I think a lot of Left intellectuals get wildly excited when they see evidence of what they call “mass activity”, you know, demonstrations, riots, people rampaging around and so on, because it gives credence to what they imagine a revolutionary upsurge to be. It’s been like that, ever since I became more politically aware as a young student in the late 1970s.
As a matter of fact, the first real political scrum I ever got involved in myself was in 1981, and it was about, uh, a football... (!) The South African rugby team came to New Zealand, and we protested against them playing, on account of the shitty, demeaning apartheid regime in South Africa, and how they selected their players. Just before that time, I had been immersing myself in the Afrikaner religion, the Afrikaner reformed church and all that, I had been translating a text about that, etc. and I came away convinced that God, if he was there, wasn’t really on the side of apartheid. The interesting thing about it was, that the sudden outburst of “mass activity” took the Left by surprise, as they admitted later. They didn’t have much of a political analysis, yet it was an issue which really riled people in practically every home up and down the country. It made me wonder what the use was, of all the intricate theory which local Marxists had been propounding. There was a lot of discontent in New Zealand at the time, because of rising unemployment and rising prices, discrimination and all sorts, a lot of grievances were actually mixed up in what happened. There were people for the tour and against the tour, even within families. It turned out that the prime minister, Mr Muldoon, acting as a sort of Down Under Bonaparte, was actually cleverly using the tour issue to split opposition to his rule. He actually managed to stay in power for another three years, until he was finally routed, due to the intervention of Bob Jones, a real estate millionaire who set up his own party for the explicit purpose of capturing sufficient votes to make Muldoon lose the election. Which is what happened. The same Marxists who had Louis Althusser, Perry Anderson and Nicos Poulantzas up to the gills, didn’t really grasp the meaning of events at all. And that taught me a lesson. If you are a bit more levelheaded, you try to inquire into what the “mass activity” really means, what people are fighting about, what you can support or oppose from your own corner of the world, what you could usefully do about it, if anything. If people in the Ukraine need help from the world, what exactly is it, that they need? Well, they probably don’t need me to pronounce on how their struggle fits into the schema of the world revolution, or anything like that. Probably they get sick and tired of people meddling in their affairs, without knowing the foggiest about what it is really about. So probably, the first real need is to create more clarity about what is really happening, and combat disinformation and all sorts of loony ideas about the nature of the conflicts, which have been simmering for years. There’s people that know about that quite well, so let them speak. Just because masses of people are on the move, isn’t all that interesting in itself, there will be much more of that in the future (after all, the world of work is going to ruin, in the wake of the financial crisis), what is interesting is what really motivates them, and where it is likely to lead to. My own knowledge of what is happening in the Ukraine isn’t all that comprehensive, I mean you try to read between the lines of the news reports, the history and so on, but I don’t speak the language or anything. Ideally, if I could, I would like to go there, and see what is happening for myself, but my priorities right now concern more basic problems of my existence, which I have the solve where I am. Since I live where I live, my first concern is with what my own people and what my own government make of it, and what they are trying to do about it. Our own Foreign Affairs Minister says Obama-like, that it is of “eminent importance” that the “territorial integrity of the Ukraine should be respected”, and he said, “worries about the situation had increased” (is that all you can say?). Meaning, presumably, that the Russians should not escalate and invade. It is of interest to me, as a layman, that my government should suddenly be interested in “territorial integrity”, since that concept has never worried NATO before (think of Libya, which is in tatters). The Ukraine, right now, is most probably infested with foreign spies and subversives as well. My thinking is, that we ought to have confidence in the Ukrainians to solve their own problems, and that if they want help, they will ask for it. If the Russians go in big time, let them try, they will only be packing another Afghanistan, since the Ukrainians will never ever buy that invasion. Point is, these problems will never, never, never be solved militarily. They will be solved with politics, with a clash of ideas about what is really best for the country. Why should we be afraid of that battle of ideas, of opinions? If the human race still has some fibre and morals left, that is exactly what ought to happen. Yes, there is a moment of disorder, of chaos. What else can you expect? But soon enough people will figure out what’s what, and take the bull by the horns. After all, they are human beings who are the product of millions of years of evolution, which they survived, and they can sort it out. So really, if we switch off the American propaganda for a moment, the big problem we have within Europe is a still lingering fad, that political conflicts could be solved with military force. That was the inheritance of George W. Bush of Texas, with his agenda for the New American Century. Cowboy Bush thought that he better do “something” about 9/11, and teach the world a lesson about what’s what, who is the boss, Jesus Christ, God, pipelines etc. But point is, all the extreme and bestial brutality and barbarism of military war actually solved amazingly little, and made a lot of problems a lot worse for the majority of the people. Military technology enables the powerful to smash things up good, but as regards building up something it fails miserably. The business class showed itself amazingly incapable, to solve even the most basic problems that people had, such as getting electricity, food and water, despite the massive injection of funds for which the American taxpayers are now liable. Joseph Stiglitz complained, the Iraq war cost billions, even trillions. I said: that money went somewhere, and who got it? No answer from the Democrats. Not only that, a lot of the veterans in this glorious operation are now left up shit creek without a paddle. Question is, do we really want that sort of thing to happen again in the world? I think, no. I still personally cringe with shame and horror about what highly educated Western people, who ought to know much better, perpetrated in Iraq. I protested about it. I would cringe with shame and horror again, if European civilization took a fright, and could think of nothing better than a Ukraine filled with soldiers, bomb craters, and tanks. There must be a better way. And I think there is, if we do not succumb to a military panic. J.
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