On Thursday morning, Russian forces stormed Ukraine for a “special military operation.” Some believe he’s backing the Donetsk & Luhansk People’s Republic’s claim of independence from the US-backed Western Ukraine. The Russian initiative is also seeking to deter American troops (and potentially NATO) from further approaching the Russian border, an act that would break America’s 1990 not “one inch eastward” verbal promise to keep Eastern European countries out of NATO.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was adamant during a Wednesday press conference that any country that interrupts their operation will face “consequences they have never seen,” which many perceive as a threat of nuclear war. US President Joe Biden has issued sanctions on Russia in the hopes that they make Russia pull out of Ukraine. But they may not work. Biden already admitted to the media on Thursday that “nobody expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening.” So why would they stop what’s already underway? The 40,000 person NATO Response Force has been activated for the first time ever. We could be on the precipice of World War III.
Instead of social media users interrogating why Donbas is seeking independence, or exploring how to help people in Ukraine caught up in a deadly tug-of-war between fascists, too many people on Twitter instead broke out their WWIII jokes. It was unsurprising but no less infuriating. Perhaps some people are laughing to keep from crying about yet another travail to worry about. Many of us use humor as a defense mechanism for their anxieties. But believing that one’s desire to laugh overrides sensitivity for people in a crisis is a selfish, individualist perspective that underscores our ignorance of the US war machine. Violence like the 1927 Tulsa Bombing and the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia were committed with the same tactics that the US war machine deploys globally. We’ve read about the toll of US military operations on innocent civilians.
Our own oppression doesn’t qualify us to make light of others’. Yes, we’re currently in an endless pandemic. The economy is crumbling, jobs are dwindling, and the people in charge haven’t given us much but comic relief with how terribly they’re mismanaging everything. Things are bleak. And while dark humor can ease our tensions and give us perspective, it’s only effective when you’re putting yourself on the chopping block. We have to pump the breaks when it comes to making light of other people’s immediate danger, especially innocent people dodging the crosshairs of fascist infighting. The entire world protested for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. Perhaps we could reciprocate by at the least not finding humor in their current suffering. But so many Americans don’t know any better.
Most of us have rarely been faced with the immediate worry that people in Southwest Asia, African countries, and Ukraine are dealing with, as missiles destroy neighborhoods while a foreign invader runs them over with tanks and occupies their airports. America’s daily international abuses are as traumatic as the domestic tragedies that we’re implored to “never forget.”
While the world was focused on Ukraine on Thursday, US-backed Israeli forces bombed Syria, and the US Africa Command, or AFRICOM, bombed Somalia. AFRICOM’s press release states that “the Federal Government of Somalia and the U.S. remain committed to fighting al-Shabaab to prevent the deaths of innocent civilians,“ ignoring the reality that the U.S. helped destabilize Somalia in the 2000s in the first place. That occupation has been historically underreported by a Western media used to sweeping US imperialism under the rug — while keeping the foreign despot of the moment, currently Putin, in the headlines. The current news cycle is teeming with news about Russia. But a Google search about the airstrike in Somalia registered a solitary New York Times report.
Perhaps if we all, Black people especially, were more cognizant of what’s going on in the world, we’d be more empathetic to their struggles, and more sensitive to the reality that joking about how we’d fare as soldiers isn’t humorous to people whose lives have been ruined by American forces. We might not make light of who we should send over to shoot up a country if we considered them our neighbor, or better yet, an ally against the colonial state. But as of now, America has succeeded with giving us blinders toward what’s going on internationally, making their plight fair game. We’re even negligent of the well-being of African people currently living and studying in Ukraine, joking about the conflict being “white on white crime.” In reality, we’re either anti-imperialist or we’re not. We can’t choose which western efforts to be in a furor over, and which to joke about. Any instance of American oppression against a powerless people is a threat to us, because it can, and has, happened to us just as easily.
The jokes that frame Putin as the solitary “villain” in this impasse also serve US interest. He’s long been the successor to Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the foreign target of American pop culture’s ire. But this framing is more than harmless fun, it reflects media coverage that shapes American perception and makes it more acceptable for the US military to combat him — even as we’re just as guilty of plundering borders worldwide.
Putin is by no means some misunderstood freedom fighter; he’s an imperialist in his own right who’s committed human rights abuses and cyberattacks on numerous countries. But in this case, some believe he’s justified in feeling like he’s preemptively protecting himself against the United States and NATO. Russia has felt betrayed by the west for almost a century. They felt betrayed after NATO was formed as a 12-country alliance against them after 27 million Soviets died helping the allied forces take down Nazi Germany in WWII. And they felt further betrayed after the U.S. broke a verbal promise that NATO wouldn’t move another “one inch eastward” toward Russia while signing a 1990 treaty. Russia has long felt like the U.S. has been angling against them — which isn’t hard to believe with how much meddling they’ve done in neighboring Ukraine.
The Bush administration sought NATO inclusion for Ukraine and Georgia, going back on their word to Russia. The Obama administration backed a 2014 coup against the Ukrainian government (and their democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovych), which split the country and united two separatist Donbas regions as the Donetsk & Luhansk People’s Republic (an arrangement approved under the 2015 Minsk II Accords). The Russi-backed Republic is has been embroiled in a war with the US-backed puppet government (and Neo-Nazi militias) since then. Over 13,000 people have died already. And now the Biden administration has given Ukraine $650 million of “lethal aid” to take back the Donbas region, which would then conceivably allow NATO and its allies to camp on Russia’s doorstep. Long story short, there’s no one villain in this instance; the entire conflict is all villainy from an infighting ruling class that’s costing innocent lives.
World leaders’ propagandic narratives ignore that the common denominator between all the ruling countries is imperialism. Biden criticized Putin for trying to resurrect the USSR, but America is the last country that should be calling someone out for forcibly consuming another country. French President Emmanuel Macron asserted that Putin wants to “take us back to the age of empires,” but France just withdrew from Mali last week, where they were involved in an ”anti-jihadist operation primarily focused on Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.” Kenyan UN ambassador Martin Kimani was praised for condemning Russia at a recent UN forum. He chided Russia while theorizing that African nations didn’t “look backwards into history with a dangerous nostalgia” when signing The Charter of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. In other words, he’s acknowledging that the most powerful African countries decided to stand pat with the colonially recognized borders instead of negotiating to give land back. Patrick Gathara of Al-Jazeera wrote the following about Kimani’s speech:
It was a masterful performance, but one that is quite troubling for its seeming valorisation of the colonial order that continues to this day. Africans, according to Kimani, had not known greatness before the white man arrived and with his departure, had apparently left them with the framework to pursue it.
Similarly, Putin is being praised by some for recognizing the Donbas region’s independence — but their separatism also serves his interest If they weren’t beholden to Russia, would their land be in his crosshairs as well?
The US-Russia Ukraine conflict is a tangled ball of greed, nationalism, meddling, and more than anything, needless violence that will harm the working class more than any of the ruling class in these countries. While innocent people are suffering, the wealthy are considering “which stocks to buy as the Ukraine crisis heats up.” That jarring ponderance is an affect of being in a country that destabilizes countries with impunity. For US imperialism, war is commerce, and lost lives are a cost of doing business. The best response from us all isn’t just to decry Putin’s actions but to call out the United States as well. If neither country was trying to control Ukraine, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Too many Americans are unaware of how drastic the anti-imperialist fight is. We might not fathom how much America has its tentacles in via military occupations, puppet governments, and destabilization that allows us to pillage resources. Our ignorance of America’s foreign exploits is directly tied to their imperialistic missions going unchallenged domestically. Let’s not highlight further highlight our ignorance by joking about it.
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