Listening to Western leftists you would think that Ukraine was the side that funded a protracted separatist movement in Russia and then launched a devastating war or aggression aimed at flattening Moscow. Listening to Western liberals you would think that Ukraine was a thriving and healthy democracy prior to Russian invasion. Listening to Russia you would get the same narrative as the Western leftists and Western conservatives alike. And this is where we manage to make everyone angry by saying that all of those narratives are heavily laden with propaganda intended to allow the Russian instigated war to spread across the lands once behind the “iron curtain” of Soviet Russia. An end goal that Vladimir Putin has not been shy about when he openly claimed the greatest disaster in modern history was the breakup of the Soviet block. A system that would, due to his president for life mentality, would have made him a modern emperor with fiefdoms stretching from Germany’s border to Central Asia all the way out to the Pacific. A reality partially made possible by Russian imperialism that relied on the genocides of native peoples across Europe and Asia. But without a war of expansion, Putin remains locked within the crumbling remains of Russia’s fallen empire.
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There are many reasons the binary outlook that Western leftism and Western fascism love so much is dangerous to the world’s majority in the global south. By constantly portraying the imperialistic nature of the powers they favor as lesser evils, or even necessary evils, the Western mind allows for the subjugation of the lesser states. China and Russia understand this to the same degree that the United States and European colonizers do. Their histories of forced subjugation of the territories you’ve been taught to accept as parts of China and Russia therefore get pushed aside in the same ways that US patriots ignore what it took to “tame the wild west”. The rationalizing away of Russian sanctioned genocide both before and after the Soviets is partially how you get allegedly woke leftists who unquestioningly accept the narrative that Ukrainian resistance is “N*z*sm”. It overlooks the reality that Russian patriotism has bred vast neo-fascist movements within diasporic communities left behind in former Soviet client states as well as within Russia itself. It also overlooks how Putin’s rule has relied upon the narrative of fascists at the gates while simultaneously utilizing the authoritarian mechanisms of a fascist state to mobilize and field troops for his expansion of Russian borders (take a minute to remember which European leaders behaved this way in the 1930s and 40s). And even when the Western leftist can admit that Putin’s Russia is largely responsible for a war that increased hunger as far away as here in Manila, the what-about-ism reactionary part of Western leftism kicks in.
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To achieve anything that Putin claims he wanted in Ukraine (defeat of fascism in his part of Europe in particular), you need the dissolving of nationalism across the board. Russia being the largest state that needs not only its borders questioned (remember, it only has its present size because of imperialist expansion) but also the legitimacy and necessity of it to exist at all. Putin started the war on the premise of combating radical elements within the Ukrainian state, the myth of “de-n*zification”. Therefore we must also be allowed to ask why Russia, ruled by extremist elements and funded by a rich elite that requires those elements exist, should be spared the same process. In turn we can look West and East of the issue and ask the same thing of the United States, France, England, Germany as well as Iran and China. Why if we allow, even through simple tolerance or passive acceptance of it, one superpower to claim it has a right to force smaller states into submission on the premise of “civilizing” them then why should we spare the superpowers themselves? A question that state based loyalists to any branch of leftism or conservativism seems unwilling to ask when deciding that picking a sports team in a war is better suited to their personal desires.
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Which brings us to former Senator de Lima and American bought and paid for President Marcos. While the two make odd bedfellows on the subject, their political opposition to each other illustrates my point on a local level. One is often held up by our “progressives” while the other is the now weathered poster child of the political right. But both find in Ukrainian suffering a narrative that fits well into their habit of making every world issue a Philippine issue. And both do so by playing into Western talking points while servicing US imperialism here at home. They manage to repackage the propaganda that sits on the other end of the spectrum while ignoring the very real differences between China’s expansionist tactics and Putin’s more traditionally European methods. This allows them to cast a remarkably consistent state narrative of an existential threat in which the citizen must fully support, without questioning, the state’s stance or be deemed a traitor and supporter of the other side. It is a mirror image of the reactionary response intended by the Russian and Chinese propaganda and yet those who choose, either deliberately or without thinking, to pick a side and fight for their chosen master(s) are also not willing to recognize how they respond in near perfect reflections of those they oppose. The fascist, the liberal, the leftist – all bound by their loyalty to the state – thus cannot avoid the same pitfalls of servitude to the messaging they are fed. Each inevitably serving an imperialist agenda held up by one of the superpowers profiting from their efforts.
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The Russian war of occupation in Ukraine did not start spontaneously nor was it the product of just one superpower’s whims. While Putin’s Russia holds the primary blame for its weakness in giving into its imperialistic urges, the Western superpowers are not without guilt for finding a proxy in Ukraine to utilize. What the “good guys vs bad guys” narratives of the Western left and right miss entirely is that multiple aspects of the story can be messy, seemingly contradictory, and yet still true. Putin can find neo-fascist elements within Ukraine that are reacting to his provocations. Ukrainians can claim they are fighting off an invading colonizer while likening rather accurately the Russian war of aggression to that of German ideals of lebensraum in the first half of the 20th century. And anyone with a shred of honesty to their world view can spot the European and American hands at play along Russia’s border. All of these have grains of truth to them. But none alone provide an adequate explanation of why a superpower has been permitted time and space in which to attack a smaller state while devastating the world’s economies and food supply lines across the global south. To fully explain that would require a more honest assessment of how the colonial era started, was carried out at its height and arguably has not ended. It would require the questioning of why violent enterprises masked as states, like that of China and Russia and the US, are allowed to exist at all.
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Which brings us to China and our waters. Another superpower that far too many Western leftist give a pass to simply because it is not the US. And in this case, with the Philippines being a client state of the American empire, the Chinese invasion of our greatest fishing grounds gets a heavy white wash by the Western leftist. Instead of recognizing that China is using military gray ships against our wooden fishing boats, the comfortable class from North America and Europe decide their activism against the US empire requires them to pick sides like this is a sporting match. While on the other side of the coin we have the fascists and patriots here at home who want to play the old colonial master in hopes the white savior will drive away the capitalist-communist fusion which is the People’s Republic of China. These homeland patriots utilize every authoritarian tactic that Beijing would happily green light in Xinjiang or Tibet because no dissent to Manila’s narrative can be tolerated. The extremes here being that in one perspective it is an American exaggeration meant to antagonize China while on the other end it is a fight to the last Filipino man, woman and child. And once again all these narratives slide past the question of why we as a global community permit superpowers to behave like China is in the West Philippine Sea.
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The only similarity the Philippines now has with Ukraine is that the superpowers have collectively decided that our people must bleed so the new map of the world order they eventually agree upon can be drawn over our bones. We are not in a fight with China and Russia alone. We are in a long struggle with the imperialism born from European colonial conquest around the globe. Just as we saw Japan take to the role of master in its attempt to grab a seat in WW2, China now joins the ranks of countries that exist only to prey upon others. It, like the Western superpowers, is a parasitic state that cannot survive without the enslavement of peoples it deems to be lesser than its own. That is the struggle we share with Ukraine. One that can only end when the superpowers themselves are dismantled.
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