The Woke Contrarian

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

Tag: propaganda

Kiev me a break! Ukraine’s divisive language policies get worse

2023-12-10 / / 0 Comments

[all links in Russian]

A few days ago, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law that increases protections for speakers of official EU languages in Ukraine (the good part), but removes the time limit for the current restrictions on the use of Russian (the bad thing). This law is unconstitutional—although the Ukrainian constitution deems Ukrainian the sole state language, there are provisions to protect the use of Russian and other languages—but the Kiev regime has been using the constitution as toilet paper. Yet again, Ukraine is continuing to divide its people rather than uniting them. If they keep doing things like this, they won’t have a state left to defend. Russia will continue to exploit Ukraine’s refusal to incorporate its ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking citizens (who may or may not support the Russian government; I suspect most of them don’t).

Russia doesn’t even need to fabricate propaganda about the mistreatment of Russians or Russian-speakers (not the claims about genocide, which are fabricated, but the ethnic-chauvinist “total Ukrainianisation”). The Ukrainian government is doing it for them. And then disgruntled Ukrainian citizens who are tired of being told that they can’t speak Russian, or that all Russians are synonymous with Putin, get fed up and start working directly with the Russians. Or maybe they’re in an occupied area and just need to eat, so they will “collaborate” with the local Russian-installed authorities. Ukrainian propagandists act accordingly and claim that they’ve been proven right, so they make life even harder for the “superfluous Ukrainians.” But then the Russians seize on the new anti-Russian laws and regulations, claiming that it is they who were right. And the cycle continues inexorably until someone gets the sense to say, “Wait a moment. Why are we doing this? All we’re doing is playing into the Russians’ hands.”

Is it any wonder that a country that constantly scores own-goals is failing on the battlefield? I despise Putin and want Russian troops off Ukrainian territory, but the bunglers in Kiev can’t seem to get their act together and work strategically—or avoid alienating at least a fifth of its population. And I suspect that its reckless actions, both with regard to domestic and military policy, have led to its inability to regain most of the territory it lost last year.

Bullet-point thoughts too short for independent posts

2023-12-06 / / 0 Comments

… really, these could just be shitposts, but they’re too serious for that, so I’m combining them into a convenient bullet-pointed list.

  • Russia and Ukraine are both using cultural and ethnic minorities as scapegoats to keep the public in line. The Russians are notorious for systematically targeting LGBTQ+ people as a symbol of “Western decadence” and “extremism.” They’re also a convenient sacrificial lamb for the ultraconservative, rural Orthodox Christian voters that Putin depends on. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are doing the same with ethnic Russians, as well as Russian-speaking Ukrainians and socialists who are critical of the government. Although some of these opponents are pro-Russian, not all are. To keep the support of the hardline nationalists, especially in the West, the central government will happily sacrifice these “superfluous Ukrainians.” I expect this from Russia, since its human-rights record has been spotty for a long time, but Ukraine’s actions disappoint me more because I expected better from a country that aspires to be more democratic than its former ruler. Being of Russian descent, speaking Russian, or preferring socialism over capitalism is not the same thing as supporting the Putin regime. (See also my comments about the Ukraine War being Russia’s proxy war against the West, and the own-goals by Ukraine and Russia.)
  • People who support terrorists are assholes? Who would’ve thought? I hate to say this, but I have seen more empathy and compassion from progressive Zionists than anti-Zionists or hardline Netanyahu supporters. Every day I continue to be dumbfounded at how cruel, vengeful and inhumane some anti-Zionists can be. I can’t side with anyone who’s being that cruel and vindictive. Not in an anodyne “why don’t we all just get along when the Israeli government is doing monstrous things” way, but the idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians or take hostages for being “settlers.” I know there are several anti-Zionisms, but I am talking about the people who support or do nothing but make apologies for Hamas. I shouldn’t expect humane behaviour or decency from anyone who actively supports a terrorist organisation. I have said this before and I will say it again: this isn’t Nelson Mandela. Mandela wanted to make a South Africa for everyone. His goal was not to kill everyone in sight and kick out non-Black South Africans. Hamas’s goal is to eliminate and destroy, not merely to liberate.
  • Western countries should drop sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Not because anyone should approve of these countries’ practices (I certainly don’t, which is obvious to anyone who’s read this blog), but because the main people who suffer from these sanctions are ordinary Russians, North Koreans, and Iranians, not their leadership or oligarchs. Russia has enough global influence (and oil) to make up for the revenue lost from sanctions. The South African sanctions worked, but that’s probably because South Africa had historical ties to the West. American and British pressure worked. There’s no love lost between Iran/North Korea and the West, and the relationship between Russia and the West has been adversarial since at least 2014, after the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.”
  • Many Marxists can be reductive and dismissive about any relationship of dominance and oppression that isn’t economic, but their universalism is refreshing in a polarised society. I’d like to see a communism that keeps some of Marx’s ideas but makes them more expansive, easier to understand and responsive to today’s modern needs.
  • There’s a difference between being a supporter of human rights and being an identitarian woke-scold. In the first case, you acknowledge systemic oppression and want to rectify it. You do this by implementing policies that allow the historically oppressed group to be a full member of their society. It’s about including everyone, not acting at someone else’s expense. Identitarians, on the other hand, use real grievances to justify an eye-for-an-eye, dog-eat-dog, hyphenated-thing-to-reflect-violent-actions morality. Gandhi never said, “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind,” but it fits all the same. Social equity is not a zero-sum game. (This kind of violent “morality” is an own-goal by social justice activists… and I think that will be my next full post.)
  • FUCK HAMAS, FUCK PUTIN, FUCK ZELENSKY, FUCK NETANYAHU. (I couldn’t resist.)

Kiev doubles down on linguistic nationalism

2023-10-30 / / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

ProleWiki: Tankies have created the funniest/most infuriating thing I’ve seen all week

2023-10-23 / / 0 Comments

Tankies have created their own counterpart to Wikipedia: ProleWiki.

A picture of a blonde light-skinned man saying, "North Korea is a socialist workers' paradise!" He's wearing a dark-red T-shirt with a red star on it and is giving the viewer the thumbs-up.

You can learn that the correct name for Americans is actually “Statesians.” You’ll also learn that North Korea—I mean the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—is a happy workers’ paradise, not a totalitarian hellhole full of people who are fed a healthy diet of propaganda rather than actual food to eat. Russia’s RT, Iran’s Press TV, and other state media from authoritarian states, as well as conspiracy-mongering publications like CovertAction Magazine and The Greyzone, are now “anti-imperialist media.” And you’ll learn that virtually anything wrong in the world is a “Statesian” plot led by the CIA. The words “bourgeois,” “capitalist,” “ruling class,” “means of production,” and “material” are thrown around liberally.

A picture of a frowning light-skinned woman with purple hair, saying, "The kulaks had it coming!" She's wearing an off-the-shoulders pink top with a teal sleeveless shirt underneath, and there is a black choker with a teal pendant around her neck.

And to the editors of ProleWiki, Stalin and Kim Jong-un are deeply misunderstood men who want to do right by their people, not iron-fisted tyrants. And Xi Jinping is praised by way of a quote from that stalwart champion of human rights, Fidel Castro. In general, if the media say anything negative about the USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, or any other “actually existing socialist state,” it’s bourgeois propaganda.

At least the ProleWiki editors are pro-LGBTQ, unlike some other Marxist–Leninists who see anything non-heteronormative as being bourgeois, idealist, or degenerate. I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

 

German-owned Politico publishes piece defending SS veteran

2023-10-05 / / 0 Comments

The European edition of Politico, which is wholly owned by Germany’s Axel Springer conglomerate, published an op-ed by Keir Giles on the Yaroslav Hunka affair. Giles, a British Russia expert, claims that SS-Galizien was cleared of all crimes in a Canadian investigation (but not the Nuremberg trials) and that Hunka was forced to make a difficult decision because of the threat the Soviets presented to the Ukrainians. He dismisses the complaints of Jewish groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, even though it is Jews who were the Nazis’ primary victims. Every acknowledgement of Ukrainian nationalists’ complicity with the Nazi regime is Russian propaganda and no more.

If I didn’t know it was from Politico and not Euromaidan Press or Ukrainska Pravda, I’d have thought Giles’s essay was Ukrainian propaganda.

The Nuremberg Trials declared all SS divisions criminal organisations with one exception: the Equestrian SS [second link is in Russian]. This means that SS-Galizien was not cleared at Nuremberg. In an article (rehosted by the author on academia.edu—the actual site is paywalled and unavailable on Sci-Hub) for the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, the historian Per Anders Rudling makes clear that the the volunteer members of SS-Galizien were not mere dupes or heroic Ukrainian freedom fighters. Members of the division had to swear oaths to Hitler, and they were educated in Nazi ideology. SS-Galizien committed multiple war crimes against Poles and civilians. Ultranationalists affiliated with the Ukrainian government—especially Volodymyr Viatrovych, the former head of Ukraine’s Institute for National Remembrance—have attempted for years to play down the atrocities that fascist and Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian nationalists have committed.

I don’t get why some of Ukraine’s supporters have to bend over backwards to defend its worst elements. By doing so, it simply hands the Russians more material for their propaganda.

Ukraine’s Own-Goals: How Kiev Unwittingly Feeds the Russian Propaganda Machine

2023-09-26 / / 0 Comments

Although Ukraine is much further along the path to a functioning democracy than Russia is, it still has disturbing authoritarian, ethnonationalist tendencies—and many of those tendencies have caused Kiev to score own-goals, thereby feeding the Russian propaganda machine1—and possibly leading many Ukrainians to collaborate with Vladimir Putin’s tyrannical regime.

Putin’s pretexts for invading an independent country are bogus. No, Ukraine is not conducting a genocide against ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The Ukrainian government is not led by Nazis. And the presence of the US and NATO in Ukraine is not an existential threat to the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Nonetheless, the refusal to acknowledge the country’s role in World War II, its rigid linguistic policies, and its suppression of dissent contradict the image of progressive democracy that Ukraine wants to project. What’s more, Ukraine’s embrace of ultranationalist policies is a threat to the country’s national security.

Erratum: In an earlier version of this post, I referred to Ukraine’s interim minister of free speech and information as “Nestor Shufrych.” Shufrych is the official who was replaced after being accused of high treason. The interim minister is Yevgeny (Yevhen) Bragar. 

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The problem with the “NATO proxy war” narrative

2023-09-08 / / 0 Comments

Critics of Ukraine often say that the US and NATO are supporting the country to weaken Russia. This is true—after all, Russia’s actions are directly opposed to American and NATO national-security and strategic interests—but this is a one-sided interpretation that places all the responsibility on the “collective West,” as Putin and his sycophants call the US–NATO alliance. Russia, too, is treating Ukraine as a proxy for its war against the West. Domestic Russian propaganda treats the war as a conflict of values between conservative, traditionalist Russia and the decadent US/NATO alliance and its client state, the Kiev regime.

The dissident Russian media network, TV Rain (Dozhd/Дождь), covers the anti-Western rhetoric espoused by Russian TV talking heads in its Fake News series. Dmitry Kiselev, Vladimir Soloviev, Margarita Simonyan and other propagandists spend as much time ranting about the United States, Britain, France, Denmark and other NATO countries as they do Ukraine itself.

Clearly, their war isn’t just against Kiev; it’s against Washington, London, Copenhagen and Paris. This is the very definition of a proxy war.

Even if you consider NATO’s problematic expansion policies or the relationship between the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations and post-Maidan Ukrainian governments, Russia still bears primary responsibility for the Ukrainian invasion. This is why I still support Ukraine militarily, even though I oppose many of its government’s actions.

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