As emotions run high, Western media shuts down dissent and debate on the how and why of Ukraine war

The Russia-Ukraine war is heading towards its third week, and was beginning to drop off Australia’s flood-drenched front pages, when the hideous bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol (City of Mary) put the war back at the centre of discussion. The event will take Western emotions to a new height.

Any critical inquiry around a charged event such as an alleged (and likely true) maternity hospital bombing is liable to be met with increasing anger and impatience. That is especially so because of NATO leaders’ unwillingness to be drawn into the war — even blocking the transfer of fighter jets by NATO members — while our mainstream media simultaneously invoke World War II, and affirm our honour, whatever our actions, or lack thereof. 

When the final push on Kyiv begins, this will surely all get much much worse. There seems little chance it will not, with Putin determined not to be defeated by a resistance that, it now seems undeniable, has surprised him and his generals. Surely, it seems, if they had thought the war would go this way, they would have waged the war differently.

With this new stage has come the closing down of any real debate about the war in the West. There was never much, a mere flurry at the start, and now there is almost none. Russia’s invasion is brutal and a violation of international law, but that does not mean that its stated reasons — that this was the last possible moment to prevent an expansion of NATO into a territory considered part of “Greater Russia” — does not have a rationale behind it.

Crucially, this is a rationale that the West could reasonably be expected to recognise as real, and likely to lead to war if transgressed. Any moral assessment of the war has to consider how wanton and irresponsible the West’s actions have been in escalating the situation to this pitch.

Yet it is this last step that has been shut down in discussion in Western mainstream media, and with near unanimous support from many journalists. The opinion pages have been tripping over each other to publish multiple versions of an identikit article, one which equates the “rights” of states with the legal and human rights of individuals in rule-of-law regimes that uphold as such.

That is an elementary category error which confuses a legal regime — where the state has a monopoly on authorised enforceable violence — with an international system, where “law” is a framework governing multiple violent players only for as long as they agree to its jurisdiction. There has even been a whiff of identity politics around the situation, as if Ukraine is not being allowed to be itself — hence the easy way in which such identity politics has become joined to the Ukrainian cause. 

The mainstream media, in such situations, usually allows a smattering of realpolitik writers from the right to dissent, and an even smaller smatteringette of left writers. That has almost vanished this time. I’ve seen nothing in the News Corp pages of the “hard realpolitik” position (as separate from neutral coverage of the war’s progress — quite a different thing), and only a single article, by Gray Connolly in The Age/SMH. However, a distinctly left view — that NATO’s expansion was an act of imperialism qualitatively greater than Russian “imperialism” and supported by a compliant Ukrainian elite who, it now seems, were given promises of support that have not been kept — of that view, there is nothing at all.

With any sort of debate having been shut down, a single logic to the conflict is then enforced by a series of similar articles which argue that the “far left” and the “far right” have some common ground as regards with “support” for Putin. This is utterly untrue, and usually asinine in its assertion. The Western far right has always had active support for Putin the man, as a personification of a unitary conservative spirit of inherited truth, against progressive delusion. The recent America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in the US — a white-supremacist alternative to the “conservative” Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — began with the audience chanting “Go Putin!”

But to say this is confined to the far right is nonsense. Donald Trump’s admiration and support for Putin have acted as a bridge to the middle right; there you will find George W Bush’s notorious quote from 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country.”

The right’s admiration for Putin the man has been longstanding. 

There has been nothing like this on the left, despite the attempt to argue for a unity using gimmicky notions such as “horseshoe theory” — that the left and right reach around to touch, branching off a position of pro-capitalism and pro-globalism held to be the “sensible centre”.

Most of the charge that the far left is “pro Putin” comes from an attack on a single article by John Pilger, where Pilger has nothing to say about Putin the man, and simply notes the alternative case against the (pretty fuzzy) Western one — Pilger’s case (and those of others) being that a reduced set of demands regarding limits on NATO expansion and Ukraine’s neutrality was presented by Russia to NATO days before the invasion began, and rejected out of hand.

There are relatively few on the left who do grant such legitimacy to Russia’s case, and none of them praise Putin the man. There are barely any fully pro-Russian advocates in Australia. Tim Anderson, a former lecturer in political economy at Sydney University, is the only one, and he has no particular words, kind or otherwise, for Putin that I have seen. The Greens and various socialist groups have denounced the invasion, and the Maoists at C21st Left (i.e. Albert Langer and a couple of others) see the war as a radical moment by which Ukrainian resistance will topple Putin, the new tsar. 

The “far-left, far-right” link-up is simply a confection of wilfully conformist and lazy journalists who don’t want the facts to get in the way of easy propaganda.

But the mainstream media fix is in, and a comprehensive groupthink, verging on a soft totalitarian impulse, is now the norm. Stan Grant’s decision to throw out an audience member of Q+A because he was advocating “violence against a sovereign state” was a weak and pathetic failure of commitment to free speech. It’s a perfectly legitimate position to advocate violence in many circumstances; if it is so abhorrent, it should be easy to argue against (and if the rule were applied during the Iraq War it would have been a very empty studio indeed). 

Tim Costello, seeking a spiritual rationale for the conflict, said in Guardian Australia of the NATO expansion issue: “We have heard a lot of ranting from Putin about the threat to Russia from NATO encirclement and justifications for the invasion to denazify Ukraine and stop their genocide of Russians. This is all propaganda and nonsense.”

Six words. Thanks for that considered analysis of geopolitics, Tim. Though an intelligent and reflective person, Costello has obviously succumbed, like so many, to the need for the meaning of this war to not be complex or messy (and coincides with a near total lack of free-ranging and critical analysis in the Guardian, a further example of its decline into conformism and humanitarian “storytelling”).

Paul Mason’s argument, reproduced in Crikey, that we should abandon any critical discussion of NATO’s expansion and the West’s wars, is a secular version of such, the clue given by Mason’s anecdote of travelling to Moscow in 1990 with tiny Trotskyist sect Workers Power, who believed that with Stalinism defeated there would be an appetite for real Marxism. The same spirit pervades Mason’s call to simply stop speaking about Western hypocrisy, cynicism or strategy. Everyone wants this war to be about something other than it is. 

For the decade leading up to this war, it was a commonplace of global politics discussion that admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, or the possibility of such, would be an irresponsible act that would bring war closer. Everyone said it, from Chomsky to Kissinger (a roll call helpfully collected by Arnaud Bertrand).

Yet now this position is seen to be irrelevant, subversive or disgraceful. One has seen this happen before, but it never ceases to amaze — the sudden huddling into groupthink, the pathetic willingness to toe the official line.

One has to remind oneself that some people are driven into journalism or writing by strong convictions; others precisely by the lack of such. They are empty and they need meaning to fill them from outside. They seek large organisations, and never let themselves get into a position of dissent from the West’s position. Most of them, ironically, would prosper in the unified state-media frame of somewhere like Putin’s Russia. 

Given that the West’s actions may have started this war — by giving Russia, as a state, reduced options for its own survival, that made the decision to invade a prominent one — it is the West’s actions that deserve scrutiny. Did Western leaders make promises to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that we have not kept, and never intended to? Would that explain his increasingly angry and exasperated tone around the lack of active support?

Whatever may have been promised, the West is clearly appeasing Russia now, and in doing so, contributing to the likelihood of its eventual victory. Chamberlain has been flayed by history for appeasement not because he negotiated with Hitler, but because he took war for Czechoslovakia off the table before the negotiations started, just as Western leaders have rushed to remove the possibility of an air-war — sorry, a “no-fly zone”. That move has made it difficult for Western moralists to square the circle: hence we have the spectacle of liberals demanding a NATO-Russia air war to maintain the necessary illusions.

Now, in the past 24 hours, Russia has offered renewed terms for immediate cessation of the war, which includes an anti-NATO clause in Ukraine’s constitution and the separation of the two Eastern republics. That is a deal that Ukraine should seriously consider, and that the West should consider urging Ukraine to consider.

But how would that now be possible, with the mythology in which we have enveloped the war? How can we think clearly about what is best for Ukrainians when their predicament has been drafted into the needs of a jaded West for stories of heroism and clear purpose? 

One has to be able to tolerate paradox in these matters. If there’s a march in support of Ukraine, I’ll be in it — though I don’t see much point in organising one in Australia, as opposed to somewhere like London where it’s a different matter.

But as a journalist or a writer, one’s sacred duty is to free, clear, independent and critical thinking, to regard all media feeds with scepticism and scrutiny, to admit to the reality of needless human suffering — without letting emotion sway the faculty for critical thinking. In that respect, and as usual, the mainstream media have failed us. And the failure, like a flood, is creeping ever closer.