Grotesque Humanity
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian war. I don’t mean that as a joke, although in a just world it would be.
To confuse the power of the state with the fulfillment of rights is to disfigure humanity with the war machine. States have appropriated human rights, just as populism appropriates democracy, giving birth to monsters.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian war. I don’t mean that as a joke, although in a just world it would be. This grotesque subjugation has a humanitarian pretext.
Vladimir Putin authorized the military operation under the fabricated pretext of protecting ethnic Russians from a “genocide” allegedly promoted by the Ukrainian state in the Donbass region. According to Putin, it is a peaceful operation to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the neighboring country. A country with a democratically elected Jewish president.
Putin’s rhetorical model for the invasion is NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia during the war in Kosovo (1999), when the Atlantic alliance bombed the Balkan country without approval of the United Nations Security Council in order to halt genocidal violence against ethnic Albanians. More than two decades ago, Russia stood by while US forces subdued Slobodan Milosevic. Now they make a mockery.
Behind the geopolitical crisis of immense proportions there is the profound ideological crisis of the 21st century. A crisis that current politics is still ill-equipped to deal with.
The extra-legal justification for NATO’s intervention in Kosovo was built on the failures by the United Nations to react and stop genocides in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda. Human rights and humanitarianism changed its definition from the limits of war to the main reason for promoting war, providing an exception to deny sovereignty when humanitarian need requires, such as the “responsibility to protect”.
After 9/11, this super-sovereign logic was exploited as preemptive war by the neoconservatives of Bush Jr.’s administration to justify their war designs on the Mideast, precipitating disaster and atrocity. Today, Putin says that he is attacking Ukraine to prevent a war. So, what previously ended in tragedy, now repeats itself as a farce.
Have we already accepted the idea that human rights come from military force? To confuse the power of the state with the fulfillment of rights is to disfigure humanity with the war machine. States have appropriated human rights, just as populism appropriates democracy, giving birth to monsters.
Putin’s ideology is also a mockery of the post-Cold War liberal order. Putin’s neo-populism represents the heights of grotesque ideological perversion in the 21st century, unashamedly mixing political themes of the right with those of the left.
During the 1990s, the Russian writer, Eduard Limonov, a dissident from the former Soviet Union, also disillusioned with the West, saw in Serb nationalism and its struggle against NATO an example to rehabilitate the Russian people. He founded National Bolshevism, that, along with its paradoxical name, mixed fascism with the memory of a glorious past of the Soviet empire. Now the late Limonov and his intellectual cadre, like Aleksandr Dugin, are considered the philosophical foundations of Putinism.
Thus, Putin cultivates support from the new far-right in the world, such as Bolsonaro and Trump, while he presents himself as an “anti-imperialist” ally for the international left. His Soviet discourse is entirely aesthetic, but it is enough to win the support of many leftists around the world, such as the MAS leadership in Bolivia. In his speech before the invasion, Putin justified the destruction of Ukraine as the “decommunization” of the legacy of Vladimir Lenin, burying the anti-colonial principle of national self-determination and reviving the borders of the Russian Empire.
It would be a mistake to assign a coherent ideology to Putin. He is pure opportunism, authoritarianism, power for power’s sake. Neo-populism in the 21st century is not only unable to create a coherent historical narrative but is more comfortable operating from post-truth; the death of the great ideological narratives of the 20th century, what postmodern philosophers extolled as liberation, has become a dead end.
What the Ukrainian people are learning from their popular struggle against the military invasion is that no geopolitical alliance is going to come down from the sky to save them. Geopolitical games belong to States, not to the peoples of the world. Human rights do not emerge from state power, but from the consciousness of the people to save themselves, their humanity and resist the oppressor. It’s a great lesson to learn in the 21st century.