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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.
There's a much more relevant difference: The Russians are blowing up culturally similar people just 1000 km away and they outright announced we would be next. A lot of Americans keep forgetting that Ukraine isn't some distant country but right next to a lot of western world, namely Europe.
I can't really understand this comment with the full context of American action in the Ukraine in the decade leading up to the conflict, nor do I recall Russia ever officially announcing that they would then move on to conquer the rest of Europe after Ukraine (provoking a nuclear conflict and the end of the world in the process). Can you please provide some citations for Russia announcing FIRST UKRAINE, THEN EUROPE? I was under the impression that Russia was taking action in order to prevent the US from setting up a client state next door, as opposed to a world conquest plan.
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Yes but why should Americans care?
Were trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives wasted over that continent not enough?
And why does proximity affect the ethics of it. America arms and funds dozens of crappy countries doing vastly worse. I haven't read of Russians doing anything to Ukrainian civilians under its territorial control comparable to what Israel does to Palestinians...
And as for unmotivated wars of aggression... Russia had a vastly better case for invading Ukraine, right next door/already waging war agianst ethnic russians, than the US ever had for invading Iraq
If they don't care, what point is there to their empire? What claim to moral superiority would they have if they abandoned even Western Europe? You don't believe empires, religions and peoples can have a point. But most believe that some of those are vehicles for genuine values of individual humans to affect reality. Some to good, some to bad ends.
Sure it's mostly bullshit, sure American elites are cynical and exploitative in their own right, sure there's the meta game where unipolarity will probably be catastrophic. Yet Pelosi is making noises supporting Armenia – a de facto unfriendly state – in its time of trial, and Putin is opening a Ferris wheel in Moscow while scores of 200's are rolling into Rostov or are left to rot in Ukrainian soil. It's pretty much impossible to make a coherent moral case for why he's less in the wrong here. As for naked geopolitics, you'll have to invent better epicycles to explain how a hostile empire is better than one you live in.
Kulak. I've brought it up before. My great-grandparents were Kulak Cossacks. They had their own little «revolt» and were curbstomped so hard I only had one blanket and two torn-up photos left as mementos. The folks in Kremlin are institutional, spiritual, legal inheritors of that system. To support them, to excuse them, to downplay their evil is morally bankrupt, and in your particular case plain ridiculous.
Contrarianism is not good enough, because it eventually leads one to contradict oneself right at the core. Please stop doubling down.
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