Unknown victims and universal lessons

Reflections on identity, motivation and politics. Soros and me. Epistemically alienated and trigger warned

A voice in the dark

Nowadays, most political conversations are filtered through the lens of identity. Have an issue about what’s happening in Palestine? Well, why don’t you shut up and listen to this ‘decolonial Arab/Jewish scholar’ who just so happens to have the same line on the matter as the US state department? Unsure about war with China? Shut up and listen to this Taiwanese activist who coincidentally is just fine with his or her territory becoming the staging ground for a war between two nuclear powers.

Of course, Ukraine might just be the pioneer in this field. Or at the very least, the most experienced user of this informational technology. Oh, you have good things to say about socialism in xyz country?

Of course, there are several things one could say in response. First, that the person making the meme probably didn’t live through communism. Second, that most former socialist countries have laws forbidding ‘propaganda praising the socialist totalitarian regimes’. Legislation enforced quite strictly in the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.

A window-washer who got a 1 year suspended sentence in 2019 in Ukraine for wearing a USSR shirt.

Third, that those who actually lived through socialism and those who materially lost out because of the end of socialism neither know English nor have the time or interest to be posting memes on twitter or facebook.

And naturally, when it comes to more present matters (not that wars over history are any less so), then any insufficiently militaristic opinion about the war in Ukraine on social media will instantly be swarming in duly indignant ‘Ukrainian voices’ informing you of the need to support arming Ukraine to the hilt, no negotiations, Putler the clinically insane warmonger, and so on and on.

Or rather, you’ll get a bunch of NATO country citizens with this profile picture informing you of the above.

Volodymyr Ishchenko has published an excellent article on the topic, titled ‘Ukrainian Voices’. I can’t agree enough with him when he advocates to

instead, starting from the tragedy of Ukraine, set out to articulate the questions of global relevance, search for their solutions, and contribute to universal human knowledge. Paradoxically, this requires a much deeper and more genuine engagement with Ukraine than happens now.

Universal lessons

To begin with, I can echo Ishchenko’s arguments about Ukraine’s status as a sort of experimental field for modern neoliberal capitalism. Understanding the economic shock therapy wreaked upon Ukraine sheds light on the same process across the world. The Ukrainization of the world proceeds apace.

One important thing Ukraine shows is that neoliberalism is hardly an unthinking machine. Instead, it has its own subjectivized activists - the Mustafa Naiems, the Vitaly Shabunins, the anti-corruption NGOs that I write so much about here. The ‘new nobility’, as they are often called, are totally confident in their political mission, and consider the task of privatization and economic liberalization to be identical with that of historical progress in general. Their pernicious economic role was perhaps most obvious in the fate of bill 3739, which I wrote about in an old article I still often return to.

Neoliberalism can even have revolutions launched in favor of it - as happened in Ukraine’s 2014 maidan, a revolution whose aim was trade liberalization (the EU trade agreement) and economic privatization. Aims fully achieved, though its nationalist ones are generally focused on in dissident English-language media.

A revolution which demonstrates yet again that a relatively small but ideologically committed and violent group can overthrow a government in conditions of general political apathy.

All of which shows that just because someone is young, good-looking and politically sincere, doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be trusted. A common ironic refrain is that ‘we are for everything that is good and against everything that is bad’. Euromaidan defined itself as against corruption, against police violence, against dictatorship, and for transparency, democracy, and everything else good and pure.

Yet what happened? As Volodymyr Chemerys said, one of Ukraine’s oldest human rights defenders, now under investigation and beaten by Ukraine’s secret services for his pacifist views:

I might rephrase that in the following way: those with an unpleasant concrete economic program often dress it up with wonderful phrases about abstract human rights. Bourgeois formalism, as the classics said.

Which brings me to another point - dwelling on Ukraine’s neo-nazis can be an optical illusion. Not that I am one to underplay their murderous actions or political power. But that ultimately, they are junior partners to Ukraine’s liberals. And Ukraine’s liberals at time may be even more militaristic than the nationalists, who more often have their lives under risk at the frontline. Even if liberal slogans may not seem quite so openly bloodthirsty as whatever rightwinger yelling about the Jewish conspiracy.

The political convergence between extreme ethno-nationalism and neo-liberalism is one of my favorite universal lessons from Ukraine. In Ukraine, it’s quite simple: the nationalists care more about cultural policy and the right to shoot those they dislike than economic policy. And the liberals need someone to shoot those they dislike.

They also share the common ideology of eurocentrism. With more of an accent on its white nationalist/moustache man aspects for the nationalists, and more of an accent on its EU/berghain aspects for the liberals. Note that in practice, I knew plenty of Azovites whose main hobby was trendy club-hopping, and my ultra-liberal family could give any US republican a run for their money when it comes to hating black people.

The optical illusion about Ukraine’s liberals often comes from the fact that they look so clean-shaven, so well-dressed, that they’re such hipsters, that they spout such progressive ‘decolonial’ rhetoric and the like.

But belonging to a ‘non-hierarchical, non-state organization’ doesn’t automatically turn you into a saint (I’ll add, also, that neither does defining one’s politics by anti-liberalism, though that’s another topic).

Dmitry Dzhangirov, a Ukrainian political analyst I used to love to watch before he was abducted, publicly humiliated and forever disappeared in March 2022, put it well: in the modern world, perhaps the most powerful form of fascism is liberal fascism, because a great network of well-organized activists is much more effective at investigating thought crimes than any half-blind state leviathan.

And describing oneself as a ‘non-governmental’ organization is hardly accurate. The NGOs who provide their employees with salaries well above the ordinary survival level are certainly funded by certain countries - though they often hide that on their websites.

Statewatch, for instance, is an anti-corruption NGO in Ukraine. Its Ukrainian ‘partners’ page shows that the US embassy and George Soros’s Renaissance Foundation is among its sponsors. No such ‘partners’ page exists on the English version of the site. When doing research, I have found the same pattern repeated over and over.

Me

When you talk about Soros, you often get some funny looks. Anti-Semitic propaganda and so on. But both my parents worked for the man and would meet with him constantly back in the ‘wild 90s’. There are few NGOs in Ukraine and the region who don’t have him to thank. His Transparency International wields huge influence over Ukrainian government decisions, as shown by the successful rollback of economic legislation like bill 3739.

One of my favorite books of this year was Aaron Moulton’s ‘the Influencing Machine’, on the post-socialist ‘Soros Contemporary Art Centers’. I need to make a post about it soon. But suffice to say that I agree entirely with him about how the mystification of the name ‘Soros’ is itself a means of erasing the entirely material way he has transformed the political landscape of Eastern Europe. His name sounds scandalous and ridiculous to even mention in the west. It’s simply an obvious fact of life in other countries.

Talking about Soros brings things back to me. The topic of Soros makes me think of my general relationship to Ukraine. No matter what I ever wanted, Ukraine, Soros, and plenty of other important names/things have always had me involved in them. Family, history, whatever you want to call it.

Of course, at a certain point I made a choice to go deeper into it. But what makes that any more or less legitimate than getting interested in any other country? I have been and remained interested in the history of a range of other countries and regions. I know Ukraine, I know the languages, so I write mostly about it. But as long as you can justify your opinions, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing about a country you have nothing to do with. All people are related if you go back far enough. Beyond political biases, plenty of locals in any country are blinded by parochialism.

Anyway, I feel obligated to talk about my identity since every so often I get introduced as a ‘Ukrainian voice’. ‘Go read Events in Ukraine, he’s a Ukrainian so it checks out’.

I am not a Ukrainian and never have been. Part of my family lives in Ukraine - some were born there, others weren’t. Plenty of them were born in the dreaded enemy country - Russia. Nowadays, they stress that they hate Russia more than anyone else in Ukraine.

I just said that all people are related. Here’s another way that Ukraine distills in a pure form some universal truths - everyone here is related with their neighbors. What Ukrainian family lacks relatives in Russia or Poland. The history of Ukraine is one of endless migrations and ethnic inter-mingling. The Cossacks, that great Ukrainian symbol, were comprised of men who had fled the laws and obligations of their ‘native’ lands in Poland or Russia. There is still little historical data on just how many people in modern-day Ukraine survived the Mongol invasion and sacking of ancient Rus in the 13th century.

Which perhaps is another reason Ukraine fascinates me - because I, too, have a confusing identity. I eventually gave up on trying to find a national identity, and have only been the happier for it.

I visited Ukraine ever since 2013 to visit my family members there. They even took me along to the Kharkov Euromaidan meeting in December 2013. I didn’t know much Russian then, so I didn’t understand much. I was also fairly confused at what I was supposed to be looking at during the Kharkov euromaidan ‘meeting’, as post-soviet liberals call their outdoor protests/get-togethers - the only people there was two of my relatives and 5 or so of their journalist friends.

Anyway, I kept on going back to visit family there. They got quite a social lift after 2014 - friends with the right people. A certain very important person in Ukraine that I’ve written about on here before. Resident of a small obscure country. A very dangerous man with a suitably sinister nickname. Anyway, this Russian-speaker and my Russian-speaking family in Ukraine were quite busy after 2014.

None were born in Ukraine either - if not Russia, then other obscure Soviet republics. Because my liberal dissident nationalist family, and the similar families they married into, all share one thing: their parents were in the Soviet elite, and hence they were born in far-flung military bases. Hardly unique among the brave dissidents of the last Soviet generation.

Each time I went there, my Russian improved, and I started becoming more and more interested in events… in Ukraine. Not that I was particularly political back then, I was more interested in literature and philosophy. But certain things kept leaping out at me. Why was there a young man wearing a shirt saying ‘freikorps’ in the main hipster district of the capital? What are all these strange advertisements in the metro of warriors, blood and soil? What do all these new Cossack statues mean? Why is it that all the Russian-language signs in Kharkov (now Kharkiv) got changed to Ukrainian ones? And why is it that my family members there got so enraged when I started reading communist literature?

One thing which particularly stumped me had to do with the stumps of trees. Why was it that all of sudden every single tree in poor little Ukraine got painted yellow and blue? Along with every other pole, bridge, or other hapless public object. I remember asking my father how people found time to do that. I don’t remember the answer.

I eventually moved there in 2019, wishing to be closer to my family, and increasingly fascinated by the country. My command of Ukraine’s languages improved, I made more interesting friends there, and I got more immersed into the country’s events. And I eventually made this substack.

Political motivations

I’ve always found identity fairly confusing. My parents had totally different background and I was born and grew up in two countries that had as little possibly imaginable to do with my parents (or the topic of this substack).

So I don’t write here out of any sense of patriotic duty. Yet I still do feel a certain amount of cringe when I’m referred to as ‘the Ukrainian substacker’. In reality, I know a lot more about the country than plenty of people who wear the ‘Ukrainian’ label front and center. I just don’t want people reading my work to be trusting me for any reason other than the citations and logical arguments I provide.

Earlier I went over the universal lessons to be learned from Ukraine. When I feel particularly hopeless about political prospects in Ukraine, I focus on them. But in reality, I do have political hopes. And I’ve always been a firm believer that any writing has some kind of political goal or function, even if unconscious.

So I’ll be explicit about it here as well. At the very minimum, I want the war in Ukraine to end. I don’t want my friends in Ukraine to continue being under constant threat of mobilization into a deadly, hopeless war. Those friends unlucky enough to have a Ukrainian passport.

And those lacking good political connections. Since I know plenty of ‘true patriots’ with good political connections who illegally left the country as soon as the war started, or who have been peacefully draft-dodging ever since. The hypocrisy of it all is one of my main motivations in writing here.

I think the best way to do that is for Ukraine to give legal guarantees that it will not enter NATO or increase military cooperation with NATO. There’s no point giving evidence for why I think that here, since it isn’t the point of this reflective piece. The militarists can keep insisting on schizophrenic Putler’s lack of goals other than his thirst for genocide. They don’t want to listen, and their political status is based on the war continuing forever. They can keep denying it and calling me a Putlerist traitor, and in the meantime countless tens of thousands will die, if not more.

The fact is, that all wars end. At some point, Ukraine will sign something like ‘Minsk-3’. An agreement which makes nationalists. An agreement signed because of Russia’s greater military strength. An agreement where Ukraine formally loses the territory it lost ever since 2022. Territory it could have kept if it had negotiated earlier. Lives that could have been saved. At that point, I will look to the fervent nationalists on facebook, my family and their friends - and I am sure that instead of self-criticism of repentance, they will begin the murderous hunt for traitors within.

It’s also possible that there will be no agreement. There might not be any more territory upon which to launch the hunt for traitors. At which point we will get a replay of the Ukrainian diaspora abroad after 1920, or after 1945. In either case, I’ll be able to think - I told you so.

Besides the war, I want to bring attention to those who are unjustly killed, tortured and imprisoned in Ukraine. Like Dnipro’s leftwing activist Oleksandr Matyushenko, kidnapped by Azov on the spurious, unproven grounds of ‘correcting Russian rocket fire’ on March 26, 2022. His brutal beating was approvingly shared to social media. His supposed cooperation with the Russian army was never proven, and he was later sentenced to prison on a different charge - the thought crime of ‘questioning Ukraine’s territorial integrity’. He remains imprisoned.

The telegram channel ‘Repression of the left and dissenters in Ukraine’ published this information and much more. It found, for instance, that public records showed that 34,323 Ukrainians had been criminally charged with collaborationism, ‘encroachment on territorial integrity’ and other political thought-crimes from February 24 to July 15, 2022.

Volodymyr Chemerys was soon after visited by the Secret Services (SBU). They were accompanied by masked rightwingers, who broke one of his ribs. He was then charged with state treason. Their main claim - that he managed the ‘repression of the left’ telegram channel.

According to the Guardian in February this year:

Ukraine’s SBU security service says it has opened more than 8,100 criminal proceedings “related to collaboration and aiding and abetting the aggressor state” and Ukrainians convicted on these counts are only held in certain prisons, where they are kept away from other inmates.

The article illustrated its coverage with a photo of a person who had had ‘orc’ carved into their head. Note how casual the article itself is. And how all those imprisoned are described as industrial workers, cleaners… In a word, people who don’t speak English and hence can’t be classified as ‘Ukrainian voices’ in western media.

Who knows how many more are imprisoned in various other ‘institutions’ - like the secret SBU black sites whose depraved sexual torture was described by humanrightswatch in 2016. Or the various other dungeons privately maintained by nationalist organizations. Where, as they so often boast online, enemies are forced to get familiar with glass bottles.

There’s no point going into all the civilian murders enthusiastically publicized by nationalists and government structures. Maybe in another post. At hand at the moment is a recent event - another twist in the case of the fitness trainer brutally beaten and forcibly mobilized in Odessa for criticizing soldiers. A couple days back, a video was published where he was tied to a tree, stating:

I am a faggot. I have just been fucked in the ass. I will serve the armed forces of Ukraine

Note that the word he said was ‘otymeli', not exactly fucked. It’s Russian criminal jargon for particularly humiliating, dominating rape.

Ukrainian mainstream social media was divided - some praised it, some worried it wasn’t the best PR for the army. But the veracity wasn’t questioned.

The story of the fitness trainer makes me think of two things.

That any talk about ‘listening to Ukrainian voices’ is somewhat simplistic. What is a voice? In Ukraine, one’s thoughts, let alone one’s voice, can be very incriminating. The trainer’s voice - he swore at some mobilization officers who came into his gym to take away his clients - cost him a great deal. Is it any wonder that the ‘Ukrainian voices’ that make their way into the oh-so-free western media space enthusiastically repeat the militarist slogans that allow one to stay on the right side of the glass bottle?

And finally, one of the most basic motivations behind this substack. A feeling of intense gaslighting. I am lucky enough to have been able to escape Ukraine - I lacked a Ukrainian passport, though I was actually planning to acquire citizenship for whatever reason in 2022. My family there also did their best to prevent me from leaving, and then shaming me for leaving. While their more favored relatives (with Ukrainian passports and of military age) left long before me.

Since then, I have found myself in the western media space, surrounded by oh-so well-meaning western citizens. And everything I see on the news, in the responses of people if I am forced to reveal that I was living in Ukraine until 2022 - everything makes me feel as if I had and have access to some sort of parallel reality.

On the one hand, the most democratic country on earth. On the other hand, a man beaten, raped, and soon to probably die (if he is even still alive) because he swore at the wrong people in public. At the very least, I hope my readers are infected with the same cognitive dissonance, the same epistemic alienation.

I’ll try finish on a positive note. Earlier, I mentioned that one of the things I liked about Ukraine is its cosmopolitanism. It sounds a bit absurd now, but it’s true. The very hostility of Ukrainian nationalism is itself a reaction to the real diversity of the country. Its hysteria an attempt to deny reality. Its paranoia and anger caused by self-hatred.

What I would like is to see a return to that cosmopolitanism. Because it’s a more pleasant environment to live in, at least for most people. I assume it also creates a better context in which to push for a more universal politics. One focused on improving the economic conditions of all, rather than witch-hunts for those who speak the wrong language.

And while it might seem unlikely now, Ukraine’s history - itself not so unique - also shows that periods of nationalist fervor don’t last forever. Ukraine had the chance to become a bridge between east and west, and lost it - at its own citizens’ cost.

I don’t know if the categories of east and west will survive into the future, but I do think that what currently exists in Ukraine can’t last forever. It can last for a very long time, don’t get me wrong. But it will end at some point - the question is when. A question which is also that of how many will die in the meantime.