There Are Things Worth Fighting For, There Are Things Worth Dying For
On Noam Chomsky and "peace-at-all-costs" politics.
The remarkable photograph above, by Ukrainian photographer Dmytro Kazatsky, showcases one of the remaining defenders of the Azovstal Steel Plant in now-occupied Mariupol. To be clear, this is not an endorsement of the Azov Battalion.
Saying that Noam Chomsky is an authority in leftist circles is somewhat problematic. First, what “leftist” means is nebulous – Chomsky is popular with both social democrats and Marxists. Second, not all leftists like him, and this dislike of him is independent of specific ideological affiliation; there are social democrats who dislike him and there are Marxists who like him, and vice-versa. Still, that Nathan Robinson and Owen Jones interviewed him shows that leftists still look to Chomsky for his wisdom. Given his age, he fits the conception of an elderly sage, full of knowledge and advices that guides leftists towards enlightenment, or something like that. In particular, Chomsky’s vociferous critiques of American foreign policy in Indochina and of Israel has made him a perennial leftist voice regarding foreign policy issues. Consequently, in the aforementioned interviews with Nathan Robinson and Owen Jones, Chomsky was asked for his opinion on the war in Ukraine.
I’m not, nor have been for years now, a leftist, at least if your standard for leftism is anti-capitalism. I can even specify the day I abandoned the term “democratic socialist” to describe my politics – April 19th, 2018 – just days after the United States, France, and the United Kingdom struck military infrastructure controlled by the Assad regime. Leftist influencers like Kyle Kulinski, Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek etc., were hysterical afterwards, refusing to give any criticism of Assad credence, attacking any and all criticism of Assad, even those criticisms qualified with opposition to intervention, as aiding imperialism. When Mehdi Hasan dared to criticize Assad while explicitly advocating against intervention in Syria (will someone think of Assad’s chemical weapon depots?) leftists hounded with accusations of being an imperialist, enabling American aggression. See for yourself: the replies to The Intercept’s tweet promoting Hasan’s piece are full of utterly deranged, naked apologia for the 21st century’s worst war criminal.
My faith in socialism was already shaken months prior; my support for Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East already made me heterodox in far-left circles, and I had become increasingly sympathetic towards a view of muscular liberal internationalism, but into spring 2018 I still regarded myself a socialist. Seeing the venom spewed against Mehdi Hasan merely for criticizing a war criminal dictator responsible for gassing children and murdering hundreds of thousands of Syrians was the flood that broke the dam down; I could no longer be in a movement that supported Assad and his gang of murderers any longer. How could social democrats, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists, etc. lend so much credence to Syria’s fascist dictator (among others) and still claim the mantle of advocating for human-first foreign policy?
This is a roundabout way of explaining that what Chomsky says should not bother me. He wields no ideational pull in my present political “community,” if any such community exists. His habitual genocide denial (see his views on Rwanda and Bosnia) alone should exclude him from any sensible intellectual discussion. Yet here I am, writing about him and criticizing him. Leftists, who predicate their views on global politics on their supposedly unconditional and universal support for human rights and peace, supported Assad in 2018. They were largely silent when the Trump administration abandoned the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces to Turkish aggression. They engaged in baseless fear-mongering when America assassinated Iranian butcher Qassem Soleimani. And when Ukraine was under threat due to a Russian military build-up, leftists defended Russia, vociferously arguing that a full-blown Russian escalation was a creation of the CIA and the warmongering arms industry. I am writing about Chomsky not because of my ideological affiliation, but because leftists keep platforming and championing him and his views, views which regularly reduce down to de facto support for global tyranny.
So what has Professor Chomsky said about Russia’s war against Ukraine? The first comment that generated outrage was from an interview published on April 13th with Current Affairs founder, editor-in-chief, and socialist union buster Nathan Robinson, where Chomsky criticized American policy vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine for being escalatory. He said “the U.S. is setting things up so as to destroy Ukraine and to lead to a terminal war” while broadly calling for the US to instead promote an “ugly” negotiated settlement to end the war, lest the possibility of the destruction of Ukraine and the world come to fruition. Chomsky reiterated his position in an hour-long YouTube interview with The Guardian’s Owen Jones, where he accused the US and the UK of running a “grotesque experiment” that would cost Ukrainians their lives in an effort to weaken Russian power rather than push for diplomacy. All-in-all, Chomsky’s position on the west’s role in Ukraine is that the west should be pushing for an immediate brokered resolution to the conflict while arguing that it is actually the US (and the UK, for Owen Jones’ self-loathing British audience) who are getting Ukrainians killed right now.
Putting aside Chomsky’s own argument momentarily, though they differ with the leftist trappings and the precision of language Chomsky uses (he’s a professor of linguistics after all), this position is popular among German, French, and Italian leadership. Indeed, a Politico article by Matthew Karnitschnig showed that Berlin, Paris, and Rome are pushing not for an explicit Ukrainian victory but for peace as soon as possible where Ukraine may grant Russia concessions on, say, recognition of Crimea and Donbas as not Ukrainian, or constitutional neutrality and demilitarization. Olaf Scholz, continuing a proud German tradition of grovelling to the Kremlin, thought it was wise to brag on Twitter about how he called for a ceasefire as soon as possible between Ukraine and Russia. Italy meanwhile submitted a conciliatory peace plan that calls for official Ukrainian neutrality, backed by security guarantees from an unnamed group of countries; because that went so well for Ukraine in 2014! Despite Italian enthusiasm for Ukraine to capitulate, the Russian foreign ministry condemned the Italian proposal as a “fantasy.” How ironic. And as if Noam Chomsky and Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Mario Draghi weren’t strange enough bedfellows, they all happen to agree with war criminal Henry Kissinger.
No one reasonable opposes diplomacy and negotiations in a vacuum. Suffice to say, this war, and all the Ukrainians lives it has ended or ruined are tragic. Russia’s war is also criminal, and good-faith negotiations with Russia are impossible. If Ukraine could have negotiated their way into abating Russia’s oft-termed “legitimate security concerns” they would have done so in January, and if Russia was interested in negotiations, Putin would have picked up the phone when Zelenskyy called him the evening before Russia’s escalation. There was nothing making Putin escalate his war in Ukraine except his dream of a restored Russian Empire. Diplomacy as a realistic option for ending the war against Ukraine was exhausted before the war began. Calling for an immediate ceasefire and diplomatic settlement is detached from reality; the conditions for a diplomatic agreement presently do not exist in Ukraine.
Chomsky, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Henry Kissinger also forget Ukraine is a sovereign state. Only Ukraine decides how long they will fight and when they will end their war. If Ukraine decides that the human and material price of a protracted conflict is not worth fighting for their de jure borders, then they alone can make that decision. Currently, they are fighting Russia, and they are fighting them valiantly, and us in North America and Europe should unreservedly support their effort. Ignoring their agency in their own war is nothing but paternalistic arrogance towards Ukraine by Chomsky and leftists, by the French, Germans, and Italians, and by Kissinger and other realist ghouls. As of May 17th, Ukraine has effectively suspended negotiations. As the Ukrainian military experiences greater battlefield success, Russia’s leverage weakens even further. If Ukraine is liberating occupied land using their newly acquired Western-provided firepower near Kharkiv and holding the Russians to a standstill in Donbas and in the southeast, why should they accept anything less but total Russian withdrawal? In a war of attrition and with western resources supporting Ukraine, Ukraine is poised to win.
But more to the point, what Chomsky and French and German leadership and Henry Kissinger (possibly willfully) miss is why Ukraine is fighting. The great and accumulating body of evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukrainians has dampened the capacity for diplomacy. The only reason Russian war aims have narrowed from an occupation of the entire country to merely controlling Donbas and other parts of southeastern Ukraine is because the Ukrainians fought them into readjustment. Ukrainians have fought so hard and so ably because this war is existential for them; if they lose, they lose everything. It is a war of survival, a war of literal survival from murder, but also a war of national survival. The massacres at Bucha and elsewhere have only reinforced this conviction – that Russia is trying to extinguish Ukrainian nationhood through terror and murder. Russia is not only planning on staying within Ukrainian territory, but they want to destroy Ukraine itself. Already in occupied Mariupol, Ukrainian signs have been replaced with Russian-language signs. The puppet mayor of the city has indicated that the city will be annexed to Russia soon, and there have been murmurs of a sham “referendum” in Kherson to give legitimacy to the Russian Federation’s desire to forcibly integrate Kherson. The massacres, the rapes, the change of signs, are not isolated incidents of depravity. They are a systematic tactic towards Russia’s goal of cultural genocide. In acting that it is the Americans and British who are getting Ukrainians killed, Chomsky is engaged in disingenuous gaslighting. The USA and the UK did not invade Ukraine. They did not slaughter the people of Bucha, or drive ten million Ukrainians from their homes. Russia did. Chomsky fails because he completely ignores the agency of Russian leadership and soldiers alike in waging their war, and instead he directs all of his energy on the imaginary crimes of the West.
A negotiated settlement with Russia is capitulation, and calling for an immediate ceasefire as Chomsky has done, is calling for Ukraine to surrender. The peace-at-all costs that Chomsky is advocating for will only result in more Ukrainians being slaughtered, pushed out of their homes, or forcibly assimilated into a nation that hates them. Between fighting for survival and a peace where you leave yourself at the mercy of genocidal monsters, peace is not virtuous. Of course, by arming Ukraine, the West is prolonging the conflict, which means that Ukrainians will die, but the conflict is being prolonged so that Ukraine has a serious chance at winning. The West is not supporting Ukraine for the sake of war; the West supports Ukraine because Ukraine deserves the ability to fight Russia off. If the West were to suddenly abandon Ukraine and push for peace-at-all-costs as Chomsky and Kissinger advocate, Ukrainians in Donbas, Kherson, and elsewhere will also die (likely in greater numbers), but only after suffering the humiliation of defeat and without the dignity of fighting back. Ukraine is fighting because they want to survive, because they want to be a part of the West; of the EU; of NATO, so that their sons and daughters can have a better, liberal democratic tomorrow. Ukrainians fully understand that in life, let alone politics, that there are things worth fighting for, and there are things worth dying for. A better future, or a future altogether is one such thing worth fighting for, and to not support the Ukrainians in this conflict is to take the side of Russian fascism and against liberal democracy.
Does it even have to be said that I do not want a Third World War? War between the US and NATO on one side, and Russia on the other, would almost certainly terminate in catastrophic nuclear war. For this reason I have not advocated for a no-fly zone, or boots on the ground, as both of those actions constitute a willingness to kill members of the Russian Armed Forces, and thus an act of war. Nevertheless, if Russia was interested in diplomacy, they would not have escalated their war to the degree they have. Now, the buck has stopped and us in the West must continue to do the utmost to assist Ukraine against their invaders, short of us going to war with Russia. The war has shown that the Russian military faces tremendous challenges that make them a paper tiger of sorts. That is not to say that Russia’s logistical, organizational, and morale issues could not be fixed with enough time and resolve, but for now, Russia wields the lowest amount of hard power leverage they have since the times of Russian feudalism and the Tatar Yoke. The only card Russia has left are nuclear weapons, a card Putin and his cohorts will not draw unless they have gone mad. As such, there is no reason not to continue arming and training Ukraine, along with working to diplomatically and financially isolate Russia. Anything otherwise would be a betrayal akin only to Munich.