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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.
Ukraine is an unusual example not because it's one of the few wars short of World War II that's good versus evil, but because it's one of the few ones that's clearly good versus evil. All the factors lined up in such a way that both political parties in the US and evey foreign country that isn't authoritarian itself are all on the same side of the war.
I don't see "clearly good versus evil" at all. From the other perspective, Ukraine is a rebellious breakaway province of Russia. In American history, the Confederacy dearly wanted to be independent at one time - was it unambiguously evil to fight a war to stop them? (granted the slavery thing muddies the waters considerably, but still). There have been lots of wars all around the world to subdue would-be breakaway provinces of greater powers. What business of mine is it whether Ukraine deserves independence or is an uppity breakaway province when I've never set foot within a thousand miles of the place?
A Russian would say they're on the side of good because they need the buffer space to defend against the next Western invasion, which has in fact happened twice in the last 250 years and been horrifical lethal to the Russian people both times. Do you expect them to believe us when we say we totally have no intention of ever doing that again, while NATO keeps gobbling up countries closer and closer to their border?
"Unambiguously evil" is not a characteristic of breakaway countries in general; it's fact-specific to this one case.
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Needless to say I disagree with your analysis. Ukraine is not only a sovereign country but one acknowledged by Russia, and given specific – broken now – assurances, hell, Putin even congratulated Zelensky specifically with winning presidency, like he did for all his predecessors! It's the perfect opposite of the consistency demonstrated by the Chinese with regards to Taiwan, and the Chinese are piss-poor diplomats themselves. I thought that «no take-backsies» is one Schelling point everyone could reasonably agree on. (The notion of NATO as a rival empire is not utterly useless in practice, but from the perspective of those «gobbled up» countries...)
But it's notable that the more unhinged Russian propagandists are also deploying this analogy.
Egor Holmogorov of RT, September 17th:
Part of the reason why I disagree with the "good vs evil" framing is that, once you have framed a conflict in that way, there is no way to end it except the total elimination of the side perceived as "evil". If you want to find peace, eventually you have to see the issue from the perspective of both sides and be able to come up with a solution that acknowledges the physical reality and the concerns of both sides. This is basically impossible if you see the other side as evil. One of the characteristics of most conflicts is that, presuming they didn't end with the total elimination of one side, they tend to end when both sides become weary enough of fighting that they're willing to let go of calling the other side evil and see things from their point of view enough to make some concessions.
I'm not sure if you're trying to make it a bad thing, but personally I see it as a good thing that I can independently come up with an argument similar to what a Russian Nationalist war-backer would use. Now, I certainly don't agree with this fellow when he makes the arguments that total destruction of Ukraine is desirable or that nuclear war is preferable to a perceived Russian loss. I don't agree that it means the "end of Russia as a state and nation", but he does have a little bit of a point in being concerned about how "Big Bad Russia" will be seen in the region after an effective loss to Ukraine and what their longer-term future will be after that.
Does it seem reasonable to be concerned about how effective the Russian nuclear arsenal would be after the poor performance of their more sophisticated forces in Ukraine? From a Western perspective, I definitely don't think we should see it as, well they probably won't work right so Russia is no real threat - far too dangerous to be even a little bit wrong. But from a Russian perspective, if you perceived an existential threat from the Western powers and saw your nuclear arms as the sole trump card guaranteeing your security, how safe would you feel?
Or seek the total elimination of the side perceived as evil, as you note in the prior sentence.
Well yeah. But if we decide we're going with that solution, then we validate the allegedly paranoid fears of the Russian Nationalists, including the guy that @DaseindustriesLtd quoted above. If that's the plan, then it's their best move to seek to dominate Ukraine and any other neighbors who they view as uppity at any cost as a necessary defensive buffer against our upcoming attempts to totally eliminate them.
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Every war is clearly good versus evil for the first few months/years. It's only later that people begin to take a more nuanced view. Who, at the time, did not view WWI, II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan the same way? I recall the same quivering righteousness over Syria.
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All the non-authoritarian states are supporting Ukraine, that’s true, but the problem with the good vs. evil mindset is the Ukrainian state itself which isn’t good by any reasonable standard
In this case the bar is incredibly low: Didn't attack another country with the explicit intention of annexing it and didn't threaten several other countries that you're going to conquer them? Ok, you're good.
Ukraine may not be super good but Russia's doing all it can to act as a stereotypical comic book villain.
In the event you're serious, rather than habitual and reflexive contrarian #8918944711...
Killing people and taking their stuff is bad. Killing lots of people and taking their everything is worse.
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I try this line with my trad-right pro-Russia friends in the U.S. -- one of whom was a fringe leftist until COVID swung him far right -- and I get the reply, "I know our government is evil, but I don't know that about Russia." The taint of the U.S. elite is so strong that it makes Ukraine look worse than Russia.
I've found this whole thing very ideologically frustrating. But I do think there is some evidence in my friend's left-right pendulum swing: his complaints about the U.S. government are, essentially, Chomskyite. Chomsky acolytes like Oliver Stone (and, I assume, Glenn Greenwald) grew up assuming the U.S. was being mean to innocent Russians, and can't shake the old allegiances -- that same memeplex is alive now on the right more than the left.
The vaccine mandate was ostensibly for the benefit of the people, and those actually harmed by it, I can assume, are much fewer in number than those harmed by Putin's latest geopolitical ambition. Even if I count only Russians and only those who didn't sign up for it.
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True, Russia bad and must be stopped; Ukraine didn’t cross any red lines and will never be a credible threat to the West; supporting it is in best interests of the western countries.
That said, the Ukraine state is corrupt, authoritarian and highly nationalist; think twice before labelling it’s government morally good.
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