The drunken husband suddenly comes home and crawls into bed next to the wife and her lover. "Darling, I'm so drunk I think I have six legs sticking out from under the covers," he says. "Don't worry," the woman replies. "Go to the door and look again from there." The husband got up, went to the door, then turned to the bed: "You're right, I'm relieved now. There are only four of them!”
The joke may be vulgar, but it provides an important insight. In principle, we expect to see a situation better from the outside than from the inside. But sometimes it is the side view that prevents us from seeing the truth. In the joke, the husband's stepping out of the situation (going to the door) created a false sense of participation that made him see the lover's legs as his own.
We find a similar dynamic in the West's support for Ukraine. We close our eyes to the fact that the domestic oligarchic clique will probably emerge as the biggest winner of the Ukrainian struggle. We should not be surprised if the post-war Ukraine turns out to be similar to the pre-war Ukraine, which was corrupted by the oligarchy and colonized by large Western corporations to put the best quality land and natural resources under their control. As we make personal sacrifices for the war effort, we fail to see that the gains will be appropriated by others, just like the drunkard who thinks they are his feet under the duvet - perhaps because, deep down, he refuses to admit the truth.
Can we avoid this trap? The pan-European organization "Europe, the patient" held a series of discussions in mid-June in London on the protection of Ukrainian communities from economic exploitation after the war. Such initiatives are needed more than ever, as support for Ukraine's defense must go hand in hand with issues of environmental and social justice. All this is equally important for the future of the country. We can fully support Ukraine only if we free it from the grip of the fossil fuel industry, which relies on Russian oil.
The mix of military, environmental and socioeconomic battles is increasingly difficult to ignore. War and environmental issues collided dramatically in the destruction of the Kahovka Dam near Kherson in early June.
Of course, Ukraine is not an isolated case. Around the same time, wildfires in Canada suffocated New York City with clouds of brown smoke, giving the city's residents a glimpse of what people across the global south know all too well. Although they constantly talk about the climate crisis and ecological collapse, rich Western countries still do little.
This limited perspective does not belong only to the right and the corporate sector. Many on the left today claim to support peace, while advocating compromise with brutal, revisionist authoritarian regimes.
To understand the "pacifist" opposition, let's think back to the beginning of World War II, when there was also a coalition of right and left opposing US involvement in foreign wars. Then, as now, "pacifists" claimed that the situation in Europe was none of America's business. They harbored a strange sympathy for the aggressor and claimed that going to war would only benefit the military-industrial complex. When, in the summer of 1940, Nazi Germany told the United Kingdom that it wanted peace, they argued that Britain should accept Hitler's generous offer.
Like all good lies, this one contains a grain of truth. American conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan offered a version of that argument in 2008 when he said the Holocaust would not have been so terrible if Winston Churchill had accepted Hitler's 1940 offer.
Moreover, the argument goes, just as Churchill brought the British Empire to ruin by provoking unnecessary wars with Germany, American President George W. Bush brought the United States to ruin by following Churchill's example. Like many on the left, Buchanan does not believe that the US should guarantee aid to countries in which it has no vital interests.
A new variation of this motif appears in the context of the Ukrainian war. Apparently, the collapse of the Soviet Union had the same effect as the Treaty of Versailles: it created a predictable desire for revenge on the victors of the last war.
As in the past, this new alliance of right and left is driven by conspiracy theories, such as those spread about vaccines by Robert Kennedy Jr. and followers of Donald Trump. The alliance condemns anti-pandemic measures as an instrument of control. He opposes helping Ukraine, because it benefits NATO's military-industrial complex. The typical model is to deny the biggest threat we face as a simple ploy by big corporations that want to exploit the working class.
Of course, the politics of denial - when only four legs are visible - is unabashedly optimistic. We do not have to deal with new dangers; we can pretend they don't exist. It is a product of populism on both the left and the right and one of the main reasons why we fell into a "democratic recession". As the Tribune's Grace Blakely notes, "Authoritarianism is on the rise despite liberal predictions that expanding free markets will lead to more democracy -- that's because capitalism will always defend social hierarchies against the threat of economic equality."
We can carry this claim further: the threat to democracy also comes from the false populist resistance to corporate capitalism, embodied in the refusal of the "pacifist" left to support Ukraine because it will "only" benefit arms dealers. Finally, Ukraine has long been colonized by Western corporations, and only through "green", just reconstruction, will it truly be freed.
To avoid our predicament, we cannot just stick to multi-party liberal democracy. We need to find new ways to build social consensus and establish active links between political parties and civil society. The immediate task is to counter the new left-right populists, and this may require alignment with the exponents of capitalist liberal democracy - just as the communists in World War II fought alongside the Western "imperialist" democracies against fascism, knowing full well that imperialism was their ultimate goal. the enemy. It was a strange situation in bed, but at least they knew whose legs were whose.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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