We must analyze the ambiguity of our support of #Ukraine with the same cruelty we analyze Russia’s stance. We should reach beyond double standards applied today to the very foundations of European #liberalism. Remember how, in the western liberal tradition, #colonization was often justified in the terms of the rights of working people. John Locke, the great #Enlightenment philosopher and advocate of #humanrights, justified white settlers grabbing land from Native Americans with a strange left-sounding argument against excessive private #property. His premise was that an individual should be allowed to own only as much land as he is able to use productively, not large tracts of land that he is not able to use (and then eventually rents to others). In North #America, as he saw it, Indigenous people were using vast tracts of land mostly just for hunting, and the white settlers who wanted to use it for intense #agriculture had the right to seize it for the benefit of humanity.
In the ongoing Ukraine #crisis, both sides present their acts as something they simply had to do: the west had to help Ukraine remain free and independent; #Russia was compelled to intervene militarily to protect its safety. The latest example: the Russian foreign ministry claiming Russia will be “forced to take retaliatory steps” if #Finland joins #Nato. No, it will not be “forced”, in the same way that Russia was not “forced” to attack Ukraine. This decision appears “forced” only if one accepts the whole set of ideological and geopolitical assumptions that sustain Russian #politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/we-must-stop-letting-russia-define-the-terms-of-the-ukraine-crisis #war #geopolitics #israel #china #zizek
