The Battle Over Ukraine is Not a Fight Between Right and Wrong. It’s a Depressing Tug of War Between Flavors of Corruption.
I hate the bald-faced kleptocratic hypocrisy of Vladimir Putin — I can’t stand to see his smug face on TV lecturing the West about NATO encroachment as a pretext for a wholly unnecessary invasion of Ukraine for ethno-fascist reasons of self-enrichment — but I can also see why nothing the West says or does has any legitimacy for him or his citizenry. No one’s paws are clean in international law, not no more, so why pretend?
I do not want to see Russian invade Ukraine. I still believe in international law, to the extent that such a thing exists anymore. The idea that there are principles divorced of national self-interest or which serve a larger set of national interests for all nations is the most edifying hope for humanity. The prospect of people dying helplessly as Iskra missiles rain down on a defenseless Kyiv would mark the stark opposite of principle and the end of the dream of a greater nobility for this species. We had earned the right to be noble creatures, divorced from the immediate avarice and violence of the rest of nature, had we not fumbled it away. Who fumbled it first? I don’t care. What I care about is who fumbled it worst, and in the battle between two rotten systems, it is the West that made that cardinal error when Team America invaded Iraq in contravention of any international norms, drove a stake through the heart of the United Nations, and forced its allies (France, Germany et al) to mutely tolerate it, same as Russia is about to do to those same countries when it rolls into Ukraine.
Look at the parallels. Russia is maintaining the fiction of genocide to justify intervening. The US maintained the fiction of weapons of mass destruction. Russia cites the threat of NATO as cause for preemption. The US cited the specter of Al Qaeda as reason for needing to disarm Iraq. (Between the two, the threat of NATO is far less of a non sequitur.)
Russia wants Ukraine in no small part to rekindle the Russian chauvinism that was the animating heart of the Soviet Union. Never mind the talk of communism — the USSR was a Russian-supremacist state. Ukrainians fared worse in that ethnic hierarchy even than the darker-skinned or even Semitic peoples of the Soviet Union. Russia wants nothing more than to dominate the one-time capital of Slavdom. Who is the US to sit in judgment of that? We are still an ethno-fascist state of our own, murdering our black population when we’re not busy putting them behind bars.
We’re just better at masking the true nature of who we are. Putin does his best to act like a democracy, but he also needs public shows of force, like the extrajudicial execution of Litvinenko and the attempted murder of the Skripals. He can’t help himself. We’re so much more civilized, except when we had a certain president who ordered the very public assassination of Soleimani. Or back in the day when we engaged in torture, because some people destroyed some buildings and killed a few thousand people. See, that was righteous violation of international law.
Even before we eviscerated the UN with cries of sovereignty, we regularly interfered in other countries’ affairs while wielding our vetoes. See, it was always a joke, and Russia has always known it; but it had more legitimacy back before the clock struck 2000.
We never really had the moral high ground, but we had a little more of it than we do today. I’m sure it felt good to beat the shit out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but was it worth it? We gave away even the semblance of believing in something greater. Now, all we’re left with are two flavors of nuclear-armed hypocrisy and bald power. Unlike in, say, Tigray, the fact that it’s a bunch of relatable white people at the point of the spear makes us feel bad. We don’t get how one group of white people could feel so superior to a different group of white people, and we’re pained. We’re sympathetic to this injustice, never mind all the other ones we let pass by unchecked (anyone wringing their hands over the 2020 conflict in Nagorny-Karabakh? No? Didn’t think so.)
With all our might, we’re powerless to stop any of this, and the one thing that might have helped was the belief in something greater than ourselves, and let’s be clear. It wasn’t Russia that took that, ripped it up and threw it away. When Russia swallows up the Donbas and then bides its time before sweeping up the rest of the country, we don’t have to like it, but we’d do well to remember our own role in making it possible.
I have lived in a corrupt state, and I often dealt with people for whom corruption was a fact of everyday life. They didn’t treat me the same, because I made it clear that those weren’t the rules I lived by. Maintaining my legitimacy was a vital shield. You had to make it clear you weren’t willing to get down in the shit. The second you make it clear that your only objection is to the color of shit you’re willing to settle into, all is lost.
I don’t say this to be on Putin’s side. I say it, because the only way we’ll ever restore what was lost is if we admit there was something valuable to lose. This whole holier-than-thou act won’t stop the fall of Ukraine, and it’s not fooling anybody anyway.
