Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 333 of William Easterly’s brilliant 2025 book, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest:

Ukraine’s approach to dignity was an attempt at a positive-sum game of liberal values – individual freedom and consent of the governed at home, voluntary international trade, and mutual respect of sovereignty with other nations. The murderous Putin’s approach to dignity was a zero-sum game, bolstering Russia’s national dignity by taking away Ukraine’s. It came after centuries of the West’s own zero-sum game of coercion of people in the Rest in the name of progress.

Sadly, Putin was able to exploit this history to justify his own tyranny at home and abroad, just as Lenin and Hitler had justified their violence by citing Western hypocrisy on liberal values.