vimothy
yurp
there's an interesting interview with ns lyons in which he makes a similar point about the ukraine:
you will have to pull identity politics from the collective West’s cold, dead, irradiated hands before we give that up.
Just a few weeks into this war and it’s now clear that the gravity of our narcissistic culture war is so strong that even the risk of WWIII and potential nuclear annihilation can’t break its grip – everything is pulled back in and reframed by the narratives we are most obsessed with.
The narrative conflict around liberalism and nationalism is a good example. Liberal internationalists have leaped on the war as a means to claim narrative victory and smear nationalists, populists, realists, and anti-interventionist conservatives as not only definitively wrong about everything, but as inherently pro-Putin and dangerous to the world. But of course the Ukrainians fighting and dying to save their country are nationalists.
Almost uniformly, they speak passionately about fighting to defend their land, their homes, and their families – not the EU. Such as this young former IT specialist, who explained to the New York Times that he's decided to take up arms because as a Ukrainian the Russian invasion threatens "everything I love," and that he "doesn't have any choice, this is my home." That is classic national conservatism – love of one’s home, and the desire to preserve and protect it – in one line. Meanwhile they are fighting off Putin’s supranational imperialist dream of gobbling them up into a multi-state Russian empire.
But such realities are steamrolled by the narrative tidal wave as everything gets reframed as needed, until we are at the point where Nancy Pelosi – a liberal supranationalist – is shouting “Slava Ukraini!” on the US Senate floor without any sense of irony.
you will have to pull identity politics from the collective West’s cold, dead, irradiated hands before we give that up.
Just a few weeks into this war and it’s now clear that the gravity of our narcissistic culture war is so strong that even the risk of WWIII and potential nuclear annihilation can’t break its grip – everything is pulled back in and reframed by the narratives we are most obsessed with.
The narrative conflict around liberalism and nationalism is a good example. Liberal internationalists have leaped on the war as a means to claim narrative victory and smear nationalists, populists, realists, and anti-interventionist conservatives as not only definitively wrong about everything, but as inherently pro-Putin and dangerous to the world. But of course the Ukrainians fighting and dying to save their country are nationalists.
Almost uniformly, they speak passionately about fighting to defend their land, their homes, and their families – not the EU. Such as this young former IT specialist, who explained to the New York Times that he's decided to take up arms because as a Ukrainian the Russian invasion threatens "everything I love," and that he "doesn't have any choice, this is my home." That is classic national conservatism – love of one’s home, and the desire to preserve and protect it – in one line. Meanwhile they are fighting off Putin’s supranational imperialist dream of gobbling them up into a multi-state Russian empire.
But such realities are steamrolled by the narrative tidal wave as everything gets reframed as needed, until we are at the point where Nancy Pelosi – a liberal supranationalist – is shouting “Slava Ukraini!” on the US Senate floor without any sense of irony.
