Rohini Hensman: The Historical Background to Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine / Chris Hedges: The Greatest Evil Is War
NB: An excellent and well-researched essay. The clinically neutral experts on mass media and academia might do themselves a favour by reading it. Beneath this essay is a comment I wrote yesterday to an article in Scheerpost by Michael Brenner, an American professor of international relations. Here is a far more humane essay on the crisis, by Chris Hedges. And here are some more comments on the Indian position on Ukraine. DS
Rohini Hensman: The Historical Background to Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine
It is impossible to understand what is happening in Ukraine today without some knowledge of its past, and to fill in some essential features of that past.
The Ukrainian nation: While human habitation in Ukraine dates back tens of thousands of years, the first stable state was Kievan Rus, established by the Scandinavian Varangians who settled in Kiev in the late ninth century AD. The height of its prosperity occurred under Volodymyr the Great (980–1015 AD), who converted to Byzantine Christianity, and his son Iaroslav the Wise; but Kievan Rus was destroyed by the invasion of Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes in the thirteenth century, and was subsequently fought over, divided and dominated by Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and Russia, until most of it was colonized by Russia (then called Muscovy) in 1654. Nonetheless there was a revival of Ukrainian culture in the nineteenth century, in the latter part of which both nationalist and socialist parties grew as Ukraine was integrated more closely into the Tsarist empire as a provider of wheat and raw materials such as coal and iron, and as a market for Russian manufactured goods.
This was a typical colonial relationship; as Lenin observed in 1914 at a talk in Zurich: What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return. Thus the interests of the world proletariat in general and the Russian proletariat in particular require that the Ukraine regains its state independence, since only this will permit the development of the cultural level that the proletariat needs.
Crimean Tatars were
the most numerous indigenous ethnic group in Crimea when it was annexed by the
Russian empire in 1783 during the reign of Catherine the Great, who proceeded
to settle it with Russian colonizers and, according to Raphael Lemkin, who
coined the term “genocide,” to drown 10,000 Crimean Tatars.
Thus, Ukraine’s
origins as a state predate the founding of the Grand Principality of Moscow
(predecessor of the Tsarist Empire) in 1263. It is therefore entirely
understandable that it would have a national liberation movement, which
succeeded briefly in establishing Ukraine as an independent Soviet Socialist
republic from 1920 to 1922. The Crimean Tatars were also granted special status
under Lenin.
All that changed when Ukraine was recolonized by Stalin in a process described as “the classic example of Soviet genocide” by Lemkin, who outlined the process in chilling detail. First the intelligentsia was destroyed by deporting, jailing or killing teachers, writers, artists, thinkers and political leaders; at the same time, the Ukrainian churches were destroyed with hundreds of priests and lay-people killed and thousands sent off to forced labor camps, deliberately separating families and sending children to Russian homes to be “educated.” Finally, in 1932–1933, as Stalin escalated his repression in Russia itself, around 5,000,000 Ukrainian peasants – men, women and children – were starved to death.
Lemkin shows that this was not the result of forced
collectivization, which had left ample crops to feed the people and livestock,
but the outcome of a deliberate policy to engineer a famine. The dead and
deported Ukrainians were replaced by non-Ukrainians, altering the ethnic
composition of the country and comprising the fourth step in the systematic
destruction of the Ukrainian nation. In 1944 the Crimean Tatars, who were also
described by Lemkin as being subjected to genocide, were deported en masse by
Stalin, a crime against humanity in which almost half of the population
perished. (Lemkin 1953; see also Coates 2014)….
https://newpol.org/the-historical-background-to-putins-invasion-of-ukraine/
Stalinism:
A Study of Internal Colonialism (1977) by Alvin Gouldner
Chris Hedges: The Greatest Evil Is War
Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression. I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno.
I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from in the hopes you can avoid being hit. I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.
I have heard the wails
of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family,
including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language.
Spanish. Arabic. Hebrew. Dinka. Serbo-Croatian. Albanian. Ukrainian. Russian.
Death cuts through the linguistic barriers....
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/
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My comment on Michael Brenner's On Humiliation and the Ukraine War
(My comment is yet to appear, it was sent yesterday. Brenner's concern is with the humiliation of Putin, not the ordinary people of Ukraine and Russia. Its a very instructive essay on the ethical vacuity of some international relations experts)
The UN says there are a million Ukrainian
refugees already. God knows how many civilians have been killed, but they
include children. Civilian areas are
being bombed, the Kharkiv university
building has been blown up. An Indian
medical student was killed the other day, standing in line to buy groceries.
There's trauma and suffering on a mass scale. Between 1994 and 2000, Russian
conducted two brutal campaigns against Chechnya, the capital Grozny was
obliterated, and there were thousands of civilian casualties.
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian journalist and human rights activist was put on trial twice for fighting for human rights for Chechnyans; then murdered in 2006. There has been continuous Russian aggressive action in Georgia. 58 journalists killed in Russia between 1992 and 2022, according to the International Committee of journalists. Dissident politicians and businessmen have been murdered at long distance in other countries.
People researching the disappearances of the Stalin era (viz the group Memorial ) have been punished and its historian Yuri Dmitriyev was recently sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony. The state prosecution accused Memorial of 'creating a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state and making us repent for the Soviet past'. So now it is a crime to investigate and write about Stalinism.
If any of the above matters had gained even a passing mention by Professor Brenner, I could have credited his argument as written in good faith. As someone who was politicised by America's war crimes in Vietnam, which cost three million lives. I recall the CIA-sponsored coup in Chile in 1973, and the thousands murdered by the military, with President Allende killed in his palace. Even Bangladesh President Mujibur Rahman's assassination was reported to have had CIA's involvement.
The American establishment can't protect its own democracy, let alone the freedom of other peoples. A vast section of it is busy trying to deprive African Americans of their voting rights. But there's no mention of Vietnam or Chile or Palestine or the 1953 Iranian coup in this piece. All we get is one-sided rhetoric and a denunciation of ''anti-Russian elements' in the periphery of the defunct USSR. Where I live too, critics of the current government are called 'anti-national elements.'
I have no axe to grind with criticisms of the militarism, imperialism and sheer hypocrisy of the Western powers. But Professor Brenner's entire essay is a justification of this ex-KGB dictator's brutal tyranny. It shows contempt for Russian like Anna Politkovskaya and Yuri Dmitriyev, for what reason? That their plight disturbs your polemic? Why do atrocities by one side justify atrocities by the other? Have we lost every shred of compassion in our eagerness to score polemical points?
The Russian revolution which began on March 8 (February 23), 1917 was a manifestation of war weariness. It was confiscated by the Bolsheviks. After a long and tortuous history, it was undoubtedly the Red Army that played the major role in defeating Hitler. The USSR suffered over 20 million dead. But forty-five years after the end of WW2, it imploded due to its own inability to legitimise itself. The KGB (Putins nursery) and the CPSU have themselves to blame to the collapse.
Why should Ukrainian civilians and kids pay the price for Western hypocrisy and NATO's triumphalism? Can experts and academicians keep in mind that human suffering and pain on this massive a scale deserves more than this kind of point-scoring argumentation? Lets stop the sophistry and have an honest conversation.
Dilip Simeon
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Nesrine Malik: Let the horror in Ukraine
open our eyes to the suffering of war around the world
10 Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats
(1977)
Ukraine:
India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion
