Notes about the War on our Doorsteps

The murderous destruction of hospitals by Russian missiles is the latest horror to be added to the wider attacks on civilians and the streams of refugee from Ukraine (the photo is of victims being buried in a Mariupol mass grave).

This will be a series of disparate notes selectively drawn from the media coverage available in a town just north of Bucharest – starting with a comment about that media coverage and the skilful use being made by Ukrainian authorities (including an interview with a Russian POW); then asking whether aggression every works and what we really know about Ukraine; and finishing with an important discussion now underway about realism in politics. 

Media Coverage

Shaun Walker is typical of the thousands of journalists now posting from the country - although today he crossed into Romania with useful tweets. Simon Wren-Lewis is an Economics academic whose blog strays into the political field and makes a useful point in his latest point 

Contrast public perception in the UK of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with the US and UK invasion of Iraq. There is, rightly, no attempt to balance the reality of what is going on in Ukraine with Putin’s propaganda. National self-determination for Ukraine is being overridden by the use of lethal force based on the fantasies of empire by one man, or a small group of men around him. But the reality of the Iraq war was not so different. The invasion was the project of one man, George Bush, or a small group of men around him, with the UK following because our Prime Minister thought he should.

Yet with Iraq public perceptions were different, because the misinformation was coming from our own governments. We were told there were stocks of chemical weapons that could be used against us, or at least our allies, whereas in reality there were no chemical weapons. The bigger lie in the US was that Iraq was somehow linked to Al-Qaeda, whereas anyone with any knowledge knew that this was nonsense. We were freeing Iraq from a tyrant, whereas in reality we were undertaking a national rebuilding process with little idea of how to go about it, with what turned out to be disastrous consequences. 

This post from Chris Hedges about “worthy and unworthy victims” extends the point.

 Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have written extensively about Ukraine – with  Snyder’s “Bloodlands” (2010) in particular being a harrowing story of the tens of millions of people killed by Stalin and Hitler in the region and his later “Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America” (2018) a curious and badly-written exploration of Russian attitudes to the region. Snyder penned this article in mid-January about to How to Think about War in Ukraine – and this is a more recent video discussion between Yuval Harari, Snyder and Applebaum.

India has adopted a neutral position on the war and this piece is therefore of interest.   

A Russian POW and the Ukraine President tell it as it is

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/03/this-moving-speech-by-a-russian-pow-in-ukraine-does-not-sound-like-a-typical-forced-confession.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/08/zelenskiy-brings-down-the-house-with-his-speech-to-the-commons 

Aggression doesn’t pay

You would have thought that, after the disastrous Russian and US invasions of Afghanistan, US and UK invasions of Iraq, Libya etc, the very idea of invading another country would have been laughed out of court. Was it just nationalistic groupthink? 

But it all depends

If this article is typical of thinking in western newsrooms, it shows how deranged we have become

This is UK military analyst Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment - and one from the US stable. 

What about Negotiation?

https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/01/03/2022/diplomatic-solution-ukraine-crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/04/what-would-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-look-like a very recent article from Anatol Lieven 

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-what-will-end-the-war-heres-what-research-says-178721

Understanding Ukraine

This series of posts has already referenced a couple of important books for understanding the conflict – Ukraine and the art of strategy; Lawrence Freedman (2019) and  Ukraine and Russia – from civilised divorce to uncivil war Paul d’Anieri (2019)

I have just come across a small collection of open access books on the region and downloaded three of them – one being a fascinating memoir from an English historian (now resident in Canada) who has made Ukraine. Russia and Belarus his specialities – it’s “Understanding Ukraine and Belarus” by David Marples. 

An important debate about Realism in international relations

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/john-mearsheimer-and-the-dark-origins-of-realism

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-95-is-ukraine-the-wests?s=r 

The Road to Unfreedom?

Do(es) 25 years of researching the “Eastern bloodlands” unhinge your mind? This is the question I’m left pondering - in all honesty - after almost completing Timothy Snyder’s latest book The Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America (2018). I appreciate it's not exactly a delicate question in view of Snyder's reputation . The reviews in the Eurozine journal set the context - 

over the past decade Timothy Snyder has sought to convince western European and English-speaking audiences of the importance of east-central Europe for the history of the twentieth-century. Although the Holocaust is usually thought of as a western phenomenon, in “Bloodlands” (2010) and “Black Earth” (2015) he shows that by almost any measure (death rates, physical devastation, population displacement, societal breakdown or institutional destruction) it was primarily an eastern atrocity.

If we wish to draw the lessons of the 1930s and 40s, we must first understand what happened there.As a scholar of totalitarianism Snyder is understandably concerned by the return of fascist ideas clothed in the guise of right-wing populism. The striking similarities between the interwar crisis that followed the Great Depression (1929-39) and the aftermath of the Great Recession (from 2007) lead him to worry that the beginning of this century might end up looking much like the early decades of the last.

His previous work, “On Tyranny” (2017), started off as a warning posted on Facebook that went viral after Donald Trump’s election and details ‘20 lessons from across the fearful 20th century, adapted to the circumstances of today’. His “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018) brings his longstanding interest in combating the western-centrism of European history and his more recent attempts to apply his knowledge of the past to the present together in a single volume. The book traces the current crisis of democracy back to Russia, showing how Vladimir Putin used fake news and the hacking of personal data – as well as support for neo-fascist parties in Europe and America – to rebuild Russian power and influence in the world.

As someone who lived in Central Asia from 1999-2007, I remember following the development of Russia’s “managed democracy” with particular interest. I never imagined that the crude but apparently successful efforts in building fake political parties there in the late 90s – an updated version of a Potemkin village – would be a test-bed for developments in the West.

Snyder’s narrative is organized chronologically, with each of the six chapters devoted to developments in a single year from 2011 to 2016. In particular, it focuses on how Russia rapidly shifted from rapprochement with the West to overt antagonism in 2012. Snyder links this transformation to the fact that Putin had to fake the presidential election that year in order to retain his grip on power.

He argues that after defeating the uprising in Chechnya, Putin needed a new enemy to rally the people behind him. He settled on the West, concocting a ‘fictional problem’ that focused on the alleged ‘designs of the European Union and the United States to destroy Russia’ (p.51).

Snyder highlights how Putin adopted the ideas of the fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), who argued that the Russian spirit must be mobilized against all external threats ‘by the caprice of a single ruler’ (p.24). Ilyin’s Manichaean worldview, combined with his obsession with sexual purity, helps explain both the vehemence of Russia’s recent rhetoric, as well as its erotic focus on the ‘homosexual’ attempts of the EU and America to ‘sodomize’ Russian virtue. Snyder notes, ‘The dramatic change in Russia’s orientation bore no relation to any new unfriendly action from the outside. Western enmity was not a matter of what a Western actor was doing, but what the West was portrayed as being’ (p.91).

Given my proximity for the past decade (in Romania) to the Ukraine, I started the book in the hope that it would help me better understand the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Phrases like “the politics of eternity”, however, soon put me off and I increasingly found myself shaking my head. Fellow historian Richard Evans captures my own thoughts in his Guardian review when he writes that

The effectiveness of Snyder’s thoughts on the “road to unfreedom” isn’t helped by the strangely declamatory, often obscure style in which they are expressed. One dubious generalisation follows another, as the author never troubles to support any of them with serious evidence. For instance: “Britain and France had no modern history as nation-states. The European powers had never been nation-states.” Does Snyder really think that the possession of an overseas empire negated the claim of the imperial power to be a nation-state?

Or: “The meaning of each election is the promise of the next one.” Most people think the meaning of an election is defined by the policies of the parties that contest it. And so on. Obsessed with the theory of Russian manipulation behind all the political surprises of recent history, from the Brexit vote to the election of Trump, he has little to say about the driving forces behind them, forces that are vital to understand if democracy is to be saved. And by packaging all of this in the endlessly repeated concepts of “the politics of eternity” and “the politics of inevitability”, he virtually guarantees that he will lose the attention of his readers. The current threats to democracy cry out for reasoned and powerfully expressed analysis, but regrettably, this is not such a book

And The Nation went so far as to suggest that Snyder’s latest book

marks the next phase in his transformation from academic historian to political commentator; it is also the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump’s wake. The book’s cover comes complete with helpful directional indicators: “Russia > Europe > America”—the road to unfreedom is a one-way street.

For Snyder, Russia is to blame for the growth of the “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama, stoking the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, the rise of the far right in various European countries, and the Syrian refugee crisis. Russia is also in cahoots with the National Rifle Association and has been sowing dissension in the United States by encouraging hostility between the police and African Americans. Putin’s “grandest campaign” of all, though, was his “cyberwar to destroy the United States of America” by “escorting” Trump to the American presidency.

“And sentences that consist entirely of rhythmic abstractions”, The Nation caustically remarks, “convey very little” eg

“As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair”. One of his favorite images in the book is the abyss: so empty and so frightening. This gives us “Having transformed the future into an abyss, Putin had to make flailing at its edge look like judo,” but also “Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.” Truly the abyss swallows up all meaning.

But most of the media are delighted with the book.....as you will see from this "resource" which includes a 15 part series of a Snyder Youtube exposition.....I've included three more substantial texts to help the reader set the Snyder book in context.....

A Resource

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-america/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-great-russian-disinformation-campaign/564032/

https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/timothy-snyder-road-to-unfreedom-book-review-politics-us-russia-news-16211/

Timothy Snyder Speaks series – started Nov 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=153&v=Eghl19elKk8

Building an authoritarian polity; G Gill (2015)

The failure of democratisation in Russia – a comparative perspective; AB Evans (2011)

Russia’s Managed Democracy; Perry Anderson (2007)