Oleksandra Povoroznyk 🇺🇦
Thread from a queer feminist Ukrainian - her fury at the western left's condescending, "careless, hurtful bullshit" on Ukraine.
"Back when I was a sociology student at Kyiv-Mohyla, I was stupidly, shamelessly enamoured with the collective western Left. I dreamed of a day when Ukrainian academia would have widespread and popular discussions about colonialism, privilege, and all of the -isms.
I read essays by prominent English-speaking activists and thought “oh, if only these brilliant people were to learn about Ukraine and its complicated past, about the discrimination we have faced throughout the centuries, about the genocides and revolutions. They would understand us.
They would probably share valuable experience or help us somehow lay down the theoretical groundwork that would explain all of the traumatic events we’ve witnessed and lived though.” I was… dazzlingly naive.
And now, when my country is under attack from a literal kleptofascist empire that openly declares it’s going to commit ethnic cleansing, when our children and women die in agony, and when our academics and queer activists, nihilists and journalists, writers and liberals, doctors, teachers, feminists and conservatives, Muslims and Jews, atheists and clergymen are desperately fighting against a better-armed, bloodthirsty enemy intent on levelling our cities with the ground, burning our fields, raping us, killing us, blowing up our hospitals and destroying our monuments, I look at the abstract western Left (or, at least, its most vocal part) and I see nothing but scorn in their eyes.
Scorn, condescending, privileged carelessness.
They preach equality and resistance to oppression and yet accuse people like myself (feminist queer women who’ve spent their lives striving for equal rights) of being Nazis because we don’t want to kneel over and die in silence.
They talk about the importance of representation and yet shut us up whenever we try and tell them about our experiences.
They write books about us without turning to a single Ukrainian expert for guidance or information.
They accuse others of being privileged and lacking empathy, and yet can’t seem to grasp the concept that not being in an active war zone and not worrying about your loved ones dying at any given moment is, in fact, privilege.
They claim that we do not deserve sympathy because we aren’t doinge nough for LGBTQ rights in this country — and then proceed to ignore the LGBTQ soldiers risking their lives on the frontlines.
They spout careless, hurtful bullshit, quoting their out-of-touch idols who preach absolute pacifism only because it’s not their lives at stake.."
I know not all western leftists are like this.
Obviously not. I know many of them do sympathise with our plight, and I’m thankful for their support. But the ones who treat this invasion as an excuse to build long-winded theories about how NATO is some ever present universal evil, or treat all of this as some sort of twisted ethics exercise, a trolly problem in which Ukrainians are the sacrificial savages who need to die quietly before real people start suffering from high gas prices or nuclear war… I’ll never forget those."
A national-ethnic struggle contains many conflicting possibilities-versions.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήIt can easily slip in a reactionary direction, it can rise in a progressive libertarian and democratic direction.
The placement of a nation/ethnicity in the socio-historical role of the oppressed social subject does not constitute a "guarantee" that it will acquire the status of the libertarian-democratic progressive subject.
There must be active ideological fermentation, and at the same time philosophical political ideological acceptance of the concept and reality called nation and ethnicity (they are not identical).
If the leftists, the anarchists, the anti-capitalists, the socialists, deny the profound objective effect of national and ethnic determinations, in the context of an extreme internationalism of anti-nationalism, then they cannot spread their progressive-libertarian democratic values to the masses. Then, these life-giving values are lost in the vacuum of Marxist or anarchist abstraction, and it is then that reactionary ethnism/nationalism wins the ideological battle within the nation/nationality.
But, beyond all this, there is an additional "side effect" of extreme hyper-internationalist anti-nationalist blindness:
The complete analytical/theoretical, and therefore political, inability of the abstract and metaphysical Marxists/anarchists and other internationalists to distinguish reactionary nationalism from national progressive ideological-political currents which can of course also be defined in the broad sense of "nationalistic" but are in a completely different direction from the aforementioned (reactionary, nationalist) currents.
Thus, a studious Marxist like M. Hekmat could not distinguish between PKK and Baath, and thus failed to understand that despite any similarities and partial identities, an Öcalan could not be or become Saddam Hussein or Assad.
Analytical, ideological, philosophical, political mistake made by Hekmat but not only him (there are worse mistakes by other "more" ''hard-line" Marxists, etc.).
This wrong way of thinking leads to an inability to predict the future, to failures in the planning of a democratic workers' revolution. Of course, there is always time for repentance and corrections, as long as the well-known Marxist or anarchist arrogance does not dominate.