Mainstream American media coverage of contemporary wars relies on a simplistic "good guys v. bad guys" framing. The lack of nuance in reporting leads to an Orwellian nightmare in which reporters and/or commentators caught deviating from the official narrative are marginalized, called traitors, and/or removed from digital platforms. Americans and western Europeans have no difficulty recognizing and--rightly--condemning censorship in Putin's Russia. Yet many so-called "liberals" will cheer as principled critics of American empire (e.g. Abby Martin, Lee Camp, Chris Hedges) have years worth of programming removed from digital platforms in an instant.
Chris Hedges was part of a New York Times team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for their explanatory reporting on global terrorism. He was forced to leave the paper because of its enabling of the Iraq war. Shunned from mainstream US media, Hedges produced a brilliant, Emmy nominated program called "On Contact" for RT. Recently YouTube deleted the entire archive of the show from its platform, even though Hedges is no more kind to Putin than he has been to American administrations. Hedges refers to having one's work deleted by digital censors as being "disappeared". He says:
"The Ukraine war, which I denounced as a 'criminal war of aggression' when it began, is a sterling example. Any effort to put it into historical context, to suggest that the betrayal of agreements by the West with Moscow, which I covered as a reporter in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with the expansion of NATO might have baited Russia into the conflict, is dismissed. Nuance. Complexity. Ambiguity. Historical context. Self-criticism. All are banished."
To try to un-banish the nuance, complexity, ambiguity, and historical context from the public sphere discussion of Russia/Ukraine, I interacted via email with Dr. Michael Jasinski, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Dr. Jasinski grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Poland, so he does not have to be lectured by anyone about what it means to resist totalitarianism. When he was 13, his family fled to America as refugees. Before coming to Oshkosh, he served in the US Military as a Russian language specialist. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Towson University, Master's in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Kansas, and Ph.D in International Affairs from the University of Georgia.
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| Dr. Michael Jasinski |
Dr. Jasinski is the author of two books: Examining Genocides: Means, Motive, and Opportunity. New York: Rowman and Littlefield International (2017) and Social Trust, Anarchy, and International Conflict. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (2011). His personal experience and scholarship make him someone that the national mainstream media should seek out actively for insight on the conflict.
I asked Dr. Jasinski five questions about Russia/Ukraine that I have not seen answered or even addressed seriously in most news about the conflict that I read, see, and listen to. He graciously responded to all the questions. Below are his unedited responses:
Media Rants: Much of the mainstream media coverage of the war, to
me, seems to be rooted in the old Cold War frame featuring lovers of democracy
and freedom standing up to Russian hegemony. What's missing from that
frame?
Dr. Jasinski: This is more of a conflict between conflicting visions of
Ukraine than between democracy vs. authoritarianism. Ukraine is a big country
whose territories have, at different points in history, belonged to the Russian
Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, the
Ottoman Empire, and of course USSR which in the end gradually put together the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic which then became the independent Ukraine
after USSR’s break-up in 1991. But whereas some parts of Ukrainian SSR were
never part of anything but the Russian Empire until administrative boundaries
placed them inside Ukrainian SSR, others became part of it only after 1945 and
were never governed from Moscow before. This process made Ukraine a de-facto
multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-cultural country with competing ideas of
national identity across those regions.
To oversimplify matters somewhat for the sake of brevity, the
concept of Ukrainian national identity with strong support in the country’s eastern
and southern regions might be fairly described as “neo-Soviet”, on account of a
large number of self-identified Russians living there, Crimea’s and
Sevastopol’s important role as a Russian and Soviet outpost and stronghold, and
the Soviet-era heavy industries built in the eastern parts of the country. The
separatist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics formed in 2014 are a
reflection of that identity. The opposing “nationalist” idea which has strong
support in central and especially western Ukraine aims at creating Ukraine as a
monolingual ethno-state, a “Ukraine for Ukrainians” to the detriment of
non-Ukrainian minorities.
These two conceptions of Ukraine have uneasily coexisted ever
since the country’s independence but erupted into open warfare after the 2014
“Maidan Revolution” which represented a bid by the nationalists to permanently
dominate Ukraine’s politics. To make matters worse, US and EU waded into that
conflict in 2014, backing the “nationalists” and lauding the ouster of
Yanukovych on the grounds he was a “Kremlin stooge”. That in turn prompted
Crimea’s secession and annexation by Russia, and the outbreak of a separatist
insurrection in eastern Ukraine that prompted first a Ukrainian military retaliation
and then a Russian military intervention that resulted in the battles of the
summer of 2014 and winter of 2014/15, followed by 8 years of low-intensity
warfare.
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| Viktor Yanukovych was denounced by Ukrainian nationalists as a "Kremlin Stooge" and deposed during the 2014 Maidan Revolution. |
To give an idea of the intensity of conflict, the “neo-Soviets”
treat Lenin and Ukrainians who served in the Red Army during World War 2 as
national heroes of Ukraine. The “nationalist” heroes, on the other hand, include
Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, even the soldiers of
the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The depth of the 2014 political rupture is
such that at the moment it is all but impossible to imagine Ukraine continue as
a single sovereign state except by one of the two factions violently
suppressing the other.
2. Russia's claim to be engaged in
"denazification" of Ukraine is either marginalized or dismissed
outright as Russian propaganda in most western media coverage of the conflict.
Frequently we hear that Ukraine cannot harbor Nazis since President Zelensky
himself is Jewish. Based on your knowledge of the region, how real is the Nazi
presence in Ukraine?
Ukraine definitely does have a “Nazi problem”, though at the
same time it is not the Nazi Germany of the 1930s. There is no single “Fuehrer”,
there is no totalitarian Nazi party of any note. There are, however, numerous
civil society organizations and associated paramilitaries which have adopted
elements of Nazi ideology and symbology, including the Azov Regiment (arguably
the best known of them all, due to its Wolfsangel symbol and recruitment of
foreign white supremacists), the Right Sector, the C14, and several others, who
are not only tolerated but also trained and armed by Ukraine’s military and
even foreign military instructors. Today’s Ukraine resembles the final years of
Weimar Germany which retained the trappings of a parliamentary democracy but
whose government made common cause with the NSDAP for the sake of combating
Communists and Socialists. Likewise the post-2014 Ukraine governments made
common cause with neo-Nazi entities for the sake of combating pro-Russia
elements in Ukraine. Azov Regiment, in particular, was stationed in cities like
Mariupol and Kharkiv explicitly to repress the ethnic Russian population of
those cities.
In addition, official Ukrainian support for neo-Nazi
paramilitaries meant that the ideology has spread into other parts of its
national security establishment, including its armed forces, police, and
intelligence services. The official Twitter feed of Ukraine’s National Guard,
for example, posted a video of Azov Regiment soldiers greasing their ammunition with pork fat for use against Russia’s many Muslim soldiers, just to cite one
of many similar examples. It’s easy to come across photos of ordinary Ukrainian
soldiers wearing neo-Nazi or white supremacist badges, something unheard of
prior to 2014. The official NATO Twitter feed had to pull down a post praising Ukraine’s female soldiers when someone pointed out one of the soldiers was
clearly wearing a Black Sun badge on her uniform.
Therefore one should not dismiss these militias as being
numerically or politically insignificant. It’s as if the US Army formed the KKK
Brigade, the Proud Boys Brigade, the Aryan Nations Brigade, and several others
along these lines, allowing them to propagate their respective ideologies and
repress those opposed to them. One can readily imagine the chilling effect such
formations would have on US politics and society. And let’s not forget that the
“foreign volunteers” who have flocked to Ukraine to fight in these paramilitaries
have big ideas for their own countries. They see Ukraine as a place to obtain
training for what they view as an inevitable “racial holy war” back home.
Bringing up Zelensky’s Jewish ancestry as evidence Ukraine has
no such problem makes about as much sense as saying that there is no problem
with systemic racism in America, no need for BLM, after 8 years of Obama
presidency. It’s worth noting that Israel has routinely condemned manifestations of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and has pointedly refused to send
weapons to Ukraine or to impose economic sanctions on Russia. Zelensky’s
appearance before the Knesset during which he appealed to them to protect
Ukraine in the same way Ukrainians allegedly protected Jews during WW2 only led
some of the Knesset deputies to note the large number of Ukrainian Nazi
collaborators and participants in the Holocaust.
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| Ukraine President Zelensky addressing the Israeli Knesset. Some pundits have argued that because Zelensky is Jewish, Ukraine cannot be a safe zone for neo-Nazis |
Zelensky certainly ran and won as a pro-peace candidate but that
quickly changed after he was elected and made a visit to the front lines on the
Donbass where he was insulted to his face by members of one of the neo-Nazi
paramilitaries who made it clear they did not respect his authority. Worse,
after that visit senior national security officials launched a public campaign
arguing that any move in the direction of ending the war would be tantamount to capitulation and have dire consequences for anyone pursuing it. They succeeded
in intimidating Zelensky who has not made any peace overtures since and even
today adheres to a very hawkish line. I’m reminded of the fate of Anwar Sadat
after the Camp David Accords and Yitzhak Rabin after Oslo Accords who were
killed by their own side’s extremists because they “capitulated”. Should
Zelensky sign a peace agreement on anything resembling Russia’s terms, he’ll
likely suffer a similar fate at the hands of his own country’s nationalists. He
seems to have been reduced to a figurehead, someone who rubber stamps decisions
by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council which is dominated by
nationalists.
3. One thing that is almost impossible to learn from
Western media is what the opposition to Mr. Putin within Russia actually stands
for. From your knowledge of Russian politics, are the majority of Putin's
opponents okay with a NATO presence in Ukraine? I personally support genuine
"small-d democracy" movements in every country. What does that
movement stand for in Russia?
As in the case of Ukraine, it is also not an issue of democracy
vs. autocracy. It’s an issue of Russia’s identity and role in the world.
Vladimir Putin, other senior Russian government officials, and the political
parties backing them, are broadly united in wanting a Russia that is a
sovereign Great Power, not tolerating foreign interference in its domestic
affairs and participating in international politics and the global economy on
its own terms. Differences among parties and factions are over how to achieve
that goal, not whether that goal ought to be pursued.
On the other hand, much of the so-called “non-systemic
opposition”, people like Navalny, Sobchak, Kasyanov, Khodorkovsky, Kasparov,
other people both in and out of Russia, favor a vision of the country as one
integrated into the global economy even at the cost of its sovereignty and
great power status. They argue Russia’s giving up on its great power ambitions
would result in an improved standard of living for average Russians. They are not opposed to NATO in Ukraine or
anywhere else on the Soviet periphery, one prominent Russian blogger Ilya
Varlamov even wrote an article titled “If we were defeated by NATO” which
argued such defeat would be a blessing for Russia.
However, their popularity was low before the war and has now
been diminished even further. First of all, “liberal” policies have been tried
in the 1990s during the Yeltsin presidency, leading to the creation of the
“oligarchs” and impoverishment of Russia’s urban, industrial middle classes. To
this day, Yeltsin and every politician associated with him, including several
of the oppositionists, remain very unpopular. Secondly, the freezes and arrests
of Russian properties and assets in Western countries even when owned by
private citizens, the calls to “permanently weaken” Russia, to try its leaders
as war criminals, NATO’s supply of weapons to Ukraine in order to kill Russian
soldiers, the presence of neo-Nazi paramilitaries who have committed atrocities
both against the civilian population and Russian POWs, have rallied the Russian
public around its government. Under current circumstances, arguing in favor of concessions
to Ukraine or the West is not likely to be well received by a public whose sons
and daughters are fighting a war against neo-Nazi-coddling Ukraine armed by NATO
countries, by a public whose welfare is being threatened by Western sanctions, and
might even result in criminal prosecution under laws adopted after February 24.
After three decades of Russia’s gradual convergence
with the West, we are now seeing a divergence that is unlikely to be reversed
in the foreseeable future. I think it’s fair to say that Joe Biden not only
“lost Ukraine”, he also lost Russia as a potential US partner, making it
instead an increasingly close partner of China.
4. As part of the fervor whipped up by the press, we are
seeing a number of cases of Russian athletes, artists, and others threatened
with losing their jobs if they do not sufficiently denounce Putin. To me, the
Russophobia we've seen promoted in the press since 2016 has disturbing
similarities to the Islamophobia we've seen since 2001. What's your take?
Both 9/11 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed the fragility
and limitations of Western institutions. For all the claims of “universal
values”, Western rule of law is not universal at all and does not apply to
non-Westerners. 9/11 gave us widespread use of torture in places like
Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and CIA “black sites”, drone strikes,
indefinite detentions, policies which likely would not have been adopted
against terrorists who were white and Christian. After 2/24 we discovered that
due process, presumption of innocence, property rights protections, the
principle of individual rather than collective responsibility, may not apply if
you are Russian. It turns out that you can be fired from your job, have your
bank accounts frozen, properties confiscated, simply because you are Russian.
The frenzy of Russophobic sentiment and policies, their speed and scope to the
point of disqualifying Russian cat breeds from international competitions, have
some disturbing similarities to the Kristallnacht and they set a precedent.
Moreover, the current bout of Russophobia has inflicted tremendous reputational
damage on US and European institutions. If you are a Latin American, an
African, a Middle-Easterner, an Asian, would you be willing to trust Western
banks, Western governments with your property, your livelihood, and even your
personal safety knowing that all of that can be taken from you in the same way
it was taken from so many Russians residing abroad? Do you really want to store
your wealth in dollars and euros subject to the whims of Western politicians? I
expect this will have long-term global economic consequences far greater than
human rights abuses after 9/11.
5. Finally, if someone is looking for nuanced views of
Russia/Ukraine that do not feature simplistic "good v. evil" frames,
where can they find it?
There are several independent media outlets that have
provided nuanced reporting of the sort wholly missing from mainstream media,
including from NPR and PBS. For more in-depth reporting on the Russia-Ukraine
conflict, I would recommend MintPress News which has run a large number of well
researched stories, including one tracing the development of Zelensky’s
relationship with neo-Nazi paramilitaries:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/ukraine-jewish-president-zelensky-made-peace-neo-nazi-paramilitaries/279862/
Another site I highly recommend is nakedcapitalism.com,
particularly its daily Links and Water Cooler features that aggregate some of the
most important stories of the day, and which also run feature articles on
relevant Russia-related topics. For example on the effect of the Russia-Ukraine
war on US-Mexico relations that shows the resentment felt in the “Global South”
due to high-handed Western policies toward Russia:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/03/us-mexico-relations-hit-new-low-over-russia-ukraine-conflict.html
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