Some Thoughts on Ukraine

The Offensive and the Intellectuals

It appears that Ukrainian armed forces have accomplished a significant breakthrough near Kharkiv and are even threatening to encircle Russian positions. The war is by no means over, Ukraine’s success is not guaranteed, but it’s clear that quick, lightning victory and perhaps even a gradual, grinding victory are now out of reach for the invaders.

I think it’s worth recalling all the lies and idiocies that have been repeated since the start of the conflict: First, we were told war was impossible, it was a figment of the Western imagination; then we were told war was inevitable, because it was provoked by the West; we were told that they intended to trick Putin into a destructive quagmire; then we were told this was part of Putin’s grand master plan to defy the West and create a new world order; then, that Russia’s total victory was assured in a matter of hours, then days, then weeks, and that news of Ukrainian success was all propaganda; then, that Russia’s serious reversals were actually pre-planned and a new offensive would eventually overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. This moving, parrying, retreating discourse seems to follow or anticipate the retreats of the Russian army itself, trying to dig in to new positions, only to have shift again.

But how about the people who buy it, repeat it, and create their own variations on its themes? What could possibly account for all these contradictory and absurd positions, which have been uttered at different times by the same people? All these sentiments are all the product of a single proposition: the Western democracies are always wrong, both morally and practically. When the West struggles and fails, it’s because of its decadence and senility, a sign of its imminent collapse, when it prevails, it’s because of its dastardly wiles and the limitlessness of its ill-gotten resources. Russia’s appeal in the West, which crosses the traditional boundaries of right and left, is irresistible for those who believe the worst crime imaginable is Western hypocrisy. Since this hypocrisy is the only unforgivable sin, Russia’s crude and cynical exercise of power, it’s barely plausible justifications for its actions, its overt gangsterism at home and abroad, is seen as a virtue.

This leads to mind-bogglingly absurd positions: self-avowed Marxist-Leninists cheering on Lenin’s great enemy, Russian chauvinism, self-declared defenders of European Civilization and “traditionalist” Christians rooting for the destruction of the cradle of Slavic Christianity at the hands of who at other times they would deride as Chechen bashi-bazouks. In the coming months and years, we will likely see the one turn into the other: Red becoming Browns, Browns turning Red, Christian becoming atheists, atheists becoming Christian, “new systems” declaring the essential compatibility of Orthodoxy and communism, of international socialism and national chauvinism, politics shrugged off and then adopted as any other affectation, like health fads or sudden tastes for the exotic Orient, but having the added benefit of granting the appearance of serious conviction and purpose. Here we get an insight into the unifying principle of all these supposedly disparate tendencies: a type of base, moronic cynicism. More than anything else, it is this moronic cynicism that takes itself to be devilish cleverness that is the governing ideology of the Russian state and society, and it attracts all its global admirers.

The cynical pose, which flatters itself on being always undeceived, is in practice highly gullible and distinguishable from naivety only in the sour churlishness of its affect. These attitudes should be expected in the nether regions of the press and intelligentsia, where people make their livings writing semi-pornographic conspiracy literature and closely identify with the mob. But these stances have infected the broader intellectual climate as well. The whole pamphlet literature of the demi-monde provides a new language that sounds provocative and fresh compared to the stale banalities of bien-pensant humanitarian liberalism. It is tempting material for those who treat both life and politics as an irresponsible flight from one pose to another. Even among the putatively more serious, there’s just the simple need to find some take that appears oppositional and critical. The bohemian provocateur can at least always just disown every past statement as a lark, not something to be taken entirely seriously, but the academic has to puff themselves up and insist on their actual correctness in the face of refuting facts.

We shouldn’t believe that the war was waged for any more serious purpose than the sum of all its contradictory defenses and rationalizations: it is not really part of either of some civilization-shaping project or cunning realist maneuvering. To indulge in this is to just create more propaganda. In its conception and execution it is identical to its justification: it is a product of brutish stupidity.