G. K. Chesterton and the Ukrainian offensive

As Chesterton warned, the statement of obvious truth has become a modern heresy

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green. — G. K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (14 August 1926)

G. K. Chesterton decried the death of common sense. The new secular society, he argued, had ushered in a mind-deadening scepticism that undermined not only spiritual belief, but the foundational secular assumptions, too. Throughout the Enlightenment, doubt became an ethos, expanding finally to encompass even the most basic tenets of rationality and common sense. Eventually, nothing was self-evident — not even the most glaring truths. The ladder of reason, from which Enlightenment secularism had supposedly been built, was kicked away, leaving the Western mind at the mercy of endless scepticism, distortion and outright nonsense.

And so it is now. The compulsory idiocies of the liberal progressives have become so abject, so glaringly false and stupid, that anybody can unpick them. The culture is now a web of self-evident lies and contradictions. Everything has become an object of the new authoritarian sophists, who deal in absurdities, the literal rewriting of history, and scientistic fabrications.

The immutable distinction between the sexes is now supposedly false — a mere “construct”. Blocking the pubescent development of confused children is “healthcare”. The unfathomable and baseless debts that underlie the entire Western financial system should cause us no consternation. Utterly untrammelled immigration from radically different cultures is an indisputable social good. One could go on and on. Living at peace with the modern paradigm requires believing myriad things that simply could not be true — things that cannot be believed by those with common sense and basic intellectual honesty.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 — 1936), the great novelist, philosopher, and Christian apologist

Yet the darkest, most dangerous fallacy at work just now is the current orthodoxy on the Russo-Ukrainian War. It claims that, if given enough money and armed to the teeth with Western equipment, Ukraine will be able to rout the Russian military back to its own border across hundreds of miles of territory. It is not merely that this view is patently wrong: it requires that its acolytes make irrational leaps of faith that defy reason, common sense and sane judgement.

For example, one has to ignore — or be utterly oblivious to — the glaring disparities between the two nations in population-size, mineral wealth, economic power, and military strength. In the same way, were India to declare war on Bangladesh, would it take the brains of an Archbishop to call the winner at the very outset? Indeed, a child would intuit the outcome — unless his mind was filled with propagandist nonsense.

Furthermore, to believe the neoconservative-neoliberal narrative, one must abdicate all knowledge of Russian history. The rout of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Moscow in 1812, and the dreadful sacrifice made at the Battle Stalingrad, must be ignored. The very suggestion that this nation might possess innately a vast spiritual and military resolve that transcends the epochs must be cast from the mind. The narrative demands either ignorance or dishonesty of its followers. Indeed, these two traits very often function in concert: the ignorance and sophistry of liberal dogma breeds a chronic, endless dishonesty.

It is of course not that Russia, by virtue of its innate strength, deserves to win this terrible ordeal. I have explored elsewhere the morality of this conflict, and the geostrategic games by which it was midwifed. The point is that drawing these inevitable, self-evident conclusions is a matter only of honest realism, general knowledge, and common sense.

But, as Chesterton warned nearly a century ago, these are the very things that have been lost in the rise of terminal doubt and nonsense. Hence, vast numbers of people, led by vacuous, credulous elites, have believed Russia to be on the verge of total military annihilation since February last year. It self-evidently has never been true — and, crucially, it would be an absurdity if it were true. Indeed, the opposite is the case: it is the Ukrainians that have been exhausted trying to sustain an all-consuming war against a vastly more powerful nation.

Russia possesses a seven-to-one artillery advantage, a five-to-one manpower over-match on the frontline, and more than seventeen times as many tanks as Ukraine. Moreover, unlike Ukraine, Russia is able to treat its wounded effectively, regenerating them rapidly for the frontline. Hence, it is estimated that, for months on end, seven or eight Ukrainians have been killed for every Russian that has been killed.

Should it surprise us that a highly populous, technologically-capable nation with profound industrial depth should overwhelm its far weaker neighbour? It is not the case that might is right. Rather, it is obvious that this is the way the world is, and attempts to pretend otherwise will lead inevitably to absurdity and catastrophe. To fuel the liberals’ ideological delusions with human lives — Ukrainian conscripts — is downright wicked.

Yet, the lies are finally creaking under their own weight. The Ukrainian offensive of the last two weeks has exposed every contour of the fantasy. Months prior to this, Ukrainian officials warned that their armed forces were woefully underprepared, lacking in equipment, vehicles, weapons, and — above all — trained, fit men. However, Zelensky has been under pressure to show progress to his Western backers, who, in turn, feel obliged to demonstrate the fruits of the proxy war they have waged so enthusiastically at their taxpayers’ expense for sixteen months.

All the while, during the build-up to this offensive, the Russian army assembled a terrible and vast lair of defences across the entire length of the front. The “main defensive belt” consists of thousands of fortifications, many of them several layers deep and defended with immense firepower. In front of this belt lies the “security zone”: a 25-kilometre-deep band of obstacles, minefields, trenches, and tank-traps, designed to attrit and slow the Ukrainians on their approach to the main Russian line.

Two weeks into the offensive, the Ukrainians are yet to reach a single position in the main defensive belt. Hundreds of Western vehicles, including the much-touted tanks that were gifted, have been destroyed by mines, armed drones, and artillery strikes. Russian aircraft have dropped minefields behind advancing columns of armoured vehicles, blocking their escape when they become lodged inside the obstacles of the security zone.

The human tragedy of this is unimaginable. Within the first few days, seven thousand Ukrainian men were killed. The current death-toll is unknown (perhaps by anybody); but it is estimated that well in excess of one thousand men are dying every day. The Ukrainian aid stations are filled with the wounded. As retired US Army colonel and author, Douglas Macgregor, has observed, the Ukrainian combat-capable force was estimated to number only 35,000 to 40,000 troops prior to the offensive. Already it has been weakened terribly. And the catastrophe continues hour upon hour, aided by Western agents and officials.

The Russians, meanwhile, have suffered modest losses. As Macgregor explains, relative to the size of its force and the fact that its core lines have not yet been reached, let alone penetrated, these losses are militarily negligible.

Thus the question now posed by many realist experts is: Once Russian troops emerge from their fortifications, how aggressively will they attack this drastically weakened Ukrainian force? As John Meirsheimer, scholar of international relations at the University of Chicago and longtime critic of US policy in the region, has predicted, the Russian army will likely grind westwards into the next four oblasts (regions) of Ukraine, before holding permanently at the eastern bank of the Dnieper River.

So: what will have been achieved at the end of this? Tens of thousands of those men whom we claim to support will lie dead, their families shattered irreparably, and their enemies emboldened. Washington has chosen, from the start, to fuel this war, using the Ukrainian nation as a battering-ram against Russia. Indeed, US officials have spoken explicitly of using this conflict as an opportunity to inflict lasting damage on Russian military power — a policy as cynical and vicious as it is Ahabian.

But the precise opposite has come true: Ukraine is exhausted of its human and industrial resources; and a newly-potent, battle-hardened, massive Russian force now sits enthroned in eastern Ukraine, convinced — rightly or wrongly — that the NATO alliance means existential harm upon its homeland.

Such absurdities appear in our designs, as Chesterton cautioned, when reality is denied and reason is subverted. When we deny that a triangle is a three-sided figure, and that the grass is green, and that men are men, and that strong nations defeat weaker ones, we fall into the abyss. The only way out is to recover our faith in self-evident truth — common sense — in opposition to the forces of doubt and cynicism to which our world is now beholden.