Have you noticed how every major foreign policy crisis since the US and UK’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has peeled off another layer of the left into joining the pro-NATO, pro-war camp?
It is now hard to remember that many millions marched in the US and Europe against the attack on Iraq. It sometimes feels like there is no one left who is not cheerleading the next wave of profits for the West’s military-industrial complex (usually referred to as the “defense industry” by those very same profiteers).
Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked, or suffering years of austerity, simply to line the pockets of Blackwater, Halliburton and Raytheon. And all the more so when such a war is sold to them on the basis of a huge deception.
So since then, the US has been repackaging its neocolonialism via proxy wars that are a much easier sell. There have been a succession of them: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela and now Ukraine. Each time, a few more leftists are lured into the camp of the war hawks by the West’s selfless, humanitarian instincts – promoted, of course, through the barrel of a Western-supplied arsenal. That process has reached its nadir with Ukraine.
Greenwald on the interests of the west's military-industrial complex: 'Right at the moment when the market for these weapons disappeared, when the US finally got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, lo and behold there's this new market in Ukraine' https://t.co/s3wVNbkOJN
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 6, 2022
Nuclear face-off
I recently wrote about the paranoid ravings of celebrity “left-wing” journalist Paul Mason, who now sees the Kremlin’s hand behind any dissension from a full-throttle charge towards a nuclear face-off with Russia.
Behind the scenes, he has been sounding out Western intelligence agencies in a bid to covertly deplatform and demonetize any independent journalists who still dare to wonder whether arming Ukraine to the hilt or recruiting it into NATO – even though it shares a border that Russia views as existentially important – might not be an entirely wise use of taxpayers’ money.
It is not hard to imagine that Mason is representative of the wider thinking of establishment journalists, even those who claim to be on the left.
But I want to take on here a more serious proponent of this kind of ideology than the increasingly preposterous Mason. Because swelling kneejerk support for US imperial wars – as long, of course, as Washington’s role is thinly disguised – is becoming ever more common among leftwing academics too.
Absolutely withering, must-read stuff from mighty @Jonathan_K_Cook on the willing prostration of Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Mason to intelligence services, and abetting of power in targeting independent anti-war journalists Can't wait for part two. https://t.co/XSmcexwChx
— Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg) June 21, 2022
The latest cheerleader for the military-industrial complex is Slavoj Zizek, the famed Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual whose work has gained him international prominence. His latest piece – published where else but the Guardian – is a morass of sloppy thinking, moral evasion and double speak. Which is why I think it is worth deconstructing. It encapsulates all the worst geostrategic misconceptions of Western intellectuals at the moment.
Zizek, who is supposedly an expert on ideology and propaganda, and has even scripted and starred in a couple of documentaries on the subject, seems now to be utterly blind to his own susceptibility to propaganda.
Cod psychology
He starts, naturally enough, with a straw man: that those opposed to the West’s focus on arming Ukraine rather than using its considerable muscle to force Kyiv and Moscow to the negotiating table are in the wrong. Opposition to dragging out the war for as long as possible, however many Ukrainians and Russians die, with the aim of “weakening Russia”, as US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wants; and opposition to leaving millions of people in poorer parts of the world to be plunged deeper into poverty or to starve is equated by Zizek to “pacifism”.
Playing games with the lives of Ukrainians – and risking nuclear war – simply to 'weaken' Russia is, Chomsky notes, 'morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we’re upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what’s involved'
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 17, 2022
“Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of [John Lennon’s song] ‘Imagine’,” writes Zizek. But the only one dwelling in the world of the imaginary is Zizek and those who think like him.
The left’s mantra of “Stop the war!” can’t be reduced to kneejerk pacifism. It derives from a political and moral worldview. It opposes the militarism of competitive, resource-hungry nation-states. It opposes the war industries that not only destroy whole countries but risk global nuclear annihilation in advancing their interests. It opposes the profit motive for a war that has incentivised a global elite to continue investing in planet-wide rape and pillage rather than addressing a looming ecological catastrophe. All of that context is ignored in Zizek’s lengthy essay.
Instead, he prefers to take a detour into cod psychology, telling us that Russian president Vladimir Putin sees himself as Peter the Great. Putin will not be satisfied simply with regaining the parts of Ukraine that historically belonged to Russia and have always provided its navy with its only access to the Black Sea. No, the Russian president is hell-bent on global conquest. And Europe is next – or so Zizek argues.
Even if we naively take the rhetoric of embattled leaders at face value (remember those weapons of mass destruction Iraq’s Saddam Hussein supposedly had?), it is still a major stretch for Zizek to cite one speech by Putin as proof that the Russian leader wants his own version of the Third Reich.
Not least, we must address the glaring cognitive dissonance at the heart of the Western, NATO-inspired discourse on Ukraine, something Zizek refuses to do. How can Russia be so weak it has managed only to subdue small parts of Ukraine at great military cost, while it is at the same time a military superpower poised to take over the whole of Europe?
The US war lobby is so massively bloated that it would be simply astonishing if it didn't have a (usually covert) finger prised into every major conflict zone on the planet – and a strong vested interest in perpetuating those conflicts too pic.twitter.com/XOVCkqx78x
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 4, 2022
Zizek is horrified by Putin’s conceptual division of the world into those states that are sovereign and those that are colonized. Or as he quotes Putin observing: “Any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”
Sovereign or colonised?
The famed philosopher reads this as proof that Russia wants as its colonies: “Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states … and ultimately Europe itself”. But if he weren’t so blinded by NATO ideology, he might read Putin’s words in a quite different way. Isn’t Putin simply restating Washington realpolitik? The US, through NATO, is the real sovereign in Europe and is pushing its sovereignty ever closer to Russia’s borders.
US military bases around the world. pic.twitter.com/9xHzhIjZEJ
— BRISL (@BRI_SL) August 4, 2019
Putin’s concern about Ukraine being colonized by the US military-industrial complex is essentially the same as US concerns in the 1960s about the Soviet Union filling Cuba with its nuclear missiles. Washington’s concern justified a confrontation that moved the world possibly the closest it has ever come to nuclear annihilation.