It doesn’t really pay for a liberal to see through propaganda because you either alienate yourself from all your liberal friends who are wallowing in it, or you sit in crushing silence out of fear of being ostracized. To be true to myself, I’ve opted for the former route, to speak out, liberal to liberal, about all the blather my dear liberal friends have put out regarding the Ukraine War. There was a time when we liberals stood for peace. “Give peace a chance,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Peace Train,” “All We Need Is Love”: Was all that just empty slogans? Maybe I was just gullible, but I swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker. I thought it represented the core of what it meant to be a liberal. How all this should be forfeited to Donald Trump and the Republican Party is beyond me. I recognize that Trump’s motivations are to reserve American resources for neocolonial projects elsewhere, but let’s celebrate peace where we can. Liberals are falling into a trap that is making a lie of our public professions, thereby draining attention away from our valid disputes with Republicans, but most importantly, working to make the world an even more dangerous place than it already is.
Ironically enough, the high-water mark of US-Russian relations came under the arch cold-war warrior, Ronald Reagan. From then on, it just went downhill. Perhaps it started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which also collapsed the Russian economy. Whereas the US offered generous assistance to former Warsaw Pact countries to get their economies back up and running, the same US advised “shock therapy” for Russia, advice that the International Monetary Fund dutifully followed. Shock it did, bringing the country to the brink of starvation. Or perhaps it started with Bill Clinton meddling in Russian elections to get the corrupt but US-plaint Boris Yeltsin re-elected president. Maybe it was Clinton blithely violating the Bush I-era “not one inch eastward” assurance regarding NATO expansion if Gorbachev would agree to German reunification, a violation every president thereafter, including Trump, continued all the way to the Russian border. I’m sure that Bush II and Trump ripping up three vital arms control treaties didn’t help, either.
The US, however, showed its anti-Russian hand in broad daylight when it participated in the 2014 coup of a democratically elected Ukrainian president who tried to keep good relations with both Russia and the West. In his place, we hand-picked a government that was sufficiently belligerent towards Russians, as documented, for example, in the covertly recorded and now-infamous conversation between Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and the then-Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. To make the coup work, we aligned with a neo-Nazi minority (or neo-fascist, whatever you want to call them; “thugs” would be appropriate) that worshipped the World War II Nazi and Holocaust collaborator, Stepan Bandera. Not a nice guy—look him up. Now Ukraine officially commemorates the once-marginalized figure as a hero, replacing statues of other people with ones of him, erecting monuments to him, and renaming streets after him. Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”)? It was the rallying cry of his 1930’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The focus of their hatred was on the Russian east and south of Ukraine, Russian ethnically, linguistically, or legally, and therefore, in that line of thinking, subhuman.
Zelensky is himself from the Russian East and Russian is his first language. Not only that, he’s Jewish, so subhuman on two counts. He could never have become president in such an environment if it were not for the votes of Russian Ukrainians. They saw him as their protector from that far-right element in the West, which was waging a kinetic war on them as well as attempting to deprive them of their rights to speak Russian and use the language in school and civic life. For a short while, it seemed that he would carry out the protector role for which he was elected, but when the neo-Nazis made their power clear through violence, Zelensky turned on a dime. Perhaps he had to in order to save himself, but turn he did, with his identity conveniently serving as a cover for violent right-wing extremism. Come on, how can Nazis have any power in Ukraine? Zelensky’s a Jew for crying out loud, right. Perhaps you remember Western media doing stories like this on these thugs and the problems they posed. The US even had a law barring our funding going to them. All that disappeared even before the Ukraine War started. By now, neo-Nazis have become nothing more than a Putin talking point.
The idea that our fight was an altruistic concern to Ukraine is embarrassingly quaint. From the start, our fight was to keep Russia from developing into a prosperous country. Ukraine was just a convenient proxy for that purpose, making a mockery of all the goodwill people showed by flying Ukrainian flags in solidarity. Our leaders, media, and think tanks have as much as admitted what the true aim always was.
The Minsk Agreements, which were supposed to resolve the tensions, turned out to be nothing more than a Western ploy to fool Russia and give the West time to arm Ukraine for war against Russia, the principals in the talks have stated. The Russians had long made their security concerns crystal clear. “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” as William Burns, Bush II’s ambassador to Moscow and Biden’s CIA director, declared in the title of his secret 2008 cable to Washington (which we only know thanks to WikiLeaks). At every turn, the Russians were ignored or outright ridiculed, right up to Biden’s refusal to even discuss Putin’s peace plan in the December before the February 2022 invasion. The White House response was a dismissive “NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine was none of Russia’s business!” Even a month after invasion, in peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, Putin agreed to return the four eastern oblasts and drop demands for Ukrainian disarmament, and in exchange, Zelensky agreed to drop seeking NATO membership and to recognize Crimea as Russian, which it de facto was anyway even when Russia recognized it as Ukrainian territory. The war would have stopped, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared, hundreds of billions of dollars would have been saved, Ukraine’s demographic catastrophe would have been avoided, and the country would have remained whole, but the US would have none of it. They coerced their client Ukraine to stay on the battlefield and lose ever more land and people despite the rosy propaganda.
Any calm and rational person would have known that a country the size of Ukraine could never win a war against a country over four times its size in population, with a military ranked second in the world only after the US. Sadly, we couldn’t find it in ourselves to be calm and rational. One would only have to imagine if Russia was the US, Ukraine was Mexico, and NATO was the Warsaw Pact creeping ever northward through Latin America to know how the US would have reacted, and long before Russia ever would.
We should all be breathing a sigh of relief that we’re finally backing away from that brink. At least we liberals should be, but in this surreal world, we’re the ones trying to stop it. We assume that since Putin took part of Ukraine, he wants all of Ukraine, and then all of Europe, maybe the world. It’s warmed-over domino theory, served back up just like Vietnam, “so we don’t have to fight Russia here,” as then-Congressman Adam Schiff put it in a 2020 House floor speech. Such words are used to justify the very belligerence that keeps your opponent fighting. In the words of British academic, Richard Sakwa, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” For the military-industrial complex, it’s the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy, only this time, with the country holding the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. For the Russians, this is a fight for their survival as a country. That makes it a fight with only one endpoint should we insist on pursuing it: The End.
I think all this unhinged Russophobia got its McCarthy-era-level juice when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Whether to spite Trump for losing to him or to assign the blame for her failure onto anyone other than herself, Hillary spawned Russiagate out of whole cloth. Although nothing ever came of it other than a few convictions entirely unrelated to the core charge, its energy lives on, making it seem like common sense that we should bleed Russia dry, regardless of whether that means making a sacrifice of a proxy country. How many of us secretly, or maybe not so secretly, were fine with Ukrainians dying so we could avenge the loss of Hillary’s ascent to her rightful seat?
I’m sure Putin is no Boy Scout. No one gets to the world stage by that route. A Boy Scout, or just someone of average moral intelligence, would think of some other option besides war. I’ve heard people list the other options Putin had short of war, but none of them sound plausible to me because they would hardly put a dent in the West’s encroachment. The only option I can think of, which also might not have worked but was at least worth a try, would have been to beef up Russia’s pathetically unsophisticated propaganda. If there’s anything they should have been learning from the Americans, this would have been it. As the old joke goes: A Russian and an American were on a plane to the US and the American asks, “So, what takes you to the US?” “I’m going there to study propaganda,” the Russian replies. “Propaganda?” the American asks, “But we don’t have propaganda.” “Exactly,” replies the Russian. If you need that joke explained to you, you know the propaganda is working. Propaganda, however, need not always be just a con game. The Russians just needed a much more effective way of piercing the West’s propaganda, for which they were never a match.
The first thing people are going to call me is a Putin puppet. It usually is, but the logic of that is like insisting that the sky isn’t blue because you heard Putin say the sky is blue. The sky really is blue, folks.
Timothy M. Cook teaches English in a small university in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. Among his acknowledgments are an Emmy award for teaching Japanese on Georgia Public Broadcasting and designation as a Master Folk Artist by the Alabama State Council on the Arts for teaching shape-note singing. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Alabama.
