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War propaganda, 'Realists' and neocons, and the denigration of the war sceptics

It's interesting to recall the widespread speculation, in the '90s, about who would be the Russian demagogue. First it was Zhironovsky (probably a tool of Soviet/Russian 'liberals'), and then, more plausibly, Alexander Lebed ('I'll kill 100,000 Russians so that 100 million can live better.')* Lebed, an even more typically Russian character than Putin (or Yeltsin for that matter), was widely touted by western commentators as 'the Russian Pinochet' (some of these commentators clearly had a hard-on), but he didn't appear to have enough backing from the Russian elite, and was, in the end, easily fucked over by Yeltsin, who seemed to have previously looked favourably upon him.

So Putin it was then, although his attitude towards the west was ambiguous in the beginning, and he was looked upon favourably in many quarters in the west for bringing order to the chaos of 'the Wild East', and thus a more favourable environment for business.


*In contrast to Lebed's bravado, Putin has killed nowhere near 100,000 Russians, although it's possible he indirectly will have before the Ukraine misadventure is over.
 
You just know that Lebed would have done all this in so much more style than Putin.

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As I'm not allowed to post in the main thread, I have to address stuff that comes up there in other threads. Such as this, from Kebabking, which I accept might be sincerely meant, but is full of holes.



'Thing is, you actually need to think about what Russia's demands are, and then decide if you can take them seriously, long before you can think about negotiating them.


'look, we need a sphere of influence where things like democracy, rule of law and territorial integrity don't count because otherwise we're not going to be able to maintain our hyper-nationalistic, dictatorial gangster state where we periodically invade our neighbours while poisoning journalists and opposition politicians, and half our population don't have indoor toilets...'.

Full of holes because of statements like this. Not only is this stated by Russia nowhere, but Russia was a gangster state before Putin was ever heard of even in Russia, not least because those who came out on top took advice from western economists, acting with western government approval, to create the conditions where gangsterism would inevitably flourish, and oligarchs be created. The gangster state began when Perestroika broke down, and flourished under Yeltsin. Few in western political and business circles were bothered, and Yeltsin, whose policies pushed it along, was treated almost as a western ally. There was a widespread assumption in western ruling circles, often uttered publicly, that the gangster state was a mere hiccup on the road to Russia becoming another normal democratic state. There was little recognition of the fact that most of the world doesn't fit this version of normaility, which arose out of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative hubris predominant at the time, let alone of the probability that it never will. Contemporary Russia only proving the point.


'Thats what Russia's 'legitimate security concerns' are: they aren't about the security of the Russian people, they're about the security of the Russian gangster power structures. 'Russia the construct' firstly the empire, then the Soviet Union, then the Putin-state, simply cannot survive with wealthy, democratic states on it's doorstep - that's the buffer zone it needs, not a military one.'

Few governments' security concerns have the security of their populations, as opposed to vested interests, at their centre, no matter what the nature of the government. For a start, the ill-advised adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed western populations to the scourge of Islamic extremist terrorism, to mention only one negative outcome of such adventurism. It's rather odd to introduce the vague concept of 'Russia the construct,' and then imply that everything that follows arises as a result of this. You could almost blame the Russians for thinking that such ideas present them as an ongoing problem to be subdued or eliminated from the picture... But it's false. The Tsarist empire went through many incarnations, authoritarian and relatively liberal, the Soviet Union broke completely with it before internal and external conditions saw it re-adopt many of its features, and the 'Putin state' did not follow from the USSR or Tsarist Russia, but came about because the even the oligarchs realised that things couldn't go on as they were. And they were joined by a majority of Russia's long-suffering population, who in several elections widely regarded as open and fair, voted for a perceived security over a freedom that seemed spurious, in a similar way that causes, or so we are told, many of the French working and middle classes turn to the far-right. It is, inevitably under the conditions which gave rise to it, a gangster state, but also a deliberately created hybrid of many elements from Russia's Tsarist and Soviet past, and one which didn't even place nationalism to the fore until it, like the western-friendly Yeltsin regime eventually realised, it seemed destined to be treated always as a potential enemy, with its security concerns always disgregarded. And there is little understanding, or so it seems, in the west, of what the security of a population eternally traumatised by being a killing ground for both invaders and domestic tyrants, let alone of how a population can, in its majority, constantly come out on the side of the domestic tyrant if he represents resistance to the invader or potential invader. When such a trauma is widespread, it matters little what the actual rights and wrongs of such concerns are. Which, of course, brings us back to the concept of Russia, the eternal problem. No matter what the outcome in the current war, Russia will still exist, and so wil the ideas which shape it.
 
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After a series of deranged articles over the course of the Ukraine war, including calling for western 'boots on the ground (why are social democrats and radicals who became neo-cons invariably the worst of the lot?), the Guardian's Simon Tisdall might have have actually come up with something more thoughtful. Albeit the article contains many of the same delusions, as well as glaring contradictions...


www.theguardian.com

Biden’s crusade for global democracy is doomed to fail | Simon Tisdall

The US president won rave reviews in Kyiv and Warsaw. But his old, cold war mindset is out of step with a changing world
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com


'Biden has cast himself as a latter-day Lionheart, leading a global crusade against the bad guys – what he calls “a test for the ages”. He’s on a high. He believes he, and the cause of democracy, are winning hands down. Sadly, he’s wrong.


By “bad guys”, Biden means, principally, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, whose delusional speech in Moscow confirmed him as undisputed heir to Ronald Reagan’s evil empire. But Biden is also rhetorically targeting authoritarians, autocrats and tyrants everywhere – anyone who challenges the western democratic model. This includes governments ruling at least half of humanity, such as China and India and many African states.'


'Biden’s division of the world into “for us or against us” camps carries uncomfortable echoes of George W Bush, circa 2001, and of Putin himself. That it is America’s manifest destiny (updated version) to defend and promote freedom and democracy everywhere is a message that normally plays well with US voters.

At least, it did once, during the cold war with the Soviet Union, when Biden’s worldview was formed. No more. Despite Putin’s aggressive imperial irredentism, that era has passed. Today’s fractured, fragmented world is multipolar and geopolitically complex.'
'This is also the complicated reality of a world split many ways, between not always united democracies, Russia and China (separately or in combination), and the rising 21st-century powers of the global south that do not adhere to 18th-century Euro-Atlantic values, Chinese-style collectivism or old-school Soviet totalitarianism.

The whole idea of the west successfully waging a universal, modern-day democracy crusade – or second cold war – is deaf to history, blind to change, surreptitiously neo-imperialist. More to the point, it’s a losing proposition.' '
 
RD2003 said:
After a series of deranged articles over the course of the Ukraine war, including calling for western 'boots on the ground (why are social democrats and radicals who became neo-cons invariably the worst of the lot?), the Guardian's Simon Tisdall might have have actually come up with something more thoughtful. Albeit the article contains many of the same delusions, as well as glaring contradictions...


www.theguardian.com

Biden’s crusade for global democracy is doomed to fail | Simon Tisdall

The US president won rave reviews in Kyiv and Warsaw. But his old, cold war mindset is out of step with a changing world
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com


'Biden has cast himself as a latter-day Lionheart, leading a global crusade against the bad guys – what he calls “a test for the ages”. He’s on a high. He believes he, and the cause of democracy, are winning hands down. Sadly, he’s wrong.


By “bad guys”, Biden means, principally, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, whose delusional speech in Moscow confirmed him as undisputed heir to Ronald Reagan’s evil empire. But Biden is also rhetorically targeting authoritarians, autocrats and tyrants everywhere – anyone who challenges the western democratic model. This includes governments ruling at least half of humanity, such as China and India and many African states.'


'Biden’s division of the world into “for us or against us” camps carries uncomfortable echoes of George W Bush, circa 2001, and of Putin himself. That it is America’s manifest destiny (updated version) to defend and promote freedom and democracy everywhere is a message that normally plays well with US voters.

At least, it did once, during the cold war with the Soviet Union, when Biden’s worldview was formed. No more. Despite Putin’s aggressive imperial irredentism, that era has passed. Today’s fractured, fragmented world is multipolar and geopolitically complex.'
'This is also the complicated reality of a world split many ways, between not always united democracies, Russia and China (separately or in combination), and the rising 21st-century powers of the global south that do not adhere to 18th-century Euro-Atlantic values, Chinese-style collectivism or old-school Soviet totalitarianism.

The whole idea of the west successfully waging a universal, modern-day democracy crusade – or second cold war – is deaf to history, blind to change, surreptitiously neo-imperialist. More to the point, it’s a losing proposition.' '
Click to expand...

Tisdall is such a hypocritical bellend - he has spent at least the past twelve months repeatedly making the same argument (as he accuses Biden of in this latest piece) himself (including this month and last month and this one and that one a few months before those).
 
Once again, Gray gets it right.

www.newstatesman.com

In its pursuit of Russian regime change, the West is doomed to repeat the errors of the Iraq War

A new generation of liberal hawks views Ukraine as the pivotal battlefield in a global struggle for democracy.
www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com


'The invasion of Iraq resonates so strongly, 20 years later, because its lessons have not been learnt. Many of its critics have seen it as an oil grab, or a dark conspiracy of some sort. In fact it was mainly driven by ideology. The message of the Iraq War is that, except as a limited measure intended to stem worsening violence, liberal intervention is a self-defeating project.'
Yet the fantasy of regime change did not dissipate in the turbulent years after Iraq was occupied in 2003. It was re-enacted with the overthrow of the Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and infused two decades of vain American-led state-building in Afghanistan. Eighteen months after the humiliating withdrawal of US and allied forces, an even more grandiose fantasy possesses the West. From being designed to assist Ukraine in defending itself against Vladimir Putin’s barbaric “special military operation”, the goal of Western policy has become regime change in Russia.'

'But for many, 21st-century America looks like a failed experiment. Few countries would wish to import the American mix of racial tension, culture wars, urban lawlessness and risk of civil war (if the results of the next presidential election are not accepted by the losing side). The model that neoconservatives aimed to export was always idealised. Today it no longer exists.'


'The course of events in the coming months is deeply uncertain, but in the enveloping darkness some things are clear. We are witnessing the definitive end of the post-Cold War global order, and the beginning of the end was the invasion of Iraq.'
 
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RD2003 said:
Once again, Gray gets it right.

www.newstatesman.com

In its pursuit of Russian regime change, the West is doomed to repeat the errors of the Iraq War

A new generation of liberal hawks views Ukraine as the pivotal battlefield in a global struggle for democracy.
www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com


'The invasion of Iraq resonates so strongly, 20 years later, because its lessons have not been learnt. Many of its critics have seen it as an oil grab, or a dark conspiracy of some sort. In fact it was mainly driven by ideology. The message of the Iraq War is that, except as a limited measure intended to stem worsening violence, liberal intervention is a self-defeating project.'
Yet the fantasy of regime change did not dissipate in the turbulent years after Iraq was occupied in 2003. It was re-enacted with the overthrow of the Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and infused two decades of vain American-led state-building in Afghanistan. Eighteen months after the humiliating withdrawal of US and allied forces, an even more grandiose fantasy possesses the West. From being designed to assist Ukraine in defending itself against Vladimir Putin’s barbaric “special military operation”, the goal of Western policy has become regime change in Russia.'

'But for many, 21st-century America looks like a failed experiment. Few countries would wish to import the American mix of racial tension, culture wars, urban lawlessness and risk of civil war (if the results of the next presidential election are not accepted by the losing side). The model that neoconservatives aimed to export was always idealised. Today it no longer exists.'


'The course of events in the coming months is deeply uncertain, but in the enveloping darkness some things are clear. We are witnessing the definitive end of the post-Cold War global order, and the beginning of the end was the invasion of Iraq.'
Click to expand...

Which is the link to "the goal of Western policy has become regime change in Russia.'"? Only comes up as a general New Statesman link for me.
 
Also interesting from John Gray (and it says a lot about our times that maverick right-wingers have more to say about our reality than most writers from the left.)

www.newstatesman.com

The triumph of corporate newspeak

An unreal consensus grips our politics – and Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak offer only technocratic fixes for a Britain that no longer exists.
www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com


The postwar social democratic model was a mix of state welfare provision, anti-monopoly regulation and Keynesian full-employment policies. The model began to break down in Britain in the mid-Seventies, but was discarded only in the wake of the Cold War. The so-called liberal order was an interregnum, not the shape of things to come. If the Soviet collapse and globalisation finished off social democracy, Chinese state capitalism and deglobalisation are killing off market liberalism. War in Europe is the coup de grâce. Deindustrialised free market economies cannot fight a long war of attrition of the kind that has emerged in Ukraine. Either they mobilise what remains of their industrial base for the duration, or the war will slip out of their control.
 
RD2003 said:
Also interesting from John Gray (and it says a lot about our times that maverick right-wingers have more to say about our reality than most writers from the left.)
Click to expand...
Isn't it funny how, as you get older, you remain exactly where you always were on the political spectrum, but find that a lot of the people you agree with happen to be on the right.
 
Raheem said:
Isn't it funny how, as you get older, you remain exactly where you always were on the political spectrum, but find that a lot of the people you agree with happen to be on the right.
Click to expand...
Yes. Some of the sensible right-wing mavericks are more interesting, if only for reminding the left of what it once stood for.
 
Kaka Tim said:
I thought anti-imperialism and anti-fascism were very much things the left supported.
Click to expand...
So did I, but I don't remember a time so many lefties so enthusiastically threw themselves behind their own ruling class. Many of today's lot might as well go in for a bit of forelock tucking.
 
RD2003 said:
So did I, but I don't remember a time so many lefties so enthusiastically threw themselves behind their own ruling class. Many of today's lot might as well go in for a bit of forelock tucking.
Click to expand...

Well world war 2 comes to mind.
 
Kaka Tim said:
I thought anti-imperialism and anti-fascism were very much things the left supported.
Click to expand...

The term anti-fascist turned out to be a lot broader and more parochial than I expected.

People who might have punched a BNP member during a demonstration in London 30 or 40 years ago clearly consider themselves anti-fascists and, to give them their due, they could probably be relied upon to oppose local fascists in their own neighbourhoods today.

But when a regime that is very clearly fascist by pretty much every agreed upon definition of the term launched an unprovoked war of conquest against one of its neighbours and committed an unequivocally huge number of war crimes against that country's civilian populations, too many of those same "anti-fascists" seemed to try very hard to downplay it and focus on the flaws of the invaded country instead of the fascist invaders.
 
Kaka Tim said:
Well world war 2 comes to mind.
Click to expand...
Apart from all those class struggles that were red hot during the war - differences (sometimes violent) between communist and liberal resistance groups, the class conflict of strikers facing off against Bevin, the relative success of the Commenwealth party, the publication of The Guilty Men.

There was plenty of socialist criticism, even opposition, to governments while still recognising that there was an advantage in allying with liberal forces to fight fascism. Whatever one thinks of the popular (or united) front the idea was not that socialists simply throw all their politics out the window.

EDIT: And of course at the start of the war you had Communist Party's in outright opposition to governments
 
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