One of the great national sports in Ireland at a time of international crisis is to engage in a bit of moralising about how our country is purer than those militarists in NATO and the EU. There’s no better time to be in people before profit than during any hint of a major conflict. At the first sign of any such situation, media opportunities for the anti war, which usually means anti-American, crowd, will always multiply. No television or radio panel to discuss the crisis is truly complete without Richard Boyd Barrett or Brid Smith, to talk about the evils of militarisation, and imperialism, and the vital urgency of getting US troops out of Shannon Airport, and maybe expelling the Israeli ambassador. Even if the Israelis are not involved.
The preening is rarely confined, though, to just the far left. Fintan O’Toole was in on the act this week, as usual, with a good old fashioned “they’re both as bad as each other” piece in the Irish Times, setting himself (and by extension, his readers) up as being both morally and intellectually superior to the base instincts of the warmongers in the Kremlin, and the Pentagon, and Number 10 downing street. We have not yet, in this instance, had the “both sides” editorial from the Irish Times, but it is surely coming.
That is, of course, the traditional Irish position on any international conflict. The reason we stay neutral, broadly, is that we would lose any fight we got into, on the international stage, being, as we are, a military minnow. That, however, is not a very flattering thing to admit. And therefore, the left play a useful purpose, by painting our non-participation as something moral and principled, because we’re better than both sides, with their grubby little war for oil, or territory, or whatever it is.
But in recent years, the anti-Americans on the left have found new allies, in the nationalist right, and in large swathes of the former middle ground. Their analysis is different, and rooted in the culture war, because at its core they reject the idea that the west is in any way morally superior to Russia. After all, it is not Russians, they point out, who are beating Truckers off the streets of Ottowa and Montreal, or Russians who confined their people to house arrest for much of 2020, or Russians who are passing laws restricting free speech. Why, they ask, should we be siding with Joe Biden and the EU over good ol’ Vlad Putin, who, for all his faults, has never done anything to us?
The latter analysis is increasingly persuasive. After all, for the entirety of the cold war, the west’s superiority – its call to arms – was based on the idea that our society was morally better than the alternative. NATO was an alliance defending more than simply countries, but instead, defending an idea: Freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. There was a very clear contrast between the western model of society and government and the Soviet one. Should territories fall to the reds, it was clear what would happen: Free speech would go, voting rights would go, property would go, and people would live (as many eastern Europeans did) as serfs, afraid of the secret police.
Fighting against that was worthwhile. But increasingly, it’s difficult to ascertain what the supposed moral superiority of the west is, anymore. It is fashionable, after all, to describe Russia as an “oligarchy”, ruled by a few powerful billionaires close to its permanent President. Is the west massively different? Does the average citizen have much say, compared to the power of google, and amazon, and facebook? Do we not, also, have massively powerful special interests, and an elite class, that increasingly set policy without feeling much need to consult the voters? Are we not progressively restricting basic civic rights like free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of conscience? There are NATO member countries now where people can be sent to prison for stating that a woman with a penis is a man, after all. If Orwell had written that about Oceania, it might have been thought far-fetched.
Of course, none of this matters to the people of Ukraine. The fundamental issue for them is that a larger neighbour is in the process of dismantling their country by force of arms. The correct thing to do is to support them, because there is no situation where that outrage is less important than the culture war nonsense do jour in the west.
But it is important, nonetheless, to journal what is happening. In American politics, for example, it is increasingly the Democrats and the progressives who want to oppose Russia, and the previously warmongering Republicans who prefer isolationism and giving Putin a free hand in his sphere of influence. We are witnessing a reversal of the cultural polarisation in the west, and it is intimately connected to the shifting power structures in our society.
This is also the weakness which both Russia, and China, are increasingly exploiting. The west is polarised and divided internally, because there is no longer any agreed set of universal values. There is no longer any universally agreed definition of words like “democracy” and “freedom” and “human rights”. Heck, there is no longer any universally agreed definition of words like “woman”. So what, exactly, would we even be fighting for?
The Russians, for all their ills, know the answer to that question. The people of the west no longer do. Until our great cultural civil war is settled, one way or another, the alliance of people on the left, and the right, who seem to prefer Putin to our own leadership, will continue to outmuscle the centre.