Are We Involved in Something Depraved?

We have a moral responsibility to put an end to anything depraved that's being done in our name.

“We learn a lot about the reigning culture from the fact that the grotesque experiment is considered highly praiseworthy, and that any effort to question it is either relegated to the margins or bitterly castigated with an impressive flow of lies and deceit.”

“There is no real consensus on what Putin might do if he’s desperate.”

“Fueling a violent conflict in a small country in order to weaken a larger adversary is, of course, morally unconscionable.”

See my previous pieces about the war in Ukraine:

• “Is US Policy Killing Ukrainians?” (17 March 2022)

• “Where’s the Diplomacy?” (26 March 2022)

• “Are We in a Propaganda Bubble?” (31 March 2022)

• “What Can WE Affect?” (4 April 2022)

• “‘To the Last Ukrainian’?” (11 April 2022)

• “Thinking About Atrocities” (17 April 2022)

• “Do We Want Peace?” (21 April 2022)

• “What’s the Endgame?” (29 April 2022)

• “What’s Our Official Policy?” (6 May 2022)

Noam Chomsky made an extremely important comment about our policy regarding the war in Ukraine:

We learn a lot about the reigning culture from the fact that the grotesque experiment is considered highly praiseworthy, and that any effort to question it is either relegated to the margins or bitterly castigated with an impressive flow of lies and deceit.

Everyone should remember that we have a moral responsibility for the things that are being done in our name—we have a moral responsibility to find out what’s being done in our name and then we have a moral responsibility to act to end anything depraved that’s being done in our name.

And it’s important to remember that the war in Ukraine threatens our lives and our wealth and our families—this isn’t simply a matter of being irresponsible and immoral, but it’s also a matter of being suicidal, since we’re really playing with fire here when it comes to nuclear war and global heating.

The CNN Piece

Chomsky’s comment about the “reigning culture” is absolutely correct, although it’s striking that the following piece appeared on CNN:

• “Putin’s current dilemma was JFK’s worst fear” (11 May 2022)

Just look at these incredible quotes from the 11 May 2022 piece:

• “Kennedy’s superpower logic is resounding poignantly as Putin gets backed into a corner by the strategic disaster of his war, Ukraine’s heroic resistance and an extraordinary multibillion-dollar allied conveyor of arms and ammunition.”

• “Washington’s explicitly stated aim in supporting Ukraine is that Putin loses the war. Biden has asked Congress for $33 billion to send military and other aid to Ukraine, and the House on Tuesday voted to pass a roughly $40 billion bill. Washington is flooding the battlefield with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, radars, drones, artillery rounds and howitzers.”

• “There is no real consensus on what Putin might do if he’s desperate.”

• “Putin has proved himself a ruthless leader with little compunction about causing mass casualties. He razed cities in Chechnya and unleashed his forces on civilians in Syria. His war in Ukraine has featured merciless shelling and bombing of residential areas, schools, stations and shelters, and apparent war crimes by his troops. Thousands of his soldiers have died. And Putin has already used weapons of mass destruction—for instance, targeting Russian defectors on British soil with radioactive elements and nerve agents—with zero regard for civilians, according to the UK government.”

• “as the war drags on, with the constant danger of an escalation or a miscalculation that would precipitate a wider clash, cracks may be opening in the fortress of Western unity”

• there’s a “growing nervousness that without some kind of outside intervention, Putin could well get pushed into the kind of corner that Kennedy was talking about in a speech at American University in June 1963”

• “Six decades later, some kind of similar accommodation, however painful that may be, could be required for Putin.”

Chomsky is correct to say that “any effort to question” the “grotesque experiment” is either:

• (1) “relegated to the margins”

• (2) “bitterly castigated with an impressive flow of lies and deceit”

This CNN piece does express the exact points that Chomsky and others have been making ever since Putin launched his monstrous and hideous and criminal invasion. And the CNN piece also says these things:

• (A) “While the US can be criticized for failing to give Putin the kind of way out that Biden was speculating about, such an initiative would be hard—and might not work anyway.”

• (B) “To begin with, Putin is not eyeing the exits.”

• (C) Putin “refused all diplomatic off-ramps, entreaties and warnings to de-escalate the conflict before the invasion”

• (D) there’s a “belief in hawkish Western capitals, like London and Washington, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces, flush with Western arms, have earned the right to win the war—and might end up doing so”

• (E) “Ukraine is, after all, the wronged party, which has suffered an unprovoked invasion.”

Regarding (A), it’s true that an effort to end the war “might not work”—Chomsky and others have been clear and emphatic about that from the outset.

Regarding (B), it’s not clear what the relevance is—the issue is that we’re currently engaged in a “grotesque experiment”, so of course Putin isn’t “eyeing the exits” right now.

Regarding (C), this is both misleading and also not necessarily relevant to the present situation.

Regarding (D), it’s true that there’s a certain “belief in hawkish Western capitals”—it’s the task of morally responsible people to combat this hawkishness if this hawkishness is depraved.

Regarding (E), Ukraine is absolutely a victim of criminal aggression and war crimes, but this is irrelevant to whether we’re engaged in a “grotesque experiment” and whether we have a moral responsibility to stop the “grotesque experiment”.

Regarding (E) again, it’s not true that the invasion was “unprovoked”. And provocation doesn’t mean justification—Putin is a war criminal and his monstrous and hideous and criminal invasion wasn’t in any sense justified.

Robinson’s Piece

Everyone should read Nathan J. Robinson’s fascinating piece in Current Affairs:

• “Is The U.S. Actually Trying to Help Ukraine?” (9 May 2022)

Here’s an excerpt:

An important question here is whether the United States, despite its rhetoric, is actually trying to set its own policies on the basis of what Ukraine wants and needs, or on the basis of the outcome the U.S. wants and needs. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in a recent interview with Current Affairs, in the 1980s the United States funded Islamist mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in part to bleed and weaken the Soviet Union. While there may have been noble rhetoric about aiding the people of Afghanistan, in reality the U.S. cared about its rivalry with the Soviets, not the millions of civilians who died in the Afghan conflict. “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War,” Zbigniew Brzeziński says he told Jimmy Carter. Fueling a violent conflict in a small country in order to weaken a larger adversary is, of course, morally unconscionable.

Let me emphasize this comment:

Fueling a violent conflict in a small country in order to weaken a larger adversary is, of course, morally unconscionable.

And here’s another excerpt from Robinson’s piece:

Shouldn’t the U.S. be crafting policy right now on the basis of what helps Ukrainians, rather than what helps (vaguely defined) “U.S. interests”? You might assume that what’s good for us and what’s good for Ukraine coincide, but that’s not necessarily the case. As Chomsky pointed out, all the talk of regime change in Russia disincentivizes Putin to end the war, because it indicates that the U.S. posture toward him will be the same regardless of what he does in Ukraine. The Guardian notes that the present U.S. posture “suggest[s] that even if Russian forces withdrew or were expelled from the Ukrainian territory they have occupied since 24 February, the US and its allies would seek to maintain sanctions with the aim of stopping Russia reconstituting its forces.” James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued that by not making it clear how Putin can get sanctions lifted, we create an ambiguity that is “dangerous because it risks obscuring the existence of an off-ramp for Putin.” If the West’s position is that it will try to topple Putin’s government, and that nothing Putin can do will change this, it places him in a struggle for survival. Boris Johnson’s spokesperson has said directly that the sanctions “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” (Downing Street later walked back the statement.) If Putin will be sanctioned if he ends the war and sanctioned if he doesn’t, then sanctions are not being used as pressure to end the war.  

We have a moral responsibility to free ourselves from the pressures of the “reigning culture”—we have a moral responsibility to do the right thing and not what the “reigning culture” that has made the world into the sad and miserable place that is today tells us to do.