Strange bedfellows: Putin, the Chomskyite left and the ghosts of the Cold War

[DonViejo]

So-called radicals who side with the Russian despot on Ukraine are stuck in a poisoned Cold War narrative

ANDREW O'HEHIR

One of the weirder side effects of the Ukraine crisis and the West’s heated confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been the reappearance of all kinds of complicated ideological rifts and conflicts left over from the Cold War. It’s as if the disease that afflicted and divided the world between 1946 and 1991 went into remission for 20-odd years but was never cured; given the right combination of rising temperatures, demagoguery and widespread confusion, the virus woke up and spread in all directions. Another way of looking at this question is that Cold War fever never abated in America but was diverted to other purposes, most notably the unsatisfying and amorphous “war on terror,” in which the goals, the tactics, the strategy and even the enemy were never entirely clear. In that context, the rise of a renewed Russian imperial power was almost a relief to the powers that be. It was like encountering a high school sweetheart who’s still looking foxy at the 20-year reunion dance.

The principal symptom of Cold War virus is a form of bipolar disorder, an insistence on viewing the world in Manichaean terms, divided into warring camps of good and evil, light and darkness. This seems to be such a fundamental component of human psychology that none of us ever resists it entirely; maybe it’s necessary to find absolute moral bedrock somewhere. Among the radical or progressive left, those people most likely to take a critical view of American policy and power, this bipolar disorder has produced many varieties of arcane self-torment and infighting over the years. In the old days, someone on the left was always available to apologize for the worst excesses of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or whomever: OK, maybe the Khmer Rouge prison-state wasn’t exactly paradise on earth, but Western aggression was mostly to blame and at least the cadres were fighting Yankee imperialism.

This lamentable tendency to make excuses for the inexcusable, and not infrequently to embrace tinpot tyrants on the flimsiest of ideological grounds, has reappeared alongside other symptoms of Cold War disease. Here’s where my own version of the disorder kicks in, I suppose: I identify with the impulse behind this tendency, but not so much with the results. It’s never a bad thing to be suspicious of the official narrative, as supplied by the State Department and the New York Times, which seeks to present the current Ukrainian crisis as a simplistic confrontation between the “forces of democracy” and the sinister, vodka-infused and quasi-totalitarian Black Hand of Sauron — I mean Putin. Amid the genuine worldwide shock and grief over the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a heinous war crime presumably committed by pro-Russian rebels with Russian-supplied missiles, it takes rigor and courage (not to mention a certain analytical coldness) to observe that we’re not necessarily seeing the bigger picture.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/26/strange_bedfellows_putin_the_chomskyite_left_and_the_ghosts_of_the_cold_war/

[frazzled]

1. "Our brains are capacious; we contain multitudes"

Thank you for posting this article, because it expresses (far more eloquently than I ever could), my unease with the black-and-white, good vs. evil (and if one side is evil the other must be good, and vice versa) thinking that pervades discussion here so frequently.

I used to be one of those apologists for "leftist" regimes (though I never really took the stance, that by virtue of that, the US was inherently evil; and god forbid, I never tried to defend the Khmer Rouge: they were merely an anomaly in my mind). I think the reason for this was not merely the "radical chic" of the times, but rather a love of ideology blinding me to the everyday realities of governmental (and human) fallibility. I was (and perhaps still am) a believer in socialist (and even communistic) ideas. What I failed to realize at the time was that those ideas had nothing to do with the despotism and deprivation and failure that Soviet Russian and Communist Chinese regimes inflicted on their populations. It was only gradually, over the years, and especially becoming close with individuals who had lived under those regimes ... in what was then Czechoslovakia, in Beijing ... that I realized how naive I had been to conflate my ideological enthusiasms with the real practices of governments that espoused them. I threw away my Mao button (honestly, I used to wear one on my lapel all the time: I was in love with Mao, and found every reason to find excuses for the Cultural Revolution). And I began to be able to separate ideology from practice.

I am thus confused and surprised that people can't seem to open their brains to that capaciousness, to that multitude of perspectives that would tell us that, even if we oppose the Israeli incursion into Gaza, that doesn't mean that we should extol Hamas; that even if we are skeptical of Western motives in Ukraine, that this doesn't make Putin a saint. I do not understand--and I do not condone--this kind of black and white thinking.

Governments, like humans, are never perfect. (And none of us is, either. We may be good liberals and espouse the right ideas, but we are not always as kind as we should be; we may even be greedy or selfish at times; we make wrecks of our lives and then try to do better.) Painting the world in stark colors of black and white, just to support our ideological inclinations, is reductive and sometimes dangerous. It's not easy to parse the world ... it's only possible to try to keep making it better, while respecting the dignity and rights of all and calling out the missteps of governments both on the left and the right, Western and non-Western, Israeli and Muslim ... and, well, so forth and so on. Life is a process, and so is history. I'd like to be able to hold the multitude of good and bad in my head all at once.

[enough]

2. Current DU discussion of the article here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025294384

[frazzled]

3. Oh, I don't think I want to participate in that discussion.

Just the usual knee-jerk, sloganistic reaction, without thoughtful response. Exactly what one could expect, alas. There's no point conversing with people whose minds are firmly made-up despite any possible points of debate. Hardly "capacious" minds.