Hypocritical Ethnonationalism -- Why Russia Was Justified in Attacking Ukraine

Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?

As the US has recently considered labeling Rusia a sponsor of state terrorism, it's interesting to look at U.S. behavior in that light.

1. The U.S. has sponsored terrorists across the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Syria.
2. The U.S., through the CIA, has worked with Nazis in western Ukraine ever since World War II.  Since the Nazis have become influential in the Ukrainian government and military, the United States has given them lethal weapons.
3. The CIA is notorious for working with violent rebel groups such as the Contras in Nicaragua and UNITA in Angola.
4. The U.S. has supported innumerable coups in places such as Iran, Guatemala, Turkey, Vietnam, etc.

The U.S. has also supported color revolutions in places such as Georgia (Rose) and Ukraine (Orange).  According to Wikipedia, "Russia, China and Vietnam share the view that colour revolutions are the "product of machinations by the United States and other Western powers" and pose a vital threat to their public and national security."  With roughly 750 foreign military bases in 80 nations around the world, the U.S. can and does cross the line between supporting peaceful protesters and supporting violent separatists.

During the Cold War, U.S. support for violent rebels was generally justified as a reaction to the Communists, especially Russia.  Thus, the U.S. supported for "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, for example.  But the Russian communists unilaterally ended the Cold War in 1990 and pulled back considerably.  Former members of the communist bloc in eastern Europe are now members of NATO.  Proxy wars around the world became fewer in number, but perhaps are on the upswing again as demonstrated most horrifically in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia itself became the site of a horrific rebellion in Chechnya.  Peace was only returned to the region after hundreds of thousands were killed and displaced.  My recollection is that Russia was criticized in the West for dealing harshly with the rebels.  But the lesson seems to be that violent rebellion often to horrendous suffering for the people in the rebeling area.  

Consider Xinjiang and the Uyghurs in China.  China has reacted strongly to the threat of violent rebellion and has, consequently, been accused of "genocide" by the West.  But few if any Uyghurs have been killed and the region has become more prosperous while the Uyghur population has increased.  The lesson here seems to be that China's tough policies may have helped overall by preserving peace, in spite of the adverse judgment of the West.  Xinjiang might have been fine without China's paternalistic crackdown, but experiences in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere across the Islamic world show that the downsides of violent rebellion should not be underestimated.

I firmly believe in the right to peaceful protest.  The world community, led by the U.S., is right to care about human rights everywhere.  The problem is that we've sometimes been corrupt, willfully blind and hypocritical, in our assessments.  A Biblical verse comes to mind:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;

and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. [Matthew, 7:5]

Ethnonationalism in US, China, and Russia

In the U.S., we've largely mischaracterized the largely peaceful protest on January 6, 2021 as a violent insurrection.  This conveniently overlooks the obvious entrapment of protestors who entered the capitol at the direction of an obvious agent of the U.S. government (Ray Epps and company).  Are there potentially violent ethnonationalists who vote for Trump in the U.S?  I think so. But they have effectively marginalized by the FBI and related law enforcement agencies.

Similar to the alleged Trumpian ethnonationalist threat, some in the West believe that Putin in Russia and Xi in China are sponsoring ethnonationalist identities which threaten peaceful coexistence in our world community.  While I agree that ethnonationalism is a great danger and has led to much suffering in human history, I think it is important to recognize that nationalism has a place in a healthy modern world; i.e. not all nationalism is evil.  Putin and Xi, it seems to me, have generally favorable records in staking out functional nations in an increasingly dysfunctional world.  Minorities are given more than lip service in Russia and China, but majority rule is not overwhelmed by the competing factions.

Ukrainian Ethnonationalism

Now look at the ethnonationalist situation in Ukraine.   The erstwhile fledgling democracy was overwhelmed by ethnonationalism beginning with the largely peaceful Orange Revolution in 2004.  Nazi collaborators who had been working with the CIA and the World Anti-Communist League, in opposition to Russia and China in the Cold War, were rehabilitated by the U.S. backed Yushchenko government.  

After his victory (in 2004), Yushchenko embarked on a full rehabilitation of the Nazi collaborator OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), which had been active participants in the Holocaust. Streets and cities were renamed, monuments to the fascist killers were erected throughout the country, and Yushchenko awarded hero of Ukraine to the infamous OUN commanders Stepan Bandera and even Roman Shukhevych, who once murdered 8,000 Poles in a single day, to widespread condemnation both at home and abroad.

Starting in 2004 with the Orange Revolution, Ukrainian society has been embroiled in a nearly two-decade long era of chaos and bloodshed, the grisly results of which we see in the current war. Slava Stetsko’s CIA-backed Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN) was there for all of it, starting from the street protests in 2004 to the Maidan coup in 2014 and the bloody repression of the Donbas which followed.

A survey conducted in November 2013 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) shows that it was split almost exactly “50/50” between those who favored an agreement with the European Union and those favoring a customs union with Russia. 

Instead of dealing democratically with this situation, there was a violent U.S. supported coup in 2014, followed by violent repression of Russian protestors.  Unlike the situations in Chechnya or Xinjiang, this was not a minority rebellion but rather a 50/50 civil war scenario.  The Minsk accords, attempts to resolve the situation peacefully and democratically, were ignored by the Ukrainian government.  The U.S. decided to support the anti-Russian side diplomatically and militarily, and the civil war eventually became a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

At this point, it's helpful to look at these key points:

• Which group was violently ethnonationalist?
• What were the interests of the proxy war nations, the U.S. and Russia?

The Ukrainian ethnonationalists were clearly the violent agressors in the civil war.  They were joined by long time cold warriors from the West, and by more moderate Ukrainian factions who simply preferred closer ties with the West, as opposed to Russia.  This coalition came to be dominated by the more militant, ethnonationalist (anti-Russian) faction.  Thus, while President Zelensky was elected as a peace candidate who would implement the Minsk accords, he had to abandon this position in favor of militancy.

U.S. Anti-Russian Militancy

Since the 2014 coup, the U.S. government has become increasingly militant and anti-Russian.  President Trump was accused of being a Russian puppet and impeached for hesitating in the sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine.  Mainstream media and politicians accused the Russians of Pearl Harbor level aggression, in addition to the sabotage of the U.S. political system.  Influential think tanks produced papers on how best to weaken Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin.  Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, opined that we have to fight Russia over there (in Ukraine), so we don't have to fight them here (in the U.S.).  Congressional groups participated in discussions on how to dismantle Russia so that its very ethnic groups can be free.  Former Russian allies in Eastern Europe became hostile opponents with NATO forces and missles able to strike Russia.  Attempts to promote trade with Russia, such as the Nordstream 2 pipeline, were sabotaged by anti-Russian militants.  Most critically, a neighboring country, Ukraine, that had mostly been part of Russia for hundreds of years and was populated by Russian speakers with Russian culture, was militantly anti-Russian and attacking Russian speakers in the civil war.

International Law

I hear of Russian irredentism and the need to respect international borders,  Unfortunately, and this is one of Russia's main reasons for attacking Ukraine, international law on these matters has become something of a joke.  Most famously, the U.S. unilaterally invaded Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses.  Rather than being taken to task by international institutions for this calamitous aggression, the same political faction that perpetrated these war crimes has come to dominate U.S. foreign policy and ALSO to dominate the relevant international institutions.  

The U.S. has ignored and manipulated international law in Syria, Central America, Yugoslavia, Israel, and many other places around the world.  Sometimes this may be justified based upon special circumstances.  I feel that way about U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia, for example.  There was a tremendous amount of violence there before the U.S. intervened, and the violence diminished after the U.S. intervention.  Context matters.  There's a big difference between what the U..S. did in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and what this U.S. has done in the Middle East this century.  

International law is supremely important, but it has been abused by the United States to an extent that it is unreasonable to expect countries such as Russia to play by a different set of rules.  The history of Ukraine matters.

1. Most of Ukraine was part of Russia for hundreds of years.  Consequently, many there speak Russian and have many Russian cultural values.
2. Ukraine as an entity is a fairly recent and short lived phenomenon.  The Soviet Union established the borders of Ukraine, with input from other allies following their victory in WWII.
3. The USSR voluntarily granted independence to Ukraine and other former consituent republics only 32 years ago.  This was done with a spirit of international goodwill. 
4. Following Ukrainian independence, there was a time of chaos and a power vacuum partially filled by the U.S., probably with the best of intentions.
5. The situation has changed and a renewed Cold War is underway.
6. Borders and agreements from the newborn nation of Ukraine should not be cast in concrete.  The situation is fluid and flexibility is needed to create stability and accomodate the interests of the various ethnic groups that have been thrown together.
7. Crimea and Donbas have had referendums and clearly prefer to be with Russia rather than the ethnonationalist Ukrainians.

Efforts at diplomacy failed due to U.S. / ethnonationalist Ukrainian intransigence.  International institutions have been compromised and corrupted.  Russia has been attacked economically and culturally by the West since 2014.  Militarily, there has been a steady advance by West into Russia's borderlands, accompanied by increasingly aggressive rhetoric.  Russia's leader has been demonized.  

Meanwhile, the U.S. is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Political and media institutions are extremely unpopular and widely distrusted.  The electorate is divided into groups that distrust one another.  Propaganda and censorship are on the rise, often scapegoating Russia for these US problems.  Most of all, the military intelligence complex has become a swollen, corrupting cancer, devouring resources and polluting the culture with lies (such as Russiagate). This is not good for the U.S., for Russia, or for the world.  Someone needs to stop us for our own good.

While I'm a great believer in democracy, we don't seem to be at the point where the world's problems can be solved peacefully.  Rather, courage is needed to stand up to the U.S. military and insist on a return to a world order based upon relatively impartial and honest institutions. Russia is apparently the only country that can do this.  I believe they are doing humanity a great service by standing up to the corrupt, cancerous US led empire.  Their courageous principled stand may ultimately save us.

From the Russian Perspective

Imagine a Trumpian coup spearheaded by Oath Keepers and Proud Boys being supported with virtually unlimited weapons from Russia and other anti-US countries.   Why is the Azov Battalion more deserving of weapons than the Proud Boys?