A brief personal note on pro-war credulity

Apologies if you’ve heard me go over this before, but sometimes I find it bears repeating. And I’ll admit I’m repeating this today because for whatever reason I find myself especially agitated about it. In late 2021 and early 2022, I was publicly skeptical that Russia would actually go through with invading Ukraine, particularly because I was dubious of “intelligence” leaks emanating from anonymous officials in the Biden Administration who proclaimed, with little hard evidence and lots of questionably-motivated conjecture, that an invasion was imminent. Thus, a primary reason for my skepticism was definitely wariness of the US government’s suspiciously inflammatory PR strategy. But another reason was the prospect of Russia invading Ukraine seemed self-evidently crazy — an obvious disaster for Russia, Ukraine, Europe, the US, and ultimately perhaps the entire world. It also seemed contrary to Russia’s own interests to launch such a crazy, self-destructive war. While I of course would never rule out that a state, whether Russia or any other, could act crazily and self-destructively, the obvious craziness and self-destructiveness of this particular act struck me as militating strongly against the idea that it was a realistic possibility.

At the time, most people within what I’ll broadly characterize as the online “alt media” sphere were in basic agreement with me about this. But in the two years since, they’re the ones that have largely flipped — transforming into open affirmative justifiers and supporters of Russia’s invasion.  (Yes, I’m purposely generalizing here to describe what I see as a plainly discernible trend without overly-personalizing or getting hung up on individual examples. I could certainly cite individual examples if I wanted to, but I’d rather just generalize for now. If you want to disbelieve that the trend I’m identifying exists, OK. Feel free to stop reading.) 

Conversely, I haven’t changed my position. I still view the idea of Russia invading Ukraine as crazy and self-evidently disastrous. And in the two years since, it has indeed been an unmitigated disaster for everyone involved, with astronomical casualties on both sides — the ruination of Ukraine, and regular attacks on territorial Russia, including another drone strike two days ago on Russia’s strategic nuclear base. So now it’s not just the mere prospect of Russia invading Ukraine that is crazy and self-evidently disastrous, it’s the actual reality of the war, which has been an unmitigated disaster for humanity. The Russian government obviously has a self-serving interest in acting like the war has not been a disaster, but I’m not sure when it became an “anti-establishment” view to credulously regurgitate the self-serving talking points of a warring foreign government. 

Cheering, advocating for, or otherwise justifying this war is absolute lunacy. The amount of previously-unthinkable nuclear brinksmanship that has taken place over the past two years between the US and Russia is alone enough to render any pro-war partisanship criminally insane. Not to mention the fundamental depravity of sitting comfortably in your computer chair somewhere in the non-war-torn United States confidently opining on why it’s a great “security” triumph for Russian and Ukrainian men in their 20s and 30s to be pummeling each other with artillery shells from opposite sides of their revoltingly pitiful trenches.

Needless to say, I’m sticking with my original 2021-2022 position on the craziness of this entire enterprise. But it seems a significant supermajority of my online periphery has transitioned to outright pro-war agitation on behalf of the Russian state, which I regard to be one of the factors currently barreling the world into the abyss. Of course, the intransigent interventionism of the US and NATO is another factor, but I’m not being hectored by my “alternative”-minded followers to support the US and NATO.

To the extent that I have been responsible for fostering this obvious surge in pro-war sentiment among people who have otherwise tended to agree with me on Russia-related matters, and who are now running around cheerleading for the Russian government’s destructive folly in Ukraine, I feel genuine shame. I’m not above acknowledging that it makes me legitimately angry.

I say this as someone who was reliably informed that I was at the literal top of the Discord “hit-list” of pro-Ukraine “NAFO” trolls throughout 2022 and 2023. I’m of course not going to hold myself out as any kind of beleaguered “victim,” because I’m an adult who voluntarily chooses to comment on contentious geopolitical issues in public. But I can nonetheless testify that being the single-minded object of incessant “NAFO” swarming is not the most pleasant experience. Being incessantly defamed as an agent of the Russian government, despite never in fact having been one, was also not the most pleasant experience. I was slimed by Media Matters for simply uttering the words “proxy war” on TV back when Tucker Carlson was still being permitted to host the one major show airing moderately countervailing views on Ukraine. For a March 2022 episode of Tucker’s show, he and I jointly reported that the Pentagon had imposed a “gag order” on US military personnel manning the new military installations erected in Poland to support US/NATO operations in Ukraine. (One of these bases, in Rzeszow, has since been transformed into a sprawling permanent US/NATO outpost.) I was ejected from a NATO summit in Brussels for not being adequately credentialed, then finally got into another NATO summit where I was the only journalist in attendance who asked a single NATO leader a single critical question about NATO war policy in Ukraine that did not simply accept the premise of conventional interventionist arguments.

I was cited in the New York Times as one of the handful of media-adjacent figures who was proven correct about “Russiagate,” also known as the first iteration of the Trump/Russia “collusion” fraud, after I spent three years reporting on that whole fiasco. I also literally visited the Kremlin just a few months ago, where I was invited to address Russian government officials and others of some notoriety. I have been to international forums in Germany, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and elsewhere speaking critically of US/NATO policy in Ukraine, which I continue to think is responsible for fueling a catastrophic escalatory spiral.

So I don’t know how more robustly I can establish that my position on the Russian war effort is not based on some reflexive anti-Russia sentiment, or grandiose propagandistic delusions about the nature of the alleged Russian threat. I am not being compromised by the CIA, just like I was never compromised by the FSB from 2016-2022. If anything, I’d probably be better off financially if I just continued regurgitating the same litany of pro-war talking points that “alt media” personalities have repeated incessantly for the past two years. But that would conflict with my sincere view, which is that the war is a disaster, and it’s always on the verge of getting disastrously worse — and there’s a disturbing trend among people in my orbit, who have generally agreed with me on Russia-related issues since 2016, but are now outright cheerleaders for the Russian state. (I view running around justifying the war-making conduct of *any* state as textbook “cheerleading.” So for example, people who supported the Iraq War but claimed to do so reluctantly and somberly were nonetheless textbook definitions of war-cheerleaders. There is no more quintessential state propaganda that one can abet than by actively supporting and justifying the war that a state initiated and is prosecuting.)

Putin is the one who chose to liken himself to Hitler during that interview with Tucker last month. I take what he says seriously. He is the one whose overwhelming re-election was just facilitated in part by purging of war critics from electoral contention, like Boris Nadezhdin. Not that Putin wouldn’t have won even under perfectly “free and fair” conditions — the radicalization of a populace behind a war effort is one of the standard features of the escalatory cycle. A similar dynamic can be observed among the populace in Ukraine.

None of this is anything to cheer for. Rather, it’s the foreseeable consequence of a crazy, destructive war that was launched by Russia two years ago, and which the US/NATO also bears responsibility for intensifying and exacerbating. To the point where today, March 22, 2024, the insanity of regular US-backed drone strikes hitting Russian strategic nuclear bases outside Moscow barely makes a ripple. The American, European, Ukrainian, and Russian populaces are becoming dangerously inured to the escalatory insanity.

It’s a brazen distortion of the historical record to act like the justifiability of this blinkered Russian war enterprise was always somehow self-evident. I’m against distortions of the historical record that make out crazy wars to have been inevitable and unavoidable. That’s what the perpetrators of crazy wars always try to claim.