Undemocratic, Professor Chomsky!

Western Liberal Intellectuals and the “Ukrainian Crisis”

No one is surprised that the ultra-rightists are Putin’s greatest allies in the West. It’s only natural for them, since the Russian fascist-like regime is the very ideal to which they themselves aspire. It’s harder to understand why people who consider themselves liberal democrats occasionally support a regime that is neither liberal nor democratic. Most likely, it’s the simple logic: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And since “Western imperialism” is the greatest enemy of Western liberals, they are ready to forgive Russia’s internal repression and external aggression for the sake of her supposed resistance to it, like liberal intellectuals in the 1930s at one time forgiving the Stalin regime much for its “anti-fascism.”

The other day, while flipping through American television channels, I happened across an interesting program called “Democracy Now!” The program was even more interesting due to the appearance of Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist, philosopher and political thinker/dissident — who, incidentally, is the son of a Ukrainian immigrant. For many American liberals Chomsky is something like a great guru, who knows the answer to all questions of history and current events. Because of this, the hour-long interview covered a variety of global issues, and everywhere the U.S. and its aggressive foreign policy were found to be to blame. I pricked up my ears: Would he say something about the Ukrainian-Russian conflict? Indeed, after a while the host, mentioning the “ceasefire,” John Kerry’s latest attack on Putin and the murder of Boris Nemtsov, asked the professor to explain what was going on in Russia and Ukraine. Chomsky began way back, at the unification of Germany. Accusing the U.S. of expanding NATO eastward up to Russia’s borders and placing responsibility for the “Ukrainian crisis” on the West, he moved on to the current situation. I am quoting from the transcript, which appeared on the show’s site before long:

“Russia is surrounded by U.S. offensive weapons — sometimes they’re called ‘defense,’ but they’re all offensive weapons. And the idea that the new government in Ukraine, that took over after the former government was overthrown, last December, late December, it passed a resolution, overwhelmingly — I think something like 300 to eight or something — announcing its intention to take steps to join NATO. No Russian leader, no matter who it is, could tolerate Ukraine, right at the geostrategic center of Russian concerns, joining a hostile military alliance. I mean, we can imagine, for example, how the U.S. would have reacted, say, during the Cold War if the Warsaw Pact had extended to Latin America, and Mexico and Canada were now planning to join the Warsaw Pact. Of course, that’s academic, because the first step would have led to violent U.S. response, and it wouldn’t have gone any further.”

It’s amazing how easily the distinguished scholar manipulates facts. The point isn’t even that the Verkhovna Rada’s December declaration wasn’t about joining NATO, but merely a rejection of non-aligned status. What’s worse is that Chomsky’s interpretation of Russia’s aggressive actions is that they were a necessary reaction to the declaration, even though it was just the opposite: The Rada’s declaration was a response to Russian aggression, which at that time had already been ongoing for almost 10 months.

However, let’s read more of the professor’s revelations:

“Now, in the case of the Ukraine, again, whatever you think about Putin — think he’s the worst monster since Hitler — they still have a case, and it’s a case that no Russian leader is going to back down from. They cannot accept the Ukrainian move of the current government to join NATO, even probably the European Community. There is a very natural settlement to this issue: a strong declaration that Ukraine will be neutralized, it won’t be part of any military alliance; that, along with some more or less agreed-upon choices about how — about the autonomy of regions. You can finesse it this way and that, but those are the basic terms of a peaceful settlement.”

The flaw in Chomsky’s argument can be seen by anyone who doesn’t view the situation through the prism of Russian propaganda and the fight against “American imperialism.” The expansion of the EU and NATO weren’t the result of an American policy of attacking Russia, but the conscious and free geopolitical choice of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, who had to work hard to gain entrance to these organizations. However, their sovereign will, like the will of the Ukrainian people, means nothing to the great democrat and libertarian. But he does resent the fact that George Bush Sr. supposedly lied to Mikhail Gorbachev, having given a verbal promise that NATO will not move “one inch” to the east. Even if that were the case, why does Chomsky believe that the leaders of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had the right to decide the fate of Europe’s peoples with their “gentleman’s agreement,” ignoring the will of the people? Why should the leaders of the West and Russia now agree on the “neutralization” of Ukraine, ignoring the will of the Ukrainian people? And does Chomsky really believe that once Kiev agrees to neutrality and autonomy for the Donbass region, Russia will suddenly relinquish its goal to bring Ukraine back under its control?

And so the veteran fighter against “hegemonic superpowers” — or, more likely, “superpower:” the U.S. — can think of nothing better than a return to the old idea of the “balance of power,” born out of last century, in which great countries decide among themselves which of the “small” countries belong to their spheres of interest, and which should be neutral. The fighter against “hierarchy of any kind” actually calls for the preservation of the hierarchical world order in which great countries negotiate and small ones submit.

I won’t fool myself with the hope that I can somehow influence Chomsky and other Western liberal intellectuals; all the more so since they don’t read Zaxid.net and generally rarely listen to Ukrainians, whom they believe are nearly all nationalists. However, I would like to spur young Ukrainians who sympathize with liberal ideas to reflection and action.

One of the greatest flaws of our partisan political system is the absence of a strong, democratic and patriotic liberal movement. Ukrainian democracy, like an injured bird, tries to fly by flapping only one wing — the right one. This hurts Ukraine in the international arena as well. Leaders of our major parties still must somehow find common ground with liberals and conservatives in the West, but they are viewed with suspicion in social-democratic and socialist circles, who are an important segment not only of European politics, but also of American public opinion, over which liberal university professors retain a significant influence. The “right slant” in Ukrainian politics is one of the reasons for the lack of understanding of the Ukrainian problem on the side of Western leftists, as well as their compliance with Russian propaganda about “fascist Banderites.” During Euromaidan our “new liberals” missed the chance to join the revolution as an independent force with its own slogans. However, the window of opportunity remains open to them. A strengthening of the democratic left would benefit Ukraine in two ways: internally, counterbalancing the excessive “right slant” and directing reform in line with the interests of the majority rather than the oligarchs, and externally, mobilizing the international solidarity of the democratic left in support of social and democratic reform in Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s aggressive policy. In the international arena the Ukrainian patriotic left could help restore the idea espoused by liberal democrats at the beginning of the last century: That it is impossible to overcome social discrimination without having overcome national discrimination, without accepting the right of peoples “great” and “small,” “historic” and “unhistoric” to choose their own developmental patch, to freely join political alliances or leave them. It is this, not the “balance of power” of great nations, upon which the new world order must be built.

However, it seems that modern liberal intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, while paying lip service to the justice of such ideas, don’t want to apply them to Ukraine and Russia. It seems that even Lenin, whom Chomsky as a true “libertarian socialist” views, correctly, as an authoritarian leader and enemy of freedom, was in this case a greater democrat and libertarian than some current “liberal democrats.” In June 1917, when Ilych was still just fighting for power and was one of the leaders of the “revolutionary democracy,” he wrote an article called “Undemocratic, Citizen Kerensky!” in which he sharply attacked the “liberal” minister of the provisional government for infringing upon the democratic rights of the Ukrainian people. Lenin posed the rhetorical question: “Is this bullying of oppressed nationalities compatible with the dignity not even with socialism, but of simple democracy?”

It’s worth redirecting these words of the then-still “liberal democrat” Lenin to current “liberal democrats” in the West and the East. I suppose that if the Lenin of 1917, opposition leader and implacable enemy of Russian great-power chauvinism, heard how the renowned libertarian thinker of our time is justifying Russian imperialism, he would surely take up his pen and write: “Undemocratic, citizen Chomsky! And not even libertarian!”