True evil

“The woke wars have sapped the West of its ability to fight true evil.” So read the headline of an article by Sherelle Jacobs in the London Daily Telegraph back in March, when the Russo-Ukrainian war was entering its second month. “True evil” was, of course, a metonym for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Her idea was a variation on one that was appearing elsewhere in the British press at about that time. A few days earlier, James Marriott had written an article titled “Culture war dwarfed by real clash of values” for The Times of London. In The Sunday Times, a piece by Camilla Long appeared with the title “A real crisis puts the internet whingers into perspective and, yes, your suffering is trivial.”...