As one has come to expect of Peterson, the presentation is (a) immensely popular, with well over a million views on U-Tube in just four days, and the number still climbing rapidly, and (b) a mix of unreasonable judgements and imaginative ideas amounting to nonsense.
Thus, Peterson begins by describing "what Putin has done" in Ukraine as "unconscionable." But in fact, what Putin has done is simply what any Russian leader was bound to do if they were to avoid being removed from office and replaced by someone with a stronger stomach.
To understand why Putin had no choice, one must understand the circumstances leading to his "special military operation" in Ukraine. It was a direct response to the decision of the Kyiv government to dispatch a hundred thousand troops to Eastern Ukraine, an army including multiple overtly Nazi formations. This action by the, according to Western media, heroic Zelensky -- who now rules Ukraine as a dictator without parliamentary opposition -- had only one conceivable objective; namely, the conquest of the breakaway Donbas Republics that have been under constant Ukrainian shelling for eight years resulting in 13,000 civilian deaths.
Without Russian intervention, Putin was faced with the near certainty of a massacre of ethnic Russians who are characterized by Ukrainian Nazis as Orcs and cockroaches. And there is nothing fake about these Nazis. They are adherents of the ideology of Stepan Bandera, Ukraine's World War II nationalist leader whose followers aided Hitler's Nazis slaughter 30,000 Kyiv Jews, and who traversed the country burning villages and slaughtering hundreds of thousand of Ukrainian Poles. These massacres, Canadians might note, were promoted by Michail Chomiac, a Ukrainian newspaper editor and the grandfather of Justin Trudeau's deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland.
And if anyone doubts that the anti-Russian genocidal impulse lives on in Ukraine, they should not forget the tapped phone conversation in which former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Julia Tymoshenko not only said it was time to "grab guns and kill damn Russians" but urged that eight million Donbas Russians be nuked*.
In a further bizarre judgement, Peterson condemns the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, for supporting Putin's military operation in Ukraine. But the Russian Orthodox Church is effectively a part of the Russian state apparatus. Patriarch Kirill can no more survive as a critic of Russia at war than the Archbishop of Canterbury could have survived had he condemned Britain's fire bombing of German cities during World War II.
In addition, though it is but a minor point, Peterson confuses the Black Sea, or possibly the Sea of Azov, with the Caspian Sea when speaking of Ukraine's offshore oil reserves, notwithstanding that Ukraine more than five hundred kilometers from the the Caspian Sea.
What may seem interesting, at first sight, is Peterson's notion that the Russo-Ukrainian war is a culturally determined European civil war between a re-Christianized Russia and a woke West, the latter having, as it must seem to the Russians, gone insane.
But if momentarily diverting, the idea is obviously wrong. While the woke West is undoubtedly insane, the conflict in Ukraine has nothing to do with culture. For Russia it is a purely defensive war against US imperialism, forced upon Russia by the genocidal actions of the Nazified Kyiv regime toward Ukraine's ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population. As Putin stated recently: "we have no interest in what Zelensky wants. The decisions are made in Washington."
The American objective upon which the US has invested more than $53 billion thus far, and on which other NATO states have invested billions more, is to weaken and then break Russia into a collection of corrupt stans ruled by the likes Poroshenko and Zelensky: states that can be readily looted by Western oligarchs, and occupied by NATO, which could then advance to the border of China, the real threat to American global hegemony.
But to grant him his due, Peterson has one thing right. Russia's attitude to foreign military bases in Ukraine is the exact counterpart to America's Monro Doctrine, which gives warning to the world that the United States will tolerate no foreign military bases in Latin America.
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* And those hated Donbas Russians, the target of Zelensky's US-backed genocidal war, are not newcomers. Some are surely descendants of Russians who settled on the East bank of the Dnieper River in the seventeenth Century, a hundred and more years before the United States even existed.
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