The pull of this conversation is instructive, as well as quite typical. Our learned friend Physics Guy salubriously reminded us that one need not be an angel to deserve moral or material support in the face of an aggressor. I echo that reminder. All I have been saying is that, however that may be, being the victim of aggression does not entitle a country to unqualified moral and material support from another, and that the people in this country who are most forceful in advocating the sort of unlimited and barely qualified support that Ukraine has been getting have a disastrous track record that should give anyone tempted to heed them pause. Prudence might be a virtue, but it is certainly a necessity in dealing with a nuclear power on a continent with half a billion people. I wish there were more of it.
Finding some prudence just on this thread is proving difficult, and the simple point I am making is turning out to be one too difficult to grasp, no doubt because it doesn't flatter one's sense of justice, and so I find my words being rebranded to mean support for “genociding Ukraine,” as Pseudo-Paul puts in one of those characteristic moments of “critical thinking” for which ex-Mormons are so famous. How did that happen? I ask myself. It is one thing to pursue my argument and have it totally ignored; it is another to have it characterized like that. It stems, as it seems, from this statement:
Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true
Honorentheos understands it rightly but is only partially correct to say “the point it makes is blunted even as it is made” because he errs in taking it as the point. No, it is merely an observation that is, as he put it quite rightly, “universally applicable to how propoganda generally works.” It is an observation in service of the argument that continues to be ignored: because this is how propaganda works, stirring up emotions through the consumption of atrocity news is a very poor basis for policy, however much it entertains a safe viewer experiencing the war in a distant country as a post-modern show of justice, and it will probably lead to many more atrocities if it is the basis of policy making. One could see it as participation in propaganda, but at most it is distraction and food for performative emotionalism. As an example:
Chap wrote: ↑Fri Sep 09, 2022 3:27 pm
Ukraine is currently being invaded by a large neighbouring country run by a man who is effectively a dictator, and who wants it, in effect, to disappear.
If Ukraine asks other people for help in resisting, what kind of response would it be to say. "We'd like to help, but in the past some of our governments have done a lot of bad or ill-advised stuff that makes us feel really upset when we think about it. Sorry, but you'll just have to manage by yourselves."?
So what's the limiting principle on this? Just today, our well tailored Secretary of State flew into Ukraine and surprised them with another $2 billion gift; but are we Americans allowed to ask how long this is going to go on and to what extent? Or are we merely an economic zone to be tapped and arms factory to be requisitioned?
No one wants to take up the points I keep raising; rather, they have failed to heed Physics Guy’s admonition in its simplest terms and have imagined that there is some burden of proof on me to prove that Ukrainians aren’t angels, the default assumption being that they must be (Why? Simply because their country has been invaded? That isn’t a moral quality). I feel no need to accept that burden. I have put out a few examples of things that I knew about and that I could quickly find. I have never said that these are proof of Ukrainian devilishness or Russian sanctity; I have emphatically said the opposite. All I was trying to show is that Ukrainians or Ukrainian-backed forces have also engaged in things that we would consider atrocities if done by the Russians, and that these atrocities are used by Russian media and in their propaganda campaigns. The Russians will do what they want, but I don’t want to participate in that sort of thing on my side.
The responses to these are somewhat ghoulish to me, and a bit deranged, frankly. I showed one instance, and Physics Guy makes it about a technical definition of mortar vs. shelling. Well, no, I’m sorry, anyone who has followed this with a little interest over the past eight years knows that there have been numerous outbursts of violence in Donetsk, that civilians have been the primary victims, and that Ukraine is supporting one side in that, often with artillery. If you don’t believe that because you haven’t found your trusted “news source” telling you, then don’t believe it. Comfort yourself in Ukrainian sanctity by parsing neat distinctions that the people maimed or killed in these attacks were done so with one kind of device but not the other kind, so it's ok: Ukrainians are still angels.
I am puzzled by Honorentheos’s comments about the closing of the canal. Do you think it was a maintenance issue? It is clearly very difficult for people on this thread to imagine Ukrainians as being anything other than a nation of angels, so denying the Russian population in Crimea water such that they lack adequate sanitation and drinking water, and have the land they depend on for food desiccated is explained away as a being merely legal question hinging on the technical definition of a war crime. Whether it meets that definition is again totally beside the point. It is a bad thing to do to people, and it is clearly done either against the Russian population living there purely for being what they are, or to punish the population in order to inflict harm on Russia (if the former, it would parallel the virulently anti-Russian discourse that has been part Ukrainian media for several years where terms like “Asiatic” and “orcs” and “mongoloid” are just some of the nicer things said). Indeed, a Ukrainian official in charge of it resisted closing the canal early on because of the humanitarian crisis it would cause and even used the word “catastrophe” (here in a Russian-language publication based in Ukraine, where, remember, most people speak Russian, not Ukrainian):
При этом председатель Госводагентства сообщил, что не рассматривает возможности отключения водоснабжения АРК, поскольку это обернется катастрофой.
"At the same time, the commissioner of the government water works said that he was not considering the possibility of closing off the water supply to Crimean Autonomous Republic, as that would lead to a catastrophe (obernetsya katastrofoy)
The English language readership of the Kyiv Post was offered a headline rather more flattering to Ukraine, saying that "
Crimea Running out of Water Due to Annexation," obviously laying the blame for the catastrophe that occurred on Russia's annexation: Ukraine good, Russia bad. Inside the article, we find:
Meanwhile, in February David Arakhamia, head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s faction in parliament, said that water supplies could be resumed from Ukraine to Crimea if Russia withdraws its troops from the Donbas.
I don't know how it could be any clearer that the Ukrainians were creating and then using the miseries of local population in Crimea for advantage in their feud with Russia. Maybe that is just, maybe not, but, for the line of reasoning in Chap's view, would it be just for a Russian reading this to say, "in the past some of our governments have done a lot of bad or ill-advised stuff that makes us feel really upset when we think about it, but we can't let this humanitarian crisis continue like this. We have to do something to stop these Ukrainians!"
I use this only to illustrate the folly of this kind of thinking. I don't think the Russian government cares at all about the humanitarian costs for Ukrainians—but I don't think the western governments care all that much about it either. If they did, they wouldn't be openly pursuing a policy to create a war of attrition. But positions like those taken by Chap and Kishkumen suggest that we have unquestionable moral obligation to make the Ukrainians fight to the last drop of their own blood—and perhaps the blood of others, too. I understand the reaction, but just what limit does that reaction contain within itself?
I am very uneasy about this "look at the suffering Ukrainians!" arguments not because they are a unnatural and unjust reaction but because they are. Their very potency makes them outrun reason and good sense. This thread is evidence of that: people can barely grasp the very dry point I'm making without dousing it in righteousness and indignation. It comes from a very deep well that springs from a noble source, but such a salty mix will never slake one's thirst for justice and will only make it harder ever to quench it.
The Russian atrocities are probably much, much worse because their capabilities are so much greater. But I simply don’t know the extent or the details except in a few cases, and no one here does either. The Ukrainian government is brazen in its propaganda successes, successes which are meant to win over the publics in the west.
And our media admire them for it! Yes,
trick us more!
This one was a gem:
Ukraine has also found success in a guilt-based narrative in the west, shaming Nato countries into providing more weapons to help Ukrainians defend themselves and for not severing economic ties to Russia fast enough.
Is guilt a sound basis for policy? It's unthinking and foolhardy, and however noble in origin cannot be noble in the execution.
But consider Mariupol. I won't even broach the issue of the many videos showing Ukrainian soldiers blocking evacuations, which was a hotly contested issue. Let's assume that's all Russian propaganda, since I don't have all day to post and translate videos, and explain how you can tell this one guy is speaking Ukrainian, etc.
All the news stories about civilian casualties in Mariupol, for example, reported a figure of more than 21,000. That figure came from the mayor, and story after story after story repeated that in the western media:
"
Mariupol is on the brink of surrender, with 21,000 dead and counting" in April.
The AP repeats it
here.
Global News (Canada)
here.
Yahoo News, just flat out reprinting Ukrainian propaganda from Ukrayinska Pravda,
states in its headline that "There may be more people killed by the Russians in Mariupol: 21,000 bodies have already been buried"
That was at the end of May. However, a somewhat clearer picture emerged in a report just over two weeks later, and it said that the civilian death toll around 1,348 according to the
Office of the High Commission for Human Rights at the UN, though it could be higher (who knows?). It probaby is higher. But where's the follow up the non-biased journalists informing the "open" and democratic publics in the west who are funding this war? Have those news stories been retracted or clarified? No. People in the west simply stopped talking about it, because their media organizations are not objective reporters of the situation. Readers thrive on atrocity porn and heroic narratives about a brave and oppressed people offering resistance to an oppressor. That is not just what their readers expect; it’s also the only thing they are expected to understand. But it leaves out significant facts, once again, about what we are supporting and how we are supporting it. We are all told that the civilian deaths are because of the evil Russians who want to genocide Ukrainians. From the report, however:
Despite our attempts at verifying, it is not clear to what extent the parties to the conflict complied with the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. Civilian survivors shared varying accounts, but most reported that military positions were often placed in the immediate proximity of civilians and civilian objects. Attacks on those positions were common practice. The harm to civilians was extensive.
This is something we condemn in Hamas but apparently tolerate, no questions asked, in the Ukraine army that we are stuffing full of weapons, sharing intelligence, etc. So far we are fine with how they prosecute their war. When their tactics lead to civilian deaths, we get to blame Russia for it and use it as an excuse to escalate it even further. So please spare me the shallow emotionalism. I don't see western government really sWith no oversight from us, we are pouring in billions into Ukraine's war chest, as well as providing material, logistical, and intelligence support.
At what point, Chap, do you think we Americans are allowed to ask for a cost-benefit analysis of all that? When should an abstract moral satisfaction yield to practical reality? It's not just that Ukraine is one of the most financially
corrupt countries in the world(surely more so in war time), just ahead of Russia, but that it can lead to a real escalation of violence. Do Americans have to die? Does it need to be a cyber attack that leads to death? What about an attack by a Russian proxy? Even a small terrorist attack will lead to a significant American response, and at that point, it will be far too late to contain the conflict.
Given that atrocity porn isn’t reliable or even consistent and that anything can be blown up into an atrocity—that is the banal observation—I simply refuse to engage in these kinds of comparisons, and I think it is better to look at interests of the various parties to the conflict or potential conflicts, so not only of one’s side but also of one’s opponents, and to consider deeper causes so that they can be addressed. A position that advocates for an escalation of the war through yet more American money and deeper NATO involvement because of this primitive blood-for-blood thinking is only going to shed greater amounts of blood, and the people who are most forceful in advocating for course of action and most influential in implementing it are proven failures who should not be listened to (and it is not about the mistakes made by a government in the past but by the people who ran and advised that government). That is my argument, and the only thing I am interested in discussing further. I have no interest in comparing atrocity porn collections.
