Petri Lahtinen
In our latest blog post we briefly touched on the war in Ukraine. Yet, as our association pursues global justice and equality we want to return quickly to the topic once more. This text is by no means intended to be a comprehensive review of the situation in Ukraine but rather we hope to compile some perspectives and notions that we deem important regarding this current conflict.
Let us first seize upon the question of what word or term should be used while referring to what is happening in Ukraine at the moment. Some have chosen to use the word ‘war’ while others use terms such as ‘conflict’ or ‘crisis’. None of these are incorrect or untruthful as such but here the choice of words reveals something essential about the different attitudes towards the situation in Ukraine. The use of the word ‘war’ often seems to refer to an idea that war in Ukraine began on the 24th of February in 2022 as Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine which, in turn, was preceded by the recognition of the independence of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk by Russia’s “president” Vladimir Putin on the 21st of February. The choice of ‘conflict’ or ‘crisis’ is more fitting, however, in a sense that it understands the bigger picture and acknowledges the fact that the war in Donbas did not start in February 2022 but already in 2014. Of course, no armed conflict is born in a vacuum but instead there are long-lasting and complicated developments behind them that are related to politics, economics and cultural history. However, it is not possible to examine all the circumstances that have led up to the current conflict in Eastern-Ukraine but fortunately there is a great number of online texts, articles and literature available on the topic.
Some might say that interfering in the choice of words in this case is unnecessary nit-picking. Yet, language and its use are significant part of propaganda and tools for exercising power. Russia itself has called its war as a peacekeeping operation in separatist regions as well as a “special military operation” aiming at the ‘denazification’ or demilitarization of Ukraine. All these choices of words are, of course, meant to direct the thoughts and attention of the listener away from the idea of war and especially war of aggression. In the talks given by Putin and the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov on international forums the focus has been for a while on propaganda that emphasizes the argument “what about the USA…”. This sort of rhetoric taken almost directly from the Cold war era as well as the antagonism towards the USA has been the ideological foundation of Putin and his supporters for a long time. In the morning when the war of aggression was launched Putin gave a speech and was already past the half point of his talk without mentioning Ukraine even once. Instead, he was talking past the whole nation to the USA where he seems to view the whole Western and globalized power be centred in. This theme will be addressed more thoroughly later.
No conflict lives solely in war fields and fronts but it also continues its existence in traditional, digital and social media in an unforeseen manner. Digital communication has led us to a situation where war is able to exists constantly as a flow of information and pictures on the screens of our smart phones and computers. During the era of attention economy, all the media agencies are in an aggressive competition with each other over the attention of readers and viewers. As a result, journalism cannot afford to content itself with the so-called objective reporting and provision of facts. As the war of aggression in Ukraine began various experts of different fields, correspondents and reporters constantly offered very different interpretations and scenarios of the development and conclusion of the war. However, in truth no one knows – nor cannot know – when and especially how a war will end.
Similarly, as language and its usage are tools for exercising power, reporting and above all the act of leaving something unreported are ways of exercising power and having an influence. The conflict in Ukraine has been widely covered in all the news media ever since Russia launched its current war of aggression. Yet, it is a legitimate question to raise how much news coverage the situation in Donbas region has received between 2014 and 2022. How many even remembered before the beginning of this year, that there has been a conflict in Eastern-Ukraine for the past eight years? Equally, it is appropriate to ask how much the Western news media and agencies have observed the refugee crisis caused by the war in Afghanistan, the war crimes that Saudi-Arabia has committed in Yemen, or the activities of Turkey in Syria. What has happened in Mariupol this year is certainly horrible but at the same time is nothing that would not have already happened in Groznyy, Fallujah or Aleppo to name a few examples from the recent past.
Many have been baffled by the apparent indifference and ignorance among the Russian citizens of the events in Ukraine. When the war is not outside one’s door, it unfortunately seems detached from one’s everyday life, distant and even unreal. How many in Europe are aware of the war crimes committed in Yemen by Saudi-Arabia and United Arab Emirates that have been made partially possible by petrodollars and weapons originating from Europe? On the other hand, how many Europeans are aware of the UN peacekeeping forces having been involved in child abuse in Afghanistan? At the same time, countries such as Finland and Sweden are financing Russia’s war by buying energy from it and joining a military alliance with Turkey that under the guise of the war in Ukraine has once again launched extensive attacks in Northern-Syria with the ethnic cleansing of Kurds, Yazidis and Christians as its goal. In all these cases the psychology behind them can be identified as a subtype of denial coined as die Isolierung (isolation) where the thing denied is pronounced as if the statement has no consequences that recognized facts usually have. The great masses are interested in their own lives as well as in those of their immediate circle and not so much in distant conflicts nor contentions of ideologies and politics.
Russia is something close and yet distant at the same time for us Europeans. The crippling dependency on Russian energy and the geopolitical proximity of Ukraine in relation to Europe have forced us to react to Russia’s war of aggression in a manner that has made it quite impossible to isolate ourselves from the implications and consequences of the war. For a long time, Russia and Putin have been viewed as some sort of irrational mystery in the West. However, while looking at the overall picture the general character of Putin’s administration has been clear from the very beginning. In 2005 Putin’s most notable adversary and the richest man in Russia at the time, oligarch Mihail Hodorkovsky was overthrown from the administration of the oil company Jukos and sentenced to prison. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the era of destitution, volatility and disorder during the 1990s when oligarchs and various groups of organized crime were struggling for power, for a great number of Russians Putin represented a chance for stability and order – even if it happened at the price of democracy and freedom. Putin was made the president of Russia once and for all with the Second Chechen War that was also characterized by massive war crimes and civilian deaths. That war did not, however, touch the EU and NATO countries since the inhabitants of Chechenia had the “wrong” religion and the area did not hold any geopolitical significance.
In the end, Vladimir Putin is not such a big mystery that we would like to think and instead he possesses many typical characteristics of a dictator. First, from the very beginning Putin’s power has been based on two pillars: on popularity on the one hand, and on control on the other hand. Second, Putin has isolated himself efficiently inside his own reality bubble: he rarely uses the internet and does not own a smart phone for example. This sort of behaviour reflects the phenomenon where the representatives of the old rule have completely fallen outside the postmodern zeitgeist. Globalization and capitalism living as a parasite alongside its triumphant march have made our world a complicated realm where the political, economic, societal and social realities have intertwined inseparably forming massive and complex systems that are connected in the most surprising and unpredictable ways. Internet, as understood by most people, i.e. World Wide Web mirrors this global transition into a hyper system that is all-encompassing on the one hand and immaterial on the other hand. It has also transformed irrevocably the processes of production: the dematerialization of commodities, the principle of cooperation and the unbroken continuity between production and consumption have made the traditional criteria for defining the value of a commodity obsolete.
The dictators and the despots of the old world rarely understand the complexity of the present-day world any more. They do not comprehend that economic and political rule is no longer tied unambiguously to power that is based on capital and material resources. Beside them a new kind of immaterial power has emerged as well as a form of social capital i.e. attention. This is something that has been understood and internalized by such figures as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and even Volodymyr Zelensky. The representatives of the old rule who have lost the track of the complex world and have fallen from the centre of world politics are acting up due to the existential crisis that stems from an experience of being left outside. As a result, they clutch to their last straws that are force, extortion, threats and violence.
The seemingly “insane” worldview of putinism should not, however, be perceived solely as a counter-reaction to the complexity of the present-day world and globalization experienced specifically as something Western and American. Instead, the roots of this worldview go much deeper into the history of Russian intellectual history that has comprehended Russia as a “special” civilization. Thus, putinism and Russian culture is overshadowed by a myth that defines them specifically through a negation that exists in relation to a “unipolar world order” that especially the USA is representing and maintaining according to the Russian view. In the end, as said before, behind Russia’s irrationality and insanity there is a radical existential crisis happening on an ideological level. Alexandr Dugin, who has been called the main ideologist of putinism and “the world’s most dangerous philosopher” has stated that the current events in Ukraine are not a war but Russia’s ontological struggle in a world where it has been shut out of the global networks. Similarly, Putin in his speeches has continually emphasized an idea, that dreams still of some sort of mythical “Greater Russia” in which Ukraine as a nation let alone as a culture does not exist in relation to Russia. Therefore, both the incapability to recognize smaller nations as truly sovereign agents as well as the paranoia about the expansion of NATO as a part of the Western unipolar world order stem from the same meaningful relationship of dependency that “the special Russian civilization” has in relation to the West.
It is hard to imagine that Putin would be prepared to give up his war in Ukraine and thus admitting his “defeat” to the world. Similarly, it would be beautiful but overoptimistic to imagine a radical turn in the thinking of the great masses of Russia that would cause them to crave for freedom instead of stability to such an extent that they would be ready to rise to a rebellion and overthrow the dictatorship of their country. We can recall, for example, how the tyranny of Stalin continued till his death and how the current rule of North-Korea has not fallen despite its many famines. Of course, there have been many revolutions and coups during the long history of Russia. Yet, the question remains what sort of developments could lead to such action today. When Putin finally falls one way or another, we are left with the mystery of Russia’s future: does it remain an isolated civilization, does it move towards western democracy or, alternatively, can it find its own way of existence as a “special civilization” and yet live in harmony with the rest of the world.
As we are pursuing global cooperation and trying to build a better world, there must be significant changes in our modes of thinking and courses of action. First, we can no longer ignore different conflicts and problems by pleading some sort of unbridgeable ontological gap between our cultures. Second, we cannot isolate ourselves from the realities of the world and bind ourselves as energy dependents and enter into alliances with such agents that do not recognize the sovereignty of other nations and ethnicities. Finally, we can no longer turn the other way when somewhere in the world there are war crimes and human rights violations happening. The current conflicts and those of the future demand more widespread solidarity and immediate action.
Sources and further reading:
- All Things Considered: How the U.S. Military Ignored Child Sexual Abuse In Afghanistan For Years. NPR 24.01.2018
- Backman, Jussi: A Russian Radical Conservative Challenge to the Liberal Global Order. Aleksandr Dugin. In Contestations of Liberal Order. The West in Crisis? Ed. Marko Lehti & Henna-Riikka Pennanen & Jukka Jouhki. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2020, 289–314.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”:
- Info Labour and Precariousness
https://www.generation-online.org/t/tinfolabour.htm
- The Warrior, Merchant and the Sage. 2004
https://www.uibk.ac.at/peacestudies/downloads/peacelibrary/warrior.pdf
- Calzini, Paolo: Vladimir Putin and the Chechen War. The International Spectator 2/2005.
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/124994/calzini.pdf
- Clunan, Anne L.: Russia and the Liberal World Order. Ethics & International Affairs. Vol. 32, No. 1, 2018, 45–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679418000096.
- Cockburn, Patrick: The mass ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds is collateral damage from the war in Ukraine. iNews 03.07.2022
- Frantzman, Seth J.: Turkey threatens new ethnic-cleansing invasion of Syria – analysis. The Jerusalem Post 25.05.2022
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-707608
- Heiser, James: Putin’s Rasputin. The Mad Mystic Who Inspired Russia’s Leader. Breitbart 10.06.2014.
- Laruelle, Marlène (ed.): Eurasianism and the European Far Right. Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD 2015.
- Lee, Joyce Sohyun; Kelly, Meg & Mirza, Atthar: Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen have been called war crimes. Washington Post 04.06.2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/saudi-war-crimes-yemen/
- media resistance group: The second Chechen war and the war in Ukraine: colonial violence as a basis of Putin’s power. Sygma 17.05.2022
- O’Leary, Lizzie: The Future of the Internet in Russia. Slate 12.3.2022.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/vladimir-putin-internet-paranoia.html
- Ratner, Paul: The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World. Big Think18.12.2016.
- Robinson, Kali: Yemen’s Tragedy: War, Stalemate, and Suffering. Council on Foreign Relations 22.08.2022
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/yemen-crisis
- Rubin, Michael: Child Sex Abuse by U.N. Forces. Where’s the Outrage? Newsweek 26.02.2016
https://www.newsweek.com/child-sex-abuse-un-forces-wheres-outrage-430583
- Salminen, Antti & Váden, Tero: Energy and Experience: An Essay in Naftology. MCM Publishing, Chicago 2015.
- Snyder, Timothy: The Road to Unfreedom. Russia, Europe, America. Tim Duggan Books, New York 2018.
- Wheeler, Skye: UN Peacekeeping has a Sexual Abuse Problem. The Hill 11.01.2020
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/01/11/un-peacekeeping-has-sexual-abuse-problem
- Vladimir Putin still does not use smartphone, spokesman says. Russian News Agency18.12.2020.
