Slightly less subsidized Russian energy (i.e., gas is no longer as dirt cheap for Ukrainians as it used to be) is not why Ukraine needs an IMF bailout, nor is it why Tymoshenko is trying desperately to get budget measures passed to qualify for IMF aid. Blaming Russian-Ukrainian energy disputes for Ukraine’s financial mess is not credible. There are a lot of central and eastern European states that depend on Russia for energy that are having financial woes, but dependence on Russian energy is not the cause of those woes. Hungary isn’t going broke because it gets gas from the east; it’s going broke because of the ripple effects of bank collapses and economic contraction.

Who said people in eastern Ukraine want their sons to be conscipted into the Russian army? I assume quite a lot of people living in *Russia* don’t want their sons conscripted into the Russian army. Who is talking about conscription here? This is, or was supposed to be, a post on literature. Did anyone deny that Russian borders have been arbitrarily drawn and established by force in the past? What are you talking about?

As a practical matter, Ukrainian independence creates a number of serious problems and flashpoints for future conflict. Ukraine is economically intertwined with its larger neighbor, so its real independence is restricted by this, but it does not receive as many of the benefits of this relationship as it would if it had stayed united to Russia. It is suffering financially in the wake of the crisis in a way that would not necessarily be the case if it were part of Russia. In a world of centralized nation-states, independence creates a lot of disadvantages for people living in Ukraine. Of course, I accept that there are things more important than economic benefits, so I don’t expect that Ukraine will cease to be independent and I don’t argue that Ukraine should cease to be independent. Viewed from the outside, though, as a matter of geopolitics and international stability, Ukrainian independence is potentially very dangerous and has many of the makings of being a flashpoint similar to Bosnia in the early 20th century.

The recent war in Georgia should also remind us that smaller separatist movements often have great power patrons that seek to exploit them for their own ends, and this tends to put the populations of the separatist regions and the state they are trying to break away from in the crossfire of violent conflict. I don’t think Russia will be as heavy-handed in the event that Crimean separatists make a bid for their own independence, in part because Ukraine is much larger and more powerful than Georgia, but the issue of possible Crimean separatism and the potential for Russian intervention on behalf of the Crimeans would never even exist had Ukraine not become independent.

In The Patriot it’s not enough to go to war against a distant monarch in the name of self-government, in opposition to taxation-without-representation, etc. Maybe those abstract principles wouldn’t have allowed the audience to feel good about enjoying the ensuing bloodbath, so the movie makes the American War of Independence a blood feud between Gibson’s South Carolina planter and an English cavalry officer who [SPOILERS AHEAD] shoots Gibson’s young son, burns down Gibson’s farm, dragoons Gibson’s free black plantation employees (!) into the British Army, burns down a church with the townspeople inside, kills another of Gibson’s sons, etc. The church-burning incident has no basis in the history of the Revolutionary War–it was based on an atrocity committed by the SS in France.

I don’t have a problem with taking some dramatic license to give Gibson a hiss-able enemy to defeat in a Revolutionary War epic. But the effect in this case is to impart the lesson that the British weren’t just the enemy, or even just an enemy fighting for the wrong cause, but were hideous monsters trying to strangle the hopes and dreams of the blameless colonists. So the British behave, not as the British actually did in the actual war, but as the Nazis behaved in occupied Europe. And the Americans (at least the Americans who don’t choose to collaborate with the evil British) aren’t flawed in any way–the hero even happens to be the rare South Carolina plantation owner who employed free blacks instead of owning slaves.

There’s an extremism and a moralism in this sort of thing that’s genuinely troubling. It helps create a narrative of the United States as a perpetual underdog that is constantly in conflict, not with other nations that have their own interests and concerns, but with an endless series of Nazi-like enemies.

The actual plot of Braveheart, obviously, has nothing to do with the United States. But I think it resonates with US audiences for the same reason–the blameless hero who just wants “freedom” against a maniac who condones the rape and murder of women, throws his son’s lover out of a window, gleefully oversees battles in which his own infantrymen are felled by his own archers, etc.

I know I sound like a humorless stick-in-the-mud. I actually LIKE Braveheart. And, again, I don’t begrudge Gibson his right to make the English a bit more unpleasant than they actually were in the name of making a rousing entertainment instead of a depressing meditation on the pitiless violence and endemic brutality of medieval Britain. But, at a certain point, all of this adds up to a coherent message that history is the story of Americans and their distant ancestors (either by blood, in the case of the Scots, or by “shared values” in the case of the execreble 300) facing off against pure evil and triumphing without making (or even considering) any moral compromises or committing any objectionable acts.

I agree with you that this doesn’t add up to “propaganda”, but it’s not in a totally different universe from propaganda.

If you had read my earlier post on this subject, you would see that I have no sympathy with the campaign to make Gogol’s work into a vehicle for Russian nationalism or Pan-Slavic claims. You would also see in the comments on that post that I understand Ukrainian attitudes about the Holodomor and I also say that Ukrainian independence is a reality that shouldn’t be undone. In the past, I have written about the importance of recognizing the Holodomor despite Russian complaints to the contrary. I don’t pretend that Yushchenko, a criminal oligarch, is some sort of martyr for democracy, because he isn’t, and I would never embarrass myself by talking about the supposed religious piety of other foreign heads of state. Putin goes to church, too–does that make him a religious man? Let’s not insult one another’s intelligence.

I don’t see how we have any real disagreement, or at least we wouldn’t if you would stick to the issue at hand rather than rant about how much you dislike Putin.

In his comments to Daniel’s last Bulba post, Ottovbvs wrote: “Ukraine, Georgia, the Crimea… are as Russian as Tolstoy.” This is a ludicrous statement. One sorta wants to take it on, but doing so would be like taking a scalpel to a wad of cotton candy, or fighting with fog.

Daniel wrote in a comment to the last post: “That said, what’s done is done, and I don’t see any benefit coming from trying to reincorporate [Ukraine] into Russia.” Kiev heaves a sigh of relief on this April morning as Daniel renders his verdict, but in fact the idea that Ukraine is going to be “reincorporated” into Russia has no reality, no one here even worries about that. (I’ve found that this is the sort of thing that non-Slavic Orthodox converts I’ve met like to talk about when they’re not intoning about “Holy Mother Russia” — sort of a compensatory mechanism for not completely fitting in.) Ukraine won’t be reincorporated for this reason: even those Ukrainians, and Ukrainian leaders, and Ukrainian oligarchs, whom idiot Western news reports reductively describe as “pro-Russian” don’t want reincorporation. Yep: Ukrainians really do have a serious affinity for Russia, and they mostly don’t give a damn about the U.S. or “the West,” but that said, they don’t want Moscow rule. (This is what’s known as “two (slightly) contradictory ideas existing at the same time.”)

It’s true, Russia could probably take Ukraine over militarily tomorrow, but why bother? Then all the Kremlin would do is alienate that huge mass of Ukrainians (the majority, I’d say) who have serious pro-Russian affinities. All the Kremlin has to do is wait until Yushchenko, with his 4% approval rating, leaves the scene. Then someone who knows the score (probably Tymoshenko in the short term; the Russians like Tymoshenko) will take over, the moronic talk about NATO and Ukraine being “a European country” will end, and that’s that.

It was also funny to see Daniel write this: “Asking whether Gogol would have identified himself with Russia or Ukraine is to ask a question that would not really have meant very much to Gogol himself, because it is a question that would not have had political or, for that matter, cultural relevance in the mid-19th century.” Does Daniel mean it had NO political or cutural relevance? None? Zero? Zed? Null set? That’s a profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-thought statement. Back in the grad school people loved to call that sort of comment “totalizating” or “an imposition of closure” and they’d laugh at you for making it. It’s just not intellectually defensible. Daniel’s generally better than this.

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/04/12/not-a-bug-an-undocumented-feature-the-case-for-anti-modernism-part-i/

Formulating a Future: The Case for Anti-Modernism, Part I

Sharon April 12th, 2009

One of the best things about life is the strange bedfellows you find in it. It makes for one heck of a slumber party.

I was thinking about this recently, because I happened to follow out the links that people have been putting in to my posts one afternoon when I had time to kill, just out of curiosity. I do this periodically, but I’d never done so systematically, or sat down to really sort through them. And the juxtaposition, say of the black women survivalists with the urban Catholic distributist nuns, the anarchist social critics and the right wing ones, the Belizian Mennonites, the Mormon food storage people, the Pagan Fiber artists, the Baptist farmers, the socialist Baptist farmers, and the guy who occasionally sticks my pieces in with his essays on South African poetry made for a truly engaging collage. And it got me asking – what do all of us have in common? …