The West has long cherished a consoling fiction: that history’s bloodier chapters closed with the twentieth century’s great catastrophes, leaving behind a socially matured civilization capable of resolving conflict through markets, dialogue, and the redistribution of resources. This conviction—equal parts progressive teleology and liberal complacency—treated human nature as an infinitely malleable artifact rather than a fixed and flawed constant.
Forced Realism
Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and the end of the West’s civilizational fantasy.
