Tomás Ó Flatharta

James Doyle responds to this post :

Correcting Mandel – Why Arming Ukraine is the Road to Peace

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Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace

It’s amazing how Amerocentric Campism enables some extremely well educated people in the west – as well as many of the profoundly ignorant – to declare their positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine (part 2) without knowing even the basics of the socio-political realities which precipitated the invasion.

Someone like Mandel has to ignore everything which has happened from Kazakhstan to Moldova, and from 1999 to 2023 – as well as Putin’s rule over the Russian people itself and how it has affected civic, minority, and labour rights – in favour of narrowing his narrative on the “causes” of the Russian invasion to what happened in the Donbas and Crimea between February 2014 and February 2022… and even then he cannot make this argument in good faith, instead following an epistemology based on ignoring easily provable factual events in favour of bald reductio-ad-NATO absurdism.

Two simple examples, though we could choose dozens; maintaining Putin was predominantly motivated by seeing “NATO expanding up to Russia’s borders” in his “reactionary” decision to invade Ukraine, when in fact NATO has “expanded onto Russia’s borders” only once, in 2004, when Latvia and Estonia joined the bloc, and while Putin himself was sitting on the Russia/NATO joint council overseeing that expansion (epistemologies like Mandel’s of course need to inform that between 1999-04 Russia was a full partner of NATO in adventures like Afghanistan, and the existence of the joint council which oversaw that relationship). Of course NATO’s rejection of Ukraine this summer further illustrates the intellectual poverty of this position; the fact is NATO has never had much interest in admitting Ukraine, and Putin knows this.

The second is the ridiculous “coup” claim, which not only necessarily ignores everything which had happened in Ukraine under Yanukovich’s rule up to 2014 (his suspension of the constitution and broadening of his own executive power, his admission in 2012 that Putin was directing his foreign policy by applying duress over energy costs, his unilateral withdrawal from economic treaties with the EU in favour of increasing indebtedness to Russia, his granting to himself of state owned properties and treasures, his granting of publicly owned media licences worth hundreds of millions to pro-Russian oligarchs, his shoot to kill orders,etc etc) as well as his unilateral withdrawal from the February 21st peace agreement with the opposition (one he had already signed, and one which would have kept him as President until new elections took place) under pressure from Russia and his subsequent 328-0 dismissal from his office as President, when even his own party voted to end his presidency and demand new elections.

Yet this is what Mandel calls a ‘coup”.

See also : https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/correcting-mandel-why-arming-ukraine-is-the-road-to-peace

James Doyle August 17 2023