Against Nihilism

Violence and viruses have snuffed the life from millions of people these past few years. The increasing sight of mass graves suggest a growing indifference to the value of the individual life. Remember how easily people talked a couple of years ago of the “culling” of the elderly – adding the phrase to the euphemisms which imperial governments have been using increasingly in the past half-century such as “friendly fire” and “collateral damage”. With the global population growing in only 20 years from 6 billion to 8 billion, it is little wonder that we can’t share Steven Pinker’s optimism about human aggression. 

Nor that, beneath our civilised veneer, we are beginning to pose questions about the readiness with which Russian leaders have been willing to sacrifice millions of individuals over the past century. 

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” was first attributed to Stalin in 1947 as ‘If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics’. 

I for one will never forget a conversation with a young Russian interpreter in St Petersburg in January 1991 when I was on a WHO mission to the city - when she spoke about how meaningless life was for her as a Russian.  

 

With Ukraine descending into hell, I stumbled yesterday – via an article and book about the country’s cultural heritage – into the field of memoirs which I last posted about some 7 years ago.

Somehow, against such slaughter, it seemed appropriate to assert that life has value – and should be lived to the full. The website Lives Retold reminded me of Theodor Zeldin’s great venture of self-portraits – with Roman Krznaric’s (of “Carpe Diem” and “The Good Ancestor” fame) being perhaps the most thoughtful. 

 

Other examples of people who led fascinating lives and whose account of them avoids the vanity of most autobiographical efforts are –

·       Dennis Healey’s “Time of my Life” (1989) - a beautifully-written and wry study of the political life at a time when politics mattered – with a dash of culture thrown in.

·       En passant he mentions that Leonard Woolf’s 5-volume “Memoirs” were an inspiration and, when I eventually got round to reading them, they proved to be one of the best in the English language both for its insights into social aspects and personalities of the time

·       “Moments of Being” is a marvellous posthumous collection of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings.  

·       Arthur Koestler's four volumes - "an unrivalled study", as the blurb on the back of the third volume ("The Invisible Writing") puts it, "of twentieth century man and his dilemmas"

·       Elias Canetti’s 4 volumes; “the Tongue set Free”; “The Torch in my Ear”; “The Play in the Eyes”; “Party in the Blitz” are somewhat more caustic and show the less attractive side of humanity

·       Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov is in a genre of its own – with a mixture of styles

·       My Happy Days in Hell; Gyorgy Faludy (1962) amazing, poetic and life-affirming memoir from an émigré who returned to communist Hungary in full knowledge that he would be thrown into jail (where he spent 3 harrowing years)

·       Victor Serge’s Memoir of a Revolutionary best conveys the self-sacrifice involved in the harrowing struggles for a better world in the first few decades of the 20^th century

·       Gregor von Rezzori’s trilogy of novels were based on the life he lived in Czernowitz which was then in Romania

·       The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig which I rate as the best simply because it is so self-effacing

·       My Century – the odyssey of a Polish Intellectual is Aleksander Wat’s stunning memoir which rates with Faludy, Koestler, Serge and Zweig.

·       The various volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography conveyed for me a powerful sense of an exciting new Europe taking shape in the post-war rubble. All Said and Done is the last.

·       graphic artist Tisa von Schulenberg’s harrowing little book “Ich Hab’s Gewagt” tells the tale of a woman who left privilege behind to pursue a life of art and integrity….

·       I also thoroughly enjoyed historian Fritz Stern’s “Five Germanies I have known”

·       And Gunther Grass’s so poetic “Peeling the Onion”

·       Poet Dannie Abse’s “Goodbye Twentieth Century” is a gentle memoir

·       Diane Athill’s various Memoirs are as good as they get

·       Des Wilson, the great campaigner, I knew briefly in the late 70s and he was good enough to send me his rumbustious “Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure”

·       JK Galbraith’s “A Life in Our Times; Memoirs” offer an unsurpassable repast of memories and intellectual musings

·       Clive James’ voluminous output is almost unclassifiable – memoirs, essays, notes – give a real insight into a great mind, prolific reader and writer of prose which jumps off the page – for example Cultural Amnesia – necessary memories from history and the arts

·       Amitai Etzioni (“My Brother’s Keeper”) and Richard Rose ( jazzily entitled Learning about Politics in Time and Space) are two prolific academics whose foray into Memoir help us understand the process of intellectual development 

·       Herbert Simon was an amazing polymath who launched the post-war interest in decision-making. The intro to his memoir Models of My Life (1996) is one of the best

·       The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1937 cover German culture and politics during this period

·       The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt was written on his death bed at the tragically early age of 62 and gives a powerful sense of what we have lost with his death

·       Journalist Sebastian Haffner – who had to leave Germany in 1933 and whose Germany – Jekyll and Hyde made a huge impact when it was published in 1940

 The Hooligan’s Return; Norman Manea (2003) a Romanian émigré much esteemed in the US paints a powerful picture of post-war Romania

·       An Encyclopaedia of Myself; Jonathan Meades (2014) pyrotechnics from a rumbustious life

·       The Pigeon Tunnel – stories from my life; John le Carre (2016) UK’s greatest spywriter’s memoir

·      Making the Most of it; Bryan Magee (2018) epub Final part of a spell-binding trilogy which started with “Clouds of Glory – a Hoxton Childhood” (2003) and “Growing up in a War” (2007) which resonate with the honesty and clarity this amazing philosopher/politician/interviewer embodied.

·       Je Chemine avec Susan George (2020) It’s an epub so needs conversion! George is a French/American radical political scientist and gives a sense of her political journey in these interviews

·       What Does Jeremy think? Is a rare biography of a top British civil servant

An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues in this tribute to his work and assesses their veracity

Models of My Life; Herbert Simon (1991)

A Synthesising Mind – a memoir; Howard Gardner (2020)

Whatever happened to political psychology?

My last – unusually short - post ended with a question about the curious psychology we seem to be applying to the Russian elite living in its gilded bubble. A couple of years ago I had a post which contained this excerpt - 

The origins (of Polish and Hungarian populism) lie partly in the humiliations associated with the uphill struggle to become, at best, an inferior copy of a superior model.

Discontent with the “transition to democracy” in the post-communist years was inflamed by visiting foreign “evaluators” who had little grasp of local realities. These experiences combined to produce a nativist reaction in the region, a reassertion of “authentic” national traditions allegedly suffocated by ill-fitting western forms. The post-national liberalism associated with EU enlargement allowed aspiring populists to claim exclusive ownership of national traditions and national identity.

The wave of anti-liberalism sweeping over central Europe today reflects widespread popular resentment at the perceived slights to national and personal dignity that this palpably sincere reform-by-imitation project entailed…… 

The excerpts were from “The Light that Failed – a reckoning” (2019) by Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian think-tanker and Stephen Holmes, an American academic who had trailed the publication a year earlier in this Journal of Democracy article.

Krastev and Holmes’ emphasis on the psychological aspects of the humiliation involved in having to copy a foreign model has passed unnoticed since then – but is actually much more relevant to Russia. An article of theirs in the Eurozine journal spells out the psychological process. 

The process was called by different names – democratization, liberalization, enlargement, convergence, integration, Europeanization – but the goal pursued by post-communist reformers was simple. They wished their countries to become ‘normal’, which meant like the West. This involved importing liberal-democratic institutions, applying western political and economic recipes, and publicly endorsing western values. Imitation was widely understood to be the shortest pathway to freedom and prosperity.

Pursuing economic and political reform by imitating a foreign model, however, turned out to have steeper moral and psychological downsides than many had originally expected.

The imitator’s life inescapably produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, lost identity, and involuntary insincerity. Indeed, the futile struggle to create a truly credible copy of an idealized model involves a never-ending torment of self-criticism if not self-contempt.

 

What makes imitation so irksome is not only the implicit assumption that the mimic is somehow morally and humanly inferior to the model. It also entails the assumption that central and eastern Europe’s copycat nations accept the West’s right to evaluate their success or failure at living up to Western standards.

In this sense, imitation comes to feel like a loss of sovereignty.

Thus, the rise of authoritarian chauvinism and xenophobia in central and eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory, but in political psychology. It reflects a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989 ‘imitation imperative’, with all its demeaning and humiliating implications. 

Michael Brenner is about the only analyst I’ve seen in all the commentaries on the war in Ukraine to develop this theme of humiliation.

Krastev and Holmes’ Eurozine article goes on make a second crucial point of huge cultural significance – 

In the eyes of conservative Poles in the days of the Cold War, western societies were normal because, unlike communist systems, they cherished tradition and believed in God. Then suddenly Poles discovered that western ‘normality’ today means secularism, multiculturalism and gay marriage. Should we be surprised that Poles and their neighbours felt ‘cheated’ when they found out that the society they wanted to imitate had disappeared, washed away by the swift currents of modernization?

 

If, in the immediate aftermath of 1989, ‘normality’ was understood largely in political terms (free elections, separation of powers, private property, and the right to travel), during the last decade normality has increasingly come to be interpreted in cultural terms. As a result, Central and East Europeans are becoming mistrustful and resentful of norms coming from the West. Ironically, as we shall see below, eastern Europe is now starting to view itself as the last bastion of genuine European values.

 

In order to reconcile the idea of ‘normal’ (meaning what is widespread at home) with what is normatively obligatory in the countries they aim to imitate, eastern Europeans consciously or unconsciously have begun to ‘normalize’ the model countries, arguing that what is widespread in the East is also prevalent in the West, even though westerners hypocritically pretend that their societies are different. Eastern Europeans often relieve their normative dissonance – say, between paying bribes to survive in the East and fighting corruption to be accepted in the West – by concluding that the West is really just as corrupt as the East, but westerners are simply in denial and hiding the truth. 

And this article by a Czech assesses not only Krastev’s argument but those contained in the books I mentioned in an earlier post - first one by Anne Applebaum (“The Twilight of Democracy?”) and the other by Timothy Snyder in whose “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018) we find a full exposition of Putin’s hero, the nationalist Ivan Ilyin.

And this article from an erstwhile hawk is also important in suggesting that the West, having done too little to oppose Russia risks going to the other extreme.

A thought

The Russian military has so far killed more civilians than Ukraine soldiers but its campaign has bogged down – particularly in the north. And the Ukrainians are resisting heroically. This is not the way the war was supposed to go – and we can only imagine the recriminations that are going on in the Kremlin, with all dissent viciously suppressed 

In the meantime, the western media taunt Putin – flapping a red flag at a psychopathic and highly dangerous bull.

This is hardly the most clever psychology

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 New Certainties

Strange how we can at one and the same time deplore the “bubbles” in which people operate and yet, unthinkingly, demonstrate groupthink in our own behaviour. George Parker used the opportunity of a George Orwell award to draw attention to the new mood of “certainty” and tribalism which has been evident in the world these past few years 

When we open a book or click on an article, the first thing we want to know is which group the writer belongs to. The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.

Politicians and activists are representatives. Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves. But today, writers have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community. Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers 

For Parker, it was the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in 2015 which started the process – when 200 US writers objected to the award that year of PEN America’s first Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly.

 

Thereafter, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its side—public figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going.

 

The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

Last year I taught a journalism course at Yale. My students were talented and hardworking, but I kept running into a problem: They always wanted to write from a position of moral certainty. This was where they felt strongest and safest. I assigned them to read writers who demonstrated the power of inner conflict and moral weakness—Baldwin, Orwell, Naipaul, Didion. I told my students that good writing never comes from the display of virtue. But I could see that they were sceptical, as if I were encouraging them deliberately to botch a job interview. They were attracted to subjects about which they’d already made up their minds.

 

Certainty has a flattening effect. It washes out the details of human experience so that they lose their variety and vitality. Certainty removes the strength of doubt, the struggle to reconcile incompatible ideals, the drama of working out an idea without knowing where it will lead, the pain of changing your mind. Good writing doesn’t deny or flee these things—it explores them down to their depths, confident that the most beautiful and important truths are found where the glare of certainty can’t reach.

Of course, in Russia these past few days, that certainty has now been enshrined in a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament 

which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”

But, even in the West, people are, increasingly, expected to toe the “official line” in comments as analysed in this article by Michael Brenner, Emeritus Professor at Pittsburgh and John Hopkins’ Universities. And it takes a courageous writer these days to write a balanced piece about the war in Ukraine such as Wolfgang Streeck’s recent piece 

Both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of both their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time begun to deny.

 

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv. 

I should make it clear that Streeck,  although a very highly respected German sociologist and political economist, does not pretend to have any particular expertise in International Relations – although he has ventured in the last few years into the field of analysis of German politics. For really solid analysis on issues of security I’ve found Anatol Lieven very reliable and in mid November last year – in the middle of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan “The Atlantic” published this piece of his reminding us that “Ukraine was the most dangerous place problem in the world” – to which there was then a solution (Minsk II) that, however, the US was resisting

Such inconvenient truths are quickly pounced upon and held up to ridicule by the liberal  mainstream media; this New Republic article has indeed invented a new name -  “westplaining” – for what it calls the 

“unending stream of Western scholars and pundits condescending to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives. Eastern European online circles have started using a new term to describe this phenomenon of people from the Anglosphere loudly foisting their analytical schema and prescriptions onto the region” 

Wolfgang Streeck is, of course, on the list – but I have to say that his geopolitical analysis gives us the sort of balanced view which any attempt at negotiation will desperately need. With Ukrainians struggling for their lives under murderous aggression, we are understandably focused on the human suffering involved. We are currently in war mode but need to think ahead…. 

After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

 

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be as ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from the FRG’s Sonderweg running out of coal and nuclear power. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would be impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2, in return for Germany agreeing to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

 

Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank.  

Further Important Reads

https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-to-read-on-ukraine/ - a fascinating commentary and selection

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/03/vladimir-putin-ukraine-war-chechnya - an interesting analysis of Putin whose biography by Masha Gessen reports his being kicked out of the Pioneers for being an uncontrollable lout. Plus ca change

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/03/02/russias-attack-on-ukraine-represents-a-demand-for-a-new-world-order/ Some people consider that Putin invaded Ukraine because he fears democracy – this energy blog offers another explanation – relating to energy supplies from which at the moment Russia is making almost 1 billion dollars a day.

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

Ukraine and Russia – from civilised divorce to uncivil war Paul d’Anieri (2019) - apparently a very balanced analysis

https://samf.su reading listbstack.com/p/space-and-time?s=r - military analyst Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/domino-effect?pc=1426 

follow the money my favourite (Canadian) blogger gives his take – the discussion thread is worth following

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/the-prospect-podcast-219-peter-ricketts-how-to-stop-putin - Peter Ricketts was a UK Ambassador to NATO and he's interviewed here by Alan Rusbridger

The Ukraine War

 Romanian television is full of images of refugees crossing from Ukraine into Romania from its northern border – some of them Romanian-speaking since the border a hundred years ago under the Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be much further north and towns like Czernowitz part of Romania. Gregor von Rezzori based his famous trilogy there. 

Like most people, I’m constantly refreshing the news to get updates about the horrific events occurring there and trying to make sense of it all. One of the things I realise is how little I can trust the commentators for whom the war seems little more than a spectacle – with roles of goodies and baddies too easily assigned. Only the likes of Paul Rogers (Professor of Peace Studies and respected military analyst) and Lawrence Freedman (Professor of military history and author of the recent amazing “Strategy – a history”) seem able to rise above this - although I reference some others at the end of the post 

Anthony Barnett is someone I can rely on to articulate most clearly our hopes and fears – whether on issues of democracy, nationalism, Brexit or the pandemic. So it’s not surprising that it is a typically nuanced piece of his which has spurred me into a few words about what a Moscow historian has courageously called “the most senseless war in history”

I have never been so wrong about a major event that was so clearly forewarned. I was convinced that Vladimir Putin would not be so reckless as to launch a full-scale conquest of Ukraine, if only for the simple reason that he would lose. I had assumed he was a cunning dictator who hated democracy, was smart enough to play on the corruption of a West enamoured of rentier capitalism and therefore had a cold measure of realities. I also thought he felt profoundly threatened by last year’s uprising in Belarus. The possible contagion of a democratic revolution there would threaten him personally, and the West’s sanctions, while not enough to undermine Lukashenko’s regime, were a close call. So I reckoned – perhaps I should say hoped – that the huge mobilisation of Russian military forces around Ukraine was a feint, whose real aim was to consolidate Russian control over Minsk, not Kyiv. This, it seemed to me, was bad enough.

It is important to hold onto one’s disbelief and the reasons for it. There is a danger in defaulting to self-regarding huff and puff, especially if you are British, with righteous declarations of how dictators must not be appeased. Putin should – and more importantly, will – be defeated. Now is the time for war, given that he has chosen it. It will be fought and suffered by the people of Ukraine, and we must extend to them solidarity and support. In the spirit of such solidarity, this also means it is time to begin to plan the peace that follows when the would-be conqueror is vanquished, and Russian forces withdraw. Ukraine’s heroic President Zelensky is right to put his country’s neutrality on the table in any negotiation. For if we do not wish to return to the old cycle that has led to this war, we have to acknowledge where we are coming from. 

There were, Barnett argues, two reasons why Putin’s invasion was ‘unbelievable’. “First, Ukraine is a large country with a proud people and long borders. It cannot be successfully occupied against determined patriotic resistance. Even if the Russian forces can completely subdue Ukraine’s professional army, which is not yet clear, they cannot withstand a long insurgency fed with the latest infantry weapons, night-vision rifles and drone technology, supported by US surveillance and cyber-warfare. The premise of Putin’s assault, as set out in his historically insane address, is that the people of Ukraine are really Russian. As his troops will learn, this is untrue. Nibbling off part of an oblast is one thing – seeking the conquest of an entire, functioning country that borders NATO does not make sense”. 

Putin is a product of the disastrous way that the US replaced the Cold War. As I write in ‘Taking Control!’, then-president George H W Bush expressed 30 years ago “the joy that was in my heart” at the way America had “won the Cold War”. He was thrilled that “a world once divided into two now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America”.

But America’s solo hegemony was responsible for a period of unrestrained unfairness. Its wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq were indecent disasters and its insatiable financial system exploded in the great crash of 2008.

Nowhere was more indecently and unfairly treated than Russia. After 1992, the US could have supported its transformation into a relatively uncorrupted democracy as its people wished. Instead of extending an updated Marshall plan to a defeated enemy, as the US had so successfully done with Japan and Germany after 1945, Russia was ravaged by economic ‘shock therapy’ and bankrupted. Putin is the foster child of Washington’s greed and myopia, determined to take revenge on the forces of the capitalist family that also orphaned him even while he has been personally enriched and empowered by it. 

Other useful analyses

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war-foretold/

https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/remembrance-of-nuclear-things-past

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-eu-oil-gas-trade-russia-budget-military-spending-ukraine-war-crisis/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/liberal-democracies-must-defend-their-values-and-show-putin-that-the-west-isnt-weak

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power

Adam Tooze Chartbook 90

Just added - Rebel Wisdom – sensemaking Russia and Ukraine A recent find, this website gives original insights. This long post is the most amazing assessment of useful commentaries and very much reflects my own feelings  

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340 An interview with Fiona Hill, the Brit in the US Foreign service who is a good Russian analyst

https://samf.substack.com/p/russias-plan-c?s=r Lawrence Freedman’s post of 2 March

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/01/on-humiliation-and-the-ukraine-war/ 1 march

Ukraine and the art of strategy; Lawrence Freedman (2019) in which the military historian links the events of the past 8 years to the lessons from his great opus on “Strategy – a history”

https://indi.ca/white-empire-is-playing-russian-roulette-with-sanctions/

https://unherd.com/2022/02/vladimir-putins-reckless-gamble/

https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/24/what-happened-in-kazakhstans-january-rebellion/

https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/18/waiting-for-the-russians-in-ukraine/

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii87/articles/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukraine-s-fractures of historical interest (the mood in 2014)

https://warontherocks.com/ a US security website “with a Realist” lens.