The Alt-Left and Ukraine:
How Can I Explain Their Behavior?
As is no doubt obvious, I’ve been shocked and angered by the behavior of Left intellectuals who’ve manifested only lukewarm or boilerplate responses to the invasion of Ukraine; who seem implicitly to echo Tucker Carlson’s claim that the war in Ukraine does not benefit Ukrainians, but does benefit all of Washington.
The latest example that’s come to my attention, and arguably the worst, is an ultimately appalling book review in the Spring Books Issue of The New York Review of Books by the American intellectual historian Jackson Lears. The review is of Samuel Moyn’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. I haven’t read that book and will not comment on it, though I’ve read his attack on “humanitarian intervention” in shorter form elsewhere.
The bulk of the review, following Moyn, is a run-through of American expansion and militarism, mostly as Moyn points out, at the expense of non-white people; it’s generally learned and thought-provoking . However, when Lears comes to the period following the collapse of Communism, the tone shifts, beginning with Bill Clinton’s Presidency, as though George W.H. Bush and the First Iraqi War were of no consequence. Bush is not a liberal who requires chastising, I guess–it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. At that point, Lears footnotes Fred Kaplan’s recent chronological account of NATO’s expansion (also in the NYRB), without realizing that, as I noted in my previous blog, Kaplan undermines the whole Russia-was-provoked-by-the-U.S. argument of how the “New Cold War” began.
In short order then, the review ends with a one-paragraph discourse on the War in Ukraine, which is treated as just another failure of U.S. foreign policy and militarism. It’s all our fault, due to the expansion of NATO, and we better make a volte-face quickly and stop supporting Ukraine. There’s no clue from either publisher or author when it was actually written, but there are at least two sentences in the following quote that could only have been written after hostilities had begun.
Here is the last passage with just a few minor omissions, and my comments interspersed:
“(The) US has failed to put a cease-fire and a neutral Ukraine at the forefront of its policy agenda there…”
[Whenever it was written, this beginning displays no interest in anything but American policy, as though the actual War were incidental to that; it suggests a relationship to the world that I can only call “neurotic.” The U.S., to get real, has nothing to say about a “cease-fire,” which is up to the actual combatants, and in any event can only be declared by Russia. When the merciless bombs are falling on your heads, only the aggressor can “cease” firing. The victim’s choice is surrender or die–or fight back. I find his sentence not only appalling, but repellent.
As Sun Tzu wrote many centuries ago in The Art of War, “in death ground, fight.” There’s a decisive difference between being “neutral” and pleading your neutrality at the point of a gun. And it’s not our choice to make; it is not. Neither to Putin nor the American alt-Left does it seem to occur that the time to discuss the Ukraine/Russia relationship was before invading, not after. There is not one scenario in a thousand in which armed aggression was justified. And as for neutrality, Finland is often put forward as a cautionary example to go along with the warnings of Kennan and Kissinger, but at this very moment its government is “reconsidering” that relationship. How could they not? To continue:]
“It has dramatically increased the flow of weapons to Ukraine, which had already been deployed for eight years to suppress the separatist uprising in the Donbas.”
[Yes, as the French aphorism puts it, “Cet animal est très méchant/Quand on
l’attaque, il se défend.” Or in the English-language version, “This animal is very wicked/It bites the foot that tries to kick it.”
Notice the language here: It would seem the “uprising” has been non-violent, apparently occurring without the use of weaponry or Russian assistance; and being innocently separatist despite the fact that even a majority of Russian-identified Easterners oppose separation; and are themselves being punished by the savage attacks on certain Eastern cities.
This is the persistent language of the alt-Left, in which West Ukraine is somehow the oppressive force, even when being governed by a democratically elected regime, and of course egged on by the U.S. and NATO. As it happens, Slovakia has just sent Ukraine an S-300 air defense system to defend against Russian bombs. Is this meant to be to the benefit of the Slovenian military-industrial complex?]
“US policy prolongs the war and creates the likelihood of a protracted insurgency after a Russian victory, which seems probable at this writing.”
[Which “writing,” clearly, took place after the bombs had started falling. So, the U.S. has prevented the Ukraine from surrendering, which would be much preferable to a “protracted insurgency” that victorious Putin would have to face. Along with any future Biden Administration. President Zelensky is apparently a U.S. puppet, who can’t wait to participate in his own personal Munich.
Of course he is trying to negotiate at this moment, but every report from Turkey suggests that the Russians aren’t serious: they still want what they want. At this point it might have been appropriate for any serious commentator to consider the possibility that the better off Ukraine is in the War, with the assistance of defensive weapons from abroad, the greater the likelihood of achieving an acceptable settlement.]
“ Meanwhile, the Biden administration has refused to address Russia’s fear of NATO encirclement.”
[This absurdity, which is repeated over and over again on the alt-Left, must have come straight out of Putin’s Ministry of Propaganda. No one looking at a map of Europe could possibly have come up with it. Ask the Finns, who were twice invaded by Soviet forces, about “encirclement;” or Estonians, who stand convicted of association with American imperialism for recognizing the need to join NATO. There’s something deeply discouraging about the way in which that falsehood has crept into our discourse. And then:]
“Sometimes we must conduct diplomacy with nations whose actions we deplore…. Without serious American diplomacy, the Ukraine war, too, may well become endless.”
[“Deplore?” Deplore? Speaking only for myself, I do not “deplore” the history of slavery, or the slaughter of Native Americans, or the War in Vietnam, or the invasion of Iraq. I deplore Will Smith’s slap, the awarding of a César to Roman Polanski, the benching of Anna Netrebko. For that matter, I do not deplore the actions of the legislative majorities and Governors of Florida and Texas: I detest and loath them; I wish there were some Dantean hell on earth they could all be dumped into. As for Putin and the Russian military, the second largest in the world: What hallucinogens has Jackson Lears been swallowing?
Is there no editor at the NYRB who would have looked at all this crap and said, “You were asked to write a book review, not go on an ego trip and append an unhinged apologia for the worst war criminal of the Twenty-First Century.” What are they drinking?]
And finally:
“How does one negotiate with any potential diplomatic partner while ignoring its security concerns? The answer, of course, is that one does not.”
Enough. How does one negotiate the difference between “security concerns” and fear for your survival as a free nation? The whole passage is written in the judicious tone of a commentary on, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, deploring the installation of Soviet ballistic missiles, but blaming it all on the U.S. for having its own missiles in Turkey; and demanding that the US halt the blockade and settle the affair by negotiating. The suggestion here clearly is that Biden and Putin emulate JFK and Khruschev and get together–in a Zoom meeting perhaps?–and work things out in a diplomatic “partnership.” Ukraine? President Zelensky? The hell with them.
As readers of this blog will know, my explanation of this behavior on a part of the Left has been a resort to intellectual history. I have described a frame of mind, vis-à-vis American militarism and the Cold War in particular, which has often been apologetic for the behavior of the Soviet Union. But that’s not a fully satisfying answer; by itself it can’t explain how day after day intelligent people can look at the totally one-sided horrors and atrocities on the screen, and not see what they’re looking at. Ideology may provide a disposition for how we see what’s happening in the world, but after all: on the screen, what you see is what you get. So how can you not see it?
The other afternoon, however (Friday the 8th), we saw the movie Babi Yar: Context, which uses an astonishing amount of archival footage, mostly taken by either Nazis or Soviets during the German invasion of the Ukraine in 1941. It’s about the events leading from that invasion up to the massacre at Babi Yar, where thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis (at first with no objection by the Ukrainians) . It’s unbearable to watch (fortunately, we don’t have to watch the titular event itself), but what is striking is the unmistakable similarity between the past and the present: fires raging everywhere, entire apartment buildings flattened by bombing and cannonades, civilians corpses lining the streets and fields, the beautiful city of Kiev (then) and other cities virtually razed by tanks smashing them to rubble.
In contrast, Jackson Lear’s tone could be that of an intellectual who has never witnessed anything worse than, say, the Cod War between Iceland and Scotland, where the divisive question is at what meridian the boundary line should be drawn. Negotiate! And afterwards I had a realization. We Americans are of an age never to have witnessed the horrors of World War II (and of course World War I) and in fact never to have witnessed total war in action, bomb by bomb, day by day, corpse by corpse, missile by missile.
We–myself, Jackson Lears, Katrina vanden Heuvel, David Bromwich, Peter Beinart, the spokes-persons of DSA–did not have any notion of what that kind of warfare is like until six weeks ago; movies certainly never gave it to us. Not one. But that is exactly what we are indeed witnessing during this awful period that has no end in sight: Total War, which began with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, nothing else. “In the past six weeks,” as the Times put it, “Russian shells have destroyed Ukrainian cities, homes, hospitals and schools.” Make all the excuses and evasions you want, but there is not one single minute of this War that has not consisted of all-out violence by one nation against another which is doing nothing but try to defend itself.
Perhaps if we’d seen the Vietnam War in daily full color we’d have been prepared, but even that was not the same kind of War, of tanks rolling over people and buildings without relief. And yes, essentially I rooted for the other side during that vicious, pointless, one-side War; but even then we were not seeing women and children exiled by the millions, nor city after city with everything habitable in it destroyed, or besieged without food or water for week after week.
But the main point here is that we were against that War, all of us, all the time; the only difference among “us”–by which I mean the entire Left–was not whether but how to oppose it. We were on the same side, myself, and Kathy Boudin (whom I knew for one year) and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin–and The Nation, and everyone associated with it. We wanted the invading Americans, our country-men to lose, to be defeated, to withdraw in humiliation: as happened.
So I make this claim: you cannot have been against that War, against our participation in it, and not be as totally, as unremittingly, against the perpetrators of this War. To do otherwise is to be either a hypocrite, or completely blind to what you must be seeing–or perhaps simply avoiding seeing . And all that blather about how the first duty of Socialists is to fight for socialism in the U.S. is depressingly ignorant. How will anyone ever trust your moral judgment if you fail the first test of moral thinking: to be able to tell the victims from the perpetrators?
As with them, how can anyone ever trust the judgment of the oft-published Jackson Lears about anything?