Just another spoiled, sheltered useful idiot lost in Russified Whataboutistan. He's never seen authoritarian police states up close, as I have (Franquista and pre-transition Spain in 1973-76, Communist Hungary in 1980, 1988, Yugoslavia in 1980, 1986). If he had, he'd know the difference between corporations gathering data about him and living in fear of an occupier's knock on the door and being sent to a filtration camp and a torture room. He'd know what it's like to be punched in the face by a Franquista police thug for walking the streets in Valencia with friends holding Catalan flags. Having never known real fear of limitless unaccountable police state power, he conflates it with data gathering and anti-trust violations by corporations.
He might develop an ounce of empathy for Ukrainians fighting for their freedom to merely exist without their historic conqueror who denies they exist attempting to exterminate them. But this de-escalation therapy expert, who has the hubris to think his customer service work qualifies him to advise Ukraine to stop fighting to exist, seems to have endless reserves of empathy for Russia as spurious NATO expansion victim, but none for the country where Russia has committed thousands of unprovoked genocidal war crimes (mass deportations, kidnapping 14000 children, torture in every occupied town, indiscriminant bombing of cities, infrastructure).
One antidote (among many) to this Russian useful idiocy is here, by the FT's Martin Sandbu, author of the The Economics of Belonging. He said better than I can how the Ukrainian people are fighting for a way of life Russia's western useful idiots take for granted. So here it is, courtesy of my subscription:
"Europeans with experience of Moscow will tell you, the Manichean language matters. It matters — as Reagan’s rhetoric did — because it speaks to the experience of those directly confronting autocracy, whether Poland during the cold war or Ukraine today.
It matters practically, too, because it shapes our perception of the choices we face. The western debate on the war in Ukraine tends to treat it as essentially about borders: who governs which territories. It has paid far too little attention to how the territories in question are governed by each side. But the difference is stark.
It is most shockingly exposed in how the Russian occupiers behave. Their cruelty goes beyond the murders, rapes, mutilation and plunder by Putin’s forces. After invading Crimea, Moscow restarted its old persecution of Tatars. There is a state campaign of child abduction. There is a pattern of torture, documented by such initiatives as the Reckoning Project. What this behaviour lays bare is the wantonness of the occupiers’ violence and oppression.
It is reminiscent of nothing so much as O’Brien’s lectures to Smith in Orwell’s 1984: “How does one man assert his power over another? By making him suffer . . . Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” It behoves the west to realise that, as much as over who gets to rule, the Ukrainians’ fight is against this way of ruling.
There are many other differences between the two systems. Over 30 years, the hallmarks of Ukrainian public life have become flourishing political competition and an indomitable civil society. If you recognise that in 1991, 2004 and 2014, the population’s political engagement changed Ukraine’s trajectory, you will be less surprised by its resilience against the darkness of the past year. Putin’s deft blend of propaganda and repression has politically pacified much of Russia’s population, and solidified his dictatorship.
While both the Russian and Ukrainian economies have long been rife with mismanagement and corruption, Ukraine’s pluralism has asserted itself in this sphere, too. Since 2014, Kyiv has shifted from a clientelistic dependence on Russia for natural gas to competitive European markets. Its transparency provisions for procurement are well ahead of those of some western governments. A decentralisation reform empowered local governments, with evident military benefits as on-the-ground commanders and local officials together proved in the battle for Kyiv. It could also help to ensure that future reconstruction money is well spent.
Above all, Ukraine’s policy of EU integration, from the 2014 association agreement to its candidacy for membership, involves a slow but steady march towards a rules-based, competitive market economy, the opposite of Russia’s capricious top-down model.
Even corruption has manifested itself differently in the two systems. In less violent times, the joke was that Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs can both be bought, but Russian ones will do as they are told while the Ukrainians will take your money, then do as they like. Ukrainian society, and even some of its reformist governments, have strived to combat corruption. Few such efforts have emerged from Russian society, let alone its state.
Those who ignore these differences are easily lured into thinking the conflict is a matter of which population’s voices will be represented in Kyiv and which in Moscow — something surely less important than stopping the bloodshed now. In fact, the question is whether their voices will be heard at all.
So western Europeans should not roll their eyes upon hearing Biden proclaim that “free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness”, but realise the fighting is about more than lines on a map. EU membership, in particular, must not be seen as just an eventual prize for Ukraine’s good behaviour. Instead, it goes to the core of the war’s meaning. Ukraine’s fight is a just war — not over territory but over ways of life, and the way of life they are fighting for is ours.
Conflating monopsony within a rule of law state with limitless rule by law state repression is just beyond silly.
