Crisis 22

Exceptional Violence

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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.

C. Russia & the U.S.

Since the present crisis largely revolves around the nuclear poles of the U.S. and Russia, it’s worth looking at the two national situations more specifically. It seems clear (to me at least) that neither America nor Russia were ever threatened by Vietnam or Ukraine. The problem seems to lie in the perception, not in the reality, of the threat, as well as in the way this perception is fostered and directed by leaders, the media, and pride.

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, the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the secret bombings of Cambodia in 1969, and the elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2003.

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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