hankyoreh

Locals wait in line at a humanitarian food bank in Mariupol, Ukraine, on June 10, 2022. (TASS/Yonhap News)

Slavoj Žižek

In the last weeks, the Western public seemed obsessed with the topic of “What goes on in Putin’s mind?” — do the people around him tell him the whole truth? Is he ill or going insane? Are we pushing him into a corner where he will see no other way out to save face than to accelerate the conflict into a total war? We should stop this obsession with the "red line," this endless search for the right measure between support of Ukraine and avoiding total war.

The “red line” is not an objective fact, Putin himself is redrawing it all the time, and we contribute to his redrawing with our reactions to Russia’s activities. A question like “Did US intelligence-sharing with Ukraine cross a line?” makes us obliterate the basic fact that it was Russia that crossed the line with its attack on Ukraine. So instead of perceiving ourselves as a group that simply reacts to Putin as an impenetrable evil genius, we should turn the gaze back at ourselves: What do we — the “free West” — want in this affair?

We should analyze the ambiguity of our support of Ukraine with the same cruelty we analyze Russia’s stance. We should reach beyond the double standards applied today to the very foundations of European liberalism. Remember how, in the Western liberal tradition, colonization was often justified in the terms of the rights of working people. John Locke, the great Enlightenment philosopher and advocate of human rights, justified white settlers’ seizure of land from Native Americans with a strange left-sounding argument against excessive private property.

His premise was that an individual should be allowed to own only as much land as he is able to use productively, not large tracts of land that he is not able to use (and then eventually gives it to others to use and gets rent for it). In North America, natives claimed that vast tracts of land are theirs although they were not able to use them productively but mostly for hunting non-domesticated animals, so their land was unproductively wasted and the white settlers who wanted to use it for intense agriculture had the right to seize it for the benefit of humanity, the argument went.

In the ongoing crisis, both sides present their acts as something they simply had to do: the West had to help Ukraine remain free and independent, Russia was compelled to intervene militarily to protect its safety.

The latest example can be found in a CNN headline about Finland’s possible accession to NATO: “Kremlin will be 'forced to take retaliatory steps' if Nordic nation joins NATO, Russia’s Foreign Ministry says.” But no, it will not be “forced,” in the same way that Russia was not “forced” to attack Ukraine. This decision appears as “forced” only if one accepts the whole set of ideological and geopolitical assumptions that sustain Russian politics.

These assumptions have to be analyzed closely, without any taboos. One often hears that we should draw a strict line of separation between Putin’s politics and the great Russian culture, but this line of separation is much more porous than it may appear. We should resolutely reject the idea that, after years of patiently trying to resolve the Ukrainian crisis through negotiations, Russia was finally forced or compelled to attack Ukraine — one is NEVER forced to attack and annihilate a whole country. The roots are much deeper, I am ready to call them properly metaphysical.

Anatoly Chubais, the father of Russian oligarchs (and orchestrator of the fast privatization in 1992), said in 2004: “I’ve re-read all of Dostoevsky over the past three months. And I feel nothing but almost physical hatred for the man. He is certainly a genius, but his idea of Russians as special, holy people, his cult of suffering and the false choices he presents make me want to tear him to pieces.” As much as I dislike Chubais for his politics, I think he was right about Dostoyevsky, who provided the “deepest” expression of the Eurasian opposition between Europe and Russia: individualism versus collective spirit, materialist hedonism versus the spirit of sacrifice, and so on.

Russia now presents its invasion as a new step in the fight for decolonization, a fight against Western globalization. In a text published on May 13, Dmitry Medvedev, the ex-president of Russia and now the deputy secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, wrote that “the world is waiting for the collapse of the idea of an American-centric world and the emergence of new international alliances based on pragmatic criteria” — here, “pragmatic criteria” means disregard for universal human rights, of course. But I agree with Medvedev when he attributes to the West a “complete disregard for the right to private property, which until recent events was one of the pillars of Western democracy.” Indeed, we will have to limit the “right to private property,” not just of Russian oligarchs but also of our neo-feudal billionaires.

So we should also draw red lines, but in a way that makes clear our solidarity with the Third World. Medvedev predicts that, because of the war in Ukraine, “in some states, hunger may occur due to the food crisis” — a statement of breath-taking cynicism. As of May 2022, around 25 million metric tons of grain were slowly rotting in Odessa, already on ships or in silos, since the port is blocked by the Russian navy.

A report on May 7 read, “The United Nations World Food Programme has warned that millions of people are ‘marching towards starvation’ unless ports in southern Ukraine which have been closed because of the war, are reopened.” Europe now promises to help Ukraine transport the grain by railway and trucks, but this is clearly not enough. A step more is needed: a clear demand to open the port for the export of grain, inclusive of sending defensive military ships. It’s not about Ukraine, it’s about the hunger of hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia. It is here that the red line should be drawn.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, recently said, “Imagine [the Ukraine war] is happening in Africa, or the Middle East. Imagine Ukraine is Palestine. Imagine Russia is the United States.” As expected, comparing the conflict in Ukraine with the plight of the Palestinians “offended many Israelis, who believe there are no similarities. For example, many point out that Ukraine is a sovereign, democratic country, but don't consider Palestine as a state.” Of course, Palestine is not a state precisely because Israel denies its right to be a state — the same way Russia denies the right of Ukraine to be a sovereign state. As much as I find Lavrov’s remarks repulsive, he sometimes deftly manipulates the truth.

Yes, the liberal West is hypocritical, applying its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way, you open yourself up to immanent criticism. When we criticize the liberal West, we use its own standards.

What Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy, because it is without global ethical standards, practicing mere pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China: China accepts the new Afghanistan while the Taliban will ignore what China is doing with Uyghurs. This is, in nuce, the new globalization advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality — the moment we apply double standards, we are no less “pragmatic” than Russia.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]