Crisis 22

Exceptional Violence

Chiaroscuro - Chiaro - Scuro - The Present Score

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Crisis 22 is in part an attempt to come to terms with a way of thinking that turns political disagreement into cluster munitions and FAB-3000 glide bombs (FAB = Fugasnaya Avia Bomba = high explosive aerial bombs). These 3-tonne ‘fab’ bombs are anything but fabulous. They’re both devastating and very difficult to stop, and Russia’s been dropping them on Ukraine since June 2024 (I’m writing this introductory page in August, 2024). A July 19, 2024 article in The Foundation for Defence of Democracies estimates that Russia is dropping about 3500 FAB-3000s per month. Each bomb contains 1400 kilograms of explosives.

What on earth possesses Russia to go to war in this way?

It’s the same question I have in regard to the American bombing of Vietnam, to the German bombing of the Netherlands and England, and to the Japanese bombing of China. I struggle to find an answer to the following question:

How do otherwise civilized people condone sovereignty violations and mass violence in the name of their own values and identity?

Part of the answer to the question may lie in the terms of the question itself. People get convinced that their values and their identities are under existential threat. In response, they adopt a kill-or-be-killed mentality — a nationalistic, Darwinian, military mode of survival. Yet I suspect that another part of the answer lies in cultural pride, and that politicians manipulate this pride to make their populations feel that their identity and their way of life are under threat. They magnify this pride and then contend that their citizens aren't living up to the glorious destiny they have in mind. Often this is because some other nefarious power is keeping them down — the Jews, the Muslims, the communists, NATO, the Ukrainian Nazis, the Americans, etc.

Having marshalled the propaganda and silenced the press, the leaders put themselves in charge of their nation’s glorious destiny (and of the removal of the nefarious power that hinders it) and urge their people to war. This war in turn requires nationalistic pride, a pro-war media, bravery in battle, sacrifice at home, and a support our troops conformity. Declarations of war can also require states of emergency and war measures acts, which strengthen the power of the leaders at the expense of civil rights, elections, fluid free markets, etc.

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Chiaroscuro

This may or may not be a good explanation. Yet perhaps more important is to recognize that there are two fundamental epistemological angles to the Ukraine Crisis: 1) we can advance explanations about what is happening and why (as I attempted to do above), and 2) we can confess that much of the dynamics of power, remain largely hidden from us — especially when it comes to beliefs and motives. However hard we try, the truth remains behind the scenes, behind veils, ciphers, and speculations. On one side we can see with varied light what is more or less chiaro, clear, yet so much of what we need to know is obscure, scuro, in the dark.

On this page I’ll first spell out what I mean by this chiaroscuro situation. I’ll then advance a more detailed geopolitical take on what appears to be happening on the lighted side. On the next page, Fog and Shadow, I’ll explore what remains largely in the dark. Suffice it here to say that even if we could look behind the scenes into Putin’s study and bedroom, and even if we could see into his brain, we’d still need to know what’s going on in the minds of those who sit in the Oval Office and the Pentagon. Are they desperately trying to counter Putin’s moves, or are they two or three moves ahead? Are they deeply disturbed or are they quietly watching how the bombs fall, calculating how their new bombs might penetrate munition depots, pinpointing where the weaknesses are in the Russian supply chains, and strategizing how and where they can further degrade the Russian economy and its connection to the democratic nations of the world?

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Our perspective on the Ukraine Crisis is necessarily a double one, and might be seen in light of the Indonesian shadow-theatre. From the seats in the audience, we see the close-up action on the screen. We see the Leopard tanks blasting T-14s, or vice versa. And we also see the larger scene: a line of tanks on a fatal mission from Belorus to Kiev, an ammunition depot exploded here, an oil refinery demolished there. In this deadly drama, Zelensky plays the role of the Pandava warrior prince Arjuna, forced to fight his erstwhile cousins and uncles. They speak the language he once spoke, back in the day, when he once acted in a TV drama that Russians once watched. On the other side is the enemy, the Kauravas, lead by their prince, Vladimir the Dread. His slippery words and light tone belie the dead silence of his eyes.

We hear the defiant words of Zelensky, and the threats of Putin, but what we can’t hear is the thinking behind these words. We can to some degree make out Zelensky’s intent — since he’s a straight-shooter like Arjuna — yet we can’t see into the mind of Putin whatsoever. All we can do is guess at his bad intentions. So, for the time being, we’ll have to look at the situation as it appears to everyone else in the audience, on the screen in front of our eyes.

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Chiaro

The present crisis largely revolves around the nuclear poles of the U.S., Russia, and China. It’s therefore worth looking at the geopolitics surrounding their national situations more specifically. I’ll start by looking at the similarities and differences between the Vietnam War and the Ukraine War.

It seems clear (to me at least) that neither the US nor Russia was ever threatened by Vietnam or Ukraine: the communist superpowers of Russia and China (in Vietnam) were never a threat to the US, and the liberal capitalist superpowers of the US and Europe (in Ukraine) aren’t now a threat to Russia. Yet both the US and Russia tend to frame global politics in terms of their national security, as if their self-endowed “spheres of influence” were the same as their national borders.

Confusing the two isn’t a mode of thinking that’s shared by many other countries, at least not since the hey-days of Empire. The noticeable exception is China, whose claims to territory (in Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and the South China Sea) are similar to those of Russia in the sense that they increase in magnitude the closer they are to home. Americans don’t claim land in Canada or Mexico, yet they send their military to Guam, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. China and Russia on the other hand are more intent on maintaining direct and complete control inside their countries and along their borders — in Chechnya, Ukraine, Tibet, and Taiwan.

China’s aggressive influence is likely to expand in all directions as it becomes more global, more like Russian and the US, in its reach. The potential for conflict is most obvious in Taiwan and the South China Sea, yet China may some day use force more widely in the areas of its Belt and Road Initiative, and in the various African countries which it’s opened up to the infrastructures of Chinese business.

China and Russia also have a potential close-range conflict in the Amur River area, which was taken by imperial Russia yet is traditionally Chinese and is now being populated by Chinese (largely because of declining birth rates in Russia and because few Russians want to live there). This potential conflict shouldn’t be overlooked, given that both Russia and China tend to react most forcefully when internal or border regions are at stake.

In this large-scale overview I don’t mean to imply that the US and Russia haven’t clashed in faraway places or that they haven’t created devastating proxy wars — as in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, etc. Yet the point I want to make here is that 1) superpowers choose where to exert force and 2) superpowers make their choices based on a complex mix of 🔸 proximity of threat, 🔸spheres of influence, and🔸ideology and other cultural and political beliefs.

For Americans, their use of force has largely been based on their peculiar mix of global capitalism, nationalistic pride, and representational democracy. For Russia and China their use of force used to be based on the economic and political models of communism, yet now it’s based on national interest and pride, combined with a deep antagonism to Western power.

Perhaps the main reason the Ukraine war is so dangerous is that Russia feels Ukraine is not only on its borders, but should be within its borders. Just as the old Cold War only got really dangerous when a more immediate location was involved — Cuba in 1962 — so Ukraine threatens to become really dangerous because 1) Russia believes (mistakenly) that Ukraine belongs in the Russian sphere of influence, 2) Ukraine’s land and culture have been connected and integrated with Russia for centuries, and 3) Russians will go to extreme lengths to make sure Ukraine doesn’t come under the geopolitical and cultural umbrella of the West. Russia once lost its Iron Curtain, hung on hooks from Riga to Sofia; it doesn’t now intend to lose its Inner Curtain, hung on the hooks of Minsk and Kiev.

Clearly, the superpowers choose where to exert control. And clearly these choices change over time and circumstance. The US no longer needs to fight Britain, Mexico and Native tribes to secure control over what they consider their land, whereas Russia and China still feel the need to do this. Perhaps Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine, and Chinese aggression in Taiwan and the Philippines, is simply an extension of their internal insecurity. Although attacking Ukraine is completely unacceptable, it’s more understandable than if the US attacked Canada or Mexico. It’s also of course possible that liberal democracies feel constrained by their own principles not to invade other liberal democracies, yet the US has in the past used this as an excuse to attack left-leaning democratic governments in Latin America (in Chile, Nicaragua, and Guatemala), which partly explains the Latin American resistance to join in the present fight against Russia.

Given that superpowers have the choice of where and when to invade, much of the problem seems to lie in the perception, not in the reality, of the threat that they use as a reason to go to war. The threat is then fostered and directed by their leaders and media, and by their own pride. While in the Soviet Union (and to some degree under Putin), Russia resembled the brutal dictatorship of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the U.S. has always allowed a free press and protests, although the flame of rational democracy dimmed considerably during McCarthyism and the Iraq War, and it dims today with Trump and the MAGA movement. One might be tempted to say that the U.S is in this sense more like the state depicted in Brave New World, where capitalism manipulates citizens through pleasure rather than pain. Yet while the levers of control are very different (Russia remaining far, far more authoritarian), government doctrine succeeds in both countries in turning what others generally see as a different form of government into a dangerous form of national security threat.

Projecting their own values and fears onto faraway countries, and mixing these with an exceptional sense of responsibility and pride, the Americans decided to defend democracy in Vietnam and human rights in Iraq. In advancing their aims, they exaggerated, invented, and lied, as we see in the fatalistic domino theory (as if nations didn’t have wills of their own), the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 (which “gave permission” for the full-scale invasion), the secret bombings of Cambodia in 1969 (which contributed to the rise of the Kmer Rouge), and the elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2003 (which the West is still paying for politically).

For their part, the Russians fear (and are encouraged to fear) for their Russian greatness, that is, for their identity and for their destiny as the overlords of a great historical Empire. So Putin and leaders like Lavrov reimagine for their people a nostalgic version of the old czarist and Soviet empires. This paves the way for them to raze the breakaway Chechen capital Grozny, bite off portions of Stalin’s homeland Georgia (in the regions of Ossetia and Abkhazia), and erase the borders and national identity of Ukraine.

Russians are encouraged to fear for the Russian identity of citizens in Ukraine, and for the very existence of their Little Russia — that is, a Ukraine where Ukrainians concede that they’re in fact Russians. In advancing his aims, Putin exaggerates, invents, and lies: Ukrainians are Russians; Ukraine is infected by Nazis (even its Jewish president); Russia will never attack Ukraine; Russia is standing up for the rest of the world against the West and NATO; the West (and not Russia) is guilty of escalating the conflict; etc.

The U.S. and Russia have their reasons for the violence they use, yet they maintain an exceptionalism in which they give themselves the right to control the fate of other peoples. They have the might to do this, but do they have the right? In a world of might makes right, yes. In a world where sovereignty and the will of peoples are respected, no. Eschewing equality among nations, they claim their exceptional rights, and refuse to submit to international courts, however many Mai Lai and Bucha massacres they commit. Whatever side we take in the Ukraine Crisis — and I clearly take Ukraine’s side — much of the background problem lies in the stirring of an exceptional pride, sometimes in the U.S. and sometimes in Russia. Too often, these two nations are willing to commit extreme violence, napalming a village and bombing a children’s hospital being the common emblems of their atrocity.

The two superpowers don’t however always get what they want. The most obvious case of this was the Soviet and American inability to defeat and control Afghanistan. (One might also note that the mighty British Empire had the same problem in Afghanistan). In Vietnam and Ukraine the superpowers had (and have) the option of using nuclear weapons to force submission, yet this puts them into a bind. If they use nuclear weapons, they’ll suffer international condemnation. If they don’t use nuclear weapons, they’re unlikely to get everything they want on the battlefield.

Here we can see a key difference between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. never threatened to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, whereas Russia continually threatens to do so. In the U.S. there’s a free press, a Congress, and an electorate to which the leaders must eventually respond. For instance, the May Lai massacre didn’t go unpunished internally, although these punishments were lighter than if the war criminals had been tried in an international court. The Kremlin on the other hand controls the media and has clamped down so hard on the press, and on all opposing voices and parties, that they don’t need to worry so much about blowback from their use of extreme violence. Indeed, the media that’s permitted by the Kremlin eggs the violence on, urging the use of nuclear weapons on London and Paris. In such an atmosphere — and again, I’m writing this in August 2024 — we can’t be sure that the Kremlin won’t use tactical nuclear weapons, in yet another escalation that they’ll no doubt blame on NATO and the West. One thing is crystal clear however: the Kremlin has repeatedly committed the unconscionable crime of threatening to use nuclear weapons.

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The Present Score

And yet for all their threats and for all the ground they’ve stolen, the Russians are no where near winning this war. Their aggression has united NATO, armed Ukraine to the teeth, and garnered sanctions and economic hardship. Meanwhile, without firing a single shot, the Pentagon has had two and a half years to analyze every Russian weakness and every possible way to stop or counteract Russian military power. The Pentagon counts each week the number of oil refineries, battleships, tanks, air-defence systems, and arms depots that the Ukrainians destroy. And all of this is not even counting the recent Ukrainian incursion into Kursk, the outcome of which is yet to be seen.

In addition, Russians are no longer welcome in many nations and their culture and good name is being dragged through the mud. While it may be obvious to say this, their closest cousins the Ukrainians will hate them for centuries. Many Ukrainians who were native Russian speakers (like Zelensky) refuse to speak Russian now, and even refuse to read great Russian writers like Dostoevsky. The only friends the Russians have left are in authoritarian states like North Korea and Iran, and these might be called tactical friends rather than true friends (in this regard, China might be called a strategic friend).

Russia isn’t close to any other nation that shares the same ideology, such as we find now between Ukraine and Sweden. And this is largely because the Russians have shown that 1. they’ll use violence against their neighbours, even when they said they wouldn’t, 2. the violence they use will be against human targets and infrastructure (not just against military targets) and will constitute war crimes in numerous ways, and 3. they’ll act in accord with their own self interest, their own notion of Russia’s great expanding role in the world, and not according to the international laws of sovereignty. If a nation becomes friends with Russia, it ought to know that this friendship will be for Russia’s benefit and not for any greater ideal of global peace or cooperation.

Finally, the only prospect the Russians have for victory now entails astronomical casualties. Or, using tactical nuclear weapons. Yet using these weapons won’t help them much either, for it will most likely alienate China and India, and thus leave them almost completely without allies. It will also leave them open to a conventional attack by NATO, one that might push them out of Ukraine for good.

This is a very imperfect and brief summary of the situation; in 🇺🇸 / 🇷🇺 Exceptionalism I go into more detail about why the general parity of American and Russian mass violence doesn’t let Russia off the hook. Even if we admit that the Americans killed about 3,000,000 Vietnamese and that the Russians have killed about 100,000 Ukrainians (a purely hypothetical number), this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do everything we can to stop Russia. We should oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine, just as we should have opposed the bombings in Indo-China, from the French bombings in the early 1950s to the American bombings of the 1960s and 1970s. Just as we should have opposed Russian aggression and invasion in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, in Chechnya in the 1990s, and more recently in Georgia.

The entire world ought to condemn any invasion of any sovereign nation. And it ought to condemn in the strongest possible terms any nation that threatens to open Pandora’s nuclear box.

— August 19, 2024

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