1. “It was warmongering Western hysteria and shameless captivity to
CIA propaganda to warn of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.” I
read countless comments almost exactly like this and again and again on the
social media accounts of numerous self-identified lefties and supposed
anti-imperialists in the days and weeks leading up to Putin’s invasion. What’s
there to say to this claim now except, to use the well-known acronym from phone
text and online communication? LOL (short for “laugh out loud”)?
2. “Putin had no choice but to invade
Ukraine.” This is absurd. There was no sudden or immediate
move to join NATO (or any other immediate precipitating action) on Ukraine’s
part close and prior to the invasion. There are numerous other ways in which
Putin could have responded to NATO’s ongoing imperialist (yes) and (yes)
provocative presence in Eastern Europe. He could have doubled down on
diplomatic pressure, threatened to withhold gas and oil from Europe or boost
the price of Russian petroleum, launched a new and smart public relations
campaign against NATO expansion, stopped and re-set after recognizing the two
“independent” republics in Eastern Ukraine and more.
How about just cool his jets and wait for the
fascist Amerikaner Party of Putin fan Trump to take back full US-national power
in 2024-25? The notion that he had no option but to launch a multi-pronged
full-scale criminal invasion causing terror and death in Ukraine (including
Russian troop fatalities) is pathetic on a scale that almost defies belief.
Yes, it’s a complex situation in which many key forces and actors have put
explosives in place, but Putin did not need to press the detonator. As the
Russian-speaking anti-imperialist and CounterPuncher Eric Draitser recently said in one
of his highly informative podcasts on the Ukraine Crisis:
“The left is almost entirely clueless when it comes to the real issues here. Yes of course NATO expansion terrible. Nobody on the Left would support the continued expansion of NATO which is a belligerent power and a threat, but the idea that Putin was forced to make this move is ludicrous apologia for the Kremlin. This not exactly the kind of thing that should be supported by any honest left-wing voices. This is something that needs to be condemned. This is imperialism. And we need to be very, very, very clear about that.
If you call
yourself an anti-imperialist and you’re cheering on the Russians, you’re a
liar, a fake, a hypocrite, and a disgusting piece of garbage. There are people
who are going to die because of this decision that Putin made – this absolutely
unilateral choice that Putin made. He didn’t have to do this.”
3. “Ukraine is a Nazi, fascist, and genocidal state and Russia is engaged in a great anti-fascist and anti-genocide struggle by attacking it.” This is childish Kremlin propaganda that many online “leftists” seem perfectly happy to spit out in defense of Putin’s invasion. Yes, there is a disturbing far-right fascist and neo-Nazi presence in some influential Ukrainian positions. But, no, Ukraine is not a neo-Nazi fascist state. It is a diverse, complex, and (yes) significantly corrupt effort at civic nationalist (not ethno-nationalist) bourgeois democracy with a Jewish president who has ancestors who perished in the Nazi Holocaust.
Russia and Russian politics
contain significant fascist, parties, and elements and characteristics, as do
the United States, Western Europe, and Brazil. A clumsy but actual fascist who
took critical advice from fascists like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and
Michael Flynn held the US White House between 2017 and 2021, but that did not
make the United States a fascist nation during those years.
That fascist president, Donald Trump, had and
retains great respect and even envy for Putin, whose authoritarian and white
nationalist politics check off numerous boxes on the fascist political
playlist, and whose invasion of Ukraine seems like something out of Hitler’s
foreign policy playbook. Ukraine is not committing genocide in Eastern Ukraine.
Russian speaking people in Eastern Ukraine have received terrible and bloody treatment but calling this “genocide” is absurdly over the top and stretches the meaning
of the word beyond recognition.
As “Comrade Redbeard” writes at People’s Voice,
“I suggest Putin put his own house in order before he starts anywhere
else. There’s an awful lot of swastika sporters walking around free and proud
in Russia. Protecting ethnic Russians from genocide? The anti-Russian
ultranationalists wield a frightening amount of power in the streets of
Ukraine, but they are a minority and in no position to carry out a genocide.”
4.
“Ukraine isn’t
a real country.” Nonsense: Ukraine is a real country, with a
distinct if diverse ethnic and territorial base formed during and after the
1917 Russian Revolution and consolidated in the wake of the collapse of
Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. It has been a fully independent and
non-federated state since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The
significant resistance Ukrainian armed forces and civilians are putting up
against the Russian invasion is richly suggestive of a very real national
identity.
5.
“Ukraine is
just a puppet of the United States.” While Ukraine receives
significant US economic and military assistance, that is a gross exaggeration.
Ukraine is a sizeable independent nation situated between imperial power blocs,
trying to pursue its own interests in strategic fashion. Its intermediate
position grants it leverage and its long history of struggle and imperial
oppression (from Russia and Germany alike) gives it lessons in the battle to
survive in the world of competing nations and empires.
FOX
and Friends and the Fog of Whore:
Then
there’s the malevolent and moronic, eco-cidal crap coming out of the minds and
mouths of Trump, Trumpists, and FOX News.
6. “Putin is a strategic genius.
His invasion is brilliant.” Putin-admiring
white-nationalist Republifascists like Donald Trump and Trump’s former
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have voiced sentiments along those lines. The
praise appears to be misplaced. As of this writing, it seems distinctly
possible that Putin miscalculated. His action appears to have potential to
become a strategic and political fiasco for him – a quagmire replete with
thousands of Russian conscript casualties, an angry Russian population, irate
Russian oligarchs, and embarrassed military commanders.
Putin may have underestimated at least three key things: Ukraine’s capacity and will to resist, the West’s capacity to stand together in opposition, and the willingness of middle-class Russians to resist a criminal war against fellow Slavs with whom Russia has many cultural and familial links.
The invasion is unpopular with Russians, with thousands risking
arrest by protesting in the streets and public squares. Russia’s powerful
partner, China, has urged Putin to negotiate with Ukraine. Putin can’t even get
the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, whose elites he recently bailed out
with a military intervention, to join his war.
Western talking heads are not indulging in pure
fantasy by discussing the possibility of Putin losing legitimacy with his
fellow oligarchs and military commanders. The oligarchs are facing significant
losses from Western sanctions against Russian elites, banks (including the
Russian central bank), pipelines and more. The military is looking at potential
humiliation some top generals are likely to blame on Putin.
7. “This wouldn’t have happened if
Trump was president.” The risible Trump bootlicker and
repulsive grifter Glenn “Fog of Whore” Greenwald (please see this for
comic relief) has gone on his favorite media outlet Fatherland (FOX) News to
make this claim. It’s more than a little bizarre: not only was Trump’s
presidency notoriously close and even outwardly acquiescent towards Putin, but
the tangerine-tinted tyrant’s first impeachment resulted from him getting
caught trying to make US military assistance to Ukraine contingent on Zelensky
somehow digging up political dirt on Joe Biden. The more likely scenario under
a second Trump term would have been a Russia-allied White House providing cover
and even assistance for Russian moves into Ukraine.
Perhaps
Putin wouldn’t have felt compelled to go in at all because he would have felt
safe against NATO expansion by the presence of his fellow NATO critic Trump in
the White House. Okay, so therefore we want an eco-cidal white nationalist neo-fascist pandemicist –
a man accurately described by “Fog of Whore’s” former friend Noam Chomsky as
“the most dangerous criminal in human history” – still in the
world’s most powerful and dangerous job, the US presidency? Really?
8.
“Biden and
Europe are not being tough enough in responding to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
because the West is too dependent on Russian oil. The West is excessively
dependent on Russian oil because it has been brainwashed into believing in the
hoax of climate change by leftist environmentalists. Russia’s invasion shows
that we need to smash the radical left Democrats and dig up and burn more
fossil fuels.” This is the eco-cidal argument being made by the
militantly fossil-capitalist climate deniers and planet-cookers at FOX News.
Beyond the question of how tough the West is or isn’t being on Russia (the
sanctions aren’t squat and neither are the arms being sent to Ukraine), it
absurdly portrays Biden and his fellow petro-imperialist Dems as left
environmentalists while using Putin’s invasion as a rationalization for
accelerating the process, already well underway, of turning the entire planet
intro a Greenhouse Gas Chamber.
Which
reminds me of another line from those young Germans of 1848: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in
constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.”
15
Bad Ukraine Narratives - CounterPunch.org
Paul Street is an independent progressive policy
researcher, award-winning journalist, historian, author and speaker based in
Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of ten books to
date… Street’s essays, articles, reviews, interviews, and
commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets… Street’s writings,
research findings, and commentary have been featured in a large number and wide
variety of media venues… Street has taught
U.S. history at numerous of Chicago-area colleges and universities. He was
the Director of Research and Vice President for Research and Planning at the
Chicago Urban League (from 2000 through 2005), where he published a highly
influential grant-funded study…
About
Paul Street - Paul Street
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