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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 happen to agree with the framing of the basic conflict, that is, the war itself, as a clear case of good vs. evil.
Putin really is a cardboard villain, and if he doesn't assert his villainy like some Commodus but excuses it, this only underscores his low character. He's begun a war that has killed and harmed an insane number of Eastern Slavs, ruined the faint potential of the EU as a sovereign pole, and, what offends me near-infinitely more, doomed Russia herself to disintegration. Yea, that'll be worse than another ethnic cleansing in the ME – even though many among his detractors will pop open champagne. If not for disillusionment with paranoid narratives that have sent us into this deathtrap in the first place (e.g. the «Ukrainian attack on Donbass», which makes sense in the long term, seeing UA commitments, and which I had believed, but which had proved to be a fake casus belli in the early 2022) – I'd have said Putin is consciously playing the villain's role°, or is manipulated into it. But – Conquest's 2nd Law.
Still. This is only true about the war. Let me piggyback here with my own rant.
Russians are being canceled. Gleefully and unjustly, with all the dynamics of American cancellation, by a coalition of groups with nakedly particularist morality, jeering and exploiting SJ sophistry. Ruskies are learning for the first time what canceled Westerners have felt. I've always sympathized with those – in the abstract, worrying mainly about consequences of their disenfranchisement, from the perspective of a man expecting, unlike them, no fairness and reciprocity. Perhaps I can't feel what they (and many of you) feel, and the analogy is still flawed. But… it's probably a good deal more accurate then their own projections of cultural tribal warfare onto Russian-Ukrainian war.
Of course, current problems of Anglophone right wingers are, in my opinion, a joke compared to what's happening to Russians. Over a hundred million people, captive audience to Kremlin as well as their opponents, not just demonized, but – cut off from the financial infrastucture, put on effective no-flight lists in the first world, like some Fuentes or Torba, much of their property seized (likely for reparations), and that's only starting. Perhaps the whole culture war was rehearsal for this; and COVID for its institutional dimension.
That's cause for dread. But what enrages me is minor specific deceit.
The best exhibit is this story. A
FrenchSpanish girl of Ukrainian descent has created a viral thread on a hate crime:Note the hashtags. She knows Twitter game well.
Our smart British friends, @doglatine or @BurdensomeCount, driven by the traditional hatred of Russia, tend to accept those outlandish victim stories at face value, as confirmations of a tendency, «what we always expected from those swine, uh, not YOU SPECIFICALLY, dear Ilforte, but… you know…»
I do. But I, too, am a Russian swine through and through, jaded as they come, from a caste so hated by smaller peoples of the Empire that our genocide is still OK to celebrate openly, and I know that this smells of more bull than Jussie Smollett, a Noose or Chanting Nigger or Indigenous Graves or some Toppled Tombstones. A Russian in France, now? 20 to 1 that he's driven from home by fear of potential mobilization or generic distaste for fascism, like me – and he's not keeping his eyes down and trying to blend with the crowd, but barbarically attempting a one-man genocide of ethnic Ukrainian culture, against women, and the cops are not doing enough?
What else, «This is SUKA country»?
Indeed:
(Other commenters say, he attacked those women because they were listening to Russian music and he assumed they were Russians, or perhaps wanted to punish them for betrayal of Volk; I can't check so will leave it at that).
106 likes, 27 QTs. The original: 5802/379, with a coordinated endorsement of #VisaBanForRussians hash tag. If you check, many have Doge profile pictures. That's NAFO, a growing pro-UA community with paid membership, headquarters in Discord and a rule against mentioning CIA («it doesn't exist», tee-hee); they credulously retweet all out-there stories demonizing Russia, like Galeev and Sumlenny’s «analysis» of Dugin sacrificing his daughter to Moloch. This is a typical one.
The hole in the narrative is downplayed by the author. A Russian with an anti-war flag says:
Her response? Classical ass-save:
Might as well have gone with this.
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There may be no pure good in this world. There are blemished things, and things massively worse. At times it's plain to see which is which. The war of aggression started by Russia under Putin is a cut-and-dry case of evil inflicted on people who are innocent in comparison, and specifically not guilty of this evil.
But they are not innocent in all matters. Ukrainians are famed for self-serving narratives with cute female touch, hiding their darkness; ask a Pole or a Jew if they own up to it enough. Northern Eurasia is a blood-soaked graveyard, and it won't become a happy-go-lucky communion of peoples if only The Prison of Nations is torn down at last and those imperialist ruskies are dealt with. Russia propped up South Ossetia and Abkhazia; democratic and NATO-aligned Georgians did ethnically cleanse Ossetians in the past. And the great Georgian thinker Mamardashvili, superstar so kindly treated by the (ostensibly Russocentric) Soviet regime, did pen this Hottentot-worthy masterpiece:
Armenia has committed war crimes, and sides with Russia&Iran. NATO-aligned Turks and Azeris have committed a genocide – the genocide, class-defining one – against Armenians, and are killing Armenians as I type; this is their hero.
Kamil Galeev, with his training in the Holocaust center and his coked-up wordcel power, can ape the rhetoric of Twitter Anti-Fascists and SJWs well, but in Russian he justifies continental-scale devastation effected by Genghis Khan, the deified champion-father of his race, and gloats at goreposting.
An Estonian fella with a cute doge pfp or a checkmark and bio of «expert», complaining of Russian barbarity, may be not some traumatized Anti-Communist but a bona fide Nazi, still butthurt about the Germanic Reich's failure to purge Slavs and Jews.
A self-appointed Russian Anti-Nazi may have powerful takes on the legitimacy of Baltic states...
So it goes. Civilization is skin-deep, there's dirt on every collective body, and the cheapest way to excuse one's group is to dogpile on the common enemy. In the US, that's white people. In Eurasia, Russian people. This is unjust in principle, and unjust in these specific cases. Let's not cancel peoples and races.
Okay?
An untrue sideswipe, especially in light of the example you chose. I am very much a 'Russophobe' in the sense of viscerally disliking the Russian state, and maybe even the Russian nation, but there's a lot more nuance to it than you paint here. For one, I learned my Russophobia years ago mostly from Russian expat grad students, as we'd sit in my college's MCR digesting dinner over a glass of Tokay. They were the one who taught me the names of Berezvosky, Khordokovsy, Lebedev, etc., who informed me that the chavviest Brit is a positive gentleman and intellect compared to the basest of their countrymen, that Putin's administration was Weekend-at-Bernie's for the Soviet Union, a cargo cult nation held together by inertia and oil and gas revenue. No-one is so good at hating Russia and Russians as Russians themselves, so I learned from the best, but the circumstances meant that of course, a special pardon was given to Russian expats, and a lesser but still significant one given to embittered children of the old intelligentsiya class who were still stuck in Russia (every expat starts has to start as a pat, after all). That's carried over to my attitudes in daily life; for example, I've been cautious about fulminating about the war with my son because there are several young Russian kids at his school, and he might not realise that they're almost certainly not aligned with the problem.
Moreover, a lot of my loathing of the modern Russian state comes from its utterly degenerate form (in the true sense of that term, not the Fuentes/4chan misappropriation). I have some actual respect for the USSR, and when I hear Shostakovich's anthem, I get the stirrings of something. That's not to deny the USSR was an expensive and unforgivably bloody experiment in leftist delusions, of course - Stalin in particular was a disaster of a leader and a human being - but throughout much of its history, there was something at least aesthetically impressive there: a grandeur and ambition. Even beyond the aesthetics, it was, at least at certain times and places, a genuine attempt to built a society on fundamentally new lines from those of the West. Of course, it failed, and history can learn from that, but there was still a hint of something honourable and aspirational there, in some respects even akin to the American Revolution. By contrast, modern Russia is a dumb klepto-petro-state feasting on the bones of its predecessors.
In any case, I think events like the one you describe would prompt at least some skepticism on my part, largely because it pattern-matches to other hoaxes, and partly because it seems unlikely in its own terms. Russians are rare in Europe, and comparatively many of them are wealthy or at least well connected. Far more likely to be ethnic Russian from the Balts than actual Russians (no visa required) or generic anti-Ukraine skinheads from Hungary or Poland or Serbia or even France. The actual explanation would probably have occurred to me too, though perhaps far down the list. I don't always apply such high standards of discretion to news when it comes in from Ukraine - I do a fair amount of willful optimism about the battlefield situation. But in operational matters at least, my predictions seem fairly well calibrated thus far, even accounting for my optimism bias, and I have no ability to materially influence things, so I'm happy to stick with my Pollyannaish prognostications of the military situation.
As for Armenia and Azerbaijan - of course, my sympathies are entirely with Armenia. It's barely a third the size of Azerbaijan with fewer allies and no petro revenues. It's an ancient bastion of Christianity in a part of the world that's been hostile to it for the last thousand years. They've already endured one genocide. But there's very little the West can do here - Armenia is landlocked, has no land corridors to the EU, is a CSTO member, and the EU is in no position to start using energy sanctions on Azerbaijan (the US has more freedom to act, and I'm still holding out hope for Pelosi's visit). I have quite strong feelings about the conflict nonetheless, and if anything, Russia's abject failure to protect its own client state from a genuine case of unwarranted aggression and ethnic cleansing further diminishes my opinion. If there was ever a time Russia could deliver on its promise of upholding Christianity in Asia or of constituting an alternate source of global order, this is it: a small long-suffering Christian nation on Russia's doorstep is under attack from a larger richer Turkic Muslim aggressor, and they have every legal right to intervene, and could do so easily. At the current time, of course, they have the excuse (!) that any potential intervention might provide a distraction from their very important and sincere commitment to several more months of sustained militarised slaughter of Slavs up and down the Dnieper. But what of the 2020 war, when they could have quickly bitchslapped Azerbaijan into accepting the status quo, and proven themselves Armenia's saviour? But no, Putin was greedy and stupid and had no real ideological commitment to helping Armenia, so waited until most of Artsakh had been reconquered by Azerbaijan, then belatedly tried to insert himself as a 'diplomat' (except it turns out, people need to take you seriously for that to work, as we're seeing now). Yet more evidence that Russian civilisation would be a good idea.
Azerbaijan and Turkey consider one another as 'two states, one nation', so naturally Turkey was backing Azerbaijan which is arguably the reason Armenia is losing. Turkey is a decently young country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with a GDP per capita of $37k compared to Russia's stagnant economy with GDP per capita of $30k. In short, Russia can not compete with Turkey in West Asia. Also you seem to missing a lot of nuance about the origin of this conflict, basically it started around the time of the dissolution of the USSR, where Armenians living in western azerbaijan wanted their land to become part of the state of armenia while azerbaijan wanted to keep the borders of their national subdivision during USSR. There was a lot of ethnic cleansing on both sides and a lot of people got kicked out of their land. What should have happened was the territory should have been divided along property lines to bring ethnic group holdings into their respective ethnostate as much as possible barring 'islands' within the other's land.
This is all fair, and I'm aware of the complex situation underlying the conflict including the first war in the 90s, and was gliding over complex nuances. Interestingly, back in the early 1920s, Artsakh was going to be been awarded to the Armenia SSR based on predominant ethnic makeup, but Stalin personally intervened to prevent it.
And you're right about Turkey. Armenia has been very unlucky with its neighbours.
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