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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.
Woo, but still, This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Leave the song aside, the Age of Aquarius is traditionally associated not with love and peace, but with the veil being lifted, with the lies of society being revealed and shamed, with new facts viewed in the cold light of day. That's how reading different commentators on the Ukraine war has felt to me, like I'm seeing a lot of people in a new light. The tide is going out and we're all seeing who was skinny dipping. The Ukraine war has revealed to us that so many intellectuals who seemed such brilliant thinkers and contrarians in the easy view of times without consequences are infested with the diseases of identity politics, even as so many of them decry identity politics themselves. We're seeing who had real ideological convictions, and who just played team sports with politics. Who opposed the mainstream because they had intellectual disagreements with how things ought to be, and who were just sour embittered losers, feeling a constant need to oppose anything that mainstream culture tells them to support.
A million trads/manosphere blogs/alt-righters love to talk about masculinity and decry the lack of it. They point back to our history to leaders like Teddy Roosevelt ("I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one") who would probably be raising a detachment of volunteers to fight in Ukraine himself; they point back to the American Revolution fought by Lafayette and Pulaski, won by the French and by men trained by Von Steuben; they ask whether modern men would have the guts to defend their homes. Well here, in Ukraine, you can watch men defending their homes! Whatever the greater geopolitical yadda yadda, if you're all about traditional masculine strength and duty, and you aren't admiring this, then your ideological prattle has no meaning. It is just Green and Blue to you, your enemies like Ukraine so you have to hate Ukraine. Somehow men defending their homes are the bad guys because something something globohomo.
Tens of millions of leftists have beclowned themselves falling over backward to announce that the Ukrainians are honorary PoC or something like that. A single swastika at any anti-Lockdown protest makes it a Nazi rally; a whole semi-autonomous regiment of avowed Nazis is just a bit of fun in Ukraine, or the Wagner Group depending which side they happen to be rooting for. Not that most of them will actually do anything about it anyway, other than whine.
BlackLivesMatter, preceded by Covid and followed by January 6th, felt very similar to me. Libertarians I thought I respected turned out to only hate cops when cops did certain things to certain people. The people have a right to protest, but only when they're protesting things I care about in the prescribed manner, not if they step out of line and disobey a law and protest against something I agree with. ACAB, except the brave defenders of democracy holding back the fascist hordes they're heroes. The federal government is a shadowy cabal of tyrants, but we Back the Blue when they fight leftists. I write essays online about civil rights and police overreach, but when there is a massive protest march against police overreach I'm just going to complain and call them LARPers instead of going AFK to actually do anything about it. I call the Congress a racist tyranny, but I feel for them when they have to hide under their desks, so traumatic!
Sadly, Porn, I've concluded that for a lot of would-be internet deep-contrarians their ideological front is just an excuse, it keeps them from ever having to actually do anything in real life. The perfect is always the enemy of the good, that protest is just LARPing because it doesn't rigidly conform to all the tenets of [ideological view held by less than 1% of the population]. I can't back that war, not every single soldier is perfectly moral and not every enemy soldier is a subhuman rat. When a real crisis happen it shows us who is interested in acting in real life, and who isn't.
Their primary enemy is the US government, NATO and so on. Russia is opposing these forces. Therefore, they are on Russia's side.
During WW2, the Western Allies were happy to enlist the Soviet Union in their 'fight for freedom'. You had all these puff pieces in the press about how Uncle Joe Stalin was a really nice guy. Stalin was fighting their primary enemy - he was their friend.
Being principled in your alliances is not an effective way to achieve your goals. Imagine if the Western Allies had declared war on Russia in 1939 (since they did indeed invade Poland along with Germany, along with the Baltics and Finland). That would be in accordance with their principle of defending countries from invasion against totalitarian, genocidal powers. But it would've decisively lost them the war. There was no way they were going to defeat the German and Russian armies working together!
"Yes, you were consistent in your principles while we compromised with evil. But we won the war and used that victory to push liberal democracy as far as Ukraine. You lost the war and the entire Eurasian world-island is ruled by dictatorships. So which of us is more true to our ideology?"
For the Western leftist, Azov is good when it's fighting Russians. When the campaign is over, they can be discarded and LGBT multiculturalism introduced. The Azovites think the same thing, presumably.
While the former is plausible, the latter is... I can't think how they can hope that.
Yeah, it's bizarre. I don't think these guys are the best and brightest.
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