Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Battalions Bending Government Policy to their Will

In Ukraine an alliance of far-right parties has used their private armies to coerce the government into adopting their economic and trading blockade of separatist-held territory as official state policy. The threat of force has allowed them to gain influence despite low electoral support, imposing a policy which presents serious risks for the Ukrainian economy.

The release of a USD$1 billion tranche of aid by the IMF was delayed from March 19 to April 3 in order to analyse the effects of the economic blockade. Despite a go-ahead by the IMF, a Reuters poll of analysts predicts Ukraine’s industrial output growth to slow from 2016’s 2.8% to 1.8% in 2017. Industry accounts for about a third of Ukraine’s GDP. In February, the blockade caused output to fall by 4.6% after having grown 5.8% in January. Overall economic growth should fall to 2% from a previously predicted 2.5%. Ukraine’s balance of trade is expected to fall by USD$ 2 billion. The government has yet to lift the state of emergency declared on February 15 over the loss of coal supplies from the separatist-held territories to the nation’s power stations.

While the world remains fixated on accusations  of Russia’s meddling abroad, far-right neo-Nazi groups with their own private armies have broken the state’s monopoly on violence and blackmailed it to follow their agenda. Their growing power threatens to sideline the electoral process and establish far right rule by dictat, undermining the pro-Western reforms sought by the Maidan revolution and posing serious danger to ethnic minorities in Ukraine.

According to Professor Ivan Katchanovski at the University of Ottawa, “The government cannot use force against the far right. The far right in in alliance with oligarchic Maidan parties had a crucial role in the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. My study found that the special armed Maidan companies were involved in the Maidan massacre of the police and the protesters. Now the far right has ability to overthrow the Maidan government.”

Professor Katchanovski is the author of a study on the shootings of protesters on February 20th, 2014 during Kiev’s Maidan protests. Widely blamed on the police, the shootings led to the immediate overthrow of President Yanukovich, abandoning a recently negotiated settlement between Yanukovich and the protesters for early elections and reduced presidential power. Katchanovski’s study found that the protesters were shot from the rear, from buildings controlled by activists from the Right Sector and Svoboda, two far-right parties involved in the subsequent overthrow. Katchanovski’s findings are gaining increasing credence in the ongoing trial of police officers for the shootings, due to reconvene April 18th. The Right Sector has repeatedly disrupted the trial.

Right Sector, Svoboda, and a third party, the Azov National Corps, which was formed shortly after the overthrow of Yanukovich, each control their own volunteer battalions. More highly motivated and better equipped than the regular military, these have formed Ukraine’s spearhead in the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the Donbass region. In January these battalions, their veterans and volunteers imposed a blockade on the separatist-held territory, preventing coal and steel from reaching power stations and factories in the rest of Ukraine. Until that point, Ukraine had benefited from trade and taxation from heavy industry in the separatist-held territory, little impeded by the conflict. On March 1 the separatists began nationalizing the heavy industry under their control after Kiev failed to respond to the separatists’ ultimatum to dismantle the blockade by that date. Most of the nationalized factories belonged to Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, who has lost an estimated USD$1 billion in assets in the process. Unwilling to take on the volunteer battalions with the demoralized national army, Poroshenko adopted the blockade as state policy on March 17.

The far right parties involved in the blockade trace their roots back to the early days of Ukraine’s independence. The Svoboda party was founded in 1991 as the Social-National Party of Ukraine by current Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Andrii Parubiy and Oleh Tyahnybok, ranked by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as one of the world’s top anti-Semites. In 2004 they changed their name and abandoned their Nazi SS wolfsangel logo in order to appeal to a broader audience. Yet as recently as January, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has condemned Svoboda’s participation in an antisemitic torchlight march.

Former close associate of the Social-National Party Andrii Biletsky carried on the unambiguous terminolgy and SS wolfsangel symbolism as leader of the Social-National Assembly. In the years leading up to the Maidan protests, Biletsky built ties with the Governor of Kharkiv Region, Arsen Avakov through far-right football fan groups, used during the Maidan protests to subdue local Russia-sympathizers. Also during the protests, the Right Sector were formed out of members of these and other far-right organizations. In the wake of the Overthrow of Yanukovych, Biletsky formed the Azov Battalion from remaining members of the Social-National Assembly to fight the separatists. The battalion received support from Avakov who was appointed Minister of the Interior, and remains in office to this day. Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Yaaakev Bleich has condemned Avakov’s appointment of “neo-Nazi” Azov Battalion deputy commander Vadim Troyan as Kiev police chief. Troyan was removed and made Deputy Interior Minister. Azov leader Biletsky carries the nickname “white chief,” and promotes a medieval prince Svyatoslav, conqueror of the Jewish Khazar Empire, as Ukraine’s national hero. In opposing funding for training the Azov Battalion in June 2015, US Congressman John “Conyers called representatives of Azov “repulsive neo-Nazis,” stressing that they are described this way by a number of American and international media: Foreign Policy Magazine, Reuters, The Telegraph, The Washington Post” Euromaidan Press reported.

Svoboda, Right Sector and the Azov National Corps signed a joint manifesto on March 16. Artem Skoropadsky, speaking in broken English on behalf of the alliance, noted that the allied parties refuse to make any compromise with the separatists and demand Donbass and Crimea be reunited with Ukraine unconditionally. They believe in a military solution rather than negotiations. The alliance doesn’t support President Poroshenko, Skoropadsky says, “because he is a Liberal, and we are for a Social-National Ukraine.” But when asked if they plan to get rid of Poroshenko, Skoropadsky expressed faith in a positive outcome in the next elections. The manifesto also calls for a Union of East European states separate from the EU and Ukraine to open a nuclear weapons program. Skoropadsky claims the alliance has no major financial backers, garnering mainly grassroots support.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center – Israel office and Eastern European Affairs offers the following statement:

“Simon Wiesenthal Center has consistently spoken out about the dangers posed to Ukrainian democracy and the well-being of the minorities in the country posed by right-wing extremists such as Svoboda, Right Sector and the Azov Brigade. These groups, whose fascist ideology is reminiscent of regimes which collaborated with the Nazis and which is racist, xenophobic and oblivious to minority rights have in the past threatened the government and continue to wield undue power and influence in Ukraine politics, which they did not achieve legitimately in democratic elections, where they have consistently failed to garner significant public support. We urge the government to refrain from adopting the policies of such groups and making all the necessary efforts to safeguard democracy and equal rights for all residents of Ukraine.”

With this far right alliance already too powerful for the government to challenge, unless something is done soon, Ukraine’s revolution of dignity is set to take on a very ominous overtone.

2022 update:  Bernhard Horstmann blogs, with verifiable quotes, on how these far right groups have blackmailed Zelensky and the Ukrainian state into developing nuclear weapons, of which Ukraine has the capability, on threat of death. Details are emerging that at the time Russia launched its “special operation”, Ukraine’s nuclear program was starting to bear fruit.

Dmowski’s prophetic diagnosis of Ukrainian Independence, 1931

Roman Dmowski from Świat powojenny i Polska/The Postwar World and Poland, 1931 translated by Alex Foster:

There is no human force capable of preventing Ukraine, separated from Russia and transformed into an independent state, from becoming a crowd of conmen from all over the world, who have been chafing in their own countries; capitalists and those seeking capital, organizers of industry, technicians and traders, speculators and schemers, thugs and organizers of any kind of prostitution: Germans, Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, Englishmen and Americans would rush [into Ukraine] with the help of locals or nearby Russians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks… A peculiar League of Nations would gather here…

These elements, with the participation of smarter, more skilled in business Ukrainians would produce the guiding layer, the elite of the country. But it would be a special elite, probably because no country could boast such a rich collection of international scoundrels.

Ukraine would become a thorn in the flesh of Europe; people dreaming of cultural production, of a strong and healthy Ukrainian nation, maturing in their own country, would be convinced that rather than their own country, they have an international company, and instead of healthy development, rapid progress of decay and rot.

Whosoever thought that the geographic location of Ukraine and its area, that the state in which the Ukrainian element finds itself, with its spiritual and material resources, and finally, that the role which the Ukrainian question has in today’s economic and political position of the world could be otherwise – he does not have an ounce of imagination.

The Ukrainian question has various advocates, both in Ukraine itself and abroad. Among the latter especially, there are many who know very well what they are doing. There are those, however, who would solve this issue by separating Ukraine from Russia, which they present as very idyllic. Those who are so naïve would do well to keep their hands away from her.

The Russia-Ukraine ICJ case: a short summary

In 2008 the Intl Criminal Court (ICJ) decided that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was legal, though it didn’t rule on the actual act of secession or the recognition of Kosovo by other countries. The ruling implied that separatists are not obliged to respect the territorial integrity of the state, only other states are subject to the applicable international laws. According to the court, the declaration was legal, even though a Security Council Resolution on interim administration and settlement process was in effect. The court claimed that the signatories of Kosovo’s declaration didn’t act as the same representatives of Kosovo who were subject to the SC resolution but acted in some kind of interstitial moment between subjectivity to it and ‘the realisation of statehood.’ This precedent has dissuaded Ukraine from taking Russia to the ICJ over Crimea’s declaration of secession.

Ukraine has taken Russia to the ICJ under the International Convention for the Suppression of Financing Terrorism and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), for the Donbass and Crimea, respectively. Ukraine claims the rebels’ “indiscriminate shelling” is terrorism, as is their alleged downing of flight MH17. They claim Russia is pursuing a policy of “erasure” of Ukrainian and Tatar culture in Crimea, limiting media and language education, banning the Tatar Mejlis and failing to investigate cases of missing activists. The Georgia-Russia ICJ case on CERD is relevant to this. Georgia charged Russia with ethnic cleansing but the ICJ threw that case out as no attempt to negotiate or consult the CERD committee had been made before applying to the court. Ukraine hadn’t appealed to the CERD committee either.

Ukraine’s case appears to be based more on hysterical innuendo than fact. For Crimea, Russia has the December 2016 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report, the CERD committee review, and ECHR coverage on its side, none of which raise issues covered under CERD. In the terrorism case, Russia can rely on OSCE reports. No state or intl organization has referred to Donbass rebel acts as terrorism, including their alleged downing of MH17. The OSCE reports show more victims of Ukraine’s indiscriminate shelling than of the rebels’. The Mejlis has explicitly threatened and acted to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in Crimea, for example, by participating in bombing the superconductor towers that serve the peninsula.

There are a lot of other technical details to the case, but, in both the Donbass and Crimea, Ukraine lacks the evidence and confidence to raise the issues of violation of territorial integrity or right to self-determination before the ICJ. Besides, to its demerit, Ukraine insists that a BBC report showing tanks on the site of a rebel shelling not be officially included in the case. The report exposes Ukraine’s claim that the rebels were targeting civilian targets as a lie before the court. They also bizarrely claim that the rebel republics are not signatories of the Minsk II Accords and that Ukraine never agreed to an amnesty, which is Article 5 of those accords. I wouldn’t bet money on Ukraine here.

http://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1307

http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?p1=3&p2=1&code=ur&case=166&k=f1

The Poverty of Post-Cold War Philosophy

MARX said many things, including “[…] I’m not a Marxist.” But my favourite thing he said was “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” Say what you like about him and his other theories, I like this quote. It’s contains two points. The second is interesting, but the first is more practical.

What if the values, ideals and principles a society can follow are fundamentally constrained by a complex matrix of circumstance over which it has little or no control? That is, in any context, our agency is limited in the aims to which it can realistically pursue are limited, pursuing other aims, or pursuing these achievable aims by the wrong methods will lead to unexpected, undesired, harmful or even catastrophic results.

Therefore, what if pursing values, ideals or principles however noble but in the wrong context or without due diligence is incredibly dangerous? Our religious heritage still seems to shape the way the theoretical foundation of our secular society is framed. This heritage taught us to hold on to our ideals, define ourselves by them, spread them and act on them. But it also taught us to maintain awe for a higher power and to be mindful of human fallibility. This seems to have fallen out of fashion. Until recently at least we have rested on the laurels of Western Liberalism’s triumph over its 20th century ideological rivals, taking for granted that our society rests on a solid foundation of proven principles and institutions which provide us with stability and prosperity. We also put our faith in our own rational and technological ability to solve practically any problem.

But wealth disparity has been growing since the financial crisis, partly caused by laissez-faire ‘neoliberal’ economic policies. The narrative is similar to that leading up to the Great Depression of the early 20th century and the Long Depression of the late 19th century, both of which were followed by major war. These wars, their preceding economic crises, and genocidal nationalism surrounding them, deeply haunted the great statesmen of the age, who, with some inter-war hiccoughs of ill-advised triumphalism or lapses in realism, finally worked to build a post-war order of peace and stability with a relatively prudent and humble consideration of the constraints they faced.

The higher levels of power and geopolitics are Machiavellian to the marrow. A state claiming that they just want to teach the world to sing, there’s no such thing as the classic security dilemma- a potential adversary should accept their stated goals and not see ostensibly defensive built up as a possible cover for offensive build up, is simply intellectually insulting. Meanwhile, at the domestic level, proclaiming a progressive stance on identity politics while shrewdly undermining any organized opposition to wealth concentration is not only abusive, but inviting a return to the cycle of crisis and war mentioned above. In the post-Cold War period, our statesmen and policy-makers seem to be complacent and triumphalist, self-righteously dismissing the possibility of internal systemic threats to our stability and prosperity, leading to western economies built on trillions in personal and national debt, and crises of faith- Brexit, Trump, and so on. Meanwhile, self-righteous, triumphalist geopolitical maneuvers in various countries from Iraq to Libya to Ukraine have at least partly backfired, undermining the narrative of the inevitable ascendancy of liberal democracy.

What if there were specific circumstances which allowed the rise of liberal democracy, not just the development of better and better liberal progressive principles and institutions? What if these specific circumstances are falling away one by one? First the incredible wealth and technological advantage the western countries enjoyed due to colonial exploitation (and its post-colonial legacy) and the discovery of the new world. Aren’t these advantages waning vis a vis various non-western countries? What if having a huge, temperate, virgin, resource-rich continental nation with impeccable geographical security to champion liberal democracy had as much an effect on liberalism’s success as the actual merits of it itself? What if both the demands of domestic labour movements and the competition with a competing ‘communist’ political economic order (related to one another, but not in straightforward ways) were key to liberalism’s successful development? What does it mean that both are now gone? What if the growth of liberalism was fueled with easily accessible energy resources, not to mention the petrodollar system, both of which may be ending? What if certain illusions were only sustainable while some of these largely economic conditions were in place, illusions about the potency of ideals, theories and rationality over economics and human nature, about the fundamental  soundness of our institutions, and about our ability to remake the world around us with the desired results?

Put simply, what if we need to be guided less by what should be, what would be best or ideal, and more by what we can do within the circumstances we find ourselves, materially, socially, and as limited, at best semi-rational creatures with murky drives and motivations? What if a mania for liberty however noble is distracting us from more fundamental imperatives? Maybe living in this or that western liberal state in this or that post-war decade was the greatest privilege awarded in human history, that doesn’t mean that this order is sustainable in changing conditions or that the spread of this order to new states with differing and dynamic conditions is possible. The USA might come out of four or eight years with a wild card president and maintain dominance but such a fluke election result could be a geopolitical existential threat for even the most powerful old world states, so many of them maintain a form of soft authoritarianism. Instead of pursuing a dogmatic normative emancipatory ideal in every and all circumstances, I’d advocate pragmatism. First, we should spend a lot more time getting to know ourselves psychologically and then nurturing our close, vital relationships, taking care of those dearest to us. When these spheres of our experience are in good condition, we can contribute positively in broader spheres. Our rationality, stream of consciousness or precious universal ideals aren’t who we are, who we are is deep inside the murky and frighting depths of our psyche and reflected in how we interact, particularly with those closest to us. I think this basic personal reorientation would lead us to realize that we don’t have much control over who we are, we don’t have needs and desires, they have us. This reorientation would lead to a radically different approach to society and politics, one shaped by the realization that we have agency, we can achieve security, dignity, belonging, love and self-realization if we are mindful of the constraints of the situation we are thrown into.

When Worlds Collide

There is no escaping that we interpret the world through a narrative framework which has deep roots in human nature. We see the same characters and plots across time and cultural boundaries. The details in these narratives are fleshed out to fit prevailing conditions by elites who offer us meaning and belonging through narrative in exchange for loyalty.

Each grand narrative, whether religion, Nationalism, Liberalism, Confucianism or Marxism-Leninism believes itself to hold a monopoly on truth, at least that truth within its scope. All tend towards reductionism,  dichotomization and projection of its flaws, that is, scapegoating, onto some ‘othered’ group. There is also a general tendency to emphasize information which re-enforces a narrative and ignore any which undermines it. These tendencies are generalized, all are guilty, while all claim unique innocence.

Interacting across boundaries between conflicting narratives is one of the greatest challenges we face. Real maturity is the ability to approach someone with whom you don’t agree, one who follows a narrative different to yours, and try to see things from their point of view. Few can do this. People often simply virtue signal, exchange comforting confirmation bias, and tell themselves that this is open, intelligent discussion. If they find someone who appears to belong to the same narrative-community as they do, but fails to reciprocate the virtue signalling, they quickly move to thought policing, selecting this or that truth deemed unassailable within their narrative and demand confirmation of it. If instead they receive a contrary interpretation stemming from an alien narrative, the discussion generally breaks down in a failure of ‘cultural’ translation, unless either or both of the participants are skilled cultural mediators. The non-conformist will be deemed stupid, ignorant or evil.

An extreme minority of individuals for some reason or another eschew acceptance of any standardized narrative, painfully costing them the basic human need of belonging. Rather than adopting virtues based on their efficacy for reciprocal virtue signalling, that is the ritual of kinship confirmation, they choose values by some non-standard criteria. This may be unsuccessful, thereby leading to greater psychological pain in the form of repetitive cognitive dissonance, in which case the individual will at best adjust his criteria, or give in and find an amenable narrative-community to join. Others may find that their independently chosen value criteria and independently constructed narrative results in less cognitive dissonance than any available narrative-community. In this case, they will likely maintain it, particularly if they can find other independent-minded individuals with whom to relate to some degree and thereby compensate for the lack of community belonging. Such individuals may emphasize value criteria of inquiry or critique over universal moral value criteria or ontological axioms, for example who must have which human rights or whether there is a God.

Attempts to share facets of their relatively cognitive-dissonance-immune narrative with conformists will necessarily meet with little success. These will, rather, lead to animosity, as the masses are too emotionally and egoistically invested in belonging, and belonging to that narrative-community which they trust holds a monopoly on truth. Rarely will anyone other than other non-conformists or those nurturing the seeds of doubt, those for some reason stricken by cognitive dissonance, but lacking the inkling of any more effective alternative narrative, benefit from these attempts at sharing.

The world is full of a variety of personality types, interpreted via the Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, the Five Factor Model or others. Besides, altogether a large segment of humanity is subject to psychological or neurological disorders ranging from sociopathy to autism. It takes all types to make a world. There will always be conformists, non-conformists and a variety of narrative-communities- they go extinct as quickly as they are born. Not all narratives are equal, they answer questions of differing times and contexts, there can be no definitive narrative. Jordan Peterson notes that all narrative-communities occupy a position somewhere on a spectrum between totalitarianism and nihilism- too much conviction and too little. As is always the way, either extreme can be fatal. Narratives could also be placed on a scale of maturity. They all feature a mythical or -semi-mythical founding figure who represented some pure and unattainable state of virtue, of moral purity, or dedication to the cause. Moses, Christ, Mohammad, Buddha, Confucius, America’s founding fathers, or any national hero-poet. However, the narrative only becomes a narrative when it is adapted or codified to become something workable in everyday human society, as St. Paul did with Christianity, Dong Zhongshu did with Confucianism, or Lenin did in a, shall we say, regrettable way with Marx. Besides likely being born out of a previous narrative, Buddhism from Vedantic philosophy, Christianity from Judaeism, Marxism from Liberalism, and so on, each narrative is inevitably subject also to syncretism- the absorption of aspects from pre-existing narratives. Christianity famously incorporates platonic concepts and aspects from various mythological traditions. Marxism-Leninism employed nationalist policies against purist Marxist dogma, and Confucianism adopted folk metaphysical ideas to compete with Buddhism, which itself adopted Daoist ideas in the formation of Zen. Another inevitable process is the division into sub-narratives. This is analogous to the division of language into dialects. The parallel with the division of dialects into ideolects, personal variations on a sub-narrative, is also useful. Christianity has its denominations, Marxism-Leninism has its Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc, while nationalists for example can disagree on where a nation should begin and end- for example, is Moldova a proud independent nation or an estranged part of Romania? Each individual will then interpret these in at least marginally unique ways. Perhaps most importantly, each narrative necessarily undergoes revision and adaption as real social or environmental conditions force it to revise itself immediately upon implementation. But those conditions constantly change forcing it to constantly adapt. Human nature doesn’t change, allowing myths older than time to still resonate today, but the relative needs for emphasis and de-emphasis of narrative aspects on the part of both elites and the masses, which themselves can change wildly in character, fluctuates over time.

Some narratives have undergone millennia of syncretism, diversification, and adaption from often very rocky and uncertain beginnings. It may be as much chance as virtuosity that selects those that are re-enforced into (perhaps seemingly) timeless relevance by these processes. The longevity o Christianity is still dwarfed by that shamanistic practice or Pharonic beliefs. It is in retreat in some regions before liberalism’s ideals of capital accumulation, progress, secular humanism, scientism and rationalism, a combination which has hardly had time to mature and indicate any level of sustainability as a narrative cocktail.

Narrative-communities are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We belong to different overlapping communities, each comes with a narrative that we identify with. Sometimes narrative communities are in direct competition and therefore they proscribe contemporaneous belonging in one another, sometimes not. Abrahamaic religions are an obvious example, but a nationalism may also seriously frown on belonging  to a religion other than the main nationally-tied one. In China there was a saying that one is Confucian in the office, Daoist in retirement and Buddhist on the deathbed. A Confucian could have been born a ‘barbarian,’ in Chinese parlance, but no barbarian advocating sovereignty for their people from the emperor could be Confucian. Bolshevist proscription of religion is a lot more nuanced and fluid than often decried. One would have been worse off as a prosperous peasant, property owner, or anti-communist nationalist. Today, some fanatically atheist liberals are more critical of the religious than pre-1917 Marxists were. The Nazi approach to the Catholic church differed little from the Bolshevik one.

The three Modern Western socio-political narratives of Fascism, Liberalism and Marxism-Leninism ape Monotheism in many ways. For example, they approach one another in much the same way as the three Abrahamaic religions approach one another- in zero-sum belligerence. This is also true within Liberalism, regarding its left-right divide, which, while a reductionist dichotomization, is a self-fulfilling fantasy. Both the intra-liberal conservatives and ‘progressive-liberals’ accept the results of the Liberal American or French revolutions, but hold discreet narratives over the legacy of those revolutions, mischaracterize the (heterogeneous) opposing side and paint them as an invasive threat to that legacy- some interpretation of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Throughout the twentieth century, the global left, which prior to 1917 had stood simply for direct-democratic worker ownership and control of the workplace (that is, of wealth creation), had been co-opted, bought out and corrupted by the Soviet State, and bandied about a fantastical image of it. Though in no way representing that original ksocialist aim, the USSR claimed to be socialist to lend itself the legitimacy that the original socialist idea had held, while the Liberal western elites were eager to de-legitimize domestic socialists by association with the undemocratic USSR, although many or most western leftists were by then intra-liberal social democrats, not Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the left characterized the right as all imperialists, racists, reactionaries, fascists and manipulative exploiters. Each had their own mutually incompatible narrative and projected the flaws of the Liberal order squarely onto the other, nurturing false narratives of the development of western liberalism that increased the likelihood of poor policy and eventual cognitive dissonance while re-enforcing polarized, communitarian boundaries. A more defensible narrative is that the liberal order is a product of the delicate balance of those ‘right-wingers’ who advocate private property rights and some semblance of a free market on the one hand, and the radical left, without whom we wouldn’t have universal suffrage, healthcare, and the most basic labour and womens’ rights which prevent most from living in an early-Liberal Dickensian dystopia.

The 2016 US presidental election demonstrates this clearly. Sanders, though barely a social democrat, was considered too ‘socialist.’ The candidate of the status quo, Clinton, despite massive ethical and legal issues, was considered the progressive choice by many, simply because she was a woman who wasn’t Trump. Opportunistic campaign media had painted Trump racist and even fascist by twisting his words and putting some in his mouth, but this was accepted by many who, certain they belonged to the narrative-community with the monopoly on truth, accepted at face value the virtue-signalling myth that their media was ‘free and fair.’ Many Trump supporters, meanwhile, decried the ‘left’ as full of fanatical ‘Cultural Marxists’ obsessed with political correctness and identity politics  which had invaded and corrupted the liberal order. However, Marx and his followers were concerned strictly with economic exploitation and were averse to anything like identity politics or political correctness, in fact viciously attacking moralizing on such issues from the likes of Proudhon. The ethos of identity politics or political correctness could just as easily be traced to the emancipatory zeal of the liberal American and French revolutions. Many were shocked when Clinton’s campaign of virtue signalling identity politics, incessant scapegoating the outsider in the form of Trump and Russia, and economic status quo lost the electorally crucial rust belt states to Trump’s message of change and jobs. The narrative which had become establishment disregarded the decline in economic outlook of millions of working people and over-estimated their eagerness to signal belonging to a narrative community whose emphasis on identity politics was only convincing if there were not more fundamental, pressing issues like the economic insecurity of millions of working families.

Since the end of the Cold War Liberals on both sides of the divide have believed in Fukuyama’s ‘end of history,’ re-enforcing their claim to a monopoly on truth. Recently, the rise of right-wing populist leaders across the west has started challenged this. In times when narratives start to break down, it can be helpful to remember that you are something deeper and more fundamental than any narrative-community in which you find identity. Human beings have evolved enough cognitive abilities to find food and reproduce, not enough to grasp objective absolute truth. We are stuck in our reductionistic, dichotomizing, comforting narratives. As soon as we free ourselves from one, we find ourselves in another. Resisting this is psychologically harmful. Granted, we can discover mathematical facts from the cosmic to the subatomic level, but the closer matters come to those of human identity and vested emotion and ego the less we can deny this dynamic. What can we do but try not to take things for granted, consider the possibility we may not have a monopoly on truth, and, when confronted with others who do not conform to our narrative, genuinely try to see things from their point of view, however distasteful it may seem at first.

Western Hubris, Dellusion and Mass Discontent lead toward Total War

Two core western liberal countries, the UK and USA, are experiencing electoral events which problematize the values that those electoral processes are ostensibly based on. Liberalism is meant to uphold electoral democracy, plurality, and universal values like tolerance and equality.

However, in the 2016 US presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum, very large segments of society are expressing non-liberal inclinations via the liberal democratic institutions. In the US, a large enough segment of the Democratic party rank and file supported Sanders at the national congress to cast serious concerns of fraud over H. R. Clinton’s selection. Support for Sanders is an expression of progressive leftist discontent with the status quo. On its own, mass support for Sanders would be notable, but it pales in comparison to the rise of populist Trump and the discontent with the status-quo which this represents. This discontent resembles that which led to the vote for Brexit. Mass discontent with the status-quo an resultant support for Trump and Bernie in the US reflects support for Brexit and Corbyn in Britain, Corbyn’s left-of-the-Overton-window policies making him a pariah even for ‘liberal progressives.’

But why is this trend erupting now not only simultaneously in the USA and UK, but with populist parallels in Continental Europe from Poland to Turkey? Both H. R. Clinton and the Brexit stay campaign uncharismatically advocating the status quo, and characterized any opponent as an ignorant, uneducated bigots. It’s easy to dismiss the discontents this way. Too easy. Especially for privileged , educated people who fail to even try to understand that discontent, probably because it problematizes their emotionally-charged identification as carriers of “the most highly evolved social order.”

This reminds me of the 2011 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver. mobs burnt cars and broke into shops to steal iPhones. Vancouverites where scandalized and rationalized this away saying it was all people from redneck Abbotsford and the like, barbarian outsiders, this wasn’t who we are, we’re civil and polite. Such rationalization protected their self righteous identity. Vancouver is often listed as the best or one of the best cities in the world to live in. It’s surrounded by natural beauty and unrivaled recreational opportunities. The motto of the province, probably thought up by real estate developers, is “the best place on earth.” Vancouver is also extremely expensive. This idea that they’re living the dream, this lotus eating lifestyle day in and day out shakes its ass in the face of many who simply can’t reach it across a mountain of bills and oligopolistic price fixing. It’s one thing to be struggling to get by, its another to do so in a playground of the rich and famous being constantly told you’re living the dream.

So this is the problem in the US and UK. People are being told things are great but very many, maybe a majority, just not feeling it. They don’t have an alternative narrative to articulate this, real leftism, which addresses systemic economic disadvantage, having been swept away, leaving only harmless centrist identity politics to masquerade as progressive. So they express their discontent crudely in tribal populist terms, allowing the relatively privileged, middle class and the liberal intellectual and media elite, in both the US and UK to belittle and discredit them. Their discontent is illegitimate, they simply don’t understand how wonderful the status-quo is. The few who are reasonably well placed and have hope for advancement under the current liberal dominance hierarchy, the educated and well-off, can’t bear the thought that this order of things may be systemically flawed, relying on false narratives of itself and unsustainable sovereign and personal debt levels in the economy. Incapable of admitting to themselves that there are flaws in the social order that need addressing, that the discontent could be legitimate and requires attention, the middle class and intellectual elite self-righteously dismiss the discontent as ignorant, increasing resentment and facilitating the leave vote and the rise of Trump. Deplorables. Liberalism is not a magic bean or a foundation of stone on which stable progress is guaranteed.

Victory in a battle of Discrete Ideologies?

Liberalism “won” the battle of ideologies because the Soviet Union defeated 80% of the Nazi forces on their behalf at the cost of almost 30 million lives, and 50 years later the Soviet elite decided it would be more rewarding to become liberal oligarchs than austere cadres. Communism was never really the coherent ideology it’s made out to be. Marx predicted that Capitalism would reach inherent limits and collapse in a crisis of overproduction in the most advanced industrialised countries, Britain, Germany and/or the Benelux. Then a revolution could be held by violent organized labour to institute direct-democratic control of wealth creation and rational economic planning. All governments engage in economic planning, not all establish centralized state ownership and control of the means of wealth creation as the soviets eventually did after the stages of Civil-War era War Communism and the capitalistic New Economic Policy which ended in 1928. While Luxembourg’s Orthodox Marxist followers believed in direct-democratic workers’ councils and some degree of centralized planning, they didn’t believe in centralized war-cabinet-style total control and dictat, and therefore called the Soviet Union “state capitalist” from very early on. Such rigid, orthodox Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg were mocked by Lenin as “infantile leftists.” Lenin thought, like Marx admitably, that the ideology had to adapt to changing conditions, but Rosa thought his adaptations, the vanguard party guided by democratic centralism- internal debate, but absolute adherence to any decision made, would lead to a bureaucracy so unwieldy that it would eventually collapse under its own weight. Marx had pondered some marginal ‘what ifs’ that have been flimsily used to justify the Bolsheviks’ revolution in barely industrialized Russia. Namely, Russia’s traditional cooperative land management system, the mir, was communistic enough that Russia may be able to leapfrog the stage of capitalism, but only if drawn in by revolution into socialism by a revolution in advanced industrial countries. That argument is obviously a red herring.

The Bolsheviks were originally internationalists who believed that the main revolution would break out in the most advanced industrial country with the most organized labour movement, Germany, and would spread around the world from there, they just had to hold on to power till then. The German revolution failed, as did Bolshevik attempts to prod it along, like the invasion of Poland. The Bolsheviks had held a vote shortly after their coup d’etat, came second, but clung to power anyway. The winner by twice the votes was Chernov’s Socialist Revolutionaries, which had split and divided between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks while the election was ongoing. It enjoyed greatest support among the peasantry, notably in what we now call Ukraine. Bolshevik support came from the tiny urban working class but mainly from the military. The Bolshevik ethos was as much formed by the martial culture of its supporters, the brutalizing context of the ongoing first world war, and the perceived need to meet Tsarist martial-brutal suppression in like kind. Their governing structure, introduced above, resembles a permanent war cabinet with permanent martial law more than the network of democratic workers’ councils espoused by the rigidly orthodox Marxists like Luxembourg. Many supporters of socialist revolution in Russia quickly became disillusioned with Bolshevik divergence from orthodoxy and the emancipatory ideal, staging various uprisings, most notably the Kronstadt rebellion which was brutally crushed, raising some of the earliest doubts about the nature of Bolshevik rule. Like the liberals today who self-righteously refuse to see flaws in their self-narrative, many socialists, desperate to count the Russian ‘revolution’ as a success ignore Rosa and Kronstadt, cling to the delusion that if only Trotsky had come to power everything would be fine.

But the power vacuum created more by the February revolution than the Bolshevik one was inevitably filled by the most ruthless contender available, it’s practically a law of nature. Stalin was not a rigid orthodox internationalist and did not hold to the Marxist line that the working class has no nation. As commissioner for nationalities he was responsible for the early Soviet project of national delimitation, drawing lines on the map, standardizing national languages and cataloging folk stories. As General Secretary he instituted “Socialism in one country,” which had nothing to do with Marx & Engels, whose works were edited and censored in the USSR to make them fit the fluxuating party line. It came with the Great Purges against the Old Bolsheviks loyal to Lenin’s adaptations of Internationalist Marxist Orthodoxy. During the Second World War, Stalin fell back on traditional modes of Russian nationalism and loosened control on religion to inspire people to fight. The Personality cult that Stalin formed around himself and Lenin had no foundation in Marxism. It was not entirely unsuccessful in uniting society. But Krushchyov dismantled it, again requiring an adjustment of narrative, values and loyalties. Was the highest value and locus of loyalty- the proletariat’s historical mission? World revolution? the State? Stalin’s leadership? Friendship of Nations? How do you grapple with the issues of forced labour and mass repressions? Was it just Stalin and Beria? Was it somehow justified? Could it happen again? Practically every decade the Soviet people were told their previous principles and loyalties were wrong and had to be adjusted. “Communism” was characterized not by a failed utopian experiment but by the failure to formulate any ideology or hierarchy of ideals that could last more than a decade or two. By the eighties economic reforms were necessary, and possible, they had overcome far greater challenges before. Gorbachyov set out to realise them. But his naive idea of loyalty to an old social democratic ideal and trust toward liberal ideals and intentions wasn’t shared by state security elites, who retained loyalty to the war cabinet model, state security and deep mistrust of the US. Meanwhile, corruption and dysfunction led others in the management structure to abandon loyalty to anything but self enrichment. Of the three groups, they were the most pragmatic and steered the reforms and subsequent collapse to their own obscene gain.

So where is a monolithic “communism?” Only in the minds of western intellectuals, on both sides of the political spectrum. The Soviet Union had co-opted and bought out the global labour movement as an instrument for its own geopolitical ends. Orthodox Marxists were marginalized or persecuted. This isn’t to say that without the results of the Bolshevik coup d’etat a pure and true Marxism would have emerged and flourished. Who knows what would have happened, I’m not interested in counter-factuals. Socialism wasn’t invented by Marx, it was attempted in Christian utopian societies in various western countries and advanced by certain participants in the French Revolution. Marx drew ideas from all of them, among others. Various pre-Bolshevik socialist movements like the Paris Commune had led to social democratic concessions from western governments, most notably that of Bismarck. Mass socialist movements and unrest even in the US, like the Knights of Labour and Chicago Haymarket Riot (among many other riots and strikes) are integral to the development of the rights and benefits any wage earner enjoys today. It’s a long and eventful history not much taught or heard of today. After the Bolshevik revolution socialists in the west could largely be divided into communists and social democrats, that is,  revolutionaries and those for gradual progress. Both were deeply involved with the organization of mass labour unions and both were beholden to the myth that the Bolshevik revolution represented some emancipatory potential. The active participation of organized labour in demanding concessions such as the 8 hour work day, the weekend, and universal suffrage, gave humanity to what had been a Classical liberalism of slavery and Dickensian conditions. The myth of the Bolshevik revolution as a repeatable, righteous, emancipatory violent overthrow, while pure myth,  gave teeth to their demands and greatly helped ensure that the social democratic concessions we enjoy today were granted.

This complex struggle which we look back on with obcene reductionism as a struggle between grand, coherent ideologies took place in a context in which traditional values and loyalties were being irreparably broken down by science and technological progress; there was no clear answer to what they would be replaced by. Liberalism used beautiful language, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” “All men are created equal,” but these pronouncements had been made by slave owners consolidating a slave economy rather than absolving it. Western ‘liberal’ colonial empire continued well after the Bolshevik revolution. We’ve heard about the Nazi death camps and the Gulag, and we’ve probably heard some figure for the number of victims. But how many were the victims of the Scramble for Africa, 1881 to 1914? How many millions of Native Americans and African Americans were killed in the US after the noble proclamation that “All men are created equal?” Some black servicemen returned to the US after the Second World War only to be legally lynched upon arrival. How many were the victims of workhouses and debtors’ prisons? The Irish under British Rule? More people died in British India through famines caused by British policy than all deaths attributed to Stalin, including the 32-33 famine (only half of whose victims lived in the Ukraine SSR, though nationalists there use it as a foundational victimhood myth). Socialists also liked to decry the cost in life of western ‘inter-imperialist wars.’

Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai, who held the country together through the psychotic rule of Mao (incidentally, the brutality and loss of life in 20th Century China surpasses anything else mentioned here) once answered a question on whether the French Revolution was a good idea with “it’s too early to tell.” He actually misunderstood the question, but his comment resonates because we intuit it to be valid. The point is that in the early to mid twentieth century there was no clear answer to how post-judeo-christian-monarchical value systems and societies should be organized. The 20th century conflict of ideologies is a reductionistic mischaracterization, as neither Communism or Liberalism was ever a rigid, stable, mutually exclusive answer to this question. Nevertheless, this reductionistic mythical struggle is ostensibly over. Now we live in a liberalism repressing memory of its atrocities and claiming full credit for social achievements realized only in tandem with its severed and murdered Siamese twin, radical leftism. The twins had agreed on the omnipotence of human reason and technology and their capacity for constant progress. But without the counterbalance of his twin’s imaginative, inspiring promises for the future, liberalism is stumbling toward the familiarity of Classical neoliberal debt slavery and Dickensian conditions. He is proud and rational, he will use technology to solve his problems, no more tiresome arguing with that dead nag over value systems, over the post-judeo-christian moral universe and social order. But that nag was part of him, and murder left the debate absolutely unresolved.

Where that leaves us Today

But if you’re among the majority who isn’t satisfied with that, you lack convincing inspiring narratives of a better future, then you fall back on base tribalism and vote Trump or Brexit, in mass. Maybe H. R. Clinton will get elected and Parliament will vote down Brexit. Problems solved? You still have huge segments of society in deep discontent, add Trump and Bernie supporters (fair weather “socialists” impotent without a faction willing to fight and sacrifice to present a real threat to vested interest) together and you probably have a majority in the US, as with Brexit plus Corbin supporters in the UK. These societies are becoming dangerously polarized.

Zbigniew Brzezinski notes “The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” I would add that this comes with a post-industrial society which focuses on the manipulation and creation of meaning rather than of material, in turn closely tied to the age of public relations/perception management. Corporate and state media, even with the internet, define and dominate the Overton window and drown out voices with less resources behind them. But even without a coherent alternative narrative to that put forward by the corporate media, something like a majority are no longer buying it. If Brexit gets voted down in Parliament and Clinton wins the election, comfortable middle class liberals will tell themselves everything is ok again, but society will still be dangerously divided. In fact probably more so as many will probably claim fraud or betrayal in each election respectively.

What do elites do when social tensions rise too high? Start a war. This is how the Franco-Prussian war started. All it takes is demonization of an enemy and a false pretext. While the Vietnam war, Afghan war or the 2nd Iraq war didn’t start to mollify a divided society, they were willfully initiated through demonization and false pretexts. The Domino effect and the Taliban’s or Saddam’s misrule respectively demonized the opponent (all three of which the US had previously helped create). The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 9/11 and mythical weapons of mass destruction provided the false pretext to engage militarily, respectively. Rectifying social disunity and discontent won’t be the only reason, Top US officials and neocons from Wolfowitz (see the Wolfowitz doctrine), Brzezinski and other old cold warriors have continued to see it as necessary to break up Russia to prevent any rival to US hegemony. These are more or less the same forces pushing “free trade” agreements on the EU under which corporations can sue governments for any legislation which costs them profits.

The Corporate media is currently on overdrive demonizing Russia and its president, very reminiscent of their treatment of Saddam, while massively building up US and NATO forces in the Baltic and Poland. This should be very alarming. Russia didn’t start the Ukraine conflict or the Georgian war. Look up Nuland appointing Yatsenyuk PM weeks before Yanukovich fled and the Estonian PM pointing out that it wasn’t Yanukovich’s police that shot protesters. Among regions involved, Donbass, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea, it only incorporated the latter, which had been Russian until 1954 and had petitioned multiple times in the post-Soviet era to return. Russia comprehensively defeated Georgia in 2008 and could have incorporated it had it chosen to. I’ve been to Transnistria, Abkhazia, Nagorny Karabakh and Russian Crimea. Locals in each place fought for their independence. Those people have agency, not everything is a Kremlin conspiracy. Maybe three or four people will read this blog and maybe I haven’t made my argument well. But there is as strong possibility that soon some hazy, unprovable pretext of Russian aggression will appear for conflict between nuclear armed powers. Think hard before buying into demonization of ‘the other’ and rationale for war. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and Libya are wastelands of US intervention, but none of them were Nuclear powers covering an 8th of the world’s surface and 150 million people. There is reason to be existentially terrified, particularly if you live in the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine or Russia. Though through the democratic magic of nuclear fallout, everyone is equally doomed. 🙂

Trump and Brexit- The Liberal Reformation: Why Right-wing Populism is Spreading like Wildfire

Ideals, principles, and convictions rest on an economic foundation. But there can be a lag in years or a couple decades between changed economic prospects, the recognition of that change, and the subsequent chance in ideals. There is also in any broad social context a fundamental gap between pronouncements of ideals and their practical application. This becomes clear to adherents of any set of ideals only when a change in economic outlook forces them to see that ideal set as transient rather than invisible, assumed, natural, universal law.

Since the rise of credit, financialization, the oil shocks, off-shoring and dismantling of union labour benefits, the death of leftist mythology and the unresolved 2008 financial crisis, this process has gradually progressed. Hillary, as representative of the establishment, is the disease (besides, she’s massively corrupt, gleeful about destroying the lives of millions of Libyans, and there is video evidence of her own racist tendencies) and Trump is the symptom. Even if Trump doesn’t win, The genie is out of the bottle. It doesn’t matter how many comfortable, educated, self-righteous middle class people cling to noble liberal ideals. Passionate support for the liberal status quo isn’t going to wash for Millions whose status quo is no fun and is laying bare systemic hypocrisy. Putin, Brexit,Tump, Erdogan’s move from westernism to islamism, Brevik, Orban, Poland’s Law & Justice, Le Pen, AfD, Pegida, the Austrian presidential election fiasco, the True Finns, far-right saturated Ukraine, Croatia’s Ustase veneration- these are all transient anomalies? Liberals have a clear understanding of the problem, how to address it and its systemic, economic roots? I’ll believe that when i see it. Seems to me more like their deeply emotionally charged identification with their ideals blinds them to contradictions and fatal flaws in their quasi-religious liberal worldview.

It’s just an observation, but the more heretics like me get demonized and belittled for pursuing facts rather than confessing undying faith to the one true Creed the more smug we become to watch it collapse, providing our observations accurate. Your ideals don’t matter, no matter how beautiful, when high finance, central banks and creditors dictate policy (read up on the Fed, ECB, IMF and TTIP), and do so to the detriment of masses who don’t feel liberalism has delivered anything to them but debt, unemployment, a worse outlook that their parents had, obscene bailouts and banker bonuses. 🙂

A History of Russian ‘Militarism’ in Point Form

• Granted independence to various nations in order to withdraw from WWI.

• To get the vital industrial and port city of Leningrad out of artillery range of the border, Russia offered Finland a much larger territory farther North in exchange for the Karelian isthmus. Finland refused, Russia pursued its vital security interest militarily and achieved its limited goal at great, unnecessary cost to both.

• Petitioned Britain and others for mutual defense treaties when war with Germany became inevitable. Rebuffed by western powers happy to see Fascism destroy Bolshevism, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was crafted to buy as much time as possible before invasion.

• Some time after Afghanistan’s domestically initiated and popularly unsupported communist coup unexpected by Moscow, the deranged prime minister had the president killed, took over and instituted bedlam. The USSR reluctantly intervened to reestablish order and the norms of their bloc (As Vietnam did in Cambodia). Without a clear endgame and with the US and Saudis nurturing Bin Laden and his takfiri ilk there, this did not end well and the fallout continues to plague us all.

• Of all great multi-ethnic political entities which disintegrated in the twentieth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire and Raj particularly, The Soviet Union ended with the least use of state violence, with a few local civil wars occurring around the fringes. Members of the Russian elite eager to become rich bourgeoisie rather than austere cadres took the initiative in abandoning socialism and disintegrating the union. Many smaller countries were handed their independence unprepared.

• on March 17th 1991 Gorbachyov held the New Union Referendum, in which the Baltics were not included, their exit from the USSR being assumed. The results of the referendum were disregarded due to the Soviet Coup. The fact remains that the highest authorities with the support of the Soviet people were ready to respect the results of this referendum. Without the coup aftermath and the unconstitutional Belavezha Accords, the Baltics would have been let go anyway.

• On September 6th 1991 separatists stormed the Chechen Supreme Soviet and defenestrated its chairman. War ensued, with the separatists supported by similar forces as the anti-Soviets in Afghanistan. Although a peace treaty was reached between Russia and independent Ichkeria (Chechnya), the latter invaded the Russian federal subject of Dagestan in 1999. The lawlessness of Ichkeria had cost it popular support and Russia was able to reestablish order. The conflict was incredibly brutal. Russia viewed what was at stake to be the Ottomanization of the Russian Federation- a precedent, once set which could encourage other separatist groups to turn an 8th of the world’s surface into a thousand Syrias, Iraqs, Palestines, Balkans, Libyas, and Yemens.

• Russian peacekeepers had been holding the line in Georgia from the civil war at the collapse of the USSR to August 2008. At that time Sakashvilli gambled that if he attacked South Ossetia, provoking a Russian reaction, NATO would come to his aid. He bet wrong. With the definitive defeat of the Georgian military by a tiny, ill-prepared fraction of the Russian armed forces which had a clear march on Tbilisi, Russia kindly pulled its troops back to the breakaway republics.

• With the Ukrainian economy in dire straits, Yanukovich refused to sign the EU agreement in Vilnius in October 2013, having received an offer with less strings attached and more funding from Russia. Protests ensued. Far-right groups staged shootings of protesters, framing the state security services. Conceding to negotiations, Yanukovich agreed to early elections and a reduction of presidential power. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter, far right mostly western-Ukrainian groups seized an opportunity to stage a coup. Two days later they cancelled a law allowing regions to officiate and educate in their own predominant language if not Ukrainian, in contravention of the European Convention of Human Rights. Shocked by these details and the methods employed by the far right, Donbass residents set up self-defence structures and demanded more regional autonomy, federalism and the right to use their own language. The coup-installed regime responded with an “anti-terrorist operation” during which private state-and-US-backed militias targeted schools, kindergartens and hospitals. These private militias were then incorporated into a new ‘national guard’ though their methods changed little. Brutalized and alienated, Donbass residents only then pushed for secession or incorporation into Russia. Private volunteers flooded in from Russia and beyond, including those with military training. Some argue that Russia supplied the Donbass with war materiel on credit and that command was gradually taken over by Russian security personnel in order to avoid geopolitical inexpedience. In a recent conversation with Donetsk residents while I was in Ukraine, I mentioned that the situation is portrayed as a Russian invasion in the western media. The response was, “that’s not how we see it. after all that’s happened, we can no longer bring ourselves to speak Ukrainian.” Meanwhile, US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland is on record selecting the post-coup prime minister and bragging about the 4 billion $US spent to shift Ukraine geopolitically westward. Russia opted to lose a large friendly voting bloc within Ukraine by annexing Crimea with the 25000 troops already present there rather than let Crimea become an unsinkable NATO aircraft carrier on Russia’s southwest flank (not to mention the potential loss of access to the Mediterranean). Corruption and living conditions continue to worsen after Ukraine chose it’s ‘European’ path, with no reasonable hope of improvement in sight. It is to the West nothing more than an economic rape victim and a spearhead in the continued Balkanization (or, as above I prefer Ottomanization) of the former USSR. NATO is happy, overjoyed even, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

• With allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it’s little wonder that US coalition ‘efforts’ to fight ISIS have met such little success. ISIS is clearly directly supported by the latter two, and ISIS actions nicely dovetail with Israeli strategist Oded Yinon’s suggested ‘strategy for Israel’- spread chaos and division rather than allow strong regional adversaries. While Chechnya for example has become an over-subsidized relatively wealthy subject of the RF, the US leaves in its wake Libyas (thanks Hillary) and Iraqs, perhaps under the delusion that liberal democracy springs inexorably from human nature, or perhaps out of sheer malice. Shed all the tears you like about the purported misdeeds that the Western Media, which has never relinquished its Cold War mentality, ascribe to Assad, circumstantially a staunch ally of Iran and Russia and a foe of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Syria before the war was probably the most inclusive Arab state. There’s a reason, like it or not, and fairly reported or not, that Alawite Assad has broad popular support and the loyalty of a predominantly Sunni military. The involvement of Russian Aerospace forces had a greater effect in its first two weeks on reversing gains of ISIS, Nusra, and other fictively moderate child-beheading takfiri terrorist forces, than four years of US coalition grandstanding.

 

This list excludes the Polish-Soviet war, Prague Spring and Hungarian Revolution, all of which occurred in their own way due to the flaws of Marxist-Leninism inapplicable to current conditions. I used to find it amazing how liberal westerners get so self-satisfied to see through the ideology and propaganda of those they see as ‘other,’ backwards and ‘bad,’ but obstinately refuse to question their own self-righteous, hypocritical worldview. But I’ve realized that they do subconsciously see their own hypocrisy, and probably subconsciously revel in the violence they inflict on those ‘beyond the limes.’ What they do though, is project their crimes onto their designated Jungian ‘shadow,’ usually Russia and Putin personally. Deceit, meddling in other countries elections and internal affairs and outright aggression are all as American as filling an SUV with fuel bought from terrorist-funding Saudis at a gas station built on the site of a US army massacre of Native Americans. Yet they subconsciously or even semi-consciously project such faults onto their ‘shadow,’ against which they cozily contrast and define themselves as righteous and wholesome. They have principles, after all. In true christian tradition what does it matter if they never actually follow them, as long as they can plant the flag of those principles in blood of their enemies? It’s the same with escapists everywhere, morons among the Russians blame the nations problems on the barbarism of Caucasian and Central Asian migrant workers, Eastern Europeans beholden to Wall Street/NATO media believe if they only cut ties with barbarous Russia a promised land of civilized progress and prosperity awaits, While in Western Europe their demons are being projected onto Muslim migrants and refugees (not to say that popular concerns about off-shoring industry and resultant unemployment, arguably exacerbated by migration, aren’t real problems). It’s the same dynamic everywhere, the immature, subconsciously well-aware of their own wretchedness, seek to avoid taking a long hard look at themselves by projecting their innate barbarism onto whatever otherable group fits the bill. They quixotically seek to cast their own demons into the nearest ‘pack of swine’ and drive them over the nearest cliff. It’s yet another symptom of the juvenile bent of our bourgeois, materialist, individualist times. Everything, particularly history, is reduced to the easily quantified and digested. Nuance is an unnecessary nuisance. Anthropocentrism and the egomaniacal self-congratulation of Western Liberalism as the culmination of history and torch-bearer of ideals can no more be questioned than an infant is able to question that it is the centre of the universe without intervention of force majeure and an ensuing shrieking tantrum. Good luck kiddies.

Why I don’t believe in Western Liberal Democracy

When I was 17 I was practically a fanatic about the power of human reason, progress, and liberty. Then I grew up and saw the world. If wisdom is recognizing how little you know (Socrates), and if a key to the good life is recognizing your own limitations (the stoics), Liberalism is quite a juvenile ethos.

I do not use ‘Liberalism’ in the shallow, narrow American sense, contrasted with conservatism and synonymous with ‘progressive.’  Rather, by liberal I mean the broader republican or parliamentarian movement that overthrew the ancien régime in primarily the Dutch, Glorious, American and French revolutions. It is originally the movement of nouveaux riches whose wealth came from overseas colonialism and slavery and who wanted to pursue capital accumulation and dispose of their property, particularly human chattel, without the intervention of a monarch. While using the language of universalism, Classical liberals in practice promoted liberty, equality, and democracy only for their small exclusive, generally racist class of propertied men. These liberals commanded a slave economy, instigated New World genocide and effected Dickensian conditions in Europe.

Only maybe in very exceptional examples are politics driven by principles. As a rule, it is driven by powerful groups ruthlessly pursuing their interests. While there was a moral flavour to the abolition of slavery, industrialization necessitated the reserve army of labour created by the wage system, which keeps wages and production costs down. Abolition didn’t solve rights issues. Shortly after the industrial North defeated the South in the American civil war, Jim Crow came to pass, and Chinese and Indian coolies were imported to perform labour, particularly railway building, in conditions hardly better than plantation slavery. Colonial and neo-colonial exploitation continued, benefiting metropolitan elites who continued to wax lyrical about their liberal ideals.

Marx agreed that politics is driven by vested interest, not morals or principles. Proudhon argued in The Philosophy of Poverty that a better society should be built by appealing to peoples’ morality. Marx viciously tore this work apart in The Poverty of Philosophy. He argued that the proletariat would be driven to liberate itself from exploitation simply out of rational self-interest. Proudhon’s Utopian Socialism assumes people should be moral, share and help one another. Marxist Socialism does not. Rather, its flaws are inherited directly from Liberalism- faith in human reason as driving behaviour, the nobility of revolution and the belief in inevitable progress. Almost all of Marx’s work was descriptive, describing how capitalism works. A bit was predictive, flawed in the ways just mentioned, and a few sentences were prescriptive, amounting to ‘the bourgeois should probably be crushed with terror and their order replaced with something democratic resembling the Paris Commune.’ Take it or leave it. There are in fact thousands of small local examples of fully functional socialism around the world in the form of cooperatives, the best example being the federated Mondragon Corporation, which was successful both under Franco and the following regime.

But I digress. Liberalism has always used the language of universalism while in practice defending the interests of the privileged. The labour/feminist movement has been the only driver of progress through broad organization and being willing to fight and sacrifice. Although confused between the humane democratic socialism of George Orwell or Rosa Luxemburg and the harsh rule of Marxism-Leninism, in the west, all compromises with power over expanding democracy, civil rights and social welfare were won through the fear of violent leftist overthrow on the Russian model. Ironically, without the spectre of Bolshevik terror, there is no universal suffrage or social welfare. The USSR crushed and co-opted most of the global labour movement, marginalizing real democratic socialists and used its global network of red patsies to further its geopolitical interests. Therefore, when the USSR collapsed, the confused and emasculated labour movement was easily crushed and swept away. Its ability to defend democracy, civil liberties, and social welfare through organized struggle was gone, and the balance of power that created that which is disingenuously presented as the ideal-driven, shared-principle community of ‘progressive liberalism’ was gone. Sure, there are still good intentioned people out there, sometimes in important positions. But in the greater balance, the ruthless pursuit of vested interest by those with the most power and resources will prove definitive in shaping the world.

Besides a militant labour movement, I’d argue that those societies with the highest standards of living, best functioning institutions and most generous social welfare systems benefit from unprecedented wealth. They are the countries that benefited most from early modern colonial imperialism and exploitation of the New World. No other countries enjoy such a surplus of resources, save the Gulf oil states. Western Europe’s complex topography of disjointed peninsulas and islands produced various small separate states in mutual existential competition necessitating innovation in administrative, maritime and military technologies. These allowed them to subdue and exploit most of the rest of the world and accumulate unprecedented wealth.  As a rule, politics is the balance of powerful groups pursuing their own perceived interests, and wealth is the foundation of power, it funds and predicates ideas, creeds, and armies. A small state which commands resources garnered from whole continents finds it much easier for powerful factions to come to a consensus over the distribution of wealth- everyone can be satisfied with their share of the massive pie. This allows institutions to function well without conflict over wealth distribution in the form of corruption or extra-constitutional power plays like coups. In the early twentieth century, organized, militant labour formed one powerful group in the west. It fought and gained its share of the pie, social welfare, and civil liberties. Besides, Europe would not have its envied standard of living without the massive post-war influx of New-World wealth that was Marshal Aid, which was accompanied by an American project to remake Europe in its image. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in states lacking resources, those drained of resources by the west, or those that see a need for massive state security expenditures, there is less wealth to distribute, a consensus is harder to reach, inter-elite conflict and corruption more common. Institutions such as democratic elections and rule of law are far less likely to function under such conditions. With less funding for nuanced forms of social control, i.e. “bread and circuses,” baser, more indiscreet forms without the luxury of respect for rights and liberties are relied on. It is also a fantasy to believe that the west’s administrative techniques, developed under very specific historical and economic conditions can be exported to states experiencing completely different conditions and expected to function the same, especially without the west’s cushion of extreme wealth. As non-renewable resources are consumed at an ever-increasing rate, there is no guarantee that this wealth upon which western social democracy is predicated will last, especially in an economy increasingly reliant on debt and money printing.

Meanwhile, while the liberal oligarchy formally retains the civil liberties that were so prominently heralded in liberal cold war and post-cold war PR: elections, free press, tolerance of diverse identities, etc, new techniques of control and exploitation are constantly perfected. These are primarily exemplified by debt-enslavement and institutionalized financial fraud, hidden behind a curtain of pop-culture escapism, fixation on the formal though anemic liberties above and obfuscation of simple economics behind needlessly technical language and professional mystification.

As the size of the pie decreases it becomes more vital for anyone who wants their share of it or to have their rights respected to organize, fight and be ready to sacrifice. But the disadvantaged have now no coherent narrative to inspire them to do those things. The best they can do is post on social media, wave a sign or a puppet or occupy a park. Creating a new inspiring narrative is an incredibly difficult task. In my opinion, it would have to tear down some key axioms of liberalism usually unquestioningly inherited by the left, particularly those mentioned above as their shared flaws.

First, it must question the myth of progress. Racism and Nationalist ethnic cleansing are both products of the modern liberal order, one arising from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the other from the French Revolution. Cosmopolitanism is not a recent progressive invention, it was promoted by the ancient Greeks, stoics in particular. Herodotus described a tendency for ancient travelers to call the gods of other cultures by the names of their own. For example, when a Greek saw a statue of Isis he or she assumed it was Aphrodite. Conflict followed contours besides ethnicity. Many ancient and medieval civilizations were chauvinistic, but a ‘barbarian’ could generally acculturate and become just as accepted as Greek, Chinese-Confucian or Muslim as the local elite. Besides, the idea of progress assumes that technology will eventually solve our problems. Why was this not true for Babylon or the Aztecs? Historically and presently technology has been shown to cause as many problems as it solves, whether speaking of the ancient, extensive and ingenious irrigation systems which led to useless, saline farmland or the contemporary acidification and die-off of the worlds’ oceans. The myth of progress also tends to produce the argument that ‘primitive’ societies were barbaric and characterized by violence, rape and a generally social-Darwinist lack of law. However, those ‘primitive’ societies which Europeans met on the Northwest coast of North America, for example, were probably better at following natural law and respecting one another than the technologically advanced Europeans were. Decisions were made democratically and redistributing one’s wealth through the potlatch system was considered a mark of honour.

Second, a new narrative must question the idea that humans are driven by reason. It’s a pretty idea that sprung out of the unrestrained exuberance at the early-modern bourgeois-liberal-driven flowering of science. In certain contexts, people do follow their perceived rational self-interest. Perceived. But human psychology is murky at best. People often or perhaps usually don’t know what their true, subconscious motivations are. Childhood experiences, neuroses, the caprice of raw human nature all play a part. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs includes love, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. These can produce seemingly irrational behaviour, confounding prescripts of rational self-interest, especially when mixed with eccentricities, disorders, and neuroses. Being rational, having facts on your side (whatever that means, most people confuse lack of cognitive dissonance with their subjective worldview as pure reason) and preaching scientific objectivity while ignoring the vagaries of human nature and eccentricity does little to practically address the problems faced by humanity and the societies they create. In fact, it can create absurd, Kafkaesque problems. Human nature is flexible but it has limits which reason can only pretend to overcome. We are both greedy and cooperative, the variation based partly on the economic conditions in which we find ourselves.

Another flawed notion that the left inherited from Liberalism was the glorification of revolution. The American, French and Russian revolutions all led to war and massacre. One major reason for the American revolution, behind the pretty rhetoric, was the British Empire’s limit on American expansion West at the expense of the Native Americans, whom the British considered helping to establish their own state. Independence cleared the way for Amerindian genocide and avoided the rumoured approach of abolition in the British Empire. The Jacobin and Bolshevik terrors require no description. Revolution produces a power vacuum which, no matter the principles for which the revolution was ostensibly carried out, will almost inevitably be filled by the most ruthless. The question of revolution versus gradual change has been a central conflict within the western left and this conflict remains unresolved. I argued in an earlier post that monarchy provides certain benefits relating to stability and provides what I see as a practical need for a reliable centre of loyalty. It’s not fair, but what in life is? It’s realistic and stable. A dynasty’s interests are inextricably tied to the interests of the country. There is corruption in any system; allowing an incontestable permanent arbiter of power to live in luxury is better than having a series of Dick Cheneys treat their term in office as a cash & carry opportunity. George Orwell also speculated on whether a democratic socialist society might require the retention of the monarchy. Controlling the sources of wealth- production and finance is more important than controlling political power. It may be wise to focus on the expansion, perfection, and defense of the cooperative and credit union systems based on the Mondragon model at the expense of advanced-capitalist oligopolistic corporate structures. How exactly to do this is an open question. The main fear of pre-modern rulers was not the masses of the peasantry but the bourgeoisie, the merchant/banker class. In medieval Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Chinese societies usury was usually banned and the bourgeoisie deeply mistrusted and kept on a tight leash. Meanwhile, the land was often conceived of as belonging to God or some equivalent, with the rulers its custodians rather than owners. Even in feudalism, there were often democratic structures at the local level, like Russian mir or English peasant courts, as lords rarely wanted to waste time and resources administering the peasants.

Every group has dominant individuals who oversee the design (or adoption) and management of an ethos or ideology with which to bind the group and ensure loyalty. Human nature according to Jung has an inbuilt architecture of mythology or narrative; we require an ethos, an ideological framework through which to make sense of the world and find a sense of identity and belonging. The dynamic is the same whether speaking about religion, nationalism, Confucianism, Marxism-Leninism, Western Liberalism or whatever, all operate practically the same with a varying ratio of implicit and explicit ideological encoding. All are fluid, syncretic, not necessarily mutually exclusive and adapt to best re-enforce power and cohesion according to real-world conditions and to the perceived collective psychological imperatives of the masses. An ethos that believes it falls outside this framework and is based rather on scientific fact, as liberalism self-exalts, is speeding headlong toward cognitive dissonance and disintegration. Ethos generally only work on those subjects for whom they are invisible. When cracks appear disintegration accelerates.

In pursuing an alternative inspirational goal, I’d advocate habits and rules found to be reliable and conducive to human nature over the longue durée. Rather than buying into the contemporary myth of progress or idolizing some arbitrary period in human history, I’d look for enduring principles that are proven to be conducive to human nature, justice, and stable social organization. Cooperative resource management is a principle older than time itself. As is having a ‘chief’ or monarch in tandem with local democratic structures. As an ethos to tie society together, I’d seek something most conducive to harmony with and respect for nature, both external and human. Rather than some arbitrarily divisive socially constructed notion of identity, I’d look for something that treats humans at their most fundamental, flawed, feeling, thinking beings that fundamentally just want security and love. To this end, I’d personally promote the organization of society on ancient stoic principles. It’s a simple and effective ethos that only fell because it was outlawed and oppressed by the incoherent and vindictive imperial Christianity of ‘St.’ Paul. It is also non-exclusive to pre-existing ethos in the myriad forms we find them in today’s world- religion, ethnicity, etc. It is conducive to the classic model of universal empire practiced by Rome, the Mongols, Manchus, Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, under which subjects are free to identify as they please as long as they remain loyal and pay their taxes.

There is nothing new under the sun. Sustainability and social justice are to be found in a fair examination of human nature- natural law expressed through principles and techniques practiced in ‘primitive,’ ancient and medieval times. Egomaniacal self-righteousness over our superior progressiveness, powers of reason and technological development will lead to ruin and pathological alienation from in-born natural law. We require humble reflection on what makes us human and what has been shown to be effective over millennia of social organization during which human nature has remained constant.

Revisiting Thomas Hobbes

I have no political affiliation or convictions. I think policy is contingent on circumstance, environment, economics, security. I don’t think that people can re-make society any way they want and I don’t believe that political economic systems that have been shown to work in one place will work elsewhere. I think that more idealism and sound institutions are possible in the west than elsewhere because of extremely disproportionate prosperity from the New World and the colonial legacy. Maybe western liberal democracy is the best possible system, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. I believe like Prof. Hansen that the future of the global economy is not bright. If China’s 1.5 billion rose to the living standards of an average OECD country, a wide array of non-renewable resources would be expended within 40 years. There is accelerating climate change and mass oceanic die-off (due to acidification, plastic gyres, heavy metals and other industrial waste, Fukushima radiation and so on). The Liberal order is not progressing to greater liberty, it’s stumbling from Berlusconi to Assange to Manning to Snowden to Orban to Erdogan, to Trump/Hillary (same shit) and ever higher personal and sovereign debt. Liberalism by itself led to Dickensian conditions. Ironically the perverted Bolshevik revolution lent legitimacy to western social democratic demands to concede social welfare concessions or face violent leftist overthrow. This, contingent on the foundation of colonial prosperity, is why up to now these have been comfortable places to live. Once the USSR fell, this legitimate threat also fell, and the roll-back of social welfare concessionss began and continues. Again, as Hansen points out, many of them are objectively no longer affordable anyway. If you are less pessemistic and think that “liberal ideals” are being pursued and are achievable, good luck. I think geopolitical goals and reduction of limitations on capital accumulation are being pursued. I’m really bored with this obsession with parliamentary elections, there are countless possible legitimate forms of democracy, many developed by traditional societies in dialogue with their own local conditions and environment. Diversity is robust; monoculture, liberal or otherwise, is a liability when crisis hits. Never mind the criticisms of liberal society offered by the Prussian Conservative Revolutionaries, Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Jung, and Marx’s theories of alienation. Why and how should liberals expect that countries can transition to western-style liberal institutions within a few years with no cultural foundation and in disregard for local social and economic conditions? If these liberal crusaders insist on remaking the world in their image, maybe they should be thinking of a multi-generational roadmap. Establish stability and consensus of elites, a unifying ethos, sovereignty guarantees etc, etc first. Maybe promoting liberal democratic reforms prematurely has a counter-effect. For example, I think Russians often become homophobic just to resist western cultural imperiousness. Maybe promoting liberal reforms prematurely makes authoritarian regimes (which, however ugly, are indeed warding off war and chaos) feel insecure and leads to reactionary retrenchment. Maybe liberal crusaders should value the role of the regime in a long arduous process, while promoting non-threatening, mainly economic reforms, biding their time, promoting security of elites, education, etc. No one wants the results of Gorbachyov’s hasty, idealistic reforms- disintegration, apocalyptic living coditions and war. Maybe there are foundational conditions that should be painstakingly built before democratization. It’s nice to sit in a resource rich, only-recently-intensively-exploited, temperate, continental country with impecable security sandwiched between two oceans and say that non-gradual change will definitely work out great. I doubt this kind of optimism will survive the global financial crisis Hansen expects, but good luck!