Over the past week, hundreds of my progressive friends have made online posts about their solidarity with Ukraine: images of the victims of war; tales of heroic Ukrainian soldiers; blue and yellow flags added to every profile picture. Of course, I have no problem with such expressions of solidarity; it’s great when we show compassion for the suffering of others.
There is one thing that we should all have a problem with, though: the selective nature of this “solidarity.”
My friend “Misha,” born in eastern Ukraine and raised in Russia, recently told me the tragic story of his relatives back home. (All translations from Russian are mine.)
“They lived their whole lives in Ukraine, but then the bombs started dropping. One aerial attack hit my aunt and uncle’s apartment building, and they had to flee the country. Meanwhile, two cousins of mine fled to other parts of Ukraine. The war tore my family apart.”
It sounds a lot like the war stories we’ve been hearing this week, doesn’t it? There’s just one thing: this all happened in 2014. Misha’s relatives were not fleeing from Putin’s bombs, but from the bombs dropped by their own Ukrainian government—bombs that our tax dollars paid for.
Washington has sent $1.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine’s government since the 2014 Maidan coup. Between 2014 and 2021, upwards of 14,000 Ukrainians died in the internal fighting, before Putin ever began military operations there. And yet, according to the logic of Washington’s agenda, those victims don’t count—only Putin’s victims do.
In the book “Manufacturing Consent,” Noam Chomsky discusses the concept of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. Whether or not a person is deemed “worthy of our compassion” depends largely on whether they are the victim of our political enemies. My Russian friend Elena explained it thusly, in an online discussion:
“We need to learn to see beyond the tip of our own nose, to care about protecting more than just our own izbá (cabin). People didn’t just start dying in Ukraine yesterday. Or what … Are the people who died there over the past eight years not ‘the right kind’ of people to care about?”
Ukraine has been in the throes of internal conflict since 2014. Jacobin magazine published an excellent summary of the 2014 coup that sparked the violence, a strange marriage between legitimate citizen protests, neoliberal Western interests, and a vanguard of neo-Nazis and other far-right militias. (“A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War,” by Branko Marcetic. https://bit.ly/3vwZ78K )
While any armed conflict is messy, the presence of neo-Nazis makes this one especially frightening. In May 2014, right-wingers burned 31 people alive inside an administrative building. (https://bbc.in/3vBaJY6 ) Following the coup, Ukraine’s government incorporated the Azov Battalion—a far-right militia whose insignia looks suspiciously similar to the SS logo—into their regular National Guard. The humanitarian crisis has been raging on long before Russia invaded.
Do any of these facts justify Putin’s invasion? Of course not. They should, however, put Ukraine’s tragedy into perspective. In our neoliberal media, meanwhile, the only victims we hear about are our enemies’ victims — and this has always been the case.
Back when George W. Bush was drumming up support for his invasion of Iraq, we heard non-stop news coverage of Saddam’s cruelty. A few years earlier, we heard of Milosevic’s victims in Serbia. While all of these tragedies are real, there is always an agenda behind feeding us a selective version of it. “See this tragedy? This is why we need to bomb Serbia. This is why we need to invade Iraq. This is why we need to fight Putin.”
There is a consistent double standard for the victims of “their bombs” vs. “our bombs.” When Putin attacked Ukraine, the cover of Time magazine depicted a sinister tank with the text, “How Putin shattered Europe’s dreams.” When we bombed Belgrade in 1999, meanwhile, Time’s triumphant headline was, “BRINGING THE SERBS TO HEEL: A massive bombing attack opens the door to peace.”
The weekend following Putin’s invasion, Saturday Night Live opened with a reverent performance by a Ukrainian folk choir. When Washington began bombing Afghanistan in 2001, they featured a silly musical number with “Kandahar” as the butt of the joke. While our current news cycle focuses on Ukraine, our own bombs have continued to fall on the people of Somalia and Yemen. We are creating new refugees every second of every day; they just aren’t lucky enough to be “worthy victims.”
Pointing to these facts does not make us Putin-lovers or Republicans. Far from the “what-aboutism” that we associate with disingenuous claims like “all lives matter,” this is simply a matter of putting the Ukraine conflict into its proper context. The big picture here is a game of bloody, high-stakes geopolitical chess, with NATO continuing to aggressively march up to Russia’s doorstep. The father of the containment strategy itself, George F. Kennan, stated back in 1997 that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
I’m happy to see so many American friends moved by the suffering in Ukraine. If we truly do care about the victims of war, though, we should have no problem finding a non-profit at home that works with refugees. And more often than not, those refugees will not be the victims of Putin, but of our own government.
My Russian friend, Anya, recently expressed the importance of making sure our compassion is open and unqualified: “The true definition of peace is when we feel compassion for everyone’s children … Not just for our own.”
David J. Schmidt is an author, podcaster, multilingual translator, and homebrewer who splits his time between Mexico City and San Diego, California. He has published books, essays, short stories and articles in English and Spanish, and is the co-host of the podcast To Russia with Love. Website: holyghoststories.com or follow him on Twitter: @SchmidtTales
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2022
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