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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.
As someone who generally enjoys your writing - please don’t fall into the trap of granting assent to Putin just because doing so runs contrary to the disingenuous mainstream narrative. He really is an enemy of freedom; almost a quintessential looter type out of Rand novels
I broadly agree with Kulak's take here. Putin isn't great yeah, but the leadership of Ukraine isn't exactly Jeffersonian classical liberals either. It's a standard regional power struggle that America has no real interests in.
If the Ukrainian people desire independence enough to really fight for it, they're welcome to it. If not, whatever, not my problem. I'm fine with selling them a bunch of weapons, but giving them huge amounts of money or direct intervention ought to be off the table IMO.
Do you not suspect that this lip service to the idea of freedom is only paid as long as there's a credible risk of you and others like you effectively or literally defecting to the far group, should the trust be thoroughly betrayed? And that, as soon as there is nowhere to defect to, the hegemony secured forever – the show's over, your carrot is taken away and into the meat grinder you go?
Yep. The western elite has seen Ukraine bar the leaving of the country, ban critical newspapers, murder dissidents, ban opposition parties, imprison opposition leaders... and they have called it the height of democracy and encouraged us to be more like them.
There is no doubt in my mind the American, Canadian, and European elite would gladdly do the exact same things, selectively conscript their ethnic rivals and send them to the suicide units the second they got an excuse.
This is why I'd prefer Putin win... it might result in regime change in the west. I understand you feel the exact same, if not worse, hatred for Putin than I do for my government...
But Putin doesn't want my family dead, and the western elite does... Toronto Star (state funded newspaper) litterally ran front page stories about how th Unvaxxed should be denied medical treatment, and senior regime figures encouraged doctors and nurses to covertly not treat the unvaxxed... this while I was split open and going through multiple surgeries.
Russia is a very long ways away, and I knew people disfigured and unbanked here.
Regime change.. towards what? Alright, suppose Putin wins and suppose it triggers some regime changes in the West — a few European Putin LARPers might come to power — then what? Is your vision of the future a world littered with dysfunctional authoritarian states on the range from Putinist Russia to North Korea?
Then about the vaccinations… I made a Pfizer shot last year. It’s actual effect on my life is zero. Yes, I get it, it’s a bad precedent. Yes, I get it, the governments should stay the fuck out of regulating what you do to your body. Yes, I get it, it can and will get worse i the future. That said: trading a Western government for a Russian one is trading away a whole lot of your actual, important, substantial freedoms for something that is not (at least yet) a big deal.
John Galt had a hidden valley in the mountains, we the Russians have the western countries; where would you go if you achieved your stated ideal of dismantling the western regime? Don’t delude yourself thinking you’d fare well in Russia. That requires either doing nothing of importance (what kind of life is that), swearing fealty to degenerates, or indeed going against the govt and winning.
No putin larpers wouldn't win. The enemies of the regime would win.
You're acting as if a socialist would want the Tzarist forces to lose the Russo-Japanese war because they want Shintoism to take over russia... No they want the Tsarist regime humiliated so the revolution of 1905 could happen (though they wouldn't like that that revolution failed).
Likewise Putinism to the extent its an ideology is already prettymuch failed and dying... I want the Liberal Globalist order to lose to that failing and dying ideology not to prop up putinism but to humiliate and ruin the Liberal international order so that the homegrown ideologies already taking off in the west can have their revolutions as detached from putinism as Liberal Constitutionalism and Socialist revolutionaries were from Shinto-Imperialism.
distant enemies of my enemy can be quite useful.
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