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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/ukraine-a-conflict-soaked-in-contradictions/">asiatimes.com</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Ukraine: A conflict soaked in contradictions</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">Vijay Prashad - March 3, 3022<br></div>
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<p>Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military
intervention in Ukraine. That’s likely because although the
intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also
marked a break with the past in a number of ways. </p>
<p>The world has become used to military interventions by the United
States. This is, however, not a US intervention. That in itself is a
surprise – one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike.</p>
<p>Even as we deplore the violence and the loss of life in Ukraine
resulting from the Russian intervention – and the neofascist violence in
the Donbas – it is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of
the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West’s
ethnocentric interest in an attack whose participants and victims they
believe they share aspects of identity with – whether related to
culture, religion or skin color.</p>
<h4>White wars</h4>
<p>War in Ukraine joins a sequence of wars that have opened sores on a
very fragile planet. Wars in Africa and Asia seem endless, and some of
them are rarely commented upon with any feeling in media outlets across
the world or in the cascade of posts found on social media platforms. </p>
<p>For example, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which <a href="https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/monuc/background.shtml">started</a> in
1996 and which has resulted in millions of casualties, has not elicited
the kind of sympathy from the world now seen during the reporting on
Ukraine. </p>
<p>In contrast, the startlingly frank comments from political leaders
and journalists during the conflict in Ukraine have revealed the grip of
racism on the imaginations of these shapers of public opinion.</p>
<p>It was impossible recently to get major global media outlets interested in <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/09/09/rwandas-military-is-the-french-proxy-on-african-soil/">the conflict in Cabo Delgado</a>,
which grew out of the capture of the bounty of natural gas by
TotalEnergies SE (France) and ExxonMobil (US) and led to the deployment
of the French-backed Rwandan military in Mozambique. </p>
<p>At COP26, I told a group of oil-company executives about this intervention, which I had covered for <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/09/09/rwandas-military-is-the-french-proxy-on-african-soil/">Globetrotter</a>, and one of them responded with precise accuracy: “You’re right about what you say, but no one cares.”</p>
<p>No one, which is to say the political forces in the North Atlantic
states, cares about the suffering of children in Africa and Asia. </p>
<p>They are, however, gripped by the war in Ukraine, which should grip
them, which distresses all of us, but which should not be allowed to be
seen as worse than other conflicts taking place across the globe that
are much more brutal and are likely to slip out of everyone’s memory
because of the lack of interest and attention given by world leaders and
media outlets to them.</p>
<p>Charlie D’Agata of CBS News <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3eDZean39s">said</a> Kiev
“isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that
has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized,
relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too –
city, where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that … [a conflict] is
going to happen.” </p>
<p>Clearly, these are the things one expects to see in Kabul
(Afghanistan) or Baghdad (Iraq) or Goma (the Democratic Republic of
Congo), but not in a “relatively civilized, relatively European” city in
Ukraine. If these are things that one expects in the former cities
respectively, then there is very little need to be particularly outraged
by the violence that is witnessed in these cities.</p>
<p>You would not expect such violence in Ukraine, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFQ392yepF0">said</a> the
country’s deputy chief prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, to the British
Broadcasting Corporation, because of the kind of people who were caught
in the crossfire: “European people with blue eyes and blond hair being
killed every day.” </p>
<p>Sakvarelidze considers the Ukrainians to be Europeans, although
D’Agata calls them “relatively European.” But they are certainly not
African or Asian, people whom – if you think carefully about what is
being said here – certain world leaders and international media outlets
expect to be killed by the violence unleashed against them by the global
great powers and by the weapons sold to the local thugs in these
regions by these great powers.</p>
<h4>Worst war?</h4>
<p>On February 23, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in
a heartfelt statement about the Russian military intervention in
Ukraine, <a href="https://www.un.org/sg/en/node/262049">said</a>: “In the name of humanity do not allow to start in Europe what could be the worst war since the beginning of the century.” </p>
<p>The next day, on February 24, with Russia <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-orders-military-operations-ukraine-demands-kyiv-forces-surrender-2022-02-24/">launching</a> “the biggest attack on a European state since World War II,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen <a href="https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1496810890250928132">condemned</a> this “barbaric attack” and said “it is President Putin who is bringing war back to Europe.” </p>
<p>“Bringing war back to Europe”: this is instructive language from Von der Leyen. It reminded me of Aimé Césaire’s <em>Discourse on Colonialism</em>
(1950), where the great poet and communist bemoaned Europe’s ability to
forget the terrible fascistic treatment of the peoples of Africa and
Asia by the colonial powers when they spoke of fascism. </p>
<p>Fascism, Césaire wrote, is the colonial experiment brought back to Europe.</p>
<p>When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, neither the United
Nations secretary-general nor the president of the European Commission
came forward to make any immediate condemnation of that war. Both
international institutions went along with the war, allowing the
destruction of Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-deaths-survey/iraq-conflict-has-killed-a-million-iraqis-survey-idUSL3048857920080130">more than</a> one million people. </p>
<p>In 2004, a year into the US war on Iraq, after reports of grave
violations of human rights (including by Amnesty International
on torture in the prison of Abu Ghraib) came to light, the UN
secretary-general, at the time, Kofi Annan, <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2004/09/115352-lessons-iraq-war-underscore-importance-un-charter-annan">called</a> the war “illegal.” </p>
<p>In 2006, three years after the war had started, then Italian Prime
Minister Romano Prodi, who had been the president of the European
Commission in 2003, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/world/europe/19italy.html">called</a> the war a “grave error.”</p>
<p>In the case of the Russian intervention, these institutions rushed to
condemn the war, which is all very well; but does this mean they will
be just as quick to condemn the United States when it starts its next
bombing campaign?</p>
<h4>War stenography</h4>
<p>People often ask me what is the most reliable news outlet. This is a
hard question to answer these days, as Western news outlets are
increasingly becoming stenographers of their governments – with the
racist attitudes of the reporters on full display more and more often,
making the apologies that come later hardly comforting. </p>
<p>State-sponsored outlets in Russia and China now increasingly find
themselves banned on social media sites. Anyone who counters
Washington’s narrative is dismissed as irrelevant, and these fringe
voices find it hard to develop an audience.</p>
<p>So-called cancel culture demonstrates its limits. D’Agata has <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/cbs-journalist-apologizes-saying-ukraine-024714455.html">apologized</a> for
his comment about Ukraine being “relatively civilized, relatively
European” compared with Iraq and Afghanistan and has already been
rehabilitated because he is on the “right side” of the conflict in
Ukraine. </p>
<p>Cancel culture has moved from the chatter of social media to the <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-just-72-hours-europe-overhauled-its-entire-post-cold-war-relationship-with-russia/ar-AAUrkjS">battlefields</a> of geopolitics and diplomacy as far as the Russian-Ukraine conflict is concerned. </p>
<p>Switzerland has decided to end a century of formal neutrality to <a href="https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/schweiz-ueberzieht-russland-mit-sanktionen-a-e7c77d69-6e01-4f2a-8f6d-aa0a3e3ddf00">cancel</a> Russia
by enforcing European sanctions against it – remember that Switzerland
remained “neutral” as the Nazis tore through Europe during World War II,
and operated as the <a href="https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/zwei-revisionen_rueckblick-auf-die-kontroverse-um-die-holocaust-gelder/36759886">Nazis’ bankers</a> even after the war. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, press freedom has been set aside during the current conflict in Eastern Europe, with <a href="https://www.rt.com/russia/550700-australia-suspends-rt-broadcast/">Australia</a> and <a href="https://www.rt.com/russia/550725-russia-react-council-europe-suspension/">Europe</a> suspending the broadcast of RT, which is a Russian state-controlled international media network.</p>
<p>D’Agata’s reliability as a reporter will remain unquestioned. He “misspoke,” they might say, but this is a Freudian slip.</p>
<h4>Calculations of war</h4>
<p>Wars are ugly, especially wars of aggression. The role of the
reporter is to explain why a country goes to war, particularly an
unprovoked war. </p>
<p>If this were 1941, I might try to explain the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor during World War II or the Japanese assumption that the
Nazis would soon defeat the Soviets and then take the war across the
Atlantic Ocean. But the Soviets held out, saving the world from fascism.
</p>
<p>In the same way, the Russian attack on Ukraine requires explanation:
The roots of it go deep to various political and foreign policy
developments, such as the post-Soviet emergence of ethnic nationalism
along the spine of Eastern Europe, the eastward advance of US power –
through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – toward the Russian
border, and the turbulent relationship between the major European states
and their eastern neighbors, including Russia. </p>
<p>To explain this conflict is not to justify it, for there is little to justify in the bombing of a sovereign people.</p>
<p>Sane voices exist on all sides of ugly conflicts. In Russia, State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveev of the Communist Party <a href="https://holod.media/2022/02/27/matveev/">said</a>
soon after the Russian entry into Ukraine that he voted for the
recognition of the breakaway provinces of Ukraine, he “voted for peace,
not for war,” and he voted “for Russia to become a shield, so that
Donbas is not bombed, and not for Kiev being bombed.”</p>
<p>Matveev’s voice confounds the current narrative: It brings into motion the plight of the Donbas since the US-driven <a href="https://mronline.org/2022/02/24/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/">coup</a> in Ukraine in 2014, and it sounds the alarm against the full scale of the Russian intervention.</p>
<p>Is there room in our imagination to try to understand what Matveev is saying?</p>
<p> <em>This article was produced by</em> <a href="https://globetrotter.media/">Globetrotter</a>, <em>which provided it to Asia Times. </em></p>
<p><em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He
is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the
chief editor of</em> <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/">LeftWord Books</a> <em>and the director of</em> <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. <em>He is a senior non-resident fellow at</em> <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y2hdjcpo">Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies</a>, <em>Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including</em> <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Darker Nations</a> <em>and</em> <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Poorer Nations</a>. <em>His latest book is</em> <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/catalog/product/view/id/21820">Washington Bullets</a>, <em>with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.</em></p>
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