As so often the case, I agree and affirm the point of the essay . . . but query how much the author understands reality of life in the USA. Take "I highly expect anti-Asian sentiment in the US to increase." The only anti-Asian sentiment in the USA is in elite university admissions departments and among low-status black communities. Take for example my small community of 15,000 in rural SW Missouri. We have a Vietnamese Catholic seminary founded by refugees from the war . . . and this week as every week since the founding my city's population will swell by at least 40,000 as Vietnamese families from all over the USA arrive for religious, cultural, and family events. And the local population welcomes and supports the whole event--it's an interracial party. Everybody has a swell time. But then we are not an elite university nor do we have a different sort of racial composition.
Thank you for drawing attention to the Amnesty report. They are taking a lot of flak for it, which suggests they're right over the correct target.
A point you didn't make but could have is the Ukrainian forces are not just hiding in civilian areas but bombarding them too, in particular the city of Donetsk. Anti-personnel ordnance, called Petals I think, are being used to maim civilians.
Likewise the HIMARS systems given as "military aid" (an obscene contradiction in terms) give Ukraine the capacity to shell enemies and civilians alike, not forgetting their own combatants taken as Prisoners Of War, from further away. Inevitably this entices DPR, LPR, and RF forces northward and westward in order to push the NATO/Ukrainian artilleries further away from the Donetsk Basin.
Great and courageous writing about a very interesting topic. I myself scratched the surface of Imagined Communities in my last newsletter titled 'How Anyone Can Be A World Citizen'. Highly simplified and mainly meant to inspire rather than tackling the important question you asked: At what point do we just live? The answer probably varies greatly for different people. It may be depended on the level of consciousness as well as are their basic needs met? But, I believe that with a little reflection anyone should be able to answer this question for themselves. So, thanks for asking, Rhyd!
This reminds me of Leopold Kohr’s book “The Breakdown of Nations” where he argues “Little states produce greater wisdom” and speaks of the “crisis of bigness”. Paul Kingsnorth introduced me to Kohr.
I believe that this is a key question of this interregnum period we now seem to be going through.
As an actual political activist for about 15 years and then in my head for another 30 ( with all sorts of imagined communities in both phases!), my initial reaction to the choice of whether to nurture, shelter and actually try to grow the life around me, was experienced on a personal psychological level as a defeat--I failed, I'm a loser etc.
But on second, third, and fourth thought such an effort to nurture and shelter now strikes me as necessary, profound and extremely worthwhile and full of enough struggles of a surprisingly different nature to last 10 lifetimes.
Great writing all around, by you, The Guardian, and Amnesty International.
Many thoughts here, some conflicting, mainly because of the nuance of the situation that like most things in life keep us away from a hard, fast A or B solution.
War is one of those human things that boils existence of the people involved in it to very simple things. Stay alive and kill the enemy. All things start with that premise. Ethics and morals should (wish I could use italics for emphasis) be taken into account but are often lost in war throughout history because the fear of death puts everything else aside. There are many things that can affect that for the better, such as training, command structure, accountability. Those things don't exist in most militaries as much as they should. We could say that those soldiers should not be in the house in the neighborhood because it risks the civilians. The soldiers likely say if we are in the woods we don't have shelter or food or warmth. Our ethics and morals say too damn bad it is your duty to not put those civilians at risk, those soldiers may say you have never experienced what we have experienced. My personal ethics and morals say that as a solider I should never put civilians at risk however I have experienced enough unique situations in emergency services where I know one should not judge until directly placed into that position in the first place. Until you have had your life directly threatened by violence you do not know how that affects your way of thinking. A lot of things you believe in disappear completely in that moment.
A note on pacifism. I love the idea of it. It is the ideal we should strive for. The danger with pacifism is that there are those that will take advantage of it. Even in the fantasy I love of the Star Trek Next Generation universe the Federation and Star Fleet with it's premise of science and exploration still had to throw down. Sometimes in defense of others who could not defend themselves, sometimes in defense of itself. The question boils down to what is worse, not fighting and living under whatever conditions arise or death. I think the question is not so much should we or should we not fight but what is worse, death or a miserable existence.
Now one could easily argue that if Zelensky surrendered to Putin and Russia annexed Ukraine not much would change for the average person. To analyse that one would have to look at what occurred in Crimea after the 2014 annexation. That is difficult because it has been under an information and democratic lockdown since then. That is part of the challenge of assessing whether the Russian people support the war, many are afraid to even take part in a survey for fear of being jailed for what has been made illegal, criticism of the so called special military operation.
Here is what it boils down to for me. And this is just me, I judge not those who have a different point of view, I am not saying I am right or wrong in this. If the choice for me is risk of death by fighting in the defense of family, friends, others who can not protect themselves or living in an existence in which I am constantly abused or fearful of death or torture or even just living a miserable day to day existence where all I am doing is trying to stay alive to get to the next day I believe I would choose the risk of death in the fight. Now I have never been in that situation so that may change the moment the first bomb drops. I can not choose pacifism if it led to a situation in which I did not want to live. You could argue that my choice affects others who may not want to fight, puts their lives in danger. I would counter-argue that they will be at risk anyways, no invading army ever handed out cake and toys when they conquered a land. Russia's history when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union speaks to that.
Diplomacy, compromise, negotiation, mutual understanding, all these among others should be our priorities. However until we live in a world where abusive and exploitative people don't exist a situation may arise in which fighting is the only option. When that occurs morals and ethics should come into place. Not bombing civilian buildings but also not housing uninjured soldiers in civilian buildings should occur. But see then where we get nuance here? If a city is surrounded by a military force where are the military forces supposed to go? We could then return to the basic premise of Russia never should have attacked in the first place. Doesn't mean that it absolves Ukraine military from their actions but it certainly is a factor.
I suppose I will leave with this. Yes, the person at the protest who throws the rock at the police is at fault if they do so in full understanding that the police will respond with tear gas which will affect the other peaceful protestors in the crowd. But what if the police were not there at all? Then what would the protestor throw a rock at? What if we lived in a society where that protest never had to occur at all?
At the end of the day I will not blame a warrior for being a warrior. Sure not all people should be a warrior but most are just trying to stay alive. It is the people who put them in that situation in the first place, either as the aggressor or senior leadership who did not provide them with the food, equipment, training to not put civilians at risk, that should be held accountable.
"I guess this question reveals me to be one of those really awful humans called “pacifists,” but so be it."
Finally! Someone else "brave" enough to say it out loud, like it's some sort of sinful confession among leftism. If only more people would acknowledge what that originally meant and not take it for being a "wussy coward who doesn't want to get his or her hands dirty with lobbing off heads or burning churches".
I personally started to have enough from certain activist environments (especially those frequented by Stalinists and Maoists, but also anarchists) when I almost felt like some sort of "counterrevolutionary" scum for being a self-declared pacifist. I'll never forget their faces, their plainly baffled expressions. Apparently abhorring the shedding of human blood no longer means a profound rejection of pointless violence, war and crime.
As many, I do believe in defending your closest people and self-defence in the case of aggression, but that's pretty much it.
Much of these attitudes of fantasizing with a big war front or some sort of mass popular army fall into the realm of collective fantasies, what one of you guys actually pointed out in the last post among the comments. And like that guy, I'm also quite pessimistic about mass collective societies and groups. Pretty much the same point of this piece.
Great article! I wish I had answers, too. In fact, I would say Ukraine is but an example of a problem that is close to home for many Americans. I live a mile from gas wells. They continually fail to light their stack off so methane just diffuses into the atmosphere. They also make the likelihood of radon percolating up through the soil or my well far higher. In other areas, such natural gas wells have caused earthquakes in states that never had earthquakes, such as Oklahoma. And that’s ignoring the purpose for which the gas is extracted- to power a fossil fuel driven economy which is ruining the planet. There is little doubt that a war is being waged and one of the battlefields is right up the road. And yet I do nothing. I have children, and to take the risk of fighting for their future would likely be to destroy their present. Is this the right choice? Similarly, given the undemocratic nature of recent SCOTUS decisions, it seems that violence would be the only effective means to restore female human rights or to maintain those left. Yet again, there seems little point. I guess a good bit of what turns the tide for me on pacifism vs rebellion is the probability of success. I know a lot of leftists condemn such a stance in theory as cowardice or point out that someone has to take the first step but I think pragmatically assessing the realistic projected results of an action is necessary. Is this a war that can be won, or is it meaningless sacrifices of lives for some abstract goal? And when it comes to Ukraine, I really don’t see the point. Independent Ukraine was still awful. The Russians may be more awful, but is the war worth it to get that little bit less awful? And from here in the US, how can my country justify propping up a war where we just don’t have a dog in the fight?
I don’t think asking these questions makes you a pacifist. At least, I’ve asked these questions and don’t consider myself a pacifist. I think the fight to create and defend Rojava was worth it. To radically change the position of women in society, to carve out the space for a tree-based agriculture to replace the annual grain-based agriculture forced on the region by conquerors, those were things worth fighting for. I could visualize thousands of people who would benefit from the defense of Rojava. When I try to visualize who benefits from the defense of Ukraine, what comes to mind is a few people in business suits. There are shades of grey between pacifism, which I generally take to mean a stance that violence is never the answer, and immature rebellion that attempts to add violence to situations where it is neither necessary or desirable. The old saying “better a live fox than a dead lion” seems like one the left ought to take to heart. But of course, I doubt our influencer masters who may or may not be on the payroll of some three-letter agency are likely to teach strategies or tactics that would actually help the left.
As so often the case, I agree and affirm the point of the essay . . . but query how much the author understands reality of life in the USA. Take "I highly expect anti-Asian sentiment in the US to increase." The only anti-Asian sentiment in the USA is in elite university admissions departments and among low-status black communities. Take for example my small community of 15,000 in rural SW Missouri. We have a Vietnamese Catholic seminary founded by refugees from the war . . . and this week as every week since the founding my city's population will swell by at least 40,000 as Vietnamese families from all over the USA arrive for religious, cultural, and family events. And the local population welcomes and supports the whole event--it's an interracial party. Everybody has a swell time. But then we are not an elite university nor do we have a different sort of racial composition.
Forest logic did not help Native Americans even one little bit though.
Thank you for drawing attention to the Amnesty report. They are taking a lot of flak for it, which suggests they're right over the correct target.
A point you didn't make but could have is the Ukrainian forces are not just hiding in civilian areas but bombarding them too, in particular the city of Donetsk. Anti-personnel ordnance, called Petals I think, are being used to maim civilians.
Likewise the HIMARS systems given as "military aid" (an obscene contradiction in terms) give Ukraine the capacity to shell enemies and civilians alike, not forgetting their own combatants taken as Prisoners Of War, from further away. Inevitably this entices DPR, LPR, and RF forces northward and westward in order to push the NATO/Ukrainian artilleries further away from the Donetsk Basin.
Great and courageous writing about a very interesting topic. I myself scratched the surface of Imagined Communities in my last newsletter titled 'How Anyone Can Be A World Citizen'. Highly simplified and mainly meant to inspire rather than tackling the important question you asked: At what point do we just live? The answer probably varies greatly for different people. It may be depended on the level of consciousness as well as are their basic needs met? But, I believe that with a little reflection anyone should be able to answer this question for themselves. So, thanks for asking, Rhyd!
This reminds me of Leopold Kohr’s book “The Breakdown of Nations” where he argues “Little states produce greater wisdom” and speaks of the “crisis of bigness”. Paul Kingsnorth introduced me to Kohr.
"At what point do you just live?"
I believe that this is a key question of this interregnum period we now seem to be going through.
As an actual political activist for about 15 years and then in my head for another 30 ( with all sorts of imagined communities in both phases!), my initial reaction to the choice of whether to nurture, shelter and actually try to grow the life around me, was experienced on a personal psychological level as a defeat--I failed, I'm a loser etc.
But on second, third, and fourth thought such an effort to nurture and shelter now strikes me as necessary, profound and extremely worthwhile and full of enough struggles of a surprisingly different nature to last 10 lifetimes.
Great writing all around, by you, The Guardian, and Amnesty International.
Many thoughts here, some conflicting, mainly because of the nuance of the situation that like most things in life keep us away from a hard, fast A or B solution.
War is one of those human things that boils existence of the people involved in it to very simple things. Stay alive and kill the enemy. All things start with that premise. Ethics and morals should (wish I could use italics for emphasis) be taken into account but are often lost in war throughout history because the fear of death puts everything else aside. There are many things that can affect that for the better, such as training, command structure, accountability. Those things don't exist in most militaries as much as they should. We could say that those soldiers should not be in the house in the neighborhood because it risks the civilians. The soldiers likely say if we are in the woods we don't have shelter or food or warmth. Our ethics and morals say too damn bad it is your duty to not put those civilians at risk, those soldiers may say you have never experienced what we have experienced. My personal ethics and morals say that as a solider I should never put civilians at risk however I have experienced enough unique situations in emergency services where I know one should not judge until directly placed into that position in the first place. Until you have had your life directly threatened by violence you do not know how that affects your way of thinking. A lot of things you believe in disappear completely in that moment.
A note on pacifism. I love the idea of it. It is the ideal we should strive for. The danger with pacifism is that there are those that will take advantage of it. Even in the fantasy I love of the Star Trek Next Generation universe the Federation and Star Fleet with it's premise of science and exploration still had to throw down. Sometimes in defense of others who could not defend themselves, sometimes in defense of itself. The question boils down to what is worse, not fighting and living under whatever conditions arise or death. I think the question is not so much should we or should we not fight but what is worse, death or a miserable existence.
Now one could easily argue that if Zelensky surrendered to Putin and Russia annexed Ukraine not much would change for the average person. To analyse that one would have to look at what occurred in Crimea after the 2014 annexation. That is difficult because it has been under an information and democratic lockdown since then. That is part of the challenge of assessing whether the Russian people support the war, many are afraid to even take part in a survey for fear of being jailed for what has been made illegal, criticism of the so called special military operation.
Here is what it boils down to for me. And this is just me, I judge not those who have a different point of view, I am not saying I am right or wrong in this. If the choice for me is risk of death by fighting in the defense of family, friends, others who can not protect themselves or living in an existence in which I am constantly abused or fearful of death or torture or even just living a miserable day to day existence where all I am doing is trying to stay alive to get to the next day I believe I would choose the risk of death in the fight. Now I have never been in that situation so that may change the moment the first bomb drops. I can not choose pacifism if it led to a situation in which I did not want to live. You could argue that my choice affects others who may not want to fight, puts their lives in danger. I would counter-argue that they will be at risk anyways, no invading army ever handed out cake and toys when they conquered a land. Russia's history when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union speaks to that.
Diplomacy, compromise, negotiation, mutual understanding, all these among others should be our priorities. However until we live in a world where abusive and exploitative people don't exist a situation may arise in which fighting is the only option. When that occurs morals and ethics should come into place. Not bombing civilian buildings but also not housing uninjured soldiers in civilian buildings should occur. But see then where we get nuance here? If a city is surrounded by a military force where are the military forces supposed to go? We could then return to the basic premise of Russia never should have attacked in the first place. Doesn't mean that it absolves Ukraine military from their actions but it certainly is a factor.
I suppose I will leave with this. Yes, the person at the protest who throws the rock at the police is at fault if they do so in full understanding that the police will respond with tear gas which will affect the other peaceful protestors in the crowd. But what if the police were not there at all? Then what would the protestor throw a rock at? What if we lived in a society where that protest never had to occur at all?
At the end of the day I will not blame a warrior for being a warrior. Sure not all people should be a warrior but most are just trying to stay alive. It is the people who put them in that situation in the first place, either as the aggressor or senior leadership who did not provide them with the food, equipment, training to not put civilians at risk, that should be held accountable.
I don't know how to answer it, either, but you're absolutely right to ask it. Excellent, heart-rending piece. Thank you.
"I guess this question reveals me to be one of those really awful humans called “pacifists,” but so be it."
Finally! Someone else "brave" enough to say it out loud, like it's some sort of sinful confession among leftism. If only more people would acknowledge what that originally meant and not take it for being a "wussy coward who doesn't want to get his or her hands dirty with lobbing off heads or burning churches".
I personally started to have enough from certain activist environments (especially those frequented by Stalinists and Maoists, but also anarchists) when I almost felt like some sort of "counterrevolutionary" scum for being a self-declared pacifist. I'll never forget their faces, their plainly baffled expressions. Apparently abhorring the shedding of human blood no longer means a profound rejection of pointless violence, war and crime.
As many, I do believe in defending your closest people and self-defence in the case of aggression, but that's pretty much it.
Much of these attitudes of fantasizing with a big war front or some sort of mass popular army fall into the realm of collective fantasies, what one of you guys actually pointed out in the last post among the comments. And like that guy, I'm also quite pessimistic about mass collective societies and groups. Pretty much the same point of this piece.
Great article! I wish I had answers, too. In fact, I would say Ukraine is but an example of a problem that is close to home for many Americans. I live a mile from gas wells. They continually fail to light their stack off so methane just diffuses into the atmosphere. They also make the likelihood of radon percolating up through the soil or my well far higher. In other areas, such natural gas wells have caused earthquakes in states that never had earthquakes, such as Oklahoma. And that’s ignoring the purpose for which the gas is extracted- to power a fossil fuel driven economy which is ruining the planet. There is little doubt that a war is being waged and one of the battlefields is right up the road. And yet I do nothing. I have children, and to take the risk of fighting for their future would likely be to destroy their present. Is this the right choice? Similarly, given the undemocratic nature of recent SCOTUS decisions, it seems that violence would be the only effective means to restore female human rights or to maintain those left. Yet again, there seems little point. I guess a good bit of what turns the tide for me on pacifism vs rebellion is the probability of success. I know a lot of leftists condemn such a stance in theory as cowardice or point out that someone has to take the first step but I think pragmatically assessing the realistic projected results of an action is necessary. Is this a war that can be won, or is it meaningless sacrifices of lives for some abstract goal? And when it comes to Ukraine, I really don’t see the point. Independent Ukraine was still awful. The Russians may be more awful, but is the war worth it to get that little bit less awful? And from here in the US, how can my country justify propping up a war where we just don’t have a dog in the fight?
I don’t think asking these questions makes you a pacifist. At least, I’ve asked these questions and don’t consider myself a pacifist. I think the fight to create and defend Rojava was worth it. To radically change the position of women in society, to carve out the space for a tree-based agriculture to replace the annual grain-based agriculture forced on the region by conquerors, those were things worth fighting for. I could visualize thousands of people who would benefit from the defense of Rojava. When I try to visualize who benefits from the defense of Ukraine, what comes to mind is a few people in business suits. There are shades of grey between pacifism, which I generally take to mean a stance that violence is never the answer, and immature rebellion that attempts to add violence to situations where it is neither necessary or desirable. The old saying “better a live fox than a dead lion” seems like one the left ought to take to heart. But of course, I doubt our influencer masters who may or may not be on the payroll of some three-letter agency are likely to teach strategies or tactics that would actually help the left.