Re: <nettime> irregular ukraine linklist

[Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com>]

On 12 May 2022, at 6:05, podinski wrote:

> "Why I Can't Wave a Ukrainian Flag – A Dissenting Teach-In on Russia's
>
> Invasion" by Daniel Herman
>
> [https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/183040](https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/183040)

This is a wordy, milquetoast variation on self-styled 'anti-imperialist left' muzak, right down to the telltale mention of (BOO!) Victoria Nuland. It indulges in the usual bothsidesisms, for example, "imagine that Russia was an economic juggernaut able to spend $5 billion to turn Mexico into a close ally" (it didn't), and "The U.S. also provoked the war with its own election meddling in Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine, a meddling that was magnitudes—light years—greater than whatever Russia did or did not do in our 2016 election" (uh, sure, dude). But maybe most of all it falls into the conventional leftoid trap of casting the alleged 'real' aggressors — an alphabet soup comprised of the US, the CIA, NATO, the NED, and "the West’s lavishly funded NGO complex" — as abstract, impersonal forces, whereas Putin benefits from being psychologized: he's cornered by this, reacting to that, had no choice about the other thing. The essay needs to do that, because it hangs on a single, central proposition, that "Putin, though capable of great brutality, is a rational actor"; I don't think we don't need 'go there' and speculate on his health to wonder how true it is that's he's acting rationally. And, though ostensibly leftist, the author says, "I have no particular expertise in foreign policy, but I defer to those who do (or did before their decease)" — notably, Kennan, Nitze, Warnke, Pipes, and (wait for it...) Kissinger. That alone suggests that the author is good at cranking out lots of words but not so good at gluing them together in meaningful ways.

What the author doesn't do is provide a symmetrically detailed accounting of the internal deliberations and actions of Russia, its allies, its technocratic intellectuals, and their collective institutions and networks over the last decades. Why? To a limited extent, it's the result of multiple biases in global media: language, focus, and of course hegemonic status. If you want to put serious time in, in libraries or even just on twitter, detailed analyses of these things are available. But they're hyperspecialized, and for a reason: the fundamental structure and fabric of governance in Russia, and before it in the USSR, as well as their networks of influence — these things have been traditionally and ideologically opaque for the last century. Reasonable people can disagree about the West's relative openness vs Russia's opacity, that, but essays like this should at least acknowledge their derivative bias front and center. Doing so would make it *much* harder to argue that the West is bad because A, B, C, D, E, F, G, whereas Russia is good because [no data].

One of my main takeaways from these debates about Russia and Ukraine is that the western lefts (very much plural) need to rethink their relationship to the state and, in particular, to the use of force. You don't have to like these things, theoretically or practically, to acknowledge that they exist and are effective — and that, if you don't grab them by the horns, someone else will.

Cheers,
Ted
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