#michael millerman

First, I trust my own position is clear, and it’s going to become even clearer with the release of my next podcast episode later today. There is no case for Putin’s war; and Dugin seems to me, with whatever allowances need to be made for his potential philosophical sophistication, a peddler of mawkish mystic fascism alien to my own allegiances.

I have, however, a bad post-9/11 feeling about the miasma of weaponized affect surrounding this war on Anglophone social media. I sense a spiraling hysteria that makes it difficult to think clearly about what ought to be done and what can be done, an increasingly absolutist moralism that makes actual morality more difficult by demanding an otherworldly standard. I dislike reckless accusations of treason or disloyalty; I despise think-of-the-children-style blackmails; and I don’t think it helps anybody in the world to run around in a frothing panic, which, in the social-media era, influences policy-makers too.

I admire the old Edward Said line, “No solidarity without criticism,” and by “criticism” I don’t think he meant persnickety fault-finding but rather an understanding of the actual (not utopian) conditions of possibility for ethical and political action. In his time, Said was labeled “the professor of terror.” The new biography of him, written by an old teacher of mine, reveals instead that he spent all his time behind the scenes trying to talk Arafat out of romantic nationalism, anti-Semitism, and revolutionary posturing—to no effect, alas.

It’s a genuine failure of the western security establishment that it exiles someone like Millerman rather than keeping him on its side, even co-opting him (the FBI maintained a file on Said, but George Schultz had him to the White House). 50 years ago, this would have been an adept “Russia hand,” but I get the sense from the outside that the total replacement of thought, even among the elite themselves, with moralistic mass-culture pabulum has done incalculable damage to the very cause these elites hope to defend. I remember in March of 2020, when the office workers began working from home, reading War and Peace was promoted as a quarantine activity. Did they finish it? Does this class of people draw no lessons from it?

The Tolkien/Marvel approach to conflict—where the enemy is absolutely metaphysically evil, an animalistic madman without human motivation—degrades the mind and soul, fully as much as Dugin-style ethno-philosophy. I admire Jack Kirby to a point, but it was a disaster for the liberal imagination when it put Kirby’s intellectual legacy in place of Lionel Trilling’s. Read the Iliad, read Simone Weil on the Iliad. There is evil, I’m sure, but it’s a force, not a person.