For peace or Putin: Is the Western left soft on Russia?
Friday, 11 March 2022
The first and most important thing to say, the point everyone can agree on, is that war is hell and no reasonable person can support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the carnage we have seen in the days since.
After that, though, there is room for nuance. The nuances gather around the why of it, the framing of it and the meaning of it. They can even require you to think harder around the blame and have a sense of history that goes back longer than a fortnight.
The horrors of war, and the near-total condemnation of the scenes witnessed in Kyiv, Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities, have made it hard for some critical, left-wing voices to be heard. When they are, they are often dismissed as “the pro-Putin left”. It is the “with us or against us” language, strictly binary in its world view, that often emerges in wartime.
But again, nuance is possible.
**READ MORE:
* 'Forgive me that I couldn't defend you': the story of the fleeing family killed on a Ukraine bridge
**
Veteran activist John Minto has been watching events from his home in Christchurch. He is best known for his leading role in the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, but he has barely rested since.
When he thinks about Ukraine, and about New Zealand’s response, he is struck first by hypocrisy.
“Our Government calls out human rights abuse to a US agenda,” he says. “That’s one of the key points.”
New Zealand was one of the 39 countries that quickly applied to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation of Russian war crimes. Good. But compare and contrast, Minto says, with Palestine, which waited years for its story to be heard by the ICC.
“Labour is very happy to have a real go at Russia and China. In both cases we passed parliamentary motions to condemn their human rights abuses. I’m not saying that’s wrong. The Government should be doing that. Nanaia Mahuta wrote the strongest thing I’ve ever seen from a New Zealand foreign minister on any issue ever the other day when she condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“But when it comes to US allies, we turn the other way. We have an indigenous minister of foreign affairs, and you would have thought that on indigenous issues like Palestine, West Papua and Western Sahara, we might see some movement, but she’s been in the job for 18 months and there’s not a murmur.
“It’s just hopeless,” he says.
Minto applauds Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi’s comment, made in Parliament during the debate about sanctions against Russia.
“Why did our successive New Zealand governments not condemn the illegal US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, or Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine?” Waititi said. “Rather than condemn the United States for their illegal, imperial invasion, we’ve supported them with troops, with training, with intelligence. This must end.”
As defence analyst Paul Buchanan puts it, “The currency of diplomacy is forged in hypocrisy”.
It is clear, Buchanan says, that the West, “or what was once known as the First World”, cares far more about what are seen as “co-specifics”, basically Anglo-Saxon Judeo-Christians, than about other cultures and populations.
“Western governments also treat friendly or allied states like Israel or Saudi Arabia more gently than, say, Iran when it comes to their misbehaviour towards their subjects or others. And it is clear that racism is a large part of that, as the differential treatment of African and Indian refugees from Ukraine attest.
“But the bottom line is also geopolitical,” he adds. “A war of opportunity announced by an invasion of a sovereign European state by a traditional Western adversary was bound to generate a much stronger reaction than the oppression of Palestinians or a genocidal campaign against Houthis in Yemen done by non-European Western allies, even admitting the Western origins of Israel.
“Europeans are bound to care more about what happens close to home than what happens far away because traditionally wars in Europe have adopted a more existential character as they drag on.”
Blue-eyed friends and Russian bears
If anything, the war in Ukraine brings clarity to issues that have sat in the background, about who we think we are, and where we think we belong. Minto says a friend of his talks about “the blue-eyed response” to wars and refugees.
“If the victims have blue eyes, we’ll shout from the rooftops. If they’ve got brown eyes, too bad. We look the other way.”
A lot has been said about Ukrainian refugees “looking like us”, as though the idea that Europeans could suffer in 2022 is as abhorrent and implausible as a war in Europe itself. Wars are supposed to happen elsewhere, to other people.
When Minto wrote an article for the left-wing site The Daily Blog about hypocrisy, published on the day Russian forces crossed the border, he had another kind of hypocrisy in mind. He was calling out the self-serving rhetoric of the US.
“When it comes to ‘flagrant breaches of international law’ the US is the undisputed world leader with its countless campaigns to destabilise democratic states and actively support the most brutal despotic regimes across much of the world,” Minto wrote. “I’ve lost count of the number of countries they have bombed since the Second World War.”
Another Daily Blog contributor, left-wing columnist Chris Trotter, was thinking the same thing.
The penny dropped for Trotter when he watched Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, “solemnly listing all the crimes of the Russian Federation which you could tick off, crime for crime, in the invasion of Iraq by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia et al in 2003.
“I was a firm opponent of the invasion of Iraq, and I’m a firm opponent of the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine,” he says. “But I haven’t lost my memory.
“Certainly if you watch a network like CNN or even the BBC, there is just no attempt at all to look back into the past and see whether your side, which is now so fulsome in its condemnation, may be guilty of similar crimes. So, yes, the hypocrisy argument is very strong.”
It is a familiar argument on the left. The position of the group Wellington Peace Action is that “the Russian invasion of Ukraine is unequivocally wrong. But the US and Nato’s hypocrisy and double-standards (as in Iraq and the Kosovo war) have created the environment for Putin to use their actions as justification for his.”
The International Socialist Organisation Aotearoa is another left-wing group with a perspective that backs neither side. It is not so much the pro-Putin left as the pro-people left.
“Our politics starts from below, not from the moves of the great powers,” they say on their website.
Dissolve Nato, they say. And if you think New Zealand’s allies have the answer, “look at the carnage and suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine”.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin must be condemned as well. The real hope, as remote as it might seem, is that “as Putin invaded Ukraine, Russians bravely responded with illegal anti-war demonstrations in 53 cities”.
The line that this is the first war in Europe since 1945 is also criticised on the left. As a rhetorical device, it does two things. First, it ignores the wars in the Balkans in which Nato intervened. Second, it directly connects Putin to Adolf Hitler in the public imagination, implying that he has the same kind of territorial ambitions and represents a similar threat.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the invasion of the Ukraine as the closest thing to war for her generation, which is a statement that perplexes Trotter. “[Kosovo] happened, I think, in Jacinda’s lifetime. She’s not that young.”
Some leftists are more tolerant of violence than others. Trotter admits that he has been called a “tankie” by some. Originally this meant Western Communists who supported the toughness of the USSR when it rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia and suppressed dissent.
But when they call Trotter a tankie, they are talking about his backing of Putin’s intervention in Syria. He has even written about having a sneaking admiration for the “shrewd and cynical” Putin who outwitted his western counterparts: “The Russian President who always took as much as the West would let him bite off, but never more than he could chew – and swallow? A little chunk of Georgia, here; the whole of the Crimean peninsula, there; and, since 2014, a third of the Donbas.”
In the run-up to the invasion, Trotter wrote a controversial column which said that “like a baited bear, the Russian Federation has watched through small, black eyes as Nato’s attack-dogs crept closer and closer”. He wrote that the Russian bear is constrained only by how many of “these slavering curs” it is willing to kill, and when.
It was colourful but more than a little aggressive in its tone. Many wondered: was the leftist Trotter turning bloodthirsty?
But he says his admiration evaporated the moment Putin’s forces crossed into Ukraine in February. The manoeuvres in Russia and Belarus had sparked “this great outpouring of angry barking from Nato”, characterised by “a jingoistic lack of finesse” from Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg.
He thought that the anger only demonstrated Moscow’s point about “the bellicosity of the Nato powers” and the argument for a new congress to resolve security matters in Europe “in a way that is more accommodating to Russia than is currently the case”.
“I thought if he’d sent his manoeuvring troops back to their bases, he would have made Nato look incredibly stupid. He would have achieved a significant diplomatic victory. But he made the decision to invade. And then everything changed.
“As soon as Russian forces crossed the border, all the arguments made by Stoltenberg, made by the Baltic states, by the Poles, were borne out. He gave them, ex post facto, perfect justification. All of his diplomatic work was undone in a moment.”
The threat of Nato, and fascism
You don’t have to be on the left to believe that the US is at least partly to blame for the crisis in Ukraine.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer, a leading exponent of the realist school of international relations, has been saying for years that Nato’s eastward expansion is dangerous. He told The New Yorker just last month that “there is a three-prong strategy at play here: European Union (EU) expansion, Nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy”.
British writer and activist Tariq Ali is fond of quoting William Burns, a former US ambassador to Russia.
Burns submitted a memorandum to former Secretary of State Condaleezza Rice in 2008, which said that “in more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from the knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. It is hard to overstate the strategic consequences and would create fertile soil for Russian meddling in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
Burns is hardly a leftist outsider. He is currently director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), meaning that, as Ali says, he will be dealing with the fallout from the advice that was ignored by George W Bush’s White House.
As left-wing public intellectual Noam Chomsky recently said of Bush: “In 2008, he invited Ukraine to join Nato, poking the bear in the eye. Ukraine is Russia’s geostrategic heartland, apart from intimate historic relations and a large Russia-oriented population.”
As for Nato, there is a school of thought that it should have been disbanded after the Cold War ended, as it existed as a balance to the Communist threat. But it didn’t just survive, it spread.
Leftists and other critics talk about betrayals and promises not kept, such as when former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was told Nato would not expand “one inch” to the east after Germany reunified. In this narrative, Ukraine’s possible entry into Nato is the last straw.
Buchanan was working in the Pentagon in the early 1990s and remembers that people were “already questioning the wisdom of Nato expansion while Russia was weak, arguing correctly that when Russia regained its strength and status it would work to undermine the enlarged alliance. When Putin arrived on the scene that process began.”
When Georgia tried to join Nato in 2008, Russia invaded and annexed South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions on the Russian-Georgian border with ethnic Russian majorities. The Ukrainian invasion has clear parallels to that Georgian dress rehearsal, as Buchanan puts it.
“The West cannot say that it was not warned about Russian concerns about Nato expansion, especially since the 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas region where ethnic Russians are a majority, and the annexation of Crimea came in response to the overthrow of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president in the Maidan Revolution.”
That is a key year. For many on the left, 2014 was not a revolution, but a coup, with US diplomat Victoria Nuland playing an important interventionist role. Russia has claimed that nationalist, even neo-Nazi, forces were also involved, which is behind Putin’s overheated rhetoric about “Denazifying” Ukraine.
Not many in the West, even on the left, buy this rationale. While Ukraine has long had a major problem with homegrown fascism, such groups have had negligible support among voters.
But it suits Russia and some of its supporters abroad to amplify the importance of far-right groups such as the infamous Azov Battalion. One New Zealand commentator who repeated the arguments was former Labour Party general secretary Mike Smith, who wrote a blog titled “Denazifying Ukraine” at the Labour-supporting blog, The Standard.
Smith wrote: “In my opinion if it was the right thing to do to fight against German Nazism in 1939, it can be argued that there is some justification for Russia to fight against Ukrainian Nazism that has been killing their compatriots at their borders.”
But the blog quoted Russian news agency Tass on the alleged deeds of Ukrainian nationalists, which stretched credibility for many readers.
Yet the fascist element does create some intriguing possibilities, as Buchanan says.
“Since foreign fighters are joining the conflict on the side of the Kyiv regime, it will be interesting to see if any of them join the Azov Battalion.”
Foreign white supremacists have been travelling to Ukraine for years, and according to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 2019 mosque attacks, the Christchurch terrorist visited Ukraine during his travels through Europe.
“It is possible that they may get caught up in some war crimes or other messy business involving non-combatants or prisoners,” Buchanan says. “How will the West respond if that is the case and Russia is defeated?”
How does it end?
But will Russia be defeated? While no-one knows how this war will end, one other thing everyone seems to agree on is that Putin’s plan backfired. Ukraine’s resistance was greater than expected and Russia’s initial push was weaker. But that could mean Russia’s response is to simply reduce Ukraine to rubble.
In the meantime, many on the left are noticing a worrying tendency to punish or condemn any dissent from a pro-Nato message. As Tariq Ali has noted, British Labour leader Keir Starmer has been openly critical of the Stop the War coalition, making his position indistinguishable from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
In an op-ed for the Guardian, Starmer wrote that “to condemn Nato is to condemn the guarantee of democracy and security it brings”.
Guardian columnist George Monbiot has called out leftist “anti-imperialists”, who he sees as falling for Putin’s propaganda and disinformation. He also had the Stop the War coalition in his sights.
Left-wing journalist John Pilger was another of Monbiot’s targets, accused of recycling “Kremlin talking points” about Nato and the reasons for war.
Pilger is arguably the best-known and most distinguished of the journalists to have taken a line that others dismiss as pro-Putin. He recently drew attention to a case of censorship in Australia.
It was the story of a Russian-Australian student named Sasha Gillies-Lekakis, who was removed from the audience of the ABC’s current affairs show Q + A for questioning stories that depicted Russia as the bad guy and Ukraine as the good guy.
Gillies-Lekakis later wrote on Facebook that while he is against war and the loss of life, he wanted to say that he supported “Putin’s grievances regarding the breaking of the Minsk Peace Agreement by Ukraine and the ensuing loss of life, particularly in the Russian-populated areas of the Donbas”.
He wondered why “these Russian deaths were seemingly less important compared to Ukrainian casualties in our media coverage”.
While there was disagreement about the death toll Gillies-Lekakis cited, many on the left saw his removal as a heavy-handed act by a public broadcaster. It was more of that “with us or against us” thinking that flourishes in wartime.