Key mouthpieces of the purportedly anti-imperialist Putin-apologizing horseshoe left has embraced Putin's false claim that this attack is only about NATO and not also about democracy.
www.emptywheel.net
March 2, 2022
"...
And the 2014 ouster of Viktor Yanukovych (which
more complicit members of the horseshoe left claim was simply a coup led by Nazis)
set off a concerted plan that incorporated support for Brexit, an attack on US elections in 2016, all conducted in parallel with relentless targeting of Ukraine....This invasion is the continuation of not just the annexation of Crimea and persistent war in Ukraine’s East, but also the hybrid attacks on
Ukraine’s power grid and,
via NotPetya, on anyone paying taxes in Ukraine and therefore any international business doing business with it. Russia’s efforts to cultivate Tories in the UK, populists in the EU, and the Trumpist right, including a good deal of disinformation capitalizing on Trump’s narcissism, was always closely connected to Russia’s closer goals in Ukraine (and, indeed, involved the participation of some of Trump’s closest allies, starting with Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani. in Ukraine).
...Ukraine, with Europe, needs to survive this attack, find a way to rebut the invasion and build a path forward.
But whatever else this moment has done,
it has made it clear how easy it was for Russia to pervert democracy in the places proudly claiming to practice it with the least little bit of Oligarch cash. Having ripped off the bandaid of Russian influence,
Europe (at least) has the opportunity to formalize protections against purchased influence. Such lessons, of course, extend beyond Russia to America’s own failed imperial catastrophes, most notably in Afghanistan,
where US-backed corruption made it easy for the Taliban to regain credibility by comparison. US hegemony is on the wane because of Green Zone thinking about capitalism, which fostered the kind of corruption that made Putin powerful.
Such lessons extend, as well, to America’s own fragile democracy, subjugated in recent years to endless supplies of corporate cash, which led in 2016 to the election of a man who aspired to impose a kleptocracy every bit as corrupt as Putin’s. Vladimir Putin has gotten a large swath of anti-imperialist American leftists to parrot a claim that he invaded Ukraine because of NATO
, and only because of NATO. Not only has that made them willful apologists for the kind of imperialism
they claim to abhor, even while ignoring the direct assault on democracy and the greater aspirations to human rights adopted by Europe. But it has led them to ignore an obvious critique of US and Russian power that would be a necessary component of building a new, more resilient order if we survive this war."
www.pewresearch.org
www.texasmonthly.com
