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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.
This is where I'd smugly point out that there's one big difference between the war in Ukraine and the Standard War Template: the aggression is Russians (the goddamn Russians!) and they're blowing up white people (the horror!)
It's the elephant in the room. Pictures of white people suffering sells clicks. It's very powerful in the attention economy. Pair that with a stock villian that everyone who remembers the cold war can point to on a map (it's quite large) and you get lots of engagement.
I don't have an exact recollection (I was very small), but I don't remember serious opposition to the war really coalescing until 2003 (I remember Al Franken's book from that year being huge) leading into the 2004 election cycle. Bur Kerry of course voted for the Iraq war and didn't promise a withdrawal during his campaign. Also, he lost.
You'd have to be very much a quokka indeed to be so anti-war as to oppose bleeding out someone who you're still in a nuclear stalemate with. As an American, every day I open my eyes with a Russian warhead pointed me, ready to slaughter my family. So pardon me if I cheer on Ukraine's humiliation of Russia's armed forces.
The one big difference between the war in Ukraine and the standard War Template of the recent decades is, actually, that Russia is straight-up annexing parts of their neighboring country. It did so in 2014 and it is gearing up to do so on an even larger a scale.
Of course, all of that is particularly dire when one lives in another neighboring country to Russia (and it's only too natural for Finns to join in cheering Russia's armed forces getting rekt, especially as Russia has taken quite a few of those troops into Ukraine right away from the Finnish border), but even taking that into account, Russian behavior in Crimea is expectional compared to nearly all the other wars in recent decades, including the Iraq War. Annexing parts of another country is really one of those things that should be considered verboten in the post-Cold-War world (Cold War world too, really, that's when the standard was formed), and this implicit standard has really been one of the main pillars of stability, such as it is, in the current global structure, the one thing that has been made a horror in the international community.
It doesn't matter whether the annexing country really, really, really feels the territory is rightfully theirs. It doesn't matter if they consider it crucial to their security. It doesn't matter if the initial annexation (Crimea) was connected to a period of chaos within the original country of the territory. It doesn't matter if the original country is authoritarian, or corrupt, or even that there are militias prowling around with Sonnenrads in their gear. It doesn't matter if the population of the annexed territory agrees. Whatever the reasons, this is one cat we still don't want to let out of the bag.
I can think of one potential counterargument - US is behaving hypocritically, since Trump gave his blessing to another notable recent case of annexation of conquered territory, the Israeli annexation of Golan Hills. That is indeed something Trump shouldn't have done, but still, two wrongs don't make a right. Individual cases of the norm being broken, no matter how hypocritically, don't mean that the international norm no longer exists or that it no longer has any validity. It just means it's been broken. Break it enough times, have that breaking sanctified by the rest of the international community, and then it no longer exists, and it's a free-for-all for all countries to start grabbing parts of other countries, and the bad old times can return.
Annexation might be the most outrageous way to disrupt equilibrium, but if done bloodlessly, it might cause less suffering in the long run, than toppling/installing governments w/t outward annexation. For some reason civilized world strongly prefers smouldering conflicts with violence and suffering spread -- and therefore, perceptually discounted -- across space and time thinly enough to look almost "natural".
Wikipedia on Syrian civil war: 15 March 2011 – present (11 years, 6 months and 3 days); aside from combatant casualties at least 306,887 civilians killed, estimated 6.7 million internally displaced & 6.6 million refugees.
For Iraq estimates and methodologies range wildly.
Costs of war project: 268,000 - 295,000 people were killed in violence in the Iraq war from March 2003 - Oct. 2018, including 182,272 - 204,575 civilians
The PLOS Medicine study's figure of approximately 460,000 excess deaths through the end of June 2011 is based on household survey data including more than 60% of deaths directly attributable to violence.
The Lancet study's figure of 654,965 excess deaths through the end of June 2006 is based on household survey data. The estimate is for all excess violent and nonviolent deaths. That also includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.
Is that burning slow enough?
This is not to justify any other conflicts. The whole framing of "justification" is hilarious, as it presumes innocence of any geopolitical act, unless you can't make up any excuses at all.
Is the claim here that someone should have annexed Syria or something? Annexation and long-run conflicts aren't the opposites, if anything the initial Russian annexation of Crimea just served as tinder for the larger Ukrainian conflict and eventually the current phase of the war.
I don't really follow.
You singled out annexation as an exceptional threat to international stability. Why do we need that stability in the first place? Not to save lives and to promote well-being in the long run? By this metric, I argue, conflicts w/t annexations inflict more damage than bloodless annexations.
That's absolutely an overstretch. Annexation and the launch of separatist movement were a direct response to revolution in Kyiv (revolution doesn't justify that response, I am just stating the causal link). Without annexation, separatist movement alone would have sparked the protracted smouldering conflict, that we observed till February. Invasion was in no way necessitated by the state of the conflict or status of annexed Crimea, unless you believe Putin's narrative.
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