The Russian invasion of Ukraine has aroused, in a good part of the world — not just in the West — a generous, legitimate solidarity in the face of an aggression that leaves little room for moral ambiguity.
One country has invaded another, snatching territory from it in the name of an imperial vision linked to its history and character from the depths of time. The whole doubled with a negation of the national existence of the other, this “other” reduced to a simple pawn of the global enemy.
Moral revulsion and spontaneous solidarity in the face of an invasion and its atrocities (Boutcha) resulted in massive material and military aid from several countries in Europe and North America, but also from distant countries, such as Japan and South Korea. South.
But it is far from it: despite the overwhelming and repeated votes at the UN to denounce Russian actions, a significant minority, including important countries, stand on the sidelines… while a “minority in the minority” gives voice – in the wake of Russian propaganda – to denounce globalized imperialism and its aggressive expansionism, “the real causes of the war”.
It is not only about the specific question of NATO, subject of legitimate debate: has NATO pushed Russia to its last entrenchments? Would another policy have changed Russia’s (secular) designs on Ukraine? Refutable… but legitimate subject of discussion.
But NATO is the object of a fetishistic fixation and acts as an automatic excuse for the Kremlin. Russia would have only reacted in a forced way, a bit like Frankenstein’s robot, to actions decided elsewhere by the “real bad guys”… who themselves pull the strings and push the buttons.
Even in a minority, this vision has forums and abounds online, with some star analysts – and their fan clubs – fond of global theories. There are really people for whom in 2022 even a Russian atomic bomb on kyiv would be, ultimately, always the fault of “American imperialism”.
“The issue in Ukraine is not Ukraine: it is the future of globalized, neoliberal, financialized capitalism governed by the United States”, wrote Samir Saul and Michel Seymour in The duty of October 26. This makes it possible to avoid the subject of “Ukraine”, which is denied any autonomy of its own. By and for itself, this subject simply does not exist.
Syria, in its time, suffered the same negation of its being: everything that happened there could only have “macro”, geopolitical causes. With keywords like “machination”, “conspiracy”, “tricks”, “imperialism”.
Syrian society in revolt against a fierce dictatorship? The organized struggle for democracy in such a context? Irrelevant, naive questions. In such a perspective, any “internal” sociological and historical analysis is neglected, even declared null and void.
Criticizing the supporters of this discourse, numerous if not preponderant in the Arab world, the Syrian-British activist Leila Al-Shami effectively refutes this globalizing approach of “camp against camp”: “campism” which stipulates that any enemy of the United States is necessarily on the side of good.
This binary approach, she says, clouds the view of many Arab intellectuals. And today, it is spreading and reverberating in the simplistic, absurdly and unfairly reversed reading of a conflict like the war in Ukraine.
“In their eyes, the United States always plays the role of the ‘bad guy,'” she wrote in a hard-hitting article, “The anti-imperialism of fools”, published (in translation) in April 2018 by the online magazine Intangible loneliness.
In a recent interview (1er December 2022) to the French-speaking daily newspaper of Beirut The East-The Day, small regional beacon of lucidity in the Middle East, Al-Shami declares:
“If we look at the case of Syria, you had a small group of individuals who constantly questioned the fact that a democratic uprising had taken place. For them, it was necessarily a machination of the United States. »
And again: “We have witnessed an immense outpouring of solidarity from Syrians towards Ukrainians. Many Syrians have linked what is happening in Ukraine with what has happened to them. It was because no one held Putin accountable for his crimes in Syria, Georgia and Chechnya that he could feel himself growing. »
Ordinary Syrians “know” their Russians well. They are less naive and more lucid than many others on this subject. Their country has been the bloody test bed of Putin’s ‘scorched earth’ method. Except that in Syria, the Russian planes which bombarded schools and hospitals had completely free rein. It was not the same in Ukraine…
Those for whom the word “imperialism” can only have one definition should read up again. That, for a patriotic Taiwanese, the struggle is first and foremost directed against Chinese imperialism and that, for a patriotic Ukrainian, it is first directed against Russian imperialism, that is something that completely escapes our “campists”, locked up in their categories from another age.
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]