In May last year, before being re-elected as Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin bear equal responsibility for the war in Ukraine.
However, whether the refusal to pick sides comes from Brazil, India or South Africa, claiming to be “neutral” on Russia’s war of aggression is untenable.
The same is true of individuals. If a passerby saw a man relentlessly beating a child on a street corner, the witness would be expected to try to stop it. Neutrality is out of the question. On the contrary, the moral turpitude of inaction is deplorable.
How, then, should British musician Roger Waters’ remarks to the UN Security Council be regarded? In a video call, the activist and Pink Floyd cofounder claimed to be speaking for “four billion or so brothers and sisters” around the world.
He said that Russia’s war in Ukraine is illegal and should be condemned “in the strongest possible terms,” but then added:
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, so I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms... The only sensible course of action today is to call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. Not one more Ukrainian or Russian life is to be spent, not one, they are all precious in our eyes. So the time has come to speak truth to power.”
Is Waters’ “truth” an expression of neutrality?
In an interview earlier this month with Berliner Zeitung, he said: “Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am now more open to listen to what Putin actually says. According to independent voices I listen to, he governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.”
As an independent voice who follows Russian media very closely, I am well acquainted with what Putin and his propagandists “actually say.”
The major television channels are full of commentators recommending that countries such as Germany, Poland or the UK be nuked.
Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s closes allies, openly calls for “the fight against Satanism [to] continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”
The official Kremlin line describes the war as a “special operation” for the de-Nazification and de-demonization of Ukraine.
Among Ukraine’s “provocations” is that it has permitted pride parades and allowed LGBTQ+ rights to undermine traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Kremlin-aligned commentators speak of “liberal totalitarianism,” going so far as to argue that George Orwell’s 1984 was a critique not of fascism or Stalinism, but of liberalism.
One finds nothing like this in the Western media, where the main motif is that Ukraine should be helped to survive.
Nobody has demanded that Russia’s borders be changed, or that some part of its territory be seized.
At worst, one finds counterproductive demands to boycott Russian culture, as though Putin’s regime somehow represents the likes of Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Leo Tolstoy.
Just as Ukraine is supported against an aggressor, so should Russian culture be defended against its abuser in the Kremlin.
Triumphalism should also be avoided, and objectives should be framed in positive terms. The primary goal is not for Russia to lose and be humiliated, but for Ukraine to survive.
“Neutral” countries outside the West contend that the war is a local conflict that pales in comparison to the horrors of colonialism or more recent events such as the US occupation of Iraq.
However, this is an obvious dodge. Russia’s imperialist war is an act of colonialism. Those who would claim neutrality forfeit their standing to complain about the horrors of colonization anywhere.
Waters is a vocal exponent of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization. Why is Ukrainian resistance to Russian colonization any less worthy of support?
Sometimes, things really are as simple as that, especially as Russia is preparing to celebrate the anniversary of its war with a new offensive.
It is obscene to blame Ukraine for Russian acts of destruction, or to mischaracterize the Ukrainians’ heroic resistance as a rejection of peace. Those, like Waters, who call for “an immediate ceasefire” would have Ukrainians respond to redoubled Russian aggression by abandoning their own self-defense. That is a formula not for peace, but for pacification.
It bears mentioning that Russia is counting on the “neutralist” argument eventually to prevail.
As military historian Michael Clarke explains, “the Kremlin’s plan will be to keep fighting until the West gets fed up and pressures Kyiv into appeasing them with whatever territory they have taken by then.”
Russia is digging in for a protracted war that would include the quiet mobilization of about 600,000 soldiers every year for the “indefinite future.”
Waters is almost right: Ukraine is indeed “provoking” Russia by refusing to submit to its imperial ambitions, even in the face of desperate odds. The only way that it could stop provoking its aggressive revisionist neighbor would be to surrender. The same, Waters would agree, is true of Palestine.
However, surrendering to imperialism brings neither peace nor justice. To preserve the possibility of achieving either, the pretense of neutrality must be dropped.
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry