NATO

In answer to my friends on the left who are holding the US as primarily responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, I would respond as follows: Yes, we need to concede that the US broke agreements made with Russia after the Cold War, after German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union – a nation that is the guardian of the memory of the worst assault on any nation in human history, which saw the Nazis take the lives of millions of  Russians (Ukrainians and Belarusians were the two nations most affected in terms of casualties for both civilian and military populations).

. The US did expand NATO up to the borders of Russia when, in fact, there was no longer any need for NATO to exist after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But arms manufacturers saw massive profits in making former Soviet Bloc countries upgraded militarily to NATO standards (thanks to the generosity of loans provided by US arms manufacturers), and they needed an enemy in order to do so, and we know the outcome of that story which goes by the name ‘Cold War.’ And look at the stock market right now – arms manufacturers are making profits heads over heels while Ukrainian civilians are literally flying head over heels as targets of Russian artillery fire. We can bring up the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the like. Or bring up the argument about spheres of interest. Yes, we know that an integration of neighboring countries into U.S.-led military partnerships – bringing NATO to the doorstep of Russia – has helped fuel the crisis. And we can understand the security threat that the US-backed NATO alliance poses to countries bordering Russia, especially when Ukraine is also increasing its commercial ties with the European Union. Yes, we can be critical of the post-Maidan regime – since 2014, the US has been governing Ukraine in a de facto sense, and we know about the nationalist radicalization and the presence of neo-Nazis in Kyiv, the Azov Battalion, for instance – but let’s remember that they are not supported politically by the majority of the Ukrainian people. They have been integrated into the National Guard.  We cannot support Nazi ideology anywhere, and one can certainly find it in the United States without looking any further than the increase in far-right militia movements throughout the United States.  But it is important to remember that  there is more political support for the far-right in Germany and France than in Ukraine. All this we know. Yes, we all remember the warning by George Kennan, the architect of the United States Cold War Policy designed to contain the Soviet Union, a warning seared into our memory, that expanding NATO would be a “fateful error” that would  surely  “inflame nationalistic, anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and would certainly imperil east-west relations.

But, at the same time, we must denounce Putin’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine as illegal and barbaric, even if this means siding with the US and NATO. Putin chose war. This is Putin’s war. We remember what Putin did to Grozny in 1999-2000, completely destroying the city. Is Ukraine part of a Grozny option? Will Kyiv become another Dresden flattened to rubble? In denouncing Russia’s invasion, we need not be a supporter of NATO or the imperialist history of the US. The US has little moral credibility left, certainly after the fiascos of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And let’s not forget the Cuban missile crisis. And the more recent NATO missile base that exists in Poland (Aegis SM-3 Block IB missiles for Poland are already on-site, only a hundred miles from Russian territory and 800 miles from Moscow). But let’s be clear, Russia clearly needs to pull back its troops. Leave Ukraine. Demilitarize Donbas and Russian border areas. Ukraine needs to be designated a neutral country, and the US must acknowledge this. Give it a status similar to Finland.  Some version of the Minsk Accords.  The US must not ‘play’ this war in a way that seeks only advantages for itself, its arms manufacturers, its possible electoral advantages, searching for strategic geopolitical advantages; too many lives are at stake.  We are at a turning point that cannot countenance invasions like the Kremlin assault on Ukraine and expect to survive as a human race since, as Marx warned, we will be forging our own chains. We must support working-class, trade unionist, and socialist resistance to this unholy attack on Ukraine while remaining critical of the bourgeois aspects of the current Ukraine regime.  But our first demand is that Russian troops leave Ukraine immediately and cease to fabricate hollow and shameless pretexts that Ukraine is overpopulated by Nazis and have made preparations to commit genocidal acts on Russians living in Donbas.  Russia’s propaganda industry, as strong as it is, has failed in this instance, and only looks foolish.

But, at the same time, we need to understand why this war broke out. Understanding the war does not mean we are justifying this war. We are watching if not the first TikTok war, or the first war that is being viewed overwhelmingly through social media, in Twitterspace and Facebook, then at the very least a military conflagration that constitutes the first major Internet war where the power of social media is being felt to a greater extent than in all previous wars, in terms of scale, scope, evolution and the quality of the virtual experiences fed to the public. It is being brought to the world through live streaming, high-quality video, tweets and retweets and massive online platforms. More people are using the Internet than ever before, and there is a growing popularity of non-news sources and thus potentially more narrative control by the victims (Cuciu, 2022). We do have the issue of information being manipulated photoshopped, and that is and will be a persistent problem. Listening to many news reports that have decried the bloody violence inflicted by the Russian military in Ukraine reveals a disturbing trend: there appears to be a flagrant ethnocentricity and racism at work. Some pundits appear to be upset with the Russian attack on Ukraine mainly because (as they shockingly proclaim) it’s a war between prosperous middle-class people, between peoples that you would never find in Third World populations in Latin America or Africa, between ‘civilized’ people, people who ‘look like us’ – fashionable victims, unlike those unfashionable victims being bombed in, say, Yemen. If they were reporting on a war between tribal factions in Africa, they would not be nearly as emotionally invested. Those are the pundits whose demands for NATO to impose a no-fly zone are the loudest. But a physical engagement between Russia and NATO would be guaranteed to bring about mutually assured destruction.

Social media accounts of the war raise our emotions to a fever pitch. But we cannot lose our capacity for sound, rational judgement. And that means that those of us in the West must continue to challenge the imperialist playbook of NATO, as we continue to challenge Putin. And we must challenge the insanity playing out in the margins of the culture wars by Trump’s QAnon followers making the claim that Trump and Putin are working together to destroy the infrastructure of Ukraine because their actual goal is to destroy a bioweapons lab set up there by Dr Anthony Fauci. What about religious messianism playing out behind the scenes in this conflict? Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed that Ukraine ‘is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.’ Since Putin has used the ‘defence of Orthodoxy’ argument to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we need to inquire as to the religious implications that stem from this ecclesiastical nationalism – ‘the Church tethered to the nation (autocephaly)’ – in this case, from Russia and Ukraine sharing the same Christian origins, that of the baptism of Prince Vladimir in 988 (De Gaulmyn, 2022). According to Isabelle de Gaulmyn, this “is a story that Vladimir Putin used in a speech tinged with Christian messianism. The Russian president’s spiritual confidant, Metropolitan Tikhon of Pskov and Porkhov, advocates for the unity of the peoples born of the baptism of Rus’ against a “decadent” West. This fits with the political views of many in Russian Orthodoxy.” However, Isabelle de Gaulmyn (2022) writes that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarch (UOC-MP), which opposes the invasion of Ukraine, is beginning to distance itself from Patriarch Kirill (Kirill is a Russian Orthodox bishop who became Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church on 1 February 2009). She notes that “[t]he patriarch has nothing to gain by encouraging the bombardment of Kyiv and its spiritual heritage, such as the Monastery of the Caves, where all the Russian saints have passed.” Pope Francis, the first-ever Roman pope to meet the Patriarch of Moscow, is sending a message through his diplomacy that by supporting Putin, The Russian Orthodox Church will lose not only Ukraine “but every bit of its influence in the Christian world.”  Russian Orthodox priest and theologian Cyril Hovorun says his Church is too entangled with Vladimir Putin and is drifting towards fascism (Corre, 2022).  Hovorun paints a picture of Russian orthodoxy that curdles the blood. Patriarch Kirill sees himself in a messianic light as a redeemer of Russia and is obsessed with the idea of a Manichean world consisting of a benevolent Russian civilization under siege by the ontologically evil West, which is complimented by the neo-imperialism of Putin. Hovorun asserts that the war in Ukraine “is being waged in the name of a special mission of religious unification, of protection of a kind of ‘holy land’ against the West – against the Western countries considered heretical, bad and liars, because they are Catholic or Protestant.  It is first of all a logic of expansion of the ‘Orthodox civilization’” (Corre, 2022).  It is a logic of expansion that knows no borders because its imperialist expansion is designed to bring Russian civilization to a corrupt Western world.  Americans should recognize this logic because it has played an enormous  role in its own Manifest Destiny narrative that has resulted in so much bloodshed in the name of defending and advancing American civilization against ‘barbarian hordes’.  But US imperialism is not the only imperialism.  Hovorun reports a sermon by Patriarch Kirill who stridently asserts “that the war in Ukraine is made necessary by the ‘genocide’ that would be perpetrated in the Donbass by Ukrainians against those who refuse Gay Pride” (Corre, 2022).   Is hosting a Gay Pride parade now the litmus test for civilization? Is it the defining characteristic of what separates good from evil? The notion that a Gay Parade has become an excuse for invading countries and slaughtering innocents must be met with the most severe denunciation.  But will denouncing Putin’s favorite Patriarch make any difference?    Especially when the mass media are treating the invasion as a spectacle, with little room, it seems, for rational maneuvering in the theatre of dialogue and peace-making. Donald Trump, known for his great admiration for authoritarian leaders, was impeached for threatening to hold military aid from Zelensky unless he provided damaging information on Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden.  And now Trump is taking credit for arming Ukraine with advanced American weaponry such as the FGM-148 Javelin (AAWS-M) is an American-made portable anti-tank missile.

  At the beginning of the invasion Trump described Zelensky as a “genius” and “savvy” and then he changed his tune and condemned the invasion. While President, Trump attacked NATO, and now he is spinning the past and claiming he attacked NATO only to make it stronger.  Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson of Fox News are spewing disinformation about the war, bending the truth in ways that favor Putin while both Republicans and Democrats are fighting over ways to use sanctions that will inflict the most pain on Russia.   The media is playing the war like a farcical plot from a television soap opera.

This much is clear:  Russia must pay for its criminal invasion. We must use every means available to support Ukraine, while at the same time trying to save the planet from nuclear devastation. This is a complex and difficult challenge, especially when we see babies that have been cut to ribbons by Russian missiles.  We must denounce toxic forms of nationalism and imperialist intervention, while continuing to search for a socialist and humanist alternative to capitalist value production. Trump must be de-pedestalized and Russia must be de-Putinized.   The people of Ukraine are fighting with an unflinching determination. We must try every means to combat the Russian imperialist aggression against Ukraine. We must hold all imperialist regimes accountable for their crimes the world over. That is why socialist internationalism is so important, especially at this inflection point in history. Russian or Western intervention must not be tolerated. Ukraine must be free to determine its own future.  That means that only Ukraine and Russia must create the final framework for a negotiated settlement.  Correspondingly,  the United States needs to support a settlement  that  meaningfully preserves Ukraine’s sovereignty and the US must give up its dream of a U.S.-run Atlanticist framework for Europe.

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We must provide shelter and support for the refugees who have escaped this imperialist war that was initiated by the Kremlin. Putin must be placed in the dock for war crimes. And Putin’s bloody regime must be overthrown. All imperialist regimes must be consigned to the dustbin of history.

References

Corre, Mikael. (2022).  «Orthodox theology must be de-Putinized,» says leading Church scholar. Interview with Cyril Hovorun. La Croix International. March 11.

De Gaulmyn, Isabelle. (2022).  March 4.  Religious Nationalism. La Croix International. https://international.la-croix.com/news/editorials/religious-nationalism/15734

Suciu, Peter. (2022). Is Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine the First Social Media War? Forbes, March 1.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/03/01/is-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-the-first-social-media-war/?sh=5e1a51391c5c

Imagen: https://www.google.com/search?q=guerra+en+ucrania&sxsrf=APq-WBufBerm_iA5WVRKjktoFldY5IJtjQ:1647813265192&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjWts_i1tX2AhU3RTABHbp3Cf0Q_AUoAXoECAIQAw#imgrc=5bJjl8jwFalafM