Being Right

As we enter the third week of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, there seems to be a gathering awareness that one of the greatest barriers to ending this war and saving lives may be a counter-intuitive one: the very righteousness of the Ukrainian cause itself. If both sides were equally answerable for various crimes or misdeeds, after all, then arriving at a compromise and power-sharing deal would be a relatively simple matter to rally behind. The problem here is that the opposite is the case. Putin started it; he chose to unilaterally invade the sovereign borders of another country, and that country now has an unambiguous right to defend itself...

Yet, a country can be 100% in the right and still be militarily in the weaker position. Putin has the bigger war machine at his disposal. He can afford to prolong the conflict, and it is not his civilians, his people's children, his innocents, who are being butchered the longer he drags out the fighting. In order to de-escalate or end the conflict, therefore, Ukraine may have to give something up, even though, morally-speaking, they shouldn't have to do so; even though, in the domain of right and wrong, they are the injured party and shouldn't be forced to part with anything. 

The question then becomes, will the Western and NATO powers support Ukraine in reaching a compromise, even if it is less than ideal from the standpoint of NATO strategic interests, so long as it stands a chance of saving lives from this bloody conflict? Or, rather, will NATO bask in the righteousness of their position, oppose measures that would meet Putin part-way on his demands, and maybe even continue to escalate the international conflict still further, through a series of even more severe retaliatory measures? 

Would they be right to do so? They might in fact be justified in not ceding an inch to Vladimir Putin's demands, in refusing to reward international bullying and aggression by giving Putin what he wants. But being right is not everything, and NATO—if they went this route—would not be the first to fall victim to MacDiarmid's "curs'd conceit of bein' richt/That damns the vast majority of men." 

Being right should certainly not be erected into an altar on which Ukrainian innocents are slaughtered. It is worth it to be less than fully right, to make some concession—whatever the Ukrainian leadership might decide can be tolerated and which would preserve their government's continuity and sovereignty—to Putin's war aims, if it stands a good chance of halting the killing. 

I have to admit that from the start of this invasion, I've been wondering: is the wisdom of a political life spent advocating against war of any use now? Does the anti-war intellectual tradition offer any insight in this moment; or does it all just become irrelevant in the face of an act of sufficiently blatant aggression and a war waged in self-defense? 

In so many other cases, after all, there were nuances to point out. The roles of bully and victim were not always so clear-cut. And some have of course tried to apply the same analysis to the present instance (What about the expansion of NATO!, they say). But try as they might, it just fails to convince. NATO may have made strategic blunders and needlessly escalated tensions with Russia at times in the past, but that's no reason why the Ukrainian people should have to suffer. There's just no moral equivalence between Putin and Ukraine. 

But when we put aside the right and wrong of the matter, and come down to asking realistically how this war might end, that's where the anti-war tradition becomes relevant again. Because it reminds us that, as any war drags on, it matters less and less who had the righteous cause in the first place. After a certain event horizon is passed, all that matters is that people are suffering and dying, and that the horror must somehow end. One realizes, as the line from Faulkner has it: "that nothing is worth anything but peace, peace, peace!" 

And the costs of war; the price of righteousness and of insisting on a point, are not limited to Ukraine, although the people there obviously face the worst of these consequences. There are also the Russian civilians—themselves the victims of Putin's autocracy—who will only suffer more the longer the Western sanctions last. 

There are also the Russian immigrants and Russian cultural institutions who are being unfairly tarred, in jingoistic local crusades reminiscent of the World War I-era persecution of German-Americans. (The Russian School of Math in Newton, Massachusetts, for instance, recently faced calls to change its name, because the very word "Russian," it would seem, has become tainted in some people's eyes... Shades of "liberty cabbage" and "freedom fries" all over again. (And, by the way, the same dangerous collapsing of the distinction between criticizing a government and attacking the people and institutions associated with the country it governs is visible in U.S. prosecutorial overreach stigmatizing Chinese and Chinese-American scientists, but more on that another time)).

There are also the Russian soldiers—largely unwilling conscripts, indoctrinated by a closed circuit of prepackaged state-controlled misinformation—who will be gunned down fighting a war that they did not choose—killed ultimately not by the Ukrainian resistance fighters who never asked to fight them, but by the Russian president who knowingly sent them to their deaths to feed his own ambitions. 

I was thinking about this earlier in the week, after data analyst and policy advocate Darrell Owens posted a powerful reflection on social media, upon seeing a video of a Russian helicopter gunned down over Ukraine. "I just think," he said, "about the mothers going through labor at the hospital to produce young sons and the families that dedicate countless days raising their children from infancy into young men, only for all that to be erased in five seconds thousands of miles away from their home." Then he added, rightly: "The Ukrainian men and women who are fighting and dying for freedom didn't kill those people in the helicopter. Putin did."

I thought back, upon reading this, to a composed photograph by Canadian artist Jeff Wall, "Dead Troops Talk," discussed at length in Susan Sontag's book, Regarding the Pain of Others. The photo—a carefully-staged tableau, complete with movie-style special FX—depicts a group of Russian soldiers killed by a Mujahideen ambush in Afghanistan, slowly gathering themselves and "re-awakening" after the moment of their deaths. The startling imagery in the photo not only evokes the horror of all loss in war—even the loss suffered by the side that was in the wrong, that was the aggressor—but speaks as well to the particular historical ironies of our present moment. 

The photo, after all—originally composed in 1992—depicts casualties from the then–recently concluded Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: an unjustified incursion that turned into a brutal quagmire for the occupying Russian forces. 

Revisited precisely 30 years after the photo was taken, it obviously takes on new significance and resonance for our moment. This past year, after all, it was the United States, not Russia, that was forced to conclude its own bloody war and quagmire in Afghanistan, after so many of its own soldiers lost their lives in much the same manner as the people depicted in Wall's photo. And, not twelve months later, Russian soldiers are now engaged in occupying another country, facing staunch resistance from locals defending their homeland, and dying in a no less bloody manner than the photo depicts. 

When we think of the universality of this violent scenario, and how it was repeated across three different wars, with the combatants changing sides but the bloodshed always the same, it should remind us once again that very little is worth enduring this for. Being right is certainly not worth it, at least when there is still some possibility of ending or bringing that war to a rapid conclusion.