The Putin regime in Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine last week, following on from the annexation of the Crimea region of the country in 2014. Attempts to understand, explain and predict the outcome of the current invasion falter ignominiously. Negotiations are underway as bombs fall, missiles destroy buildings, paratroopers land at airfields, tanks roar down country roads and across farmland, while local people die, flee or cower in whatever shelter is to hand.
There are a number of recent precedents for this process. The infernal exit of US and allied forces from Afghanistan has barely cooled on international media platforms. Assaults on Iraq, continuing attacks on Yemen and interventions in Syria and Libya asserted the same rationale: the need to defend people from the power of a desperate leader in an unwanted government or to re-integrate territories and ethnic groups in terms of a disputed historical argument.
The tone and content of reporting by Western European state-sponsored and independent media of the atrocities in Ukraine differs from the tone and content of those other interventions.
The change of tone and address occurs because Ukraine is not Ukrainistan.
The civilians, armed forces and militias who fight back against the invaders are not termed terrorists. They are termed heroes, using weaponry sold to them by arms manufacturers, largely state-supported, including a shoulder-held bazooka made in Belfast. A Unionist political leader asserted that people in Northern Ireland should be proud of this. He is preparing for election to the government Assembly. He intends to be a power-broker in the final shake-down. Will he support sales of bazookas to olive farmers under attack by Israeli-state supported settlers in Palestine? Will he advocate putting them in the hands of civilians in Afghanistan or Yemen?
War is good for business, depending on who is dealing. Selling fighter jets to the Saudi regime is good. Selling bazookas to Houthi militias is bad. Unless it takes place secretly. Who’s to know then? It’s just business after all, as dramatist George Bernard Shaw had arms manufacturer Undershaft, in his 1905 play Major Barbara, say
Think of my business! think of the widows and orphans! the men and lads torn to pieces with shrapnel and poisoned with lyddite, the oceans of blood, not one drop of which is shed in a really just cause! the ravaged crops! the peaceful peasants forced, women and men, to till their fields under the fire of opposing armies on pain of starvation! the bad blood of the fierce little cowards at home who egg on others to fight for the gratification of their national vanity! All this makes money for me: I am never richer, never busier than when the papers are full of it.
The nexus of international finance, fossil-fuel and armaments economies that underpins the current world order drives land-grabbing, resource-hogging and human slaughtering by poverty and war. It is run by the power blocs: US/NATO/EU/RUSSIA/CHINA, and their satellite proxies, bashing up against each other like rowdy drunks jostling to get to the bar, as if they were thoughtless, inanimate and abstract tectonic plates.
But they are neither thoughtless, inanimate nor abstract. They are real, driven by the worst of human traits: hypocrisy, greed, sectarianism and racism.
Reports are emerging of African and South-Asian workers and students being stopped at the Polish border, after being separated from Ukrainian fellows, who move onto sanctuary in an EU-country. The Africans and South-Asians are pushed back into the war zone. For them, it is Ukrainistan. The global economy doesn’t favour all equally.
As well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the current Russian invasion follows the brutal war between Russia and Chechnya from 1994 to 2017. There will be more. And the stock markets will continue to rise. The Undershafts of the world will continue to make money. Until people in Russia refuse to join the invading army. Until EU/NATO/EU/US/CHINESE citizens say ‘not in our name’ and refuse to work for the arms manufacturers and the war mongers.
Writing in 2016, in a prescient supplement in the New York literary journal n+1, Russian-American novelist Keith Gessen described a grim Pentagon press conference, following Russian interventions in Syria.
“Some people at home,” one of the journalists posited, “would say that the Russians are giving the middle finger to the United States. How do you respond?” It was, on the one hand, a fair question; it was, on the other hand, an American journalist urging the Pentagon — the Pentagon! — to adopt a more warlike stance. Which is interesting and indicative. We do still live in a democracy, after all. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but these journalists will eventually get their war.”
Not in our name!
Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw, stage-play, Court Theatre, London, 1905
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-24/ukraine-supplement/western-journalists-in-ukraine/
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