Vladimir Putin’s brutal and cruel war against the Ukrainian people is utterly without justification.
It is entirely appropriate, and, indeed, necessary, for us here in Canada and in other Western countries to oppose that war. We are right to support the Ukrainians by any reasonable means that do not expand the war or risk the global catastrophe of nuclear conflagration.
But it is an error and potentially self-defeating for us to characterize the conflict as being in defence of our own Western values.
Not only is that claim disingenuous, given the West’s own history, it does not help build a broad coalition in support of Ukraine.
Many in the Global South oppose Putin
There have been two votes on the war in the United Nations General Assembly, the most recent on March 22. In both, only a tiny handful of countries sided with the Russians. The majority voted with Western countries to condemn the Russians as the aggressors.
That majority includes many UN members from the Global South, among them Nigeria, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil.
Some of those countries might, in other circumstances, feel a certain affinity for Putin’s Russia. In the case of the Ukraine invasion, however, it is clear they cannot stomach the Russian president’s murderous brutality and flagrant disregard for international law.
With that in mind, it is counter-productive for leaders and pundits in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe to prattle about our superior Western values. Such careless talk will not strengthen the resolve of the many non-Western countries which now oppose the Russian aggression.
The two largest countries by population, China and India, chose to abstain in both UN votes. But it is notable, and not insignificant, that they did not take Russia’s side.
The rest of us have an interest in maintaining Chinese and Indian neutrality. We do not want the two giants to tilt toward Putin as we continue to hope the Russian leader will finally see reason – or, failing that, decide the cost of total victory would be too high – and agree to a ceasefire and negotiated settlement.
President Zelenskyy of Ukraine has already conceded his country will not pursue membership in the NATO alliance, and has signalled he is ready to consider some sort of autonomous status for the two contested regions in eastern Ukraine.
For us in the West, as we legitimately support Ukraine, a healthy measure of candour about our own record might be in order.
Slavery, colonialism, coups, and death squads
What Putin is doing is an act of aggressive imperialistic aggrandizement. But we in the West know all about imperialism and about the cavalier use of violence to advance imperial ambitions.
Our legacy includes the slave trade and the extensive and profitable slave-based economy that trade nourished. For several hundred years, the legal practice of slavery meant millions were forced into lives of misery, while millions more died in horrible and degrading circumstances.
And that legacy is not merely a matter of ancient history. If you were to visit plantations in the U.S Deep South today the guides would show you the un-serviced slave shacks where share-croppers and other farm workers still lived as recently as the 1980s.
Then there is settler colonialism and the efforts to eradicate Indigenous peoples. We are still confronting the legacy of that enterprise in Canada to this day.
The end of the Second World War was supposed to usher in an era of peace and human rights, inspired by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms – freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from fear and want – and the creation of the United Nations.
Instead, since the defeat of fascism the world has witnessed nearly constant war, much of it in support of self-serving, imperial ambition.
During the 1950s, the French and British engaged in a number of costly and futile rearguard military actions to keep their empires intact – in Algeria, Indochina, and Kenya. The Portuguese stayed at it for a lot longer, right into the 1970s, fighting protracted wars to keep control of their African possessions.
Of more enduring consequence has been the way the United States has repeatedly resorted to multiple forms of violence and coercion. It often did so with the goal of advancing the economic interests of trans-national corporations. In addition, like Putin today, the U.S. used violence to defend and expand its political and military sphere of influence.
U.S. wars in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 2000s in Iraq, were no more legal and justified than Putin’s current war in Ukraine.
Plenty of dishonesty to go around
Like Putin, U.S. leaders were frequently dishonest in their goals – to defend a non-existent democracy in Southeast Asia, for instance, or to get rid of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And they were mercilessly violent in their methods, which often made victims of innocent civilians, including children.
There is also the U.S.’s penchant, since 1945, for engineering coups and financing insurgencies to get rid of regimes it considered unfriendly.
Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, and Salvador Allende in Chile were all victims of U.S. interference. They had all been democratically elected.
And when repressive and authoritarian regimes friendly to Western interests faced popular grassroots resistance, the U.S. financed and supported paramilitary death squads.
In 1981, in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, one such death squad murdered about 1,000 people, mostly women and children, in cold blood.
It was the worst massacre in recent Latin American history, but it contributed only a small portion of the more than 70,000 casualties wrought by the Salvadoran civil war.
In recent years there has been a belated effort in El Salvador to bring those responsible for the El Mozote killings and other similar atrocities to justice. But the current right-wing, pro-U.S. populist government of President Nayib Bukele is doing its best to shut that effort down.
In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has shown he has well learned his lessons in brutality. The Russian leader obviously understands the utility of terror as a tactic of war. He does not seem perturbed in the slightest by all the Ukrainian blood on his hands, including the blood of a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor, of pregnant women, and of innocent children.
We in the West have to do our utmost to end the carnage and defend Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign nation. But if we want to keep the non-Western world onside, we must cease proclaiming we are doing so in the name of our own narrow interests and values.
We must defend Ukraine, and oppose Putin’s aggression, in the name of humanity as a whole.
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