Caught Between Failing Empires

Europe, censorship, and also an upcoming livestream with Gordon White

You and I both probably need a break from thinking about the absurd war situation, and especially the really bizarre jingoism suddenly seizing people, so I’ll write only a tiny bit about it and also tell you about something cool.

First of all, you probably heard that the EU has announced they’ll be blocking access to RT and Sputnik, two state-owned Russian media outlets, within European countries. There’s been no specific details announced yet as to whether that also means internet access as well. Such things are easily gotten around through proxy servers, but of course that level of technological understanding isn’t very common, meaning that for most there will be no ready access to any form of Russian news about this conflict.

This matters a lot. To be clear, both those outlets are quite damn biased. But so, also, are all media outlets, state-run or private, in Russia and the rest of the world. Learning to get through that bias is not an easy task, and it requires first identifying that bias. And the only way to do that is to compare the same news stories from several sources and learn to track the alterations in narrative.

We’ve been here before, remember. During the Iraq war many Middle Eastern English-language news services were blocked in the US—either dropped from cable or satellite television services through ‘private’ corporate decisions or official US government policy. Of course, in the US the corporations and the government generally work in tandem the same way they do in Russia. We call the Russian version of this ‘oligarchy’ and in the US it’s called ‘democracy,’ but either way it’s pretty much the same thing.

What should worry us about this decision is not so much the present conflict but rather the possibility of a larger one. NATO countries are shipping weapons to Ukraine to help them defend from the invasion. This is at least part of the reason why Putin ordered a much larger ‘defensive’ stance (including nuclear readiness). To understand why, consider what happens if NATO and EU governments decide to send even more weapons. At what point does ‘giving military aid’ to one side in a conflict start to look more like actually taking part in the conflict?

Let’s put this another way. Imagine we’re witnessing a fight between two people, one of them weaker than the other. And then we hand the weaker one something he can use to hit the stronger one back. And we keep doing it.

Unless the stronger guy is a complete idiot, eventually he’ll realise he’s got a few options. He can start hitting the weaker guy really, really hard in hopes of knocking him out faster. Or he can stop fighting altogether. Or, he can hit us.

The first option for Russia (hit Ukraine really, really hard) would mean civilian casualties. Maybe you haven’t noticed this, but Russia has been showing a very peculiar restraint regarding civilians, which the Ukrainian government and Western media is spinning as Russia just being ineffectual or Ukrainians being better fighters.

The US showed no such restraint in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, killing civilians without remorse because they knew it was a relatively quick way to make those nations surrender. Russia has always had that option, but it’s so far avoided it.

The second option, just stop fighting, would be super nice of Russia to pick. That’s the one we all want, and that’s what NATO and the EU are hoping for by giving Ukraine all these weapons. It’s also super unlikely, though.

The last option—hit those helping the weaker guy—means something very very awful. NATO and the EU are betting that will never happen, though Germany’s sudden reversal of decades of de-militarization suggests maybe they believe it might be possible regardless.

It’s unlikely, right? I mean, we’re supposed to be at the end of history and all. But the thing that makes it not as unlikely as we would wish it were is the US.

A lot has been made of Russia being a collapsing political and military state. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been narrated as a last-ditch effort to make Russia and himself relevant again, or at least to appear powerful. The US, though, is in a similar situation, as there’s been a long trend of nations in the Global South and also in Europe becoming less and less subservient to dictates from Washington DC.

One of the most odious things about Trump for the Democrats in the US was how he had eroded a sense that the US was the moral leader of the world. I’d argue this had been happening under Obama as well, but it all really started under George W. Bush and on account of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Going along with what the US wanted had become quite an unpopular thing for a European leader to do, at least as far as the people who elected them were concerned. This has meant that Europe was becoming increasingly independent of US interests, and this put NATO into a situation of diminishing relevancy.

Ukraine is a chance for the US to get back its ‘moral’ authority and for NATO to appear relevant again. Democrats are saying as much, and also even asserting that the apparent European unity against Russia is specifically because of Biden’s leadership.

They might be right, but I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation.

European nations rushing to arm Ukraine may in fact be their own attempt at heading off a US escalation. This would explain Germany’s sudden desire to turn back into a military power. The alternative for them is relying even more heavily on the US for their own security, which makes them more dependent and subservient to America.

In other words, Europe may be hoping that by deterring one fading empire to their east, they can eventually escape from the grip of another fading empire to their west.

That might actually work, but only if the US can be prevented from escalating this. Unfortunately, the best way to prevent the US doing that is from within, a massive anti-war movement shutting down any possibility of Biden expanding this.

That’s why shutting down Russian news sites is really bad. If the only news about what is happening is coming from one side, and if there is no counter-narrative to balance it out or at least help people see where the biases of Western news accounts might lie, it will be impossible to mobilize people against war. Especially worrisome is the way anyone arguing for a broader understanding of what is happening gets shut down or smeared as a traitor.

As I said, this has happened before. Anyone arguing that maybe the Iraqi resistance to the US invasion might have a legitimate point was treasonous. One of my first political street brawls was defending a socialist hall in Seattle that was being mobbed by far-right protestors (including a rabidly anti-Muslim Rabbi and members of his synogogue) for a sign they socialists had put in the window stating “victory to the Iraqi resistance.”

Me in 2004. That dude with the flag was actually kinda scary.

So much and so little has changed. Support for Ukrainian resistance is the new vogue thing to do, and that’s great I guess, but it’s hard for me to look at photos of everyday people arming themselves there and not also see the images of everyday Iraqi people who did the same thing decades ago. They were all ‘terrorists,’ we were told, because that’s what fit our nationalist media narrative. When that same nationalist media narrative now describes a different group of people who are doing the exact same the Iraqis did instead as heroes, it’s hard not to wonder what the larger goal is here.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say on this. And I promised you at the beginning something that won’t be about the war and maybe might be a fun distraction.

Tomorrow (1 March 2022), I’ll be on a livestream with Gordon White. This is the second time I’ve been honored to appear on his show, and I’m pretty excited.

We’ll officially be talking about my latest book, Being Pagan. More than likely we’ll talk about other things too, like his latest book on a similar theme (I just received a copy yesterday). We’ll probably talk a bit about politics too, but not too much I promise.

To watch it live, go to this link. It starts at 9PM Luxembourg/France/Germany time, so it’ll be afternoonish for US/Canada viewers and 20h for UK viewers. The video link is set to your local time wherever you view it, so you can figure out the precise start time for you there. You can also set a reminder via YouTube.

If you miss it live, it will be available afterwards as well. And if you’re interested in our previous conversation, this is the link for it:

Also, Gordon’s latest book is available here, and my latest one is here.