Criticism in a Crisis - Thinking Ukraine and Russia

 As we pass the anniversary of Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, it is harder and harder to find space in the public sphere and the public discussion where viewpoints other than the liberal consensus can be expressed.    By 'the liberal consensus', I mean the broad tendency in the EU and the United States, as far as I can see, to consider the crisis to be one entirely of Russia's making; to be without context or history or backstory; to be driven by a single psychopathic leader, Vladimir Putin; and to be resolvable principally by war.  Ukraine must prevail, this line of thinking goes, Putin must fall, Russian military capacity must be destroyed, and a nice new leader must take power in Moscow.

The problem with this line of thinking is its utterly un-reflexive nature.   At no point in this ideological framework is any blundering or culpability or greed or strategizing by the United States, other great powers, NATO or the European Union considered or even imagined.    Specious historical analogies are drawn - so we have Michael McDowell (not a stupid man, by any means) comparing the current moment to - wait for it - Munich 1938.  This is what passes for intelligent and historically-minded 'analysis' in the  Irish Times, the Irish 'newspaper of record'.   Or we get the same Irish Times carrying an ignorant and superficial 'critique' of John Mearsheimer's writing about Russia and Ukraine by the Financial Times columnist (and Orwell Prize winner, God help us) Gideon Rachman, which ignores Mearsheimer's valuable scholarship and portrays him as a 'useful idiot' for Russia and China.   One can only conclude that the likes of McDowell and Rachman are 'useful idiots' for NATO and the United States' proxy war against Russia.

Amidst the wreckage on the intellectual landscape, the odd beacon still stands.  Mearsheimer himself is attractively irrepressible.   His colleague Stephen Walt likewise.   In Britain, Anatol and Dominic Lieven, major historians of Russia and of the former USSR, have been voices of integrity and nuance.   Here are articles by each of them.

First, Anatol Lieven in today's Guardian:

 For years, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. What made him finally snap in 2022?

Anatol Lieven

And an interview with Dominic Lieven, from December last:

Dominic Lieven: 'It's Against Ukraine's Interest To Take Back Crimea' (rferl.org)

Conor

Blowing Up the Blowhards? - Seymour Hersh on Nordstream

Seymour Hersh is one of America's greatest investigative journalists.  He'll always be remembered as the writer who exposed the My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers in 1968.   But his work has continued ever since.   For me, his book on the secret Israeli nuclear programme, The Samson Option (1991) has been particularly important but his work has covered multiple issues and crises.

Hersh has now published an article on the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline, joining Russia and Germany, last September.   We've been told that this action was perpetrated by Russian saboteurs.   Hersh is arguing differently.   His story has a significant weakness - its dependence on one source.   But the flak he has taken in just days since its publication suggests that he has touched a nerve, and penetrated some of the propaganda murk which swirls around the apparent moral and political clarity with which the Ukraine war is discussed.

Here is an interview with Hersh, with hyperlinks to his article, published by Sidecar, the New Left Review blog.  It makes interesting reading.

Conor

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

ALEXANDER ZEVIN & SEYMOUR HERSH

An interview with Seymour Hersh.

15 FEBRUARY 2023

POLITICS

The Political Unconscious of Education - an interview with Jacques Ranciere

Recently, I read Pierre Bourdieu's short Sketch Towards A Self-Analysis, which portrays his own passage through the French education system.   What jumps out from Bourdieu's book is the enormous ressentiment which drove him, a feeling based on his class location as a child, and his felt marginality vis-a-vis the Paris intelligentsia when at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.   The product, therefore, was a non-intellectual intellectual, or an intellectual who rejected the given French models of intellectuality.  It was enhanced further by Bourdieu's pursuit of a career in the discipline of sociology, as against the more prestigious philosophy, and it helped to make Bourdieu's rich and revealing work on education, culture, and the production of what he famously called 'cultural capital'.

This same outsider's scepticism is expressed in this short but very interesting interview with Jacques Ranciere.   Ranciere, a philosopher from the world which Bourdieu excoriated, has his own uneasy relationship with that world - part of the Althusser circle which produced Lire le Capital, he later made his own break with Althusser and forged his own path in a leftist philosophy based in archival research and a renewed sense of history.

This interview comes from the Verso website:

‘No institution emancipates people’: An interview with Jacques Rancière

Conor