Why should Americans care about the war in Ukraine? Part II of II
An attempt to answer a challenging question.
Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash
by framersqool:
Clayton Craddock sent a message which threw down an intellectual gauntlet on me, of staggering proportions, when he asked, 'tell me Ron... why we should care about the war?' Here is a second response:
The revolution and its bastards -Why invading Ukraine and scapegoating ‘foreign agents’ and the LGBTQ community are two sides of the same coin: the Kremlin’s flight from accountability
The mixture of revolutionary intolerance and traditionalism is the basic recipe for fascism. The Russian authorities claim to be defending stability, but their method remains the method of revolutionary terror. They claim to be the custodians of tradition, but the only well-rooted traditions left in Russia are the late-Soviet “traditions” that make a pastiche of the claims to some venerable ancestral heritage.
Of the whole traditionalist repertoire — Orthodox Christianity, family values, subservient women, social conservatism (including the war on abortion and divorce), patriotic art and architecture, and so on — Putin’s regime has chosen to persecute the LGBTQ. The probable reason is that it banks on a society already permeated with the moral and social norms borrowed from the prison subculture. Still, given enough time, those in power can expand their pursuit of traditionalism, to include the whole array of the options just mentioned. Paradoxically, this is all the more likely since the regime has no special interest in tradition as such, with its inherent ideas and ideologies. Instead, its ideological choices are a byproduct of its greatest wish: to get away with its crimes unpunished, and to be forever free of responsibility. Whatever ideas will best aid this goal will be the ideas promoted by the state.
Now that I am (what's it called again?) 'retired', having received two days ago my first socialist insecurity payment and still trying to get used to the idea of a predictable income I don't have to go out hustling for, one of my pursuits is going to be to continue in earnest on a quest I began during the time of Gorbachev, and still feel a novice at: trying to make some sense of just what it meant when there was a revolution in Russia over a century ago, two revolutions months apart actually, the second being meant to hijack the machinery of state from the first.
The entire world changed beyond recognition, the moment Comrade Lenin boarded that legendary 'sealed train', paid for by the government of Kaiser Wilhelm with armed security provided by a wartime German army, and set off from extended exile in Zurich bound for Petrograd (now St Petersburg, and in 1917 still the seat of power in Russia, briefly held since that February by a ragged coalition of sorta-socialists and idealist intellectuals, who had hastily improvised a provisional government following the abdication of Nicholas II and the end of three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty, with a world war raging on their front porch...)
Trying to answer your challenge is a far more complex undertaking for me than you might think.
And my own point of view is not even so much about any rightness or wrongness of American foreign policy or arms shipments, indeed these are the very least of my concerns and the least of what I feel needs to be given much greater weight and insight in the US.
My intense and newly enhanced interest in these current events is about how we have both over- and under-estimated the threat Russia has posed to America, for far longer than you or I have been drawing breath.
Because the average American doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground about Russia, and cares even less.
In the American worldview Russia is a scary caricature, a comic-book rendering of a bland and brutal Stalinist commissar, turned international gangster for the past thirty years or so, who has nukes to play with, and must not be overly provoked lest these be pointed at us.
In my lifetime I might estimate the Americans I have encountered who know any more than that about Russia as maybe one in ten thousand.... but this figure may be a tad generous.
And I won't be able to spell it all out, this requisitely Tolstoyan reply to what you might have thought a simple or even flippant query to me... ME, the most verbose and STFU-challenged auto-didact thrift-store hippie-intellectual you ever knew, in one or two or ten or maybe even a hundred extemporaneous holdings-forth like this one.
But I mean to try. You did ask for it....
By way of digression, from days before the invasion on February 24, when news outlets in the west were going all cardiac showing maps with big red dots on them meant to represent Russian troop concentrations, and Joe Biden practically blowing a gasket on that outsized ego of his by (for once) having his finger on the pulse of events, and then when the shooting actually started, I knew that I would never again have any business claiming any interest in Russian history if I didn't start paying very close attention to this war, and going about it in my own way: looking for my own answers to questions no one else was even asking.
In my own intellectual process I have developed two basic queries I use in tandem, to begin organizing my research and figuring out what to emphasize: what doesn't add up? and, (I borrow this one from lots of detective dramas about homicide investigations, mostly with subtitles), who benefits?
My early emphasis, on inept western press coverage combined with a lockstep process of think-tankery quickly easing into a set of digestible narratives unworthy of a third-grade classroom, was what led me to seek out and organize a regular set of daily and near-daily better sources set of better sources to examine for my information.
You may find it noteworthy that not a one of these sources now installed as shortcuts on my browser is an American 'mainstream' venue, other than Associated Press, which now serves as little more than a bottom-shelf check-in on American media thinking (or rather, lack of....), and which hardly ever publishes anything on the war I hadn't already become better informed on by a dozen other sources.
But in a sense, you were right in that message the other day, and I realized that an astonishingly stupid American media industry, reporting more stupidly than ever on the biggest event in the history of my lifetime, really wasn't much of a topic in itself.
More like rather effortlessly stating the obvious, and not really germane to the real story at all.
But by starting there, and ending up even days into the war dropping the once-venerable BBC from my source list after I realized that all it was doing was reciting stories long since covered, and covered better, in the blogosphere and in the overnight-sensation universe of 'open-source intelligence' (OSINT, in post-2/24/22 parlance), and that by the time BBC ran such stories they were already days or even weeks out of date, as events developed at an avalanche pace in the war, I began instead to research and collate a whole new type of sources I had never even known existed.
It turns out that by 2022 there had developed a vast news and commentary library of English-language publications and TV/Youtube channels, from all over the world.
Within maybe two weeks after the battle of Hostomel I was already scanning through items originating from Poland, France, Germany, Turkey, India, China, along with both Russia and Ukraine themselves, all written in post-graduate Oxford English, most reaching far further into their stories and examining them from far more angles than any American MSM has dared to even attempt since Watergate.
And so by narrowing down that list to the ones I thought the most credible and reliable and balanced, I began to realize I had some chance of knowing what the hell is going on over there.
And no, Americans do not have one god-damned clue why this war is so crucial to pay close attention to.
And they aren't going to find out by weighing Tucker Carlson's bullshit against Rachel Maddow's bullshit, and maybe throwing in a NYT item or two which have been no better sourced or compiled than BBC's pathetic copy-pasta.
So, I'll be getting back to you on this.
The passage above is from Meduza, a Russian 'opposition-exile' outfit that has been around for a while but is now operating (I think) out of Latvia. It is one of my top-shelf sources and has been for months now.
For a edge-macated fella such as yourself, you should be able to see, just from the above-average syntax and compositional cohesion of these two paragraphs, that this is reportage/analysis of a whole different order than you'll find anywhere in the American press.
Why I include it here touches on this question of the term 'support' and what it means in American discourse regarding the war.
And again, what doesn't add up, and who benefits, is how I am looking at what these two paragraphs, and the vast sub-topic in itself they represent, of new wartime laws passed within Russia and indeed the whole phenomenon of what this war means within that Federation itself, to her own people.
And, whether The American Taxpayer approves of it or not, to ours.
What doesn't add up, for this purpose, is why the American right is so dead-set against giving the slightest impression of 'support' for Ukraine's war to defend itself from an invader.
And it isn't about those handy 'tax dollars' which serve as such a standard shrug when Republicans want to pretend they don't believe in government at all. (I don't, but I'm no Republican.)
Why indeed, I'm still working on it.
But according to Tucker et al, it does seem to have some vague connection to 'traditional values.'
Repubtards love to bluster on about traditional values, you must know.
And Vladimir Putin does love to pander to that precise sentiment, both for the Trump camp's consumption and his own audience across Russia. If you're a Republican and you want to pretty much ignore the war but maybe have a preaching point or two about it just for backup, you can always vaguely suggest that Putin might be a fascist with nukes and a state sponsorer of terrorism and all that UN stuff, but he does seem to 'support' traditional values.
Or something. Just changing the subject and pretending there's no war on at all is the more usual approach, at least here in the heart of Trump country.
Who benefits, from this aggressively self-righteous apathy toward the war in the US, is more for this purpose a question of who doesn't.
And that would be Joe Biden, Gun-Runner Extraordinaire, Leader of the Free World, Waster of Our Tax Dollars: and for as long as that creature sits on that throne, few self-preserving Republicans, and their swing-voter erstwhile allies harping about their Tax Dollars, are going to get on board the Support Ukraine train.
If this invasion had happened on, say, Dubya Bush's watch, Republicans would be all over it, calling for a new draft, demanding even more arms to Ukraine, flirting with preemptive-first-strike dogma, etc, etc.
So the looming potential of a new source of un-bridgeable divides between left and right, this time the question of support-vs-don't-support Ukraine, might to say the least assume far more dangerous proportions in American politics in the very near future.
In much the same way as the question of 'what's your position on Spain?' circa 1937 was just beginning to herald the dilemmas in the near future for the USA. A future which came to include an accidental and unwanted and extremely tax-dollar-costly alliance with the USSR, in the largest war the USA ever fought.
American foreign policy, which has been built on the sand foundation of a colossally over-stated and under-informed fear of Russia since October 1917, and even more so the events of October 1962, is heading down a collision course with its own stupidity once again, to where America enters yet another war for shaky reasons and hardly understanding what it is getting itself into, or whose side it really ought to be on, with hardly a thought to how little anyone in the USA knows or cares about why more American soldiers are placed in harm's way one more time.
Before Pearl Harbor, popular American sentiment was probably fairly evenly divided between those who wanted no part in any European war, those who wanted the USA to become an ally of Germany to make America great again and put America first, and those who barely even knew there was a war on at all.
The idea that America would soon enthusiastically arm its worst enemy the Soviet Union for four years, and relieve it of any burden of fighting Japan at all, probably wasn't very popular with anyone but a handful of college-town types with the correctly pro-Soviet position on Spain. Before Pearl Harbor.
America plays a stupid, ignorant, ill-advised, barely-considered role on world affairs, again and again and again, because the above precisely describes the level of American knowledge of WTF is going on in the world.
And it's happening all over again.
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.