The Morality of Immoral Stories

Lenin once said there are decades when nothing happens — and days when decades happen.

February 24, 2022, was certainly one of those days.

The Russian aggression turned Ukraine into a hell overnight, where people's very survival is directly threatened. We all awoke to a new world — even more ominous and dangerous than the one that ended with the incursion of Russian tanks onto Ukrainian soil.

A war in the heart of Europe is not something we Europeans can — as we’re accustomed to — ignore due to geographical distance. No more "out of sight, out of mind." The war isn't somewhere else this time — it has come to us.

All serious political parties in Slovenia have clearly and firmly condemned the Russian aggression. To claim otherwise is simply false. But I believe all serious political parties should also take a clear stand against those who are justifying or relativizing Russia’s responsibility for the attack on Ukraine. And there’s no shortage of them in Slovenia.

According to a survey by the Valicon public opinion agency, a striking percentage of people in Slovenia blame the war (also) on the U.S., NATO, or even Ukraine itself.

Not all Kremlin propaganda ruminators are fringe Twitter trolls. One of Slovenia's major media outlets published an op-ed by a long-time columnist shortly after the Russian invasion, arguing that Russia’s position is “fundamentally rational, logical, fact-based, and legitimate.”

From various commentators — now self-proclaimed experts and seekers of “alternative truths” — we’re hearing a barrage of arguments placing the blame anywhere but the Kremlin.

Some evidently can’t resist Putin’s narrative about Ukraine needing "denazification." I’ve written before about Ukraine’s problems with extremists — but to get a fuller picture, I recommend examining the life and legacy of Ivan Ilyin, a bona fide Russian fascist who died in Switzerland in 1954 and whom Putin had ceremoniously reburied in Moscow in 2005. Or look into the ideas of Alexander Dugin, Putin’s court philosopher and sometime political actor.

Putin quotes Ilyin in his speeches, interviews, and articles.

The views of Ilyin and Dugin — their stance toward democracy and Russia’s role in its neighbourhood and the Western world — have left an indelible mark on Putin’s domestic and foreign policy. Today, their ideology is being violently implemented in Ukraine — with tanks and bombs.

The fact that someone used to be a communist doesn’t mean they can’t be an ultra-nationalist today.

We now hear voices claiming that civilians are partly responsible for their own deaths — because Ukrainians stubbornly resist and refuse to lay down arms before a superior occupying force.

It’s almost like our battle of Dražgoše all over again, isn’t it?

A common argument is that Russia is merely protecting its legitimate security interests, supposedly threatened by broken NATO promises. But some people seem to need constant reminding that NATO did not attack Russia — Russia attacked Ukraine.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the historical context and circumstances of those alleged promises are far more complex than the Sunday-night security analysts would have us believe.

What stands out is the deeply imperialist logic behind this “anti-imperialist” talking point: a world where great powers have exclusive rights to enforce their interests by negotiating over the heads — and at the expense — of smaller countries.

In this worldview, Ukraine has no right to decide for itself whether to join NATO or the EU.

No right to a democratic future.

And in Putin’s most extreme version, no right to exist at all.

If anyone doubts this, they should read his speech justifying the “special military operation.”

The populist right, in Slovenia and worldwide, should especially look at its own doorstep.

The problem is not just fringe figures, but their first team.

Sure, most now forcefully condemn Putin’s aggression — and that’s the only correct stance — but it doesn’t change the fact that many of them were singing a different tune just days ago.

From Trump, who called Putin a "genius" right before the invasion and now proposes a “brilliant” idea to bomb Russia with planes painted in Chinese colours; to Bolsonaro and Le Pen, the latter having, like mainstream figures such as Fillon and Schröder, accepted roubles for loyalty; and Salvini, who until recently was parading around Red Square in a Putin T-shirt — only to have one stuffed mockingly in his face by a Polish mayor during a “humanitarian” visit to the Ukrainian border last week.

Salvini’s — and not only his — panicked distancing from Putin and sudden compassion for Ukrainian refugees is not only short-lived but also hypocritical.

Of course, every real gesture of help to those fleeing Ukraine deserves full support.

But not when it comes from people trying to score political points on the backs of the suffering — especially when their “compassion” is so selective.

This contradiction was most clearly voiced on French radio last Wednesday by Robert Ménard, the mayor of Béziers and a long-time associate of the French far-right:

"This is not moral. We cannot have different categories of victims. There are not Christian Europeans we must help, and Middle Eastern Muslims we can ignore. There is a double standard. Today in Béziers we welcome everyone seeking refuge. Three or four years ago, we did not — and that was wrong. Bombs don’t care if they fall on my friends in Kyiv or my friends in Aleppo."

He actually apologized.

Instead of doubling down in racist entrenchment like many of his ideological comrades, he held up a mirror to them.

The hypocrisy of some of these newly minted Putin critics — like Salvini, Trump, and the rest — shows not only in their attitudes toward refugees, but in the fact that their entire political careers are built on ideas very similar to the ones Putin has used to dominate Russia for over two decades — and now seeks to impose on his neighbours.

Using laws and “extra-legal” means to persecute political opponents, muzzle independent journalists, suppress freedoms, and fortify a “vertical of power” as an alternative to the “weak and corrupt” liberal democracy — one which Putin has despised and rejected from the very beginning.

The global far-right and illiberal populists have long been fascinated by (and often funded by) Putin’s decisiveness in the culture wars — fighting against all forms of social liberalism: feminism, tolerance, diversity, and other “degenerate Western delusions.”

They embraced his homophobia, baked into his obsession with a neo-Soviet, Eurasian empire; his nationalism, and his mythic vision of Russia as the last bastion of spiritual and moral purity in a battle against a “decadent, gay, drugged-up” West.

In their newly discovered anti-Putin enthusiasm, they either fail to notice — or refuse to — that the Russian tanks and bombs killing Ukrainian civilians today are the brutal but logical consequence of exactly what they admired in Putin all along.

As the Patriarch of All Russia, Kirill, put it in his sermon supporting the “special military operation”:

Russia is merely defending itself against the “Western genocide of countries that refuse to hold pride parades.”

The moral of the story?

You can’t credibly criticize Putin in Ukraine if you’re inspired by Putinism at home.

And vice versa.

Some people should be deeply ashamed.

But all is not lost.

Let’s follow the example of the mayor of Béziers.

Now is the time, despite our differences, to come together and do everything we can to stop the war and help those affected.

Everyone. That’s something we should be able to agree on.

There are plenty of other big, important topics left for us to argue about — at least as long as we remain a democracy, built on the freedom to decide our own future, and one that does not divide people into humans and lesser humans.