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Russia Plays Western ‘Anti-War’ Left For Fools

Their contempt for Ukraine shows.

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Flag of Russia and Ukraine painted on a concrete wall. Relationship between Ukraine and RussiaEven in death, Christopher Hitchens will probably never live down his stubborn, enthusiastic support for the war in Iraq even as much of the American public soured on it. Nevertheless, in a 2005 interview with Italian journalist Christian Rocca, he made a prescient observation about certain figures in the anti-war movement:

“It annoys me when I read lazy journalism … which refers to those who are opposed to the regime change policy of [President Bush] as ‘anti-war.’ Well, this is true if they are pacifists, which none of them are … It has to be said they are pro-war, actively pro-war, but on the other side.”

I call it prescient because 17 years later, as Russia looks poised to invade Ukraine, there is yet again a vocal segment of the left that, far from being anti-war, effectively excuses Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s revanchism and gives him tacit approval to attack, while showing utter contempt for Ukraine’s sovereignty and right to set its own domestic and foreign policies. Most public attention has focused on the pro-Russian appeasement by right-wing figures like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, but the left-wing equivalent to that appeasement is no less dangerous or despicable.

As of Sunday, Putin had positioned an estimated 130,000 soldiers and advanced weaponry along Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus, as numerous Western countries warned their citizens to leave. The US and other Western countries have promised a raft of economic sanctions and sent weapons to Ukraine to defend itself, but they have ruled out actually sending forces into Ukraine.

But let’s be clear: If war breaks out, it will be an act of unprovoked aggression and entirely the fault of Putin’s regime and nobody else – not Ukraine, not NATO and not the US. And when thousands of Ukrainian men, women and children die, it will be Russian bombs and bullets killing them.

But listen to some people on the Western left, and you’d think they live in the “Star Trek” Mirror Universe, where the US about to invade Ukraine, while Russia is just an innocent victim defending its interests.

A Feb. 9 article by Jacobin magazine writer Branko Marcetic is a prime example of this bizarro view. Citing a Feb. 8 op-ed in The Guardian by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Marcetic – like Sanders – takes at face value Russia’s phony concerns about “NATO expansion” and whines that it’s “neo-McCarthyism” to suggest people parroting Russian propaganda are pro-Russian. But he really takes the cake when he gives a nod of agreement to views from right-wing figures like Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

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Marcetic doesn’t bother mentioning Carlson’s white nationalism or Hawley’s support for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, only halfheartedly admitting they’re “the worst people in the world” before saying they “have a point.”

Hawley, apparently, has a point in “warning that ‘our interest is not so strong’ in Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty that it would ‘justify committing the United States to go to war with Russia.’” Carlson, meanwhile, “accurately” compared Ukraine joining NATO to Mexico allying with China and questioned Ukraine’s strategic value to the US, while Marcetic gushes that Republicans adopting Carlson’s positions marks “a notable shift for a party that has typically never met a war it didn’t want to charge into.”

It’s weird that Hawley is speaking of going to war with Russia, given that the US has explicitly taken that option off the table. And Carlson’s comparison of Ukraine joining NATO to a Chinese-Mexican alliance is nonsensical given the US does not pose any military threat to Mexico, whereas Russia poses an immediate one to Ukraine, after having already invaded and occupied Crimea. But both of these statements display contempt for Ukraine, its safety and its right to sovereignty without Russian interference, as Marcetic does in approvingly reprinting them.

As for Sanders’s view that Russia has “legitimate concerns” about post-Soviet countries joining NATO, that overlooks the fact that the whole reason why the Baltic countries, Ukraine and Georgia – which Russia invaded in 2008 – would want to join NATO is that they have far more legitimate concerns about Russian aggression.

Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Intercept, displayed similar contempt on Feb. 11 when he sarcastically tweeted, “If Russia retakes Ukraine, what if it becomes a hotbed of corruption, ruled by bickering oligarchs? We can’t have that.”

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Despite his problematic use of the word “retakes,” he subsequently tweeted that he is “100% opposed to Russia invading Ukraine.” But his tweet showed the same disregard for Ukraine’s sovereignty as Marcetic and a sneering dismissiveness toward its efforts to develop rule of law and root out corruption, as every nascent democracy recovering from decades of dictatorship must do.

One of the worst comments came in the form of a Feb. 3 tweet by ice cream producer Ben & Jerry’s that said, “Sending thousands more US troops to Europe in response to Russia’s threats against Ukraine only fans the flame of war” and suggesting the Biden administration was “[preparing] for war.” The day before, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., sounded a similar note, criticizing the administration for sending weapons to Ukraine because it “escalates the conflict.”

Weird, because I thought it was Russia’s deploying, without provocation, 130,000 soldiers to the Ukrainian border, poised to invade, that was escalating things.

The basic premise of these ideas is that the US and NATO should do nothing substantial to deter Russia from invading and then sit on their hands if it actually does invade. The bigger question is why so many leftists who claim to be anti-war and anti-imperialist would give succor to Russia as it engages in the very warmongering and imperialism they claim to deplore.

One possible reason is a longstanding binary worldview that sees the US as the main cause of the world’s problems and so irredeemably evil that it praises any nation opposing its interests – e.g., the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Russia in the present, China, Venezuela or Syria. This inevitably leads to double standards when it comes to imperialism and human rights abuses and a tendency to blame the US and its allies first.

The Iraq war didn’t help either, giving rise to isolationism and kneejerk cynicism about American foreign policy whereby anything emanating from the Pentagon or State Department is assumed to be a lie. But unlike Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Russia’s forces amassed along Ukraine’s border are clearly visible.

Another is Russian propaganda, disseminated by state-owned outlets like RT and Sputnik. They have been tremendously successful at pumping pro-Russian ideas into Western political discourse while also promoting anti-system populist politics aimed at exacerbating divisions and destabilizing democracies. Kremlin propagandists can count every Westerner sincerely arguing Russia has “legitimate concerns” about “NATO expansion” as a success story.

But a larger reason is a failure to admit what Russia actually is and always has been, which is a colonial empire, every bit as much as its Spanish, British and French counterparts. The differences are that it was an empire of land rather than sea, and that with the collapse of the monarchy in 1917 it slapped a left-wing revolutionary coat of paint onto a state that remained just as imperialist as when the tsars ruled from Petrograd.

That’s why Georgia’s first tenure as a democratic republic after declaring independence in 1918 lasted only three years, ending with the Red Army invading and taking over the country in 1921. Armenia and independence movements in Central Asia experienced similar fates.

Consequently, the decolonization that Spain, the UK and other European powers underwent after World War II didn’t come to Russia until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. That decolonization is what Putin referred to as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” in 2005.

But where other former European colonial powers are content to let their former colonies govern their own affairs, Putin cannot tolerate former Russian colonies doing the same. That’s why pro-democratic uprisings in post-Soviet countries – most recently Belarus and Kazakhstan – scare him so much and is likely the reason he has his eyes on Ukraine. After all, a Ukraine that is free, democratic and prosperous and enjoys close ties with the West threatens his ill-gotten power and wealth, as it might cause Russians to start asking why they can’t have democracy and prosperity too.

If a war breaks out in Europe, it will happen because a predatory, kleptocratic mafia state presided over by a psychopathic dictator started it. It will be because all the diplomacy in the world could not stop Putin’s revanchist desire to restore Soviet power. Undermining efforts to prevent that from happening or punish Putin’s regime if he does invade isn’t anti-war.

It is, as Christopher Hitchens said, pro-war, but on the other side.

Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @biotechvisigoth.

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