Plagues and houses: the Left's betrayal of Ukraine

June 8, 2023

RUSSIA has been accused of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka Dam near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, risking catastrophe. Many people who claim to be on the Left are still saying this war is all NATO’s fault and that Ukraine is a Nazi state, and some even say Kiev deliberately blew up the dam themselves to cut off water supplies to Russia-occupied Crimea.    

In his latest dispatch, historian Timothy Snyder warns us against what he calls the “bothsidesing” of Russia’s invasion. Giving credence to Russian claims that this was an act of sabotage by the Ukrainian side “is not part of a story of an actual event in the real world. It is part of a different story: one about all the outrageous claims Russia has made about Ukraine since the first invasion, in 2014.”

Almost everything any Russian spokesperson has said about the war has been a transparent lie, Snyder writes, and there is nothing to be gained by giving it the same weight as Ukrainian statements, which have been largely reliable. 

The story doesn't start at the moment the dam explodes. Readers need to know that for the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive…

The pursuit of objectivity does not mean treating every event as a coin flip, a fifty-fifty chance between two different public statements. Objectivity demands thinking about all the objects -- physical objects, physical placement of people -- that must be in the story, as well as all of the settings -- contemporary and historical -- that a reader would need in order to come away from the story with greater understanding.

Meanwhile, a human rights organisation in Kharkiv says the Russians are wantonly destroying other dams in occupied Ukraine territory, and accuses the media of “playing safe” when they try to be even-handed in their coverage. Russia has spent so long poisoning the well of international discourse, supporting fake news factories and propagating disinformation on an industrial scale and nurturing the assumption that our own governments must be doing exactly the same thing.    

Let’s take a closer look at what the anti-Ukraine Left are saying. According to a very instructive opinion piece on the World Socialist Website, the presence of avowedly fascist soldiers on the Ukrainian front line, together with all the various and manifest imperfections of Ukrainian democracy and the shameful role played by the likes of Stepan Bandera during the Second World War nearly eight decades ago, somehow proves ipso facto that the defence of Ukraine is not a worthy cause.

What does Stepan Bandera have to do with anything, unless you are trying to imply that Ukraine is inherently, ahistorically, essentially Nazi to its very core, which justifies anything that the corrupt, autocratic, irrational, self-serving Kremlin throws at them? And even if Ukraine does have a Nazi problem, does it follow that we must instead back Moscow’s evisceration of the country? The World Socialist Website concedes that Russia’s invasion is both “disastrous and reactionary”, and yet, its apologism only goes one way. 

One would think that any author attuned to even the slightest manifestation of Nazism in Ukraine would also understand that the Putin regime has long since degenerated into the sort of decadent late-capitalist fascist-adjacent kleptocracy that Marxists would normally have condemned wholeheartedly, especially when it chose to devour a smaller neighbour. 

As ever, the World Socialist Website’s solution to all this is both dystopian - a plague on all their houses! - and utopian - workers of the world unite!  My conclusion: this isn’t socialism. This is maladjusted, sneering, resentful, antisocial pseudosocialism that chooses to perch on a pedestal and presume that the world with all its muck and inconsistency isn’t worth dealing with, and all we are left with are airy-fairy quasi-religious slogans about the workers of the world uniting. .