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Rage Fueled rant: What is with the intellectual bankruptcy on Ukraine?
I'm not talking about fog of war stuff, or always erroring towards one side... even the most stern eyed realist struggles with emotions infecting analysis...
I'm talking about respected, degree holding, prominent figures... who have built careers around the dispassion of their analysis, engaging openly in the worst, laziest, most childish, intellectual abuses when it comes to Ukraine.
I was listening to a commentator, i had followed for quite some time, and thought of as quite dispassionate (won't link him... he's dead to me) who just opened a video declaring that "The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
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set aside everything else... set aside your faction in the culture war, set aside what you think of the war...
Can you think of another war where this language would be tolerated from an allegedly dispassionate subject matter expert?
"The Second Libyan civil war (2014-2020) was the clearest example of good vs. evil in the 21st century", "The 2014 Gaza War was a matter of Good vs. Evil", "Gulf War 1 was really about Good vs. Evil", "the Falklands was a clear example of Good vs. Evil", "The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was entirely a matter of good vs. evil (though there you could make the case... they were fighting the Khmer Rouge)", "The US invasion of Grenada... really just a matter of good vs. evil", "The Sino-Indian war was really a matter of good vs. evil", "The bay of pigs invasion, when you get down to it, was about good vs. evil", "The French War in Algeria was a clear matter of Good vs. Evil", "The Spanish civil war was a true contest of good vs. evil", "The Irish war of Independence was really a conflict of Good vs. Evil"... WW1? Good vs. Evil. The Russo-Japanese war? Absolutely good vs. evil, had to stop the yellow menace. The Boer war? Entirely good vs. evil (though again there you could make the case... the British, Canadian, and Australian contingent invented the concentration camp in that war to deal with the Rebellious ethnic Dutch colonist...The Boer, the scum race of the Transvaal)
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If you heard any figures saying these were matters of "Good vs. Evil" you'd immediately discount them and probably think them some anti-intellectual freak. In my first year history course I received a D on an essay for an anachronistic, sides taking, argument 1/1000th as egregious. (I argued the attitude expressed by a Ming dynasty diplomat describing India could be interpreted as "Westward Orientalism")
This figure would be embarrassed describing any other war in such terms... hell I'd never even heard him use such language discussing the second world war...
And yet the 2022 Russo-Ukraine war... that's the war so egregious he'll throw intellectual impartiality to the wind in the name of sheer denunciation.
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It's not even the most egregious war currently being fought within 1000km of the Black sea. That infamy belongs either to the reignited Nagorno-Karabakh war where Azerbaijan and Turkey are trying to squelch the young democracy in Armenia, or the ongoing conflict in Syria where turkey is likewise trying to Squelch the increasingly autonomous Kurdistan and its various democratic movements ... We don't hear about these conflicts though, because Turkey is a NATO member and a keystone of Europe's treaties to keep migrants out.
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I could grasp this, though not respect it, if this figure was somehow tied up in the US establishment and had career opportunities riding on it... but he's well independent of that. Just likes the coolaid.
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This trend i also egregious if you consider the rhetoric around the Ukraine war... That its fought for democracy, that Putin is an Autocrat... that this is a war for freedom....
Such as the freedom to criticize your government? Do you? Nope, just criticizing the people the government and media tells me to criticize.
The applause signs around words apparently being more important than any meaning the words themselves might have.
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Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
Or is the Anti-war movement silent because this is Putin and he's now coded pro-trump and Anti-gay... (yet somehow everyone else in central Eurasia isn't)
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Sorry if this is ranting... I actually respected this commentator and this combined with other things was just a remarkable intellectual slide... I feel dirty... like the time engaging with him left me dumber somehow, and now I have to go back through ideas I first heard from him and check for the rot.
I wish there were a more charitable way to say this, but the level of anti-war outrage in the US (and, I suspect, in the western world more generally) correlates almost entirely with the party affiliation of the person currently in the White House.
The MIC is a juggernaut, and it rolls every president of my lifetime but one. Yet somehow, mass protests and general media denunciations only happen when Republicans are in office. We saw this most starkly with Code Pink after Obama was elected. They were media darlings for six years, and then unceremoniously dropped, their membership cratered and they ceased being a nationally relevant organization in the span of a few months, coincidentally at the end of the year, 2008. And this without any scandal on their part or material change in the status of the wars they were protesting.
Now, there's different ways at looking at this phenomenon. One is that the right doesn't have much of an anti-war crowd, but do notice the howls of "Putin supporters" that shouted down anyone who was skeptical of the official narratives at the start of the war. There was some energy there, but it was stamped out pretty quickly. The right just doesn't have institutional support for anti-war activity. It's the sort of thing much more organized by the left, but then is turned off when they are in power.
All that said, I do think the Ukraine conflict is pretty straightforward, one country is invading another to take their territory. I'm sure there have been atrocities (probably on both sides, though probably not equally). But that's just war. If anything, the Russians have been notably gentle compared to their own behavior in past conflicts.
Mass protests and general media denunciations of American foreign policy are quite rare, no matter what administration is in office. People always think about the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, but those were expections; even Afghanistan, I believe, never got a mass protest reaction beyond the usual, ie. the small Communist parties and pacifist groups that kept demonstrating also during the Obama era, like Code Pink. The same orgs generally tend to think that US actions vis-a-vis Ukraine are escalatory, as well.
Iraq and Vietnam, in turn, inspired protests mainly because they led, or had the potential to lead, to mass US casualties. In Iraq, military casualties, despite the "surge", had been high precisely in 2003-2007 period but dropped in 2008 and then became a trickle. Indeed, protesting activity seems to also have subsided right around that era, preceeding the election of Obama, with 2008 only seeing one notable protest with "thousands of protestors" in the US, far cry from earlier tens or hundreds of thousands. The last notable international protests mentioned in Wikipedia take place in 2007.
The war became a standard US conflict where Americans might get killed if they are really unlucky or in specialist tasks where it's obvious to everyone they've fully voluntarily taken a very high risk task. Other than that, the deaths were Iraqi, ie. fundamentally unimportant for American society. In Ukraine, of course, there are no (formal) American troops, so it's even less likely to lead to a protest movement, apart from Ukraine solidarity rallies in the Western world calling for more Western support in the early months.
People's memories are hazy, but Afghanistan was incredibly popular at the time. The US was actually attacked on its own soil. The casualties were even greater than Pearl Harbor.
The anti-war people I knew on September 10, 2001 had reactions ranging from "well, I said the military is only for self-defense, this looks like it" to "shrug I guess we are gonna go to war."
The Onion had a fairly representative debate between pro-war and anti-war factions in the wake of 9/11:
"We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage" vs. "We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage"
That entire issue was brilliant.
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All that can be true, and still does not conflict with what I said. You're looking at the behavior of the relative normies, and I'm talking about the already-ideological. Both can be true, that the true believers are inconsistent and that the general public doesn't pay a lot of attention until their kids start coming home in bags.
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