Reflections On The War

Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and watched his comrades die. She nervously hoped he wouldn’t die too, which is to say that she hoped her government wouldn’t kill her prospective husband.

I have taught Chinese and Taiwanese girls who sat and worked together happily in my class, building a nice friendship before my eyes — while the Chinese girls’ tyrannical overlords were and are daily developing plans to forcibly absorb Taiwan, which will cause the deaths and imprisonments of who knows how many people, possibly including family members and friends of those very girls who smiled together in my class as they shared fashion advice and chatted about weekend activities.

Tyrants engender evil, and public figures outside of the tyrants’ domains, and therefore beyond reach of their oppressive curtailment of human life, who blissfully or self-promotingly rationalize or obfuscate on behalf of those tyrants, assist in this propagation of evil, although obviously from a more snivelling and worm-like perspective. That is, lacking even the amoral chutzpah to be overtly tyrannical themselves, these pretenders and small-time muckrakers for gain for profit, whether in politics, production, popular media, or pop intellectualism, willingly reduce themselves to being the shoeshine boys and manicure girls for the masters whose crumbs they crave. Meanwhile, twenty-one-year-old girls who are not so cozily detached hope their lovers survive a megalomaniac’s missile attacks, or try to ignore the daily news and propaganda cycle promising to convert new friends into deadly enemies in the near future, which destructive ambitions are grounded in nothing but personal vanity and a hypocritical apery of nationalism.

Nationalism and Responsibility.— Apropos of the first sentence of the preceding reflection, I observe that Garry Kasparov is now firmly insisting that critics of the invasion of Ukraine stop referring to it as “Putin’s war,” demanding instead that everyone firmly understand that this unjust war of destruction and conquest cannot be laid at the feet of the current Russian dictator alone, but must rather be understood as a continuation of the imperialist form of nationalism that has been endemic to his homeland’s psyche for many generations. Kasparov even notes the great men of nineteenth century Russian romanticism, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as artists who helped to foster and reinforce the “mysticism of the Russian soul” as something essentially distinct from, and therefore somewhat hostile towards, Western ideas, and especially the spirit of cosmopolitanism which moderates the rationalizations of nationalist tribalism.

I see Kasparov’s point: The Russian people, from the intellectual class to the “proletariat,” have a long history of viewing their fatherland as fundamentally separate and spiritually unique in the universe, and therefore of being resentful and disdainful of any “foreign influence” from geographical neighbors. In other words, as he explains in the interview linked above, people both within and beyond Russia must divest themselves of the illusion that the communist era was a stand-alone event or abberation in Russian history, and realize that it was just one more manifestation of an authoritarian and imperialistic mentality that runs deep in his country. His conclusion is that nothing will change this aspect of the Russian character until the country is defeated, soundly defeated, in a way that provides the “visual shock” that might shake the psychological foundations and force the Russian people to wake up to a truer picture of their place in the cosmos, one which would lead to a basic rejection of the old romanticism of “the spirit of Russia.” 

The special concern that seems to have pushed Kasparov to this position is his frustration, well-explained, that the current Russian opposition to Putin’s rule is disappointingly silent on the need for Ukraine to win the war, which is to say the opposition’s refusal to reject the very core of Putin’s claims to Ukrainian territory on principle, but rather only to criticize the economic impact of the war within Russia. It is, he suggests, as though Putin’s Russian opponents were reducing the question of whether the annihilation of Ukrainian independence and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children is justifiable to a mere matter of domestic politics and national wellbeing from a Russian point of view. 

I appreciate his concern, as well as his obvious desperation in the face of such narrow-mindedness and nationalistic weakness from the most vocal of his fellow Putin critics, as the Ukrainian people suffer unto decimation at the hands of the Russian government, the Russian military (Kasparov laments the relative rarity of desertions among the soldiers sent into Ukraine), and, indirectly, the Russian people’s relative passivity under the control of a tyrannical imperialist leader, so sadly reminiscent of their generations of passivity under the rule of the communist party. However, I think one must be careful not to conflate the general sentiments or sentimentality of a population at large with the maniacal aggressions of their leader(s), nor to confuse faulty post-Rousseauean philosophies of cultural uniqueness with the militaristic machinations of practical despots. As for the military’s refusal to rebel, name the established tyrant in history who did not have at least a decently strong grip on the majority of his armed forces. After all, military men, for all our romanticism about them throughout history, are, for the most part, not men known for great acts of non-compliant intellect or independence of character. In fact, such traits would not serve well in most military roles, where unquestioning obedience to commands and loyalty to one’s comrades in arms are the primary and most indispensable virtues inculcated. Are most of the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers immoral men driven by an evil desire for death and destruction? Presumably not, or at least not much more so than their counterparts in any other large country’s military. They are men whose patriotism — a nearly universal human emotion — has been woven into their job training and whipped into a sense of life-or-death responsibility for their fellow soldiers and their fellow citizens. They are the noble dogs Socrates and Glaucon discuss in The Republic, men of a spirited nature and therefore in need of rational leadership. Where such proper leadership is not provided, the irrational intellects who have usurped the proper rule of right reason will hold sway over the hearts, or at least the actions, of those noble dogs. Such has long been the case in Russia, just as in China, in North Korea, and for that matter almost everywhere else on Earth for the entire history of nation states.

Likewise, populations in all times and places have had their irrational biases and national prejudices. Such has been the human condition since we broke free of the nasty and brutish life of primitive nature and formed communities in the name of mutual benefit and collective defense. But neither excessive sentimentality about one’s country and its “national spirit,” nor the resulting presumption in favor of one’s country’s cause in any situation, can be equated with actual decisions and orders instigating wars of aggression or mandating inhumane treatment of civilians during those wars. The aftermath of most wars, especially when an unjust aggressor has been defeated, involves difficult questions about the extent to which the offending footsoldiers may be held personally accountable for the outrages in which they participated under orders (beyond the level of their own consciences), as well as how to reintegrate these rank-and-file military members into civilized life. Similarly, a population that has long been inured (or propagandized) to mass compliance with injustice cannot be blamed en masse in the same way we may hold the leaders of national action accountable. So much of what has gone wrong with modern political dialogue resides in precisely our loss of this moderate and sensible approach to reconciliation in the face of strong disagreement or even disapproval. Should the German population have been exterminated after WWI in order to kill the German spirit that “gave rise to” Nazism? No decent human being would ever propose such a thing, in spite of the lingering difficulties inherent in knowing that so many ordinary Germans were passive enablers of horror. Likewise with the Chinese population that was pacified during the Cultural Revolution. To suggest that the war in Ukraine may not properly be placed at the feet of the man who dreamt it up and ordered the attack, on the grounds that Russia has long been in thrall to nationalistic sentimentality of a dangerous sort, seems to me to be eliding the universal and inevitable weaknesses of human nature under the influence of national bias and cultural identity. 

Is Kasparov’s account of the history of Russian nationalism sound? Probably. And this includes his critique of the powerful effects on the Russian psyche of the — well, let’s call a spade a spade in spite of our deep respect for literary greatness — parochialism infusesd through much of the work of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Having said that, and certainly agreeing that current Russian opponents of the Kremlin who refuse to speak clearly about the war of annihilation against an unthreatening neighbor are guilty of a terrible and perhaps morally nullifying sin of omission, I believe it is still correct and proper, as well as clarifying, to refer to this war as essentially Putin’s war. (In fact, I have frequently argued — see here for example — that it is precisely the refusal to hold Putin personally accountable that has been the characteristic rhetorical canard of those Western apologists who accuse anyone who rejects the Kremlin propaganda rationalizations of the war of being “anti-Russia.”) Putin is neither Russia nor the Russian people, whatever national sentimentalities he may be clever at exploiting. His choices are his own, and this reality is not mitigated by noting, as Kasparov does, that Putin himself is not doing the shooting. Actually, in a sense yes he is, as civilized men have always understood that a tyrannical aggressor is the true agent of all the death and destruction carried out in his name and under his command, however morally compromising the physical carrying out of his orders may be for the souls of those minions complying with such commands.

We can all join Kasparov — as I have in this forum many times — in condemning the war, and also in lamenting the passivity of the Russian people and in particular their opposition leadership. But it would be unfair to Russia and its people to hold them all fundamentally responsible for Putin’s despotic acts on the basis of their mere embodiment of a deeply flawed but longstanding national romanticism. Yes, that romanticism ought to be countered by reason, and yes a thorough defeat in the current war could be an excellent instigator for such rational spiritual reform. But the focus of such reform should be on how it might help to prevent the rise of yet another manifestation of the brutal exploitation of this national mythology to follow in the line of the tsars, the communists, and Putin’s oligarchy. In order to achieve such a reform, however, it will be necessary, as it always is, to forgive the people in general for the atrocities of their leaders, while publicly holding those leaders accountable in the most forceful and unequivocal ways, this accountability being, after all, precisely the practical meaning of the sort of overhaul of the national sentimentality that Kasparov proposes as necessary for the revitalization of the Russian soul.