Kremlin.

The defense of Putins regime has been offered by people operating as literary critics, ever disassembling and dissembling. Ukrainian resistance, embodied by President Volodymyr Zelensky, has been more like literature: careful attention to art, no doubt, but for the purpose of articulating values. If all one has is literary criticism, one accepts that everything melts into air and concedes the values that make democratic politics possible. But when one has literature, one experiences a certain solidity, a sense that embodying values is more interesting and more courageous than dismissing or mocking them.

Creation comes before critique and outlasts it; action is better than ridicule. As Pericles put it, We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. The contrast between the sly black suits of the Russian ideologues and propagandists and the earnest olive tones of Ukrainian leaders and soldiers calls to mind one of the most basic requirements of democracy: individuals must openly assert values despite the risk attendant upon doing so. The ancient philosophers understood that virtues were as important as material factors to the rise and fall of regimes. The Greeks knew that democracy could yield to oligarchy, the Romans knew that republics could become empires, and both knew that such transformations were moral as well as institutional. This knowledge is at the foundation of Western literary and philosophical traditions. As Aristotle recognized, truth was both necessary to democracy and vulnerable to propaganda. Every revival of democracy, including the American one of 1776 with its self-evident truths, has depended on ethical assertions: not that democracy was bound to exist, but that it should exist, as an expression of rebellious ethical commitment against the ubiquitous gravitational forces of oligarchy and empire.

This has been true of every revival of democracy except for the most recent one, which followed the eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. At that point, as Russia and Ukraine emerged as independent states, a perverse faith was lodged in the end of history, the lack of alternatives to democracy, and the nature of capitalism. Many Americans had lost the natural fear of oligarchy and empire (their own or others) and forgotten the organic connection of democracy to ethical commitment and physical courage. Late twentieth-century talk of democracy conflated the correct moral claim that the people should rule with the incorrect factual claim that democracy is the natural state of affairs or the inevitable condition of a favored nation. This misunderstanding made democracies vulnerable, whether old or new.

The current Russian regime is one consequence of the mistaken belief that democracy happens naturally and that all opinions are equally valid. If this were true, then Russia would indeed be a democracy, as Putin claims. The war in Ukraine is a test of whether a tyranny that claims to be a democracy can triumph and thereby spread its logical and ethical vacuum. Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny. The Ukrainian resistance is the wake-up call.

On the Sunday before Russia began its latest invasion of Ukraine, I predicted on American television that Zelensky would remain in Kyiv if Russia invaded. I was mocked for this prediction, just as I was when I predicted the previous Russian invasion, the danger that U.S. President Donald Trump posed to American democracy, and Trumps coup attempt. Former advisers to Trump and President Barack Obama disagreed with me in a class at Yale University, where I teach. They were doing nothing more than reflecting the American consensus. Americans tend to see the war in Ukraine in the long shadow of the 9/11 attacks and the American moral and military failures that followed. In the Biden administration, officials feared that taking the side of Kyiv risked repeating the fall of Kabul. Among younger people and on the political left, a deeper unease arose from the lack of a national reckoning over the invasion of Iraq, justified at the time with the notion that destroying one regime would create a tabula rasa from which democracy would naturally emerge. The idiocy of this argument made a generation doubt the possibility that war and democracy could have something to do with each other. The unease with another military effort was perhaps understandable, but the resemblance between Iraq and Ukraine was only superficial. Ukrainians werent imposing their own vision on another country. They were protecting their right to choose their own leaders against an invasion designed to undo their democracy and eliminate their society.

The Trump administration had spread cynicism from the other direction. First Trump denied Ukraine weapons in order to blackmail Zelensky. Then he showed that a U.S. president would attempt a coup to stay in power after an electoral defeat. To watch fellow citizens die in an attempt to overthrow democracy is the opposite of risking ones life to protect it. Of course, if democracy is only about larger forces and not about ethics, then Trumps actions would make perfect sense. If one believes that capitalist selfishness automatically becomes democratic virtue, and that lying about who won an election is just expressing an opinion like any other, then Trump is a normal politician. In fact, he brazenly personifies the Russian idea that there are no values and no truth.

Americans had largely forgotten that democracy is a value for which an elected officialor a citizen, for that mattermight choose to live or die. By taking a risk, Zelensky transformed his role from that of a bit player in a Trump scandal to a hero of democracy. Americans assumed that he would want to flee because they had convinced themselves of the supremacy of impersonal forces: if they bring democracy, so much the better, but when they dont, people submit. I need ammunition, not a ride was Zelenskys response to U.S. urgings to leave Kyiv. This was perhaps not as eloquent as the funeral oration of Pericles, but it gets across the same point: there is honor in choosing the right way to die on behalf of a people seeking the right way to live.

For 30 years, too many Americans took for granted that democracy was something that someone else didor rather, that something else did: history by ending, alternatives by disappearing, capitalism by some inexplicable magic. (Russia and China are capitalist, after all.) That era ended when Zelensky emerged one night in February to film himself saying, The president is here. If a leader believes that democracy is just a result of larger factors, then he will flee when those larger factors seem to be against him. The issue of responsibility will never arise. But democracy demands earnest struggle, as the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said. Ukrainian resistance to what appeared to be overwhelming force reminded the world that democracy is not about accepting the apparent verdict of history. It is about making history; striving toward human values despite the weight of empire, oligarchy, and propaganda; and, in so doing, revealing previously unseen possibilities.

On the surface, Zelenskys simple truth that the president is here was meant to undo Russian propaganda, which was claiming that he had fled the city. But the video, shot in the open air as Kyiv was under attack, was also a recovery of the meaning of freedom of speech, which has been forgotten. The Greek playwright Euripides understood that the purpose of freedom of speech was to speak truth to power. The free speaker clarifies a dangerous world not only with what he says but by the risk he takes when he speaks. By saying the president is here as the bombs fell and the assassins approached, Zelensky was living in truth, in the words of Vaclav Havel, or walking the talk, as one of my students in prison put it. Havels most famous essay on the topic, The Power of the Powerless, was dedicated to the memory of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who died shortly after being interrogated by the communist Czechoslovak secret police. Putin, a KGB officer from 1975 until 1991, extends the sadistic tradition of interrogators: nothing is true, nothing is worthy of sacrifice, everything is a joke, everyone is for sale. Might makes right, only fools believe otherwise, and they should pay for being fools.

After 1991, the nihilism of late communism flowed together with the complacent Western idea that democracy was merely the result of impersonal forces. If it turned out that those forces pushed in different directions, for example, toward oligarchy or empire, what was there then to say? But in the tradition of Euripides or Havel or now Zelensky, it is taken for granted that the larger forces are always against the individual, and that citizenship is realized through the responsibility one takes for words and the risks one takes with deeds. Truth is not with power, but a defense against it. That is why freedom of speech is necessary: not to make excuses, not to conform, but to assert values into the world, because so doing is a precondition of self-rule.

In their post-1989 decadence, many citizens of North American and European democracies came to associate freedom of speech with the ability of the rich to exploit media to broadcast self-indulgent nonsense. When one recalls the purpose of freedom of speech, however, one cares less about how many social media followers an oligarch has and more about how that oligarch became wealthy in the first place. Oligarchs such as Putin and Trump do the opposite of speaking truth to power: they tell lies for power. Trump told a big lie about the election (that he won); Putin told a big lie aboutUkraine (that it doesnt exist). Putins fake history of eastern Europe, one of his justifications for the war, is so outrageous that it provides a chance to recall the sense of freedom of speech. If one of the richest men in the world, in command of a huge army, claims that a neighboring country does not exist, this is not just an example of free expression. It is genocidal hate speech, a form of action that must be resisted by other forms of action.

In an essay published in July 2021, Putin argued that events of the tenth century predetermined the unity of Ukraine and Russia. This is grotesque as history, since the only human creativity it allows in the course of a thousand years and hundreds of millions of lives is that of the tyrant to retrospectively and arbitrarily choose his own genealogy of power. Nations are not determined by official myth, but created by people who make connections between past and future. As the French historian Ernest Renan put it, the nation is a daily plebiscite. The German historian Frank Golczewski was right to say that national identity is not a reflection of ethnicity, language, and religion but rather an assertion of a certain historical and political possibility. Something similar can be said of democracy: it can be made only by people who want to make it and in the name of values they affirm by taking risks for them.

The Ukrainian nation exists. The results of the daily plebiscite are clear, and the earnest struggle is evident. No society should have to resist a Russian invasion in order to be recognized. It should not have taken the deaths of dozens of journalists for us to see the basic truths that they were trying to report before and during the invasion. That it took so much effort (and so much unnecessary bloodshed) for the West to see Ukraine at all reveals the challenge that Russian nihilism poses. It shows how close the West came to conceding the tradition of democracy.

If one forgets that the purpose of free speech is to speak truth to power, one fails to see that big lies told by powerful people weaken democracy. The Putin regime makes this clear by organizing politics around the shameless production of fiction. Russias honesty, the argument goes, consists of accepting that there is no truth. Unlike the West, Russia avoids hypocrisy by dismissing all values at the outset. Putin stays in power by way of such strategic relativism: not by making his own country better but by making other countries look worse. Sometimes, that means acting to destabilize themfor instance, in Russias failed electoral intervention in Ukraine in 2014, its successful digital support of Brexit in the United Kingdom in 2016, and its successful digital support of Trump in 2016.

This philosophical system enables Putin to act but also to protect himself. Russians can be told that Ukraine is the center of the world and then that Syria is the center of the world and then again that Ukraine is the center of the world. They can be told that when their armed forces intervene in Ukraine or Syria, the other side starts killing its own people. They can be told one day that war with Ukraine is impossible and the next that war with Ukraine is inevitable, as happened in February. They can be told that Ukrainians are really Russians who want to be invaded and also Nazi satanists who must be exterminated. Putin cannot be backed into a corner. Because Russian power is equivalent to control over a closed media system, he can simply declare victory and change the subject. If Russia loses the war with Ukraine, he will just claim that he has won, and Russians will believe him or pretend to do so.

For such a regime to survive, the notion that democracy rests on the courage to tell the truth must be eliminated with violence if it cannot be laughed out of existence. Night after night, Kremlin propagandists explain on television that there cannot be a person such as Zelensky, a nation such as Ukraine, or a system such as democracy. Self-rule must be a joke; Ukraine must be a joke; Zelensky must be a joke. If not, the Kremlins whole story that Russia is superior because it accepts that nothing is true falls to pieces. If Ukrainians really can constitute a society and really can choose their leaders, then why shouldnt Russians do the same?

Zelensky at an event commemorating fallen Ukrainian soldiers, Lviv, August 2022

Russians must be deterred from such thoughts by arguments about Ukraine that are as repulsive as they are untrue. Russian war propaganda about Ukraine is deeply, aggressively, deliberately false, and that is its purpose: to make grotesque lying seem normal and to wear down the human capacity to make distinctions and check emotions. When Russia murders Ukrainian prisoners of war en masse and blames Ukraine, it is not really making a truth claim: it is just trying to draw Western journalists into reporting all sides equally so they will ignore the discoverable facts. The point is to make the whole war seem incomprehensible and dirty, thereby discouraging Western involvement. When Russian fascists call Ukrainians fascists, they are playing this game, and too many others join in. It is ridiculous to treat Zelensky as part of both a world Jewish conspiracy and a Nazi plot, but Russian propaganda routinely makes both claims. But the absurdity is the point.

Democracy and nationhood depend on the capacity of individuals to assess the world for themselves and take unexpected risks; their destruction depends on asserting grand falsehoods that are known to be such. Zelensky made this point in one of his evening addresses this March: that falsehood demands violence, not because violence can make falsehood true, but because it can kill or humiliate people who have the courage to speak truth to power. As the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin has observed, to live inside a lie is to become the tool of someone else. To kill or die inside a lie is even worse, in that it enables a regime such as Russias to reconstitute itself. Killing for lies has generational consequences for Russia, even beyond the tens of thousands of dead and mutilated young citizens. An older Russian generation is forcing a younger one through a gauntlet, leaving the political terrain so slippery with blood that the young can never advance, and the old can hold their places until death. Ukraine is already governed by a generation that is accustomed to choosing its own leaders, an experience Russians have never had. In this sense, too, the war is generational. Its violence, in all its forms, is meant to eliminate the Ukrainian future. Russian state media has made Moscows genocidal aspiration plain, over and over again. In occupied territories, Russians execute male Ukrainian citizens or force them to go and die at the front. Russians rape Ukrainian women to prevent them from wishing to have children. The millions of Ukrainians forcibly deported to Russia, many of them women with young children or of child-bearing age, have to accept what they know to be false to avoid prison and torture. Less dramatic but still significant is Russias deliberate destruction of Ukrainian archives, libraries, universities, and publishing houses. The war is fought to control territory but also wombs and mindsin other words, the future.

Russia embodies fascism while claiming to fight it; Russians commit genocide while claiming to prevent it. This propaganda is not entirely ineffective: the fact that Moscow claims to be fighting Nazis does distract many observers from the fascism of Putins regime. And before North Americans and Europeans praise themselves for winning the battle of narratives, they should look to the global South. There, Putins story of the war prevails, even as Asians and Africans pay a horrible price for the war that he has chosen.

Putins propaganda machine, like the rest of his regime, is funded by revenue from oil and gas exports. The current Russian order, in other words, depends for its existence on a world that has not made the transition to sustainable energy. Russias war on Ukraine can be understood as a kind of preview of what uncontrolled climate change will look like: petulant wars waged by mendacious hydrocarbon oligarchs, racial violence instead of the pursuit of human survival via technology, shortages and famine in much of the world, and catastrophe in parts of the global South.

In Ukrainian history, political fiction accompanies political famine. In the early 1930s, when Stalin undertook what he called an internal colonization of the Soviet Union, much was expected of Ukraines fertile soil. And when his plan for rapid collectivization of agriculture failed, Stalin blamed a long list of ready scapegoats: first Ukrainian communists, then imaginary Ukrainian nationalists whom the communists supposedly served, then imaginary Polish agents whom the nationalists supposedly served. The Politburo, meanwhile, enforced requisitions and other punitive measures that ensured that about four million Ukrainians perished. Those abroad who tried to organize relief, including the Ukrainian feminist Milena Rudnytska, who happened to be of Jewish origin, were called Nazis. This list of fantasy enemies from 1933 is startlingly similar to Russias list today.

There is a larger historical pattern here, one in which the exploitation of the fruits of Ukrainian soil is justified by fantasies about the land and the people. In ancient times, the Greeks imagined monsters and miracles in the lands that are now Ukraine. During the Renaissance, as Polish nobles enserfed Ukrainian peasants, they invented for themselves a myth of racial superiority. After the Russian empire claimed Ukrainian territory from a partitioned Poland, its scholars invented a convenient story of how the two lands were one, a canard that Putin recycled in his essay last year. Putin has copied Stalins fantasiesand Hitlers, for that matter. Ukraine was the center of a Nazi hunger plan whereby Stalins collective farms were to be seized and used to feed Germany and other European territories, causing tens of millions of Soviet citizens to starve. As they fought for control of Ukrainian foodstuffs, Nazis portrayed Ukrainians as a simple colonial people who would be happy to be ruled by their superiors. This was also Putins view.

It appears that Putin has his own hunger plan. Ukraine is one of the most important exporters of agricultural goods in the world. But the Russian navy has blockaded Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, Russian soldiers have set fire to Ukrainian fields, and Russian artillery has targeted grain silos and the rail infrastructure needed to get grain to the ports. Like Stalin in 1933, Putin has taken deliberate steps to risk the starvation of millions. Lebanon relies heavily on Ukrainian grain, as do Ethiopia, Yemen, and the fragile nations of the Sahel. Yet the spread of hunger is not simply a matter of Ukrainian food not reaching its normal markets. The anticipation of shortages drives up food prices everywhere. The Chinese can be expected to hoard food, driving prices higher still. The weakest and the poorest will suffer first. And that is the point. When those who have no voice die, those who rule by lethal spectacle choose the meaning of their deaths. And that is what Putin may do.

Whereas Stalin covered up the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s with propaganda, Putin is using hunger itself as propaganda. For months now, Russian propagandists have blamed a looming famine on Ukraine. The horror of telling such a lie to vulnerable African and Asian populations is easier to understand in light of the Putin regimes racist, colonial mindset. This is, after all, a regime that allowed an image of Obama fellating a banana to be projected onto the wall of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and whose media declared the last year of the Obama administration the year of the monkey. Putin, like other white nationalists, is obsessed with demography and fears that his race will be outnumbered.

The war itself has followed a racial arithmetic. Some of the first Russian soldiers to be killed in battle were ethnic Asians from eastern Russia, and many of those who have died since were forcibly conscripted Ukrainians from the Donbas. Ukrainian women and children have been deported to Russia because they are seen as assimilable, people who can bolster the ranks of white Russians. To starve Africans and Asians, as Putin sees it, is a way to transfer the demographic stress to Europe by way of a wave of refugees fleeing hunger. The Russian bombing of Syrian civilians followed a similar logic.

Nothing in the hunger plan is hidden. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2022, Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the state-run network RT, said that all of our hope lies in famine. As the skilled propagandist understands, the point of starving Africans and Asians is to create a backdrop for propaganda. As they begin to die, Ukrainians will be scapegoated. This might or might not work. All past fantasies about Ukraine and its foodstuffs were at one time believed by influential people. Russian propaganda today has an edge in the global South. In much of Africa, Russia is a known quantity, whereas Ukraine is not. Few African leaders have publicly opposed Putins war, and some might be persuaded to parrot his talking points. Across the global South, it is not widely known that Ukraine is a leading exporter of foodnor that it is a poor country with a GDP per capita comparable to that of the countries it feeds, such as Egypt and Algeria.

There is some reason for hope. Ukrainians have been trying to communicate the reality of their position to people in the global South, so that they can speak the truth about Moscows hunger plan and thereby make it impossible. And as Ukraine has gained better weapons from the United States and Europe, Russias hold on the Black Sea has weakened. In July, Ukraine and Russia signed agreements with Turkey that should, in principle, allow some Ukrainian grain to leave the Black Sea and feed Africans and Asians. Yet the day after it signed the agreement, Russia fired missiles at the port of Odessa, from which Ukraine ships much of its grain. A few days after that, Russia killed Ukraines leading agribusinessman in a missile strike. The only sure way to feed the world is for Ukrainian soldiers to fight their way through the province of Kherson to the Black Sea and to victory.

Ukraine is fighting a war against a tyranny that is also a colonial power. Self-rule means not just defending the democratic principle of choosing ones own rulers but also respecting the equality of states. Russian leaders have been clear that they believe that only some states are sovereign, and that Ukraine is nothing more than a colony. A Ukrainian victory would defend Ukrainian sovereignty in particular and the principle of sovereignty in general. It would also improve the prospects of other post-colonial states. As the economist Amartya Sen has argued, imperial famines result from political choices about distribution, not shortages of food. If Ukraine wins, it will resume exporting foodstuffs to the global South. By removing a great risk of suffering and instability in the global South, a victorious Ukraine would preserve the possibility of global cooperation on shared problems such as climate change.

For Europe, it is also essential that Ukraine win and Russia lose. The European Union is a collection of post-imperial states: some of them former imperial metropoles, some of them post-imperial peripheries. Ukrainians understand that joining the European Union is the way to secure statehood from a vulnerable peripheral position. Victory for Ukraine will have to involve a prospect of EU membership. As many Russians understand, Russia must lose, and for similar reasons. The European states that today pride themselves on their traditions of law and tolerance only truly became democracies after losing their last imperial war. A Russia that is fighting an imperial war in Ukraine can never embrace the rule of law, and a Russia that controls Ukrainian territory will never allow free elections. A Russia that loses such a war, one in which Putinism is a negative legacy, has a chance. Despite what Russian propaganda claims, Moscow loses wars with some frequency, and every period of reform in modern Russian history has followed a military defeat.

Most urgently, a Ukrainian victory is needed to prevent further death and atrocity in Ukraine. But the outcome of the war matters throughout the world, not just in the physical realm of pain and hunger but also in the realm of values, where possible futures are enabled. Ukrainian resistance reminds us that democracy is about human risk and human principles, and a Ukrainian victory would give democracy a fresh wind. The Ukrainian trident, which adorns the uniforms of Ukrainians now at war, extends back through the countrys traditions into ancient history, providing references that can be used to rethink and revive democracy.

Athena and Poseidon can be brought together. Athena, after all, was the goddess not only of justice but of just war. Poseidon had in mind not only violence but commerce. Athenians chose Athena as their patron but then built a fountain for Poseidon in the Acropolison the very spot, legend has it, where his trident struck. A victory for Ukraine would vindicate and recombine these values: Athenas of deliberation and prosperity, Poseidons of decisiveness and trade. If Ukraine can win back its south, the sea-lanes that fed the ancient Greeks will be reopened, and the world will be enlightened by the Ukrainian example of risk-taking for self-rule. In the end, the olive tree will need the trident. Peace will only follow victory. The world might get an olive branch, but only if the Ukrainians can fight their way back to the sea.

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Ukraine Holds the Future: The War Between Democracy and Nihilism - Foreign Affairs Magazine

Storytelling and nightmares take centerstage at Hedgerow Theatre Company this fall. Following a sold out run of Twelfth Night, Hedgerow invites audiences on a darkly comedic journey into a crime story written by one of modern theatre and film's legendary writers.

Leaning into the Halloween season, Hedgerow announces Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman running October 5-31. This thrilling work of theatre is co-directed by Megan Bellwoar and Hedgerow Executive Artistic Director Marcie Bramucci. Opening night is Friday October 7 at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $20-$35 and are available online http://www.hedgerowtheatre.org. All shows are performed at Hedgerow Theatre located at 64 Rose Valley Rd in Media, PA.

"The Pillowman has been described as 'a complex tale about life and art, about fact and illusion,' and all of this is true - but the thing I love most is that it's a DYNAMITE story," shares co-director Megan Bellwoar. "McDonagh's ability to horrify us in one moment and have us laughing despite ourselves in the next is that of a master storyteller, and I'm so looking forward to diving into the darkness and tenderness and hilarity of this particular play."

The Pillowman centers on a writer in a totalitarian state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories, which have striking similarities to a series of recent child murders. The result is an unflinching and urgent work of theatricality - a taut examination of the very nature and purpose of art.

"This play grips and does not let go," notes co-director Marcie Bramucci, Hedgerow's Executive Artistic Director. "You don't want to blink as McDonagh throws twists and turns to keep us off-balance every step of the way." This Laurence Olivier award-winning play is a "thoroughly startling and genuinely intimidating" (The Chicago Tribune) theatrical tour-de-force.

The Pillowman is perfect for macabre storytelling enthusiasts who enjoy tales from The Brothers Grimm to True Crime podcasts, with a dash of Quentin Tarantino for good measure. In a New York Times interview McDonagh said of his work, "There's much more hope and a lot less nihilism in my stuff than sometimes the critics give credit...A black comedy is still a comedy, and a comedy is there to entertain and make people laugh. Black is just one way to go about it."

Philadelphia actor James Kern makes his Hedgerow debut as Katurian the writer whose stories may or may not be connected to a series of murders. He is interrogated by Pete Pryor as Detective Tupolski and Stephen Patrick Smith as Detective Ariel, reunited from Hedgerow's The Weir. Daniel Romano plays Katurian's brother, Michal, following his dynamic turn as Malvolio in Hedgerow's outdoor Twelfth Night this summer.

Hedgerow welcomes back Shannon Zura (lighting/sound design for The Weir) as Scenic Designer, Robin Shane (In the Next Room...) as Costume Designer, and Eilis Skamarakas as Assistant Stage Manager. Joining Hedgerow for the first time are Lily Fossner as Lighting Designer, Garrett Adams as Sound Designer, Terri J. McIntyre as Fight Director and Hedgerow Fellow Gauri Mangala as Stage Manager.

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Hedgerow Theatre Company Dives Into The Darkness With Martin McDonagh's THE PILLOWMAN, October 5-31 - Broadway World

I cant lie to you people because I love you too much, but if there is one genre of music that has always chafed my taint since it first reared its baggy shorts and oversized Ts, its skate punk. Just when I thought I have run these pesky punks out of my yard for good, they come back like a bad case of hives. In the late 90s, these randy chain-wallet kids just completely voided punk of its nihilism and blood-letting and replaced it with bad fart jokes and predictable cookie cutter arrangements while providing the nursery-rhyme soundtracks to sell cell phones and shoes. Basically, skate rock is the piano keyboard tie of punk. I know, I know Im old and jaded AF, but I am beside myself with rage over the fact that these guys are still jumping around in 2022. Also, almost all of them are guilty of ripping off the mighty pop punk beats of the forever rad Descendents! So get out of my yard!!!

For whatever reason, though, there are a ton of mall punk bands that are ending their hiatus from the Warped Tour from decades ago and are now packing into cramped vans to squeeze the last drop out of the kids. There are a couple of Fat Wreck show mentions this week, but the fattest of em all (and arguably the crappiest) will be calling it a day next week so keep yer eye peeled here so I can hip you to a band I greatly dislike just like the curmudgeony old punk record-collector type I am.

Friday: Although Against Me! were sprung from the vibrant Florida punk scene, they often got lumped in with the Warped Tour crew due to bad timing. Its really sad, as chief songwriter Laura Jane Grace was able to distill the best moments of Jawbreaker and Hot Water Music and deliver them in a unique signature style something the Pennywise imitators couldnt come close to. Grace has aged with, uh, grace and can still attack the heartstrings with precision and intent. Grace will reduce the size of le National to an intimate room with opener Lande Hekt Mobina. This is what punk should actually sound like. 1220 Ste-Catherine E., 6:30 p.m., $31.74

As I mentioned last week, there has been a great trend to counter the rising cost of ticket prices, with the odd free show dotting concert calendars, and tonight lets the cheap times roll with another free gigger. At Lopez, you can catch Twenty 2, who launch their new jammer Dismissed with the high-octane rock of the Lookout. Lookout singer Martha Rockhard has promised high kicks, so dont get too close to the stage. 6725 St-Hubert, 7 p.m., free

Saturday: Its an oddly quiet week for the metal scene but there are two gigs that youll want to strap on yer blinding white Reebok trainers for. The first gig for you riff-loving beasts would be Revocation with the solidly heavy support of Krisium and Alluvial at the place where metal sounds and smells best, Foufs. If you are just skimming this column for the riffs then go ahead and skip right down to Tuesdays announcement. I wont hold it against you. 87 Ste-Catherine E., 6 p.m., $34.99

My big pick of the week goes to the locals this week, specifically Montreal superdupergroup Pypy (Red Mass, Duchess Says), coming out of moth balls to turn the dancefloor of lEsco upside down. If you want the old school party vibes of Montreal shows of yore, try and squeeze into this one. Opening is the awesomely titled rock music project Night Lunch. 4461 St-Denis, 8 p.m., $20

A perfect event that will go amazing with way too many Laurentides is happening at the very oo-la-la room of Brasserie Beaubien. For some real-deal rockabilly and rock n roll, head down to the Taj Mahal of bathrooms to catch the Howlin Hound Dogs with Israel Proulx with DJ Pat White keeping things spinnin all night. 73 Beaubien E., 9:30 p.m., $15

I always thought the Replacements were maybe the best damn bar band ever, whether they were playing huge venues or tiny holes in the wall. Using the same measuring stick, I can safely say that Barfly faves Punching Weasel are probably the best damn bar band in our fair burg. If you ever saw Punching Weasels previous stint as the Mighty Ffud, you know I am not blowing smoke here, or, as you young people say, being a jive turkey. The Weasels will be laying it down at Turbo Has with Death Drive. No one under the age of 40 will be admitted.2040 St-Denis, 9 p.m., $10

Monday: If you were hoping to see true post-punk and paisley psych legends Echo and the Bunnymen at Thtre Corona and didnt grab tix yet, yer fucked without a kiss, Jack cause its sold da fuk out. You are probably wondering why, if the show is sold out, am I mentioning it here? Well, the day you come up with a song as well crafted and downright haunting as The Killing Moon, let me know and I will write about yer shiddy band every time you water your plants.

Tuesday: Heshers who were squealing with glee over the mention of the Revocation show will also want to dust off the air guitar for Swedish melodic death metal dudes In Flames with Fit for an Autopsy, Orbit Culture and Vended. This supreme metal fest will all be going down at Thtre Corona, nestled in the heart of lil ol Saint-Henri.2490 Notre-Dame W., 6:30 p.m., $101.15

I really love the fug outta the fine people at Pouzza Fest and know for a fact they are completely doing what they do for the right reasons and work hard AF. Having said that, I am also convinced they are deaf as all of the Fat Wreck bands they seem to love are bands that I hate with all of my blackened-old punker-ouch-my-back-hurts heart. If youre still sporting a chain wallet and cupping farts, youll want to check out Fat Wrecks Get Dead with the oddly not taken name of support band Lost Love. This is all happening at Da Turb, so instead of starting a pit with your built-up angst, act it out through interpretive dance and street magic. 2040 St-Denis, 8:30 p.m., $25

Wednesday: In more news about bands I cant stand, that old 90s mall sensation Lagwagon will return to town to play MTelus with Big Wig (what???) and Grumpster. Will hip hop skate bros Shades of Culture make a surprise appearance? Who knows? Keep your eyes peeled here next week for even more Fat Wreck news in our Lords year of 2022 ya jive turkeys! 59 Ste-Catherine E., 8 p.m., $50

Current Obsession: Sex Pistols, 76-77 CD box set

For more Montreal music coverage, please visit theMusicsection.

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The skate punk brats of the '90s are back to ruin our lives again - Cult MTL