Spoiler warning: Links are included for context, but please don’t click on any of them until you’ve finished reading the first two paragraphs.
February 22nd, 2022. A date with some numerological rhythm to it (2/22/22). A world superpower drops bombs on a far weaker power. Explosions rain down. Dozens are killed. No worries, the world superpower assures a frightened world: We have only killed evildoers, and have been sure to minimize potential civilian casualties. And besides, the superpower argues, we are not simply invading out of greed or bloodlust; we have an alliance with a legitimate local government, and we’re simply defending our allies. They issue a statement to this effect, both showcasing transparency and defending the legality of their actions.
Does the world believe them? Does it matter? Within the global superpower, armed to the teeth and wealthy in a way that the vast majority of the world cannot truly imagine, they also control their own media so well that no counter-narrative is allowed to exist. International organizations are skeptical of their claims that civilians aren’t being killed, but the citizens of this nation are assured that theirs is the only media to be trusted, and that international media to be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the superpower argues, we must stand up for ourselves, and the world has a long history of being against us; filled with bad actors and extremist ideologies, the international community is not to be seen as our ally. We must, the superpower insists, wipe out these evil ideologies from the face of the earth. If some civilians get killed, or if alliances of corrupt governments oppose us, this cannot deter us. And, anyway, we have the firepower to do whatever we want, with impunity.
I am speaking, of course, of the U.S. airstrike in Somalia, targeting al-Shabaab militants. The current administration has carried out a number of such airstrikes there, most of them over the summer. The previous administration had, in its classic bumbling way, managed to run afoul of all possible attitudes on the ongoing war on terror. On the one hand, they were the target of the Amnesty International report cited above; on the other hand, Trump did attempt to draw down troop numbers there; he was critiqued by his generals, whom we should of course trust, because they have had such an excellent record of bringing about death and destruction on all continents without seemingly having made anyone any safer at all. That is to say, it is easier to get Americans to lament pulling out of warzones than it is to get them concerned about how many human beings our government has murdered in any given week.
But that sort of misplaced hand-wringing is common in America. After all, there were countless published criticisms of Biden’s desire to finally end America’s longest (and possibly most ineffective) war, but very few criticisms of the murder of 10 civilians, including 7 children, that we carried out at the tail end of our withdrawal. The context of that attack was, if you recall, that a bombing took out 13 armed U.S. soldiers at the airport in Kabul, an airport named after Hamid Karzai, a corrupt puppet leader put in place by a foreign invading force. Since we were pulling out anyway, there was no strategic purpose to a response to this attack; no U.S. soldiers would be at risk from further attacks in Afghanistan, after all. However, a combination of factors did make a response necessary: one, the optics of domestic politics, with the retreating Democratic President being accused of weakness by his Republican opponents, and two, the seemingly just need for retribution and punishment. As a result, we murdered a bunch of children, and decided unilaterally to punish no one for it. Because, you know, it’s war, and bad things happen in war. Those seven children just made the mistake of having been born in a country that we had decided, a decade or so before their birth, to invade, so, that’s just their bad luck.
It’s well-known that the situation in Afghanistan isn’t unrelated to Russia. After all, we were there fighting against the Taliban, a regime we originally put in place 40 years ago as part of an effort to combat a Russian invasion. And our strategy worked, hooray! Interestingly enough, the situation in Somalia is also part of a sphere of conflict that includes Russia. The dynamics of Africa have been, for the past 60 years or so, an ongoing “cold war” between numerous world powers, among them China, Iran, the U.S., and Russia. It’s no secret, even if it’s not reported much, that Russian mercenaries have played a large role in the internal conflicts of African countries. Russia’s goal in Africa has been to expand its own influence and power by arming its chosen allies and then sending troops (surreptitiously and extra-legally, hence we call them “mercenaries”) into combat zones. In response, the U.S. has been doing the same — except, as we control the international legal community and terminology, our interventions are more “legal” in nature.
It’s confusing, and important, to continue to use this phrase “cold war” for the current state of affairs. During the period from 1945–1991, the pretense was that the U.S. had built an alliance based around Democracy and Capitalism, while the Soviet Union had built an alliance based around Totalitarianism and Communism, and that the point at issue between the two superpowers was thus ideological. Of course, this was always, and continues to be, utter nonsense. In reality, the “cold war’ began in the 1800s, between the UK and Russia, when the two waged what is known as the “Great Game” for control over Central Asia. During the US-USSR chapter of the ongoing struggle, America supported such bastions of liberal democracy as Pakistan and Chile (under Pinochet), while the USSR supported such Communist ideologues as Gamal Nasser and Nelson Mandela (yes, this entire sentence is meant as sarcasm). That is to say, it was never about ideology, but only about the accumulation of power, by attracting whatever allies we could; as such, the fall of the USSR has had no effect on this centuries-old battle for world domination, and so it continues to this day.
The use of the term “cold war” is, of course, a brutally racist one, as it has always been. The term was meant to imply the lack of direct violent conflict between Russian and American soldiers in the postwar era, but during the so-called “cold war,” millions died in conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America — conflicts directly caused by, and largely armed by, Russia and America. In short: the war is only “cold” in that very few white people die. As many have pointed out, this seems to be the major difference when it comes to public perception of the war in Ukraine: for the first time, going back to the First Afghan War of 1839 (with the British army largely staffed by Indian troops, and the Afghan army supported by Tsarist Russia), it’s white people dying in a cold war conflict.
This is hardly the first, nor will it be the last, article written pointing out the hypocrisy of the melodramatic pity party Americans have been throwing for the past six weeks over Ukrainian suffering. And all such articles run the risk of suggesting a facile whataboutism. Of course Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is bad, and of course Ukrainian civilian suffering is bad, and of course it’s worth opposing. But every time I hear a report on the dramatic toll taken on Ukrainian life, or on the “war crimes” being committed by Russia in its targeting of civilian structures, I’m struck by the total absence of self-reflection in the American media. We still have prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, for Pete’s sake. Who exactly are we to talk about “war crimes”?
Recently, I attended a concert in which the old Dylan classic “Masters of War” was played, with fury and passion, while the stage was lit up in yellow and blue. All around my liberal hometown, I see yellow-and-blue flags, alongside (or sometimes replacing) the BLM flags that waved there a year ago. All I can think is, were any of these people flying Iraqi flags, in public, back in 2003? Would that have been acceptable? Did you support the Iraqi people as they were systematically butchered by a global superpower, in a war that killed millions of civilians in violation of international law?
The sanctions brought against Russia are clearly meant to achieve the result of bringing down Putin’s government and ending the war from within. Some have suggested openly that the Russian military should do so, treasonously but nobly. We’ve also shown pride and support for Russian youth protesting the war, hoping that they too could be part of overthrowing Putin (Putin, apparently, agrees that this is possible). In short: We are hoping that the Russians, both in the military and in the populace, act with greater morality and courage, and with less patriotism and callousness, than the American military and populace have for the past … um, than forever.
Meanwhile, that song “Masters of War” Is not targeted at some vicious enemy, but rather at entirely domestic villains — at “You that build all the guns,” the military contractors who profit off of, and are financially incentivized to encourage, war and death. Dylan wrote this song in 1962, pre-Vietnam; it’s not a protest of any particular conflict, but actually a protest of the “cold war,” of the arms race and of the fear tactics used by our leaders to drive us towards a profitable war. When we read that the U.S. is offering $2 billion in “military aid” to Ukraine, do we realize that this means that U.S. weapons manufacturers are getting $2 billion in U.S. taxpayer money? Do you think that perhaps the profit motive behind such a windfall has any effect on the constant media coverage of this conflict?
To reiterate, I am hardly alone in noticing this hypocrisy. I can only ask you to try to check some of it yourself. The U.S. has long been the de facto leader of the international community, and as such, the “policeman of the world,” like it or not. Without U.S. military intervention, there is no war crimes trial for Slobodan Milosevic (well, almost; he died in custody first), and for the same reasons, there has never been any accountability for the various war crimes committed by Americans for the past century, from the Philippines to Hiroshima, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But whenever one nation sends its armed soldiers into another country with orders to destroy buildings and drop bombs and shoot their weapons at the people they encounter in that country, it’s a problem, and I for one could not care less what the excuse or rationale is. Russia can only be condemned in the same breath as America. Otherwise, all the ongoing fretting about Ukrainian suffering isn’t what we think it is — we’re not so much defending International Law and Decency as we are defending Our Side in the ongoing “cold war,” and reserving our right to continue to defend Our Side when it’s our turn to be the aggressors.
(Trigger warning: This next part is far more radical)
The title of this piece reflects a longstanding socialist attitude towards all nationalistic wars. The distinction between “legal war” and “criminal war” activity has always been a tool for the victors of a war to execute those they have defeated, and for one side to hypocritically condemn the other. By labeling Russia’s actions in Ukraine as “war crimes,” but treating our own as “more complicated” at worst, we affirm the notion that Our Side is Morally Superior. The only stance that avoids this hypocrisy — a hypocrisy that inevitably leads to the wanton murder of millions of innocent people — is to acknowledge that all aggressive war is crime. If you invade another country, whatever justification you willfully fabricate for your own foolish population to swallow alongside their nationalistic Pledges of Allegiance and other proto-fascistic tools of brainwashing and psychological oppression, you are knowingly going to murder, and as in most wars, it’s safe to assume that roughly half of the people you murder will be civilians.
The majority of people killed in almost every war are civilians, regardless of whether or not the “rules of war” are followed. Massive civilian casualties are a foreseeable consequence of any invasion; pointing out Russia’s war crimes adds to a pretense that when we invade “legally” and follow the “rules,” we don’t end up murdering millions of innocent people. And far, far more civilians have been killed as collateral damage in “legal” wars than have been killed by “war crimes.”
I encourage you to read the Democratic Socialists of America official statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While condemning the invasion and demanding a diplomatic solution, it also calls out the “imperialistic” aims of NATO and the role that the U.S. has played in setting the stage for this escalation. The statement also ends with a socialist mantra, “No war but class war,” which I think deserves some elaboration. As unpleasant as it is to see Russian shells destroying Ukrainian cities, the question at the core of this war is — whose flag should fly over the capitol building in Kyiv? Is it that of the Russian Federation or the USSR or Ukraine? And if Ukraine, is it a leader chosen “democratically,” or chosen by the U.S., or chosen by Russia? The answer to this question, from a Socialist perspective, is: It doesn’t really matter. Nationalism is a tool used by the military-industrial complex to both scare and inspire the masses to fight for such arcane symbols as flags and anthems and borders, so that the working class of various countries kill each other, and in the end, does it really matter which ethnicity are the oligarchs who control your economy and your very soul through the inherent exploitation of capitalism? Are you truly freer because “Americans” rule you through their impenetrable and antidemocratic institutions, such as the Supreme Court and the NYSE and the Senate and various lobbying organizations? Would you be worse off if those institutions were run entirely by Mexicans or Chinese or Russians? Does your ethnic and national pride really matter more to you than a just world in which the working class is allowed to profit off the fruit of their own labor? Do you realize that your Patriotism is a commodity, worth trillions of dollars to arms manufacturers, and bought with the blood of tens of millions of innocents?
In this war, as in every, there are only victims, and there are no winners. Working-class Russian soldiers have been sent to their deaths by an oligarchy of rich Russians who face no repercussions. Working-class Ukrainian soldiers and civilians will die; none of the economic or political elite who oppose the war, from Biden down to Zelenskyy, are in any personal danger. Meanwhile, those who profit off of war will make a killing, so to speak. Around the Western world, attention is distracted away from our own exploitation at the hands of our Feudal overseers, as well as our government’s own consistently murderous and illegal actions taken in our name and paid for by our coerced taxes. In a world in which we attain transnational class consciousness and solidarity, there will be no more reason for wars of conquest, of nationalistic defense, of competition for geopolitical domination like some perverse game of “Risk” played out with living pieces. But as long as we continue to support a system where we turn power over willingly to the all-powerful motive for profit, a system where we rally around national identity and demonize only our opponents, a system in which we make no apologies for our own war crimes, in the past or the present, while using legalistic language to condemn, not only strategically but morally, the national enemies of our nationalistic leaders — as long as we continue to buy into this, and wave flags, and support the troops, and vote for one psychotic lying corporate murderer over another as if it makes a difference which psychotic lying corporate murderer gets to murder people for the next 4 years — we will continue to live in this world that we’ve wrought.
If you want to hate, and condemn, and take up arms against the right people for the right reasons, then by all means, let’s do so. But here’s a hint for identifying them: It doesn’t matter which nationality they are.
To conclude, consider the following three article titles:
In the long run, wars make us safer and richer (2014)
Researchers have found that war has a remarkable and miraculous effect (2016)
Economic warfare is hurting Russia. But it’s risky for the U.S., too. (2022)
All three are from the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Are you sure, really sure, that you know who the villains are?
