The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Category: Ukraine/Russia (Page 2 of 4)

A queer antinationalist on Ukraine and Russia

2023-12-02 / / 0 Comments

I am queer. I am also a vehement antinationalist. These facts make it impossible for me to offer ideological support to either Moscow or Kiev.

Let’s start with the obvious one: the Putin regime. Russia has heightened its repression of LGBTQ+ people, including a new Supreme Court ruling that effectively outlaws pro-queer activism as “extremist.” LGBTQ+ activists face the risk of fines and imprisonment up to 12 years. Putin has already used these tactics against dissidents like Boris Kagarlitsky, Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Putin’s Russia tries to contrast itself with the “decadent” West with its persecution of LGBTQ+ people, even though our right-wing politicians hold views that are just as bad as Putin’s. Like western conservatives, Putin weaponises religion—in this case, the Eastern Orthodox Church, rather than evangelical Protestant denominations or the Roman Catholic Church—to impose an authoritarian social agenda. And I could go on about Russia’s other reactionary, repressive policies and laws, but there’s already ample coverage in CNN, the New York Times, NBC, The Guardian, etc.

Ukraine, for its part, is aggressively pursuing an ethnonationalist agenda that conflates Russian ethnicity and language with Putin’s vile regime. Even soldiers in the far-right, extreme nationalist Azov Battalion have been attacked for speaking Russian, primarily by the now-fired Lviv Polytechnic professor Iryna Farion, who used to be a member of the Nazi-adjacent Svoboda party (link in Russian). Nationalism has infected even otherwise progressive circles in Ukraine: according to the Kharkov-based anarchist group Assembly (link in Italian and English; English is on the bottom), many feminist and LGBTQ+ activists are closely tied with Ukraine’s nationalist movement. Instead of uniting the entirety of the Ukrainian people against the Russian state, the Ukrainian government and many of its supporters have chosen instead to create even more divisions. As I’ve said before, Kiev’s own-goals push people towards supporting Russia, even though it’s unlikely they’ll get any more freedom there than they do in Ukraine.

The situation is undoubtedly worse for people who find themselves ostracised from both sides—for example, I can’t even imagine what it feels like to be a queer leftist in occupied Eastern Ukraine (especially one who primarily speaks Russian) who runs the risk of being persecuted by Kiev or the Russian occupiers. Or for pro-Ukraine (or merely anti-war) Russians who want to leave the country: many of Russia’s European neighbours have closed the border; Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles distrust Russians, regardless of their support of Putin; and Putin’s dictatorial rule has made it impossible for them to stay home in Russia with the people they love the most. They’re being told that there is something inherently evil inside them for being from Russia, and they’re also being told that there’s something inherently wrong with them for opposing the Russian regime.

I can’t support either position. Both Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ repression and Ukraine’s ethnonationalism are incompatible with a functioning pluralist society. They imply that if you’re not an ethnic Ukrainian who speaks Ukrainian, you’re not a real Ukrainian, or that if you’re gay or bi or trans, you’re not a real Russian. If you’re not a nationalist, you’re not a real feminist. If you’re a leftist, you’re not a good Ukrainian. If you’re a liberal or progressive, you’re not a good Russian.

And once you’re no longer seen as a real member of your society, you’re open to persecution, since civil rights and liberties are reserved only for real people, not superfluous ones.

I don’t know what the right answer is, either to put a stop to Russia’s increasing repression or Ukraine’s nationalist obsessions. I don’t think anybody does, no matter how many thinkpieces are written, no matter how many declarations are made on TV, no matter how much people rant and rave on Telegram and Reddit and Twitter.

What I do know is that people are suffering, dying and praying for a better chance for themselves, their families, their friends and their communities. And neither Russia’s sexist repression nor Ukraine’s reactionary ethnic nationalism will bring their people the peace they so desperately deserve. You don’t want real liberation or justice if your goal is to make a new group of second-class citizens.

You can capitalise “Nazi,” but not “Russian”?

2023-11-25 / / 0 Comments

A Ukrainian fact-checking website has failed to notice that writing “Nazi” with a capital N, but using a lowercase R for “Russian,” makes them look as though they have more respect for the Nazis than the Russians. Considering Ukraine’s track record with Nazis and Nazi collaborators (Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Symon Petliura…) and their apologists (especially Volodymyr Viatrovych), and the Russians’ false claims that Ukraine is a “Nazi regime,” this is an especially bad look. It’s the kind of thing Russian propagandists would seize on: “Look, those Ukrainians love Nazis so much that they lowercase ‘Russian’ and capitalise ‘Nazi’!”

But this case isn’t unique; it’s part of a pattern of petty and juvenile behaviour from certain Ukraine supporters. I’ve seen one Ukrainian software company get rid of the Russian localisation of its app and replace it with a Ukrainian one. Before that, they had only Russian and not Ukrainian. Why not both? Russian is spoken in multiple countries—why punish other Russian-speakers because Putin is a shithead?

And some Ukrainian news sites will write “Russia,” “Putin,” “Belarus,” “Russian,” and other words connected with Russia (and sometimes Belarus) with lowercase letters, which sounds as though a twelve-year-old dreamed it up. I also saw one quoting someone using “Kiev” (rather than the government-approved “Kyiv”) and writing it with a lowercase K… presumably because it’s “russian.” Even Russian propaganda doesn’t lowercase “Ukraine.” (They just refer to it as the “Kiev regime,” the “Nazi Ukrainian regime,” or “the Zelensky regime” in every other article.)

Most Ukrainians or overseas supporters do not do this, but there are enough of these people to piss me off. I don’t remember the Allies writing “Hitler,” “Himmler,” “Japan,” “Germany,” “Italy,” “Mussolini,” “Tokyo,” and “Nazi Party” with lowercase letters. I saw people writing “Trump” with a lowercase T on forums and social media, but no news site or paper, no matter how left-wing they were, would print “trump” instead of “Trump.” I’m fine with the flags and “Support Ukraine” fundraisers. But this crap?

My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse…

2023-11-25 / / 0 Comments

…I mean, a left movement that manages to avoid the following things:

  • Praising Hamas or other theocratic terrorist organisations (eg, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah)
  • Writing in a way that’s inaccessible to the people they claim to stand for (usually the working class, and sometimes disabled people if it’s disability-studies scholars who sound no different from their non-disabled counterparts in all the worst ways)
  • Politicising identity to the point that people turn into two-dimensional “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (usually based on ethnicity, race, or gender) without nuance or distinction
  • Thinking that YELLING LOUDLY WITHOUT CLARIFYING YOUR POSITION is a GOOD WAY TO MAKE A POINT IN AN ARGUMENT. Extra points if you use the clapping 👏 hand 👏 emoji 👏 or repeat your sentence three times, first time in regular type, then italicised, then boldfaced
  • Promoting ideas that are impossible to implement on a large scale unless there’s a transitional period between the current and ideal states
  • Claiming that state propaganda organs like RT (Russia), Sputnik (Russia), TASS (Russia), the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea), Xinhua (China), Press TV (Iran), Global Times (China), TeleSUR (Venezuela), Prensa Latina (Cuba), Al Mayadeen (Lebanon), or Orinoco Tribune (Venezuela) are real “anti-imperialist news”
  • In contrast, relying solely or primarily on Western state media like Radio Liberty/Radio Free Asia (USA), BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), or France 24, though this is more of a centre-left phenomenon. Although these sources are much more reliable than their Russian, Chinese, or Iranian equivalents, they tend to gloss over the faults of pro-Western regimes like Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
  • Using only pro-government sources (there are sites that criticise the government without defending Russia) about the Ukrainian conflict, including Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Euromaidan Press, and Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian propaganda is less likely to make shit up than Russian propaganda, but it often treats Kiev’s repression and ethnocentric nationalism as a good thing
  • Using conspiracy-theory-laden websites like The Greyzone, MintPress News, Donbass Insider, and Moon of Alabama as reliable sources about China, Russia, or Syria
  • Spreading conspiracy theories in the name of “anti-imperialism,” including debunked claims about Syria’s gas killings and Ukraine’s purported biolabs
  • Treating activism like the Oppression Olympics, even though that’s a game nobody actually wants to win
  • Creating new political parties instead of trying to push existing ones further to the left (yes, I’m kind of an entryist; deal with it)
  • Related to the last point, running presidential or other candidates that have no chance of winning—why run anyone for office if you know damn well that a candidate from the People’s Socialist Party of Freedom, Equality and Liberation has zero chance of winning against the Democrat or Republican (or mainstream equivalents in other countries, like the Tories and Labour in the UK, or the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats)
  • Refusing to build coalitions across the left because purity politics makes it impossible, thereby allowing the right to split us up and indirectly help leaders like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Jair Bolsonaro come to power
  • Expressing essentialist ideas about genders, races or cultures (“Russian culture exists to oppress Ukrainians,” “Indigenous Americans are noble sages,” “men are all rapists,” “‘real’ women are delicate flowers who need ‘sex-based rights’ to protect them from evil trans women”)
  • Calling anyone who disagrees with them “reactionary” or “pseudo-left” (Trotskyists do this a lot)
  • Focusing more on style than substance (“trans women” versus “transwoman”, #KyivNotKiev)
  • Venerating past and present tyrannical dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, “respected comrade” Kim Jong Un and the rest of his family, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin (who isn’t even a leftist, much less a communist), Xi Jinping, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, ad nauseam
  • Focusing on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy
  • Focusing on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy
  • Treating Volodymyr Zelensky (and by extension the bumbling Ukrainian central government) as though the were the second coming of Winston Churchill
  • Throwing around jargon like “anti-imperialist,” “settler colonial,” “decolonise,” “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” “imperialist,” “neoliberal,” and “geopolitical economy” without being clear about what they mean
  • Reducing all relationships of dominance and oppression to the control of the means of production or the lack thereof (which is silly, since racism, all sexisms and xenophobia can occur under any economic system, including socialism)
  • Supporting right-wing authoritarian states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly Russia and Iran)
  • Supporting authoritarian communist or socialist states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly China, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria)
  • Treating politics like a sports game
  • Spouting ableist views—including fat-shaming—because their concept of class or identity organising completely ignores the idea that disability is political
  • Treating the writings of Marx and Engels (or sometimes Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) as holy writ
  • Siding with anti-Western states because they’re “anti-imperialist” (as though China and Russia weren’t expansionist empires, which is the analogue of Japanese, Ukrainian or Taiwanese boosting of Western imperialisms because they’re against China and Russia)
  • Supporting reactionary, xenophobic movements like Brexit (a common view among some British communists, as well as the perennial candidate and professional fruitcake and anti-vaxxer Jill Stein) because they’re against the EU’s neoliberalism
  • Dismissing reports of sexual abuse because they’re a “distraction” from the class struggle
  • Denying genocidal actions of anti-US regimes (China in particular)
  • Claiming that their movement, whether Trotskyism, orthodox Marxism–Leninism, anarchism, or any other tendency, is the only way to solve society’s problems
  • Uncritically defending Ukraine or other pro-Western countries with deeply problematic policies (more common in North American and Western European mainstream media, though views like this sometimes appear among social democrats and other more moderate leftists)
  • Dismissing, defending or promoting racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia on the grounds that feminism, pro-LGBTQ activism and antiracism distract from the class struggle
  • Constantly putting political one-upmanship over the real lives, concerns and feelings of actual human beings

Unfortunately, this seems impossible to find, at least for now. I know I can’t agree with everything I find, but the lacuna between my views and theirs is staggering. (But mainstream centre-left politics leaves me unsatisfied, too, and anything on the right is obviously out of the question.)

Vengeance is not justice.

2023-11-20 / / 0 Comments

The key to breaking the cycle [of tragedy] is to move social discourse away from the quest for vengeance (often mislabelled “justice”), to the goal of building a society together with one’s former enemies.

—Nicolai Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine

EU gives Kiev carte blanche to weasel out of accommodating Russophones

2023-11-14 / / 0 Comments

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Ukraine’s continuing efforts to impose a rigidly ethnonationalist agenda on a deeply divided country. Ukrainian officials have claimed that ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians aren’t a “real” ethnic minority—they’re just Ukrainians who happen to speak Russian—and don’t need special protection under the law, unlike Hungarians, Romanians, and Tatars who live in Ukraine. Go ahead and force them to stop speaking Russian—after all, they’re not a real minority worthy of protection. The EU has no plans to intervene on Russophone Ukrainians’ behalf, either. (Link is in Russian.)

I think this is yet another own-goal by the Ukrainian government. One of Russia’s “justifications” for invading Ukraine was the country’s supposed oppression of Russian-speakers. By constantly doubling down on anti-Russian-language laws and statutes, Kiev is simply giving the Russians talking points. If I were less informed about Moscow’s propaganda, I would have thought Putin was telling the truth. (In general, Russia has a tendency of noticing real problems—Ukrainian ethnonationalism and its connections with Nazi collaborators, racial tensions in the US, labour disputes in France—and using them to justify its own actions and deflect criticism.) Remember, the best lies contain a grain of truth, and this is no exception.

(To learn more about the divisive nature of Ukrainian nationalism, I strongly recommend reading Nicolai Petro’s The Tragedy of Ukraine or some of the articles that preceded the full book.)

War is not a sports game.

2023-11-07 / / 0 Comments

War is not a sports game. And yet, and yet.

I’ve seen this with Ukraine and Russia, and now I’m seeing it with Israel and Hamas. In the past, I saw it with the Iraq War. It’s like being in Ancient Rome and watching gladiators go at it against each other—but worse.

I get this impression that people are thinking, “Three-nil to Russia!” “Touchdown! Israel clinched it in the nick of time! Look at that crowd over there! It’s unbelievable!” “Foul for Israel: goaltending!” “Kiev scored an own-goal—oops!” “Send them off the pitch! Russia—red card!” “Hamas scored a home run! And that’s a ball game!” “And that was a surprise save by Ukraine! If you look over there, Putin is fuming!” “Slam-dunk by Hamas!” “And Netanyahu’s been sent to the penalty box!” “Penalty kick to Ukraine!”

You want to watch sports? Watch Arsenal or Real Madrid or Dynamo Kiev. Watch the LA Lakers or Boston Celtics or Chicago Bulls. Watch the Dallas Cowboys, New England Patriots or Oakland Raiders. Or watch the Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants or New York Mets (boo!). Watch England and India play cricket. Hell, you can even watch Donald Trump make an idiot of himself on the golf course. But Israel and Ukraine are not playing fields. They are war zones. These are people’s lives we’re talking about, not just points on a scoreboard.

It’s saddest from people who support a particular side because they want to see justice in the world. But even in just wars, even after the American Civil War and World War II, it was changes made in peacetime that brought about justice, not just the wars themselves. (There are vanishingly few just wars. Rarely is your opponent going to be an Adolf Hitler.) You can win the war and lose the peace.

But these justice-seekers treat the wars in Israel and Ukraine in the same way the thrill-seekers do: like a sports game. All they want to do is score goals over the other guy. You can’t point out the problems with the other “team” because if you do, it means that their team loses. You can’t find a solution for both Israelis and Palestinians, or the different ethnic communities in Ukraine. Someone’s got to win and it has to be them. These people want to win the game, not heal the pain.

War is not a sports game.

Enough is enough. No more weapons to Kiev.

2023-11-06 / / 0 Comments

After nearly two years of supporting the Ukrainian effort (though there’s not much I can do as an armchair observer), I’ve changed my mind about supporting Kiev militarily. At this point, the war is unwinnable by either Ukraine or Russia. This is a war of attrition. It is a meat grinder. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has spluttered. Russia has barely gained any territory, and it didn’t “take Kiev in three days” as it planned to last year.

The world has been flooded with propaganda, both Russian and Ukrainian, claiming that each side will win handily. Anyone with a pulse who paid attention to the Western mainstream media knew about Russian propaganda, which was indeed full of shit. But Ukrainian propaganda, too, misled the Western public. Ukrainian propaganda doesn’t tell outright lies like its Russian counterpart, but it distorts, exaggerates, minimises, denies and obfuscates. “If you just give us enough weapons, we’ll win the war,” Zelensky said over and over again. For a while, it worked: Russia’s troops failed to take major cities like Kiev, Odessa, Lviv and Kharkov. Ukraine was able to recapture Kherson. But this year, Ukraine’s luck ran out. The Russians took Bakhmut, even though it was a hollowed-out shell with very few inhabitants. “Putin is the next Hitler,” they said. Russia can’t even manage to take over the entirety of Ukraine. There is little chance that it will try to take Poland, Georgia or any other nearby country. Putin’s goals have been as quixotic as Zelensky’s. If Russia resorts to using nuclear weapons, even China will stop dealing with it. It is likely that Russia’s only ally will be North Korea, a worldwide pariah state.

I really hate to admit this, since… the Ukrainians did not deserve what Russia did to them—the Bucha massacre, the daily bombings, the child abductions, the fake referenda, the crushing repression in all Russian-occupied areas. The injustice is palpable. As much as I have complained about Ukraine’s ultranationalist politics and its accommodation of the extreme right, ordinary Ukrainians are not synonymous with their leadership. Remember that Zelensky won his election handily because he ran on a peace platform. He ran to bring all Ukrainians together, whether they came from Lviv, Vinnytsia, Kiev, Odessa or Donetsk. Instead, he and the Rada passed Poroshenko-like laws that favoured Western Ukraine. But that’s not what Ukrainians voted for in 2019. They’d had enough of that after Poroshenko. These are ordinary people trapped in extraordinarily bad circumstances.

But at the same time, it’s time for some policy realism. Ukraine needs no-strings-attached humanitarian aid—and a change in government to flush out the ultranationalists, not more weapons from the US, NATO and the EU. It is time for Moscow and Kiev to go to the negotiation table. Enough is enough.

Inverse oppression is not liberation.

2023-11-01 / / 0 Comments

Inverse oppression is not liberation.

Calling to commit genocide against a dominant ethnic group is still wrong. It still implies that there are groups of people who don’t deserve to live, not because of what they have individually done, but because of the cruel actions of their government. Targeting your own citizens because they speak the “oppressor’s language” isn’t going to free you from domination; it’s merely going to tear your country apart because your blinkered nationalism has caused you to forget who is also on your side.

I don’t mean this to be a saccharine “why can’t we just get along” plea. I don’t mean that we have to suck up to people who don’t value our lives. Fuck them. But I won’t endorse essentialist claims about how, for example, Russians exist solely to oppress Ukrainians and must be destroyed. This is toxic garbage. Nobody exists solely to oppress anyone else. When you claim that someone’s very existence is oppressive, you sound like a fucking fascist.

Most social justice activists aren’t like this. Most want to find a place for themselves within a pluralist society. But they are drowned out by a loud minority that calls for blood at the earliest opportunity.

Turning misogyny around and claiming that men are all domineering brutes who want to subjugate women doesn’t lead to women’s liberation—it just causes misogynists to double down and act worse because “women hate us anyway.” And “reverse misogynists” are often the ones who end up becoming TERFs, since they believe in sexual determinism. If you’re born with this bodily configuration, you’re virtuous; if you’ve got the other kind, you’re damned.

Certain “woke” academics and students think that antiracism means dehumanising white people, straight people, or cis people—and those white, straight, and cis people will turn around and escalate their racist, homophobic, and transphobic claims because they think that non-white and LGBTQ+ people are out to get them. They think they’re going to be oppressed, too. When they talk about being “decolonial,” they want to become the new colonisers instead, wiping out history and rewriting it to fit a new “liberated” agenda. (And some are perfectly fine with some colonisers like the Chinese.) They conflate cultural exchange—a near-universal in all human societies—with crude cultural appropriation, like white people wearing stupid fake Native American headdresses at Coachella.

Real liberation occurs when societies can reckon with historical inequities and find ways to live alongside each other. We must not tolerate racism, sexism or any other prejudice. But this demand must be separated from retributive, eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth “morality.” There is a difference between fighting for one’s rights—even with violence—and wanting to eliminate the other side. For example, I don’t want white Americans to be wiped out. I want them to start seeing their non-white counterparts as full members of society.

I am tired of hearing that calling for reconciliation and kindness, rather than calling for blood, means “siding with the oppressor.” Unfortunately, a lot of oppressed people think that liberation means doing what the other guys did to them. The oppressed can become oppressors. One cursory look at a history book will show this to be true. The Russians were oppressed by the Mongols. Later, they turned around and oppressed Mongolic groups like the Buryats. Jews were and are oppressed in Western societies and the Arab world. But now the Israeli state (not Jews as a whole, just the Israeli state) is oppressing Palestinian Arabs, and those Arabs, as well as their Iranian allies, are now calling for the oppression of Jews as a whole. Both Jews and Muslims are marginalised religious and ethnic minorities in the West, and this complicates politics among Israel’s allies. Anti-Zionism is shot through with antisemitism, and Zionism is shot through with Islamophobia. And there are people who are both oppressor and oppressed—for example, non-white Americans may serve in the army and still struggle with racism at home. I side-eye anyone who talks about “The Oppressor” as though this is a permanent category, an indelible mark of evil.

I do not believe in tit-for-tat morality and I will never endorse it, even if it is masked as “liberation.” I’m not against the use of violence to send a message (though it should occur only after non-violent options have been exhausted), but it has to be targeted—and it should not be directed at civilians or private citizens. I’m sick of this Manichaean bullshit, and I hate that social justice movements have been infected with it.

If you are obsessed with eliminating groups of people, you aren’t freeing anyone from literal or figurative bondage. You just want to be the new master.

Kiev doubles down on linguistic nationalism

2023-10-30 / / 0 Comments

According to a new poll from the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 45% of Ukrainians think that linguistic discrimination is a problem—even more than discrimination based on sexuality, gender, or disability. But you wouldn’t guess that from the attitudes expressed by some Ukrainian officials and hyper-nationalist citizens. Yet again, Kiev has continued to score own-goals by discriminating against large swathes of its population instead of trying to bring its people together.

Keep in mind that KIIS’s poll probably doesn’t include the heavily Russian-speaking Donbass, currently occupied by the Kremlin. The people being polled are in places like Kiev, Lviv, and Vinnytsia, far away from the frontline.

The English-language press hasn’t picked up on this—they’re too busy focusing on the fanatical Israeli and Palestinian nationalists instead. All the links in this post will be in Russian and Ukrainian—Google Translate will help you out if you don’t read them fluently, which I don’t.

By treating the Russian language and its speakers as synonymous with Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is merely playing into the Kremlin’s narrative about oppressed Russian-speakers who need to be saved from Kiev. And yet they do it anyway:

  • Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s head of national security, said that the Russian language should disappear from Ukraine, equating its very use with Kremlin propaganda. Of those who continue to use Russian, he said, “We don’t need anything from them. Let them leave us behind; let them go to their swamps and croak in Russian.” He also said that the government would switch its “FreeДом” channel from Russian to English—even though English is not a native language of most Ukrainians. Russian, however, is. This lack of regard for his fellow Ukrainians is stunning in its callousness. Is it any wonder that there are so many Ukrainian citizens willing to work with the Russians? He’s giving talking points to Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov, Margarita Simonyan, Dmitry Kiselev and Vladimir Soloviev, not encouraging national unity.
  • The Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev will stop teaching Russian, Belarusian and Farsi courses. (I suspect that they’re cutting Farsi because Iran is anti-Israel—they’re mixing in Zionism with their own local ethnonationalism. I would also object if a university cut Hebrew because of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians.)
  • A taxi driver in Kiev was fired because he refused to give into his riders’ rude demands that he stop speaking Russian. He kicked his riders out for their behaviour, and from what I can pick up, they reported him to the government. Ukraine’s “language ombudsman,” Taras Kremin, promised to impose a fine on this driver.
  • Taras Kremin has called for Ukrainian TV stations to stop making bilingual programming.
  • The irony in all this is that, although just over half of bilingual parents in Kiev have started to speak Ukrainian more frequently to their children, 20% of Kiev preschoolers barely understand Ukrainian. Kids often pick up Ukrainian at school, but according to this survey, most of them continue to speak Russian during breaks and with their families, and the memes that teens share online are vastly more likely to be in Russian or English than they are Ukrainian.

The most disturbing aspect of Ukraine’s anti-Russian-language drive is that the authorities simply don’t care about at least one-fifth of their population, if not more. They’re throwaways, or “superfluous Ukrainians,” as the leftist activist Anatoly Ulyanov put it.

I am actually afraid of the consequences if Kiev wins. A Russian victory would be worse—everything Ukraine is doing, Russia does at least fivefold—but if Zelensky pulls out a win against the odds, it will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. Hollowed-out cities, a lowered standard of life even for the poorest country in Europe, unbearable national debts, privatisation and neoliberal policies in a country whose president has sold out its people to the highest bidder, and a class of second-class citizens based on their native language. I cannot enthusiastically support Ukraine. I have not quite reached the point where I can’t support it at all—I think Kiev can eventually be held accountable, unlike Israel and Hamas—but it is extremely difficult to do so.

Why is it so difficult? Because nationalism is heartbreaking, gutting, life-destroying poison. Unlike patriotism, it relies on a desire to eliminate anything that does not match its narratives. It is chauvinistic, narrow-minded, bigoted and short-sighted. And when there is nationalism, there is no real peace.

 

Hamas is an oppressive, right-wing, authoritarian government. Leftists need to stop defending it.

2023-10-16 / / 0 Comments

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: Hamas is a right-wing, repressive, theocratic, authoritarian, dogmatic, inequitable, terrorist organisation. If it gains control over what is now called Israel, it will be no better than the current Israeli government. Instead of Jewish-supremacist nationalism, it will bring Muslim-supremacist nationalism.

Just two months before Hamas started its attacks, people in Gaza were protesting against Hamas’s mismanagement and repression, as well as Israeli oppression. Hamas responded by beating protesters and clamping down on dissent. Hamas claims to speak for the people of Gaza, but it doesn’t give a shit about their welfare. Gazans are starving, unemployed and struggling to survive, while Hamas leaders are living high off the hog. For example, Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, is a millionaire. The Gazan government has been known to harass and muffle journalists.

What happened in August was a legitimate pro-democracy protest. What Hamas is doing, on the other hand, is terrorism.

Hamas may have a lot of popular support despite its clear failings—but then again, so do Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, despite the wartime political repression occurring in both Russia and Ukraine. Ironically, the defenders of Hamas (as well as leftists who refrain from condemning it) are often those who criticise Kiev for its repression of opposition politicians and journalists, its association with American and NATO imperialism, the promotion of Nazi sympathisers among some ultranationalist politicians and activists, and its disregard for ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Hamas’s repression is worse than Ukraine’s, but because the West is not supporting Hamas, contrarian leftists continue to support it without criticism. Ukraine, at the very least, aspires to be democratic; Hamas does not. This is why, despite my severe misgivings, I have not completely turned against the idea of offering Kiev military aid. Hamas, on the other hand, deserves no support from the left. Nor does the Israeli government.

Instead, leftists must reject both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, as well as the leaders who promote it. Although Palestinians are clearly the victims of Israeli oppression, it is dangerous to counter eliminiationist nationalism with more of the same thing, this time with a crescent instead of a Star of David. Neither the Israeli nor Palestinian leadership is worthy of our support.

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