Superpowers are hypocrites
Let’s think a bit about the stories that we’re told about the world.
These stories show up individually, without context.
Mostly we don’t get context for the story itself, but we almost certainly don’t get context about the story relative to other, similar stories.
When the U.S. and NATO[1] cried “that’s enough” and bombed the former Yugoslavia[2] nearly flat, for humanitarian reasons—because of a “genocide”[3]—and then created and quickly internationally recognized the country of Kosovo, that was considered a blow for democracy and humanity in general.
When Russia executed and then supported the result of a referendum to allow Crimea to return to Russia from Ukraine after a coup in Ukraine that swept in a very Russophobic government, that was called “annexation”.
When Syria asked its ally Russia for help in suppressing rebels in the east, the Russians came to his aid. Assad was bombing his own people, but it was OK because he’d first labeled them as separatists and terrorists. In that case, the U.S. and NATO jumped in on the side of the separatists/terrorists and fought a proxy war against Russia to help Assad.
In Ukraine, after the putsch, the new government was in the same situation as Assad: separatists and terrorists in the east want to be their own republic.[4] In this case, Russia rushed to the support of the separatists/terrorists, while NATO rushed to support the leader attacking his own people.[5]
So, sometimes, countries end up supporting authoritarians who bomb their own people and sometimes they end up supporting separatists/terrorists[6] who want to create a new country.[7]
This almost never happens without armed conflict, in one form or another.
We seek a good guy and a bad guy.[8]
But there are no good guys.
They’re all bad guys, if they’ve taken up arms.
That’s what it means to be anti-war.
You don’t have to support the side that your newsfeed has told you to, as you reluctantly call for military intervention just this one time.
Instead, you should put your effort into learning as much as you can about (A) what’s actually going on[9] and (B) what could be done to resolve the situation without violence.[10]
No one said that pacifism was easy.
[1] I list them separately because it’s not the U.S. acting on its own, but it’s also very much not NATO acting on its own. NATO is a puppet of the U.S., full stop.↩
[2] Just “Yugoslavia”, at the time↩
[3] It’s in quotes because, as many commentators knew at the time, and, as subsequent investigations showed, there were, at most, a few thousand victims, which, horrific and tragic as that is, hardly qualifies as a genocide in a population of many, many millions. Words have to have meanings.↩
[4] Two republics, actually: Luhansk and Donetsk.↩
[5] No, there are no boots on the ground yet, but the U.S. has been shoveling new arms contracts to Ukraine for months now. Those weapons are used to attack Russic separatists living in the east. The goal was clear: goad Russia into invading.↩
[6] The media will choose a label depending on which side they’re supporting, of course.↩
[7]
Another recent example where the U.S. plays the role of Russia is with Taiwan. Taiwan wants to separate from China, just like Donetsk and Luhansk. In this case, the U.S. supports separatism, because it is in its best interests to do so: they get to sell weapons to Taiwan and they get to play savior for the world’s leading semiconductor-producer, while simultaneously taking away the same prize from China.
A more historical direct comparison of similar situations—missile emplacements uncomfortably close to national borders—comes from the article Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin) (which I read after publication of this article, so this is an update).
↩“And so, what was all this for? Why were the Ukrainians walked up a garden path only to be abandoned to their fate? Did anyone really believe that Russia would permit American missiles to be placed on its border? They didn’t, for the same reason we all know that the United States would never permit China to place its missiles in Guadalajara. In fact, we don’t need the hypothetical: when the Soviet Union tried it in Cuba, we got the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.”
[8]
Because we are, for the most part, morons. We are very simple machines that want to think that we are unwaveringly on the moral high ground. So, we pick a good guy and we stick with that entity, no matter what else we learn. If it gets too uncomfortable, we just stop learning rather than put any effort into changing our minds. We would rather be ignorant and happy than informed and conflicted.
The amount of other people’s suffering engendered by our support of their oppressors doesn’t matter at all. The goal is to reduce our own suffering, even if it’s only the inconvenience of having to live with uncertainty.
That others might suffer much more can be temporarily of interest, but we’d rather not lose sleep over it.
↩[9] “What’s actually going on” need not have anything to do with what aligned parties and their propaganda teams want you to believe, even though they have no evidence whatsoever.↩
[10]
After publication, I read Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin), which seems to hit many of the same points I made above, while being simultaneously more eloquent and informative.
“We hear very little today about Britain’s role in the NATO-led war in Libya in 2011, which demolished that state, left its people in the hands of warlords, and pushed thousands to flee and drown in the Mediterranean. Nor do we hear about Britain’s complicity in the ongoing war in Yemen, conducted by our ally Saudi Arabia with our weapons, £17.6 billion of which have been provided by BAE systems to the Saudis since 2015. The United Nations estimates that 377,000 Yemenis have died in that conflict.
“These lives are not any less or any more important than the lives of Ukrainians. We should fight to end all of these wars, and all of the wars yet to come.”
The U.S. and other NATO nations similarly choose to whom they wish to sell weapons and whom they choose to condemn for using them. People very cynically choose whom to care about and whom to ignore.
I’ve seen Swiss people castigating themselves publicly for not having supported Ukrainians sooner, but I’ve never seen anyone do so for Yemenis or Libyans (or any of myriad other beleaguered peoples).
People generally support the official good guys against the official bad guys. When the discomfort from peer pressure exceeds the discomfort of having to actual care about other people, they relieve that pressure by pretending to believe in a cause for a little while.
People get there a lot faster if someone can explain to them how it might affect them directly[11]. Attacking Ukraine is an attack on Europe, which is infinitely worse than killing brown people in the sand somewhere that no-one would ever want to visit on vacation.
↩[11] Or indirectly, but not by too many hops or any too-complex ones. People generally throw their allegiance behind whatever will prop up the supply chain that keeps their lives going in relative luxury.↩