Ukraine and Russia, Again

In the Washington Post of May 24th, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Nation, has an op-ed that is headed:

“It’s time to challenge the orthodox view on the war in Ukraine.” But this is not just a challenge of that view; it’s also a criticism of the discussion that sustains it. Its main argument is that “pundits” and “military” consultants on “the media” have monopolized discussion of American policy toward the war, and prevented the contrary view from being heard. “Before the war ends,” she adds, “many Ukrainians and Russians will die while Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman make fortunes. “

To an extent she’s correct. The view she represents is hardly heard on TV as far as I’m aware. But that last sentence is so intellectually…I’m trying to be polite here, so let’s say, unworthy. You don’t impugn an opinion by identifying its protagonists. (My own experience as a long-ago SANE critic of nuclear arms policy was that Army officers were much more receptive to the case against strategic bombing than were Air Force officers: in both cases military men, but with quite different outlooks on the use of force against civilians.) Moreover, like most of the people who share the view on the War expressed in this blog, I don’t think of that view as “orthodox”; we’ve all come to it, I imagine, after giving it a lot of thought. And it’s always subject to modification, especially in detail–should the US or should it not transfer jet fighters to the Ukraine air force? — at any moment.

Worse yet, that sentence, with its underlying heartlessness, suggests that the victims of the war are of only secondary interest: what really counts, as with DSA, is taking a Left position in American politics and having a media voice for it. That’s not a big issue in Ukraine. In any event, I hold a lot of positions that no one in organized politics or mainstream media advocates for. So what?

Taking the op-ed at its face value, though, it contains what looks like a serious argument against the existing version of American and NATO intervention, that essentially calls for continued and increased military aid to Ukraine: the purpose of that aid being to halt and repel the invasion and bring Putin to the negotiation table on at least equal terms. So, what’s wrong with that argument?

First, of course, some quotations from the op-ed; it should be read in full but I think these passages are representative:

“[The] more protracted the war in Ukraine, the greater the risk of a nuclear accident or incident. And with the Biden administration’s strategy to ‘weaken’ Russia with the scale of weapons shipments, including anti-ship missiles, and revelations of U.S. intelligence assistance to Ukraine, it is clear that the United States and NATO are in a proxy war with Russia.

“[T)here are cogent arguments… providing much-needed context and history to explain the background of this war.

“[There is a need] to hear voices of restraint, who disagree with the tendency to see compromise in negotiations as appeasement, who seek persistent and tough diplomacy to attain an effective cease-fire and a negotiated resolution, one designed to ensure that Ukraine emerges as a sovereign, independent, reconstructed and prosperous country.”

Why do I disagree?

Basically, we have a critic addressing everyone but Putin to halt the war. Not Katrina Vanden Heuvel nor Noam Chomsky nor anyone I know of has actually addressed Putin directly; has highlighted to him his responsibility for the slaughter. As for “context,” and “background,” once again that appears to be only US and NATO “responsibility.” The experiences of Eastern European nations–and recently Ukraine itself — with both the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia simply disappears. And the US and NATO should stop arming Ukraine–-who is going to “stop arming” Russia, with the world’s second-largest military, and a history of trampling over weaker countries? Please!

There is not the faintest hint that the war and the cataclysm–never addressed in human terms by the alt-Left critics–need never have happened; or that Putin could or could have stopped it at any moment. Or that his visible–and audible — megalomania makes him completely untrustworthy as an adversary in “negotiations”–until his back is against the wall.

Worse, in the rush to implicate the US and President Biden (Vanden Heuvel quotes Chomsky on this point) any possibility of an ethical consideration disappears in a totally one-sided, short-sighted version of “history” that manages to exculpate both the Soviet Union and Putin at the same moment, while implicitly treating Volodymyr Zelensky as a non-person: as though neither he nor the nation of which he’s the elected President might have any interests they can call their own. Or that only the possession of nuclear weapons gives a nation any standing in the international world.

In that respect, and above all, the most visible of these defects in moral reasoning is the total refusal to hold the man–the only man, the single man–who made the threat of using nuclear weapons, to any accountability at all. You might think that since The Nation by now probably has more credibility in Moscow than it does in Washington D.C., it might occur to its Editors to address themselves directly to President Putin, instead of pussy-footing around his existence, and implore him to renounce his nuclear threat. Is that too much to expect?

Finally, what makes me especially disheartened is that as a long-time inhabitant of the Old Left–perhaps now the too-Old Left?–my bedrock notion of a “Just War (see Michael Walzer’s analysis of Just and Unjust Wars) was the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. That was true of The Nation too. But the just cause of a democratic Republic was lost when, with Nazi Germany sending heavy weapons and airplanes to the insurgent Fascist military, the US, Britain, and France enforced a joint policy of “non-intervention” with blockade that prevented any equalizing arms from going to the to the Loyalists.

If, as Marx quipped, History repeats itself the first time as Tragedy, the second as Farce,” we are clearly and horribly in the first iteration. But, if I may directly address the advocates of what would effectively be a unilateral disarmament–-which of those two roles identified above are you playing in this Tragedy?

P. S.

Above, I called the tactic of impugning ideas by identifying their protagonists as “unworthy,” but I’ve decided that’s not enough. I’m sorry, Katrina. Ad hominem arguments are always unworthy, but this one in particular–the accusation that Ukrainians and Russians are dying so Raytheon et. al. can profit — is shameful and repellent. Not to mention that as an argument it’s either disingenuous in the attempt to provide an irrelevant justification for an obvious falsehood; or else based on ignorance about what in philosophy is known as the “Genetic Fallacy,” a title which explains itself.

But I’ll give one timely and crucial example. To wit:

Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist with contemporary notions about “inferior” peoples or classes. No doubt about it. She also was a revolutionary figure in the movement for women’s greater access to contraception and family planning, a movement that culminated in the Supreme Court ruling in Griswold vs. Connecticut.

Anti-abortion activists, especially women among them, delight in using this example to show how (allegedly )corrupted that movement was from the start, and as justification of the move–visible in Justice Alito’s forthcoming overruling of Roe v. Wade–to overrule Griswold and enable state governments to once again outlaw methods of contraception; or subject them to religious requirements or objections.

So let’s be clear: Griswold and what has followed is one of the great liberating revolutions in human history. Margaret Sanger is an indelible hero of that liberation. No impeachment of her character can change that. To try to blacken it by blackening her name is odious.

In the same way no impeachment of any retired General or profit-making corporation can change the truth about what’s happening in Ukraine.