In May of last year, during the presidential campaign, the current president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, assured that the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, are equally responsible for the war in Ukraine. But no matter who refuses to take sides (Brazil, South Africa or India), claiming to be “neutral” in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine is untenable.
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The same goes for people in certain situations. For example, if a passerby sees a man beating up a child on the street, she assumes that he should try to stop him. There is no room for neutrality. On the contrary, we would deplore the moral turpitude of inaction.
How then should we respond to Roger Waters’ comments to the United Nations Security Council on February 8? In a video call, the activist and co-founder of Pink Floyd assured that he was speaking on behalf of “some four billion brothers and sisters” around the world. He acknowledged that Russia’s war in Ukraine is illegal and should be condemned “in the strongest terms.” But then he hastened to add something else.
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“The Russian invasion of Ukraine was provoked, so I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest terms… The only reasonable course of action is to call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. Not one more Ukrainian or Russian life should be lost, not one more, they are all precious. The time has come to speak truth to power.”
Is Waters’s “truth” really an expression of neutrality? In an interview the musician gave earlier this month to the Berliner Zeitung, he declared: “Maybe I shouldn’t, but now I’m more willing to listen to what Putin really says. According to independent voices to which I pay attention, Putin rules prudently and makes decisions on the basis of consensus within the government of the Russian Federation.”
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As an independent voice myself who closely follows the Russian media, I know very well what Putin and his propagandists “really say”. The main television channels are full of commentators who recommend dropping a nuclear bomb on Poland, Germany or the United Kingdom. The bellicose Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s closest allies, is openly suggesting that “the fight against Satanism must continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”
In fact, the official line of the Kremlin describes the war as a “special operation” for the denazification and demonization of Ukraine. One of Ukraine’s “provocations” has been to allow Gay Pride parades and LGBTQ+ rights to undermine traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Kremlin-aligned commentators speak of “liberal totalitarianism,” even going so far as to argue that George Orwell’s 1984 was not a critique of fascism or Stalinism but of liberalism.
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Ukraine is ‘provoking’ Russia by refusing to submit to its imperial ambitions, even under extremely unfavorable conditions
None of this will be found in the Western media, where the central theme is that we have to help Ukraine survive. As far as I know, no one has called for a modification of Russia’s borders or the capture of any part of its territory. At best we have been met with counterproductive calls to boycott Russian culture, as if the Putin regime had anything to do with artists like Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy.
Just as we support Ukraine in its fight against an aggressor, we must defend Russian culture against its abuser from the Kremlin. We must also avoid triumphalism and present our objective in positive terms. The central goal is not for Russia to end up defeated and humiliated, but for Ukraine to survive.
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“Neutral” countries outside the West argue that the war is a local conflict that pales in comparison to the horrors of colonialism or more recent events like the US occupation of Iraq. But it is clear that this is a evasion: Russia’s imperialist war is itself an act of colonialism. Those who claim to be neutral lose the right to protest the horrors of colonization elsewhere. Waters vehemently supports Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization. Why is the Ukrainian resistance to Russian colonization going to be less worthy of support?
Sometimes things are that simple, especially now that Russia has celebrated the first anniversary of its war. It is obscenity to blame Ukraine for Russian acts of destruction, or to misrepresent Ukraine’s heroic resistance as a rejection of peace. Those like Waters who call for an “immediate ceasefire” want the Ukrainians to respond by abandoning their own self-defense in the face of redoubled Russian aggression. That is not a formula for peace, but for appeasement.
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It should be mentioned (once again) that Russia hopes that the “neutralist” argument will end up prevailing. As military historian Michael Clarke explains: “The Kremlin’s plan will be to keep fighting until the West has had enough and pressures Kiev to appease them by giving them whatever territory they have so far taken.” Russia is preparing for a protracted war that will include the silent mobilization of some 600,000 soldiers a year “indefinitely.”
In one thing Waters is not wrong: Ukraine is “provoking” Russia by refusing to submit to its imperial ambitions, even under extremely unfavorable conditions. At this point, the only way to stop provoking your aggressive revisionist neighbor further would be to lay down your weapons and surrender. And (Waters will agree) the same can be said of Palestine.
But surrendering to imperialism generates neither peace nor justice. To preserve the possibility of achieving one or the other, we have to abandon the fiction of neutrality and act accordingly.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
© PROJECT SYNDICATE
LJUBLJANA
Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and author of ‘Heaven in Disorder’ (2021).
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