E. Rowell: The globalist overlords have sacrificed Ukraine but in the process are sacrificing Europe and the United States. They cannot stop themselves from parasitizing the lives of all the citizens and taxpayers of Ukraine, Europe and the US. Since the people of Europe and the people of America are against all of this destruction taking place, it is just a matter of time before these Satanic predators are forcibly removed from power.
By Arta Moeini, COMPACTMAG 25 March 2024
Photo: AP
The West’s Ukraine policy appears to have reached an inflection point. Washington and Brussels have now spent more than $200 billion on the war—a figure that, adjusted for inflation, far exceeds the entire cost of the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe in the wake of World War II. After the failure of last year’s much-touted Ukrainian counteroffensive, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have found allocating new money to the war effort an increasingly daunting task. The European Union finally pushed through a €50 billion ($54 billion) funding package for Ukraine last month, but this came after months of pushback from Hungary. Meanwhile, war-skeptical parties are surging in the polls in several countries, propelled by voters reeling from the severe cost-of-living crisis the war and Western sanctions have unleashed.
The Ukraine war has also been a strategic disaster for the Continent, quashing any lingering aspirations for Europe to achieve genuine strategic autonomy, vassalizing Europe to the United States and leaving it at its weakest since the end of World War II. Regardless of how the Ukraine conflict eventually turns out, Europe—especially Western Europe—has lost.
So why do European leaders remain so hostile to diplomatic efforts to end the war? In recent weeks, French President Emmanuel Macron went so far as to suggest European or NATO troops could be deployed to Ukraine, then doubled down when his remarks drew criticism, insisting that the war is “existential” for Europe and nothing should be “off the table.” Such claims aren’t based on reality, however. European security isn’t “at stake”: Russia is unable to conquer and hold even half of Ukraine, let alone expand beyond it. And the common myth in the West that Putin aims to restore the Soviet empire is just that: hyperbolic mythology detached from reality.
Still, EU elites’ commitment to Ukraine, no matter the costs, is too deliberate and systematic to be dismissed as madness or sheer incompetence. Lurking beneath the clamor for European unity is a political struggle to establish supranational EU sovereignty—a project that trumps all other considerations, including Europe’s own strategic autonomy. Macron’s worry that the Russian victory in Ukraine (a non-EU state) would obliterate Europe’s “credibility” makes sense when we recognize that he and other leaders are engaged in a comprehensive project of top-down state-building in which Ukrainian plight plays a foundational role.
Ukraine has become central to the agenda of transforming the European Union from a regional and institutional association of multiple nations into a sovereign administrative superstate—a “United States of Europe.” The European establishment has an ontological attachment to Ukraine: In the minds of many European technocrats, “Europe” always included Eastern Europe but excluded Russia. The conflict in Ukraine thus reaffirms the conceptual territorial boundaries of their imagined continental state. But more importantly, the narrative built around Ukraine’s tragic situation is instrumental to the European Union’s statist ambitions and pursuit of political legitimacy.
Given the prevalence of the nation-state model and belief in popular sovereignty as the basis for state legitimacy, all modern states—even ostensibly transnational and imperial ones—must legitimize themselves through establishing identity with a people. The modern Leviathan is a parasite that feeds on the mythos of the demos. It can’t exist without a host to live off of and eventually subsume.
In the modern era, when sovereignty and political legitimacy hinge on “identity,” the who-ness of the ruled, rather than the specific qualities of the rulers, justifies power. The invasive, ever-growing tentacles of the modern state are nestled behind a hypostatized, self-legitimizing “We” (the people), a constructed or projected monolith that the ruling class ritualistically and routinely adulates to greenlight every overreach. Modern states are thus not only impersonal and faceless, but formed atop a web of myths and stories about the people.
Yet not only is there no historical European “people” for a projected United States of Europe to embody, EU technocrats viscerally despise the romantic idea of nationhood that forged modern states out of the pre-existing traditions and cultures of 19th-century Europe. Instead, the late-modern attempt at European nation-building hinges on constructing a common civic identity. In other words, to establish its legitimacy, the new superstate’s aspiring ruling class must harness and socially engineer a pseudo-mythical, abstract, and ahistorical demos based on liberal cosmopolitan values, those into which they have been socialized postwar.
Recognizing the emotive power of Ukraine’s struggle against Russian dominance, European elites have appropriated this struggle to preach the ideological precepts that for them signify “European-ness” and, indeed, civilization itself. Seemingly overnight, Ukraine came to stand for enlightened “European values”—freedom, democracy, tolerance, good governance, and so on—with Russia transformed into civilized Europe’s opposite, the barbarian horde at the gate. As the sociologist and Compact contributor Frank Furedi has written, Ukraine is now a wellspring of moral authority and a source of collective redemption whereby “faith in the ‘West’ is validated by the ‘heroes in Ukraine.’”
The deeper source of the European establishment’s fixation on Ukraine is precisely its position as a victim of “aggression” by a larger and more powerful enemy. As Nietzsche was the first to grasp, modernity is an epoch in which the world is experienced primarily through the lens of oppression and identities are formed out of the “ethic of ressentiment”: The downtrodden are deemed inherently righteous and accorded the ultimate moral value. Under this dispensation, the defense of “the oppressed” becomes the basic ideology for statecraft, serving as a vehicle for the ruling class to gain and consolidate power, sanctifying their supremacy and planting the seed for their future power as the great liberators.
This “victimism” has provided the organizing principle behind much of the European Union’s sociopolitical agenda: Its promotion of multiculturalism, diversity, and LGBTQ rights, its policies on hate speech, immigration, and education all pivot on identifying scapegoats and sacralizing a socially vulnerable and “unprivileged” minority. Saving the virtuous victim generates moral currency and serves as a legitimation mechanism for Brussels, ensuring its continued institutional and bureaucratic empowerment. Ukrainian suffering offers a new opportunity to expand the victimist narrative that already drives EU policymaking. “Ukraine” (as mythology) comes to play a major role in the scheme to settle the boundaries of the new Europe to the exclusion of Russia; and in identity formation—the basis on which Europe’s neo-feudal elites seek to forge their new, cosmopolitan European burghers.
The will to invent and manufacture such a demos requires demoting, leveling, and ultimately re-socializing the real historical peoples that already inhabit Europe but whose complicated histories and regular insistence on difference and particularity make them unsavory, uncouth, and outdated in the minds of an EU establishment that prefers a more isomorphic and homogeneous Europe. Their imagined polity is an abstract, transnational, and legalistic “nation-state” whose citizens are primarily bound to universal values, and animated by global social justice and the utopian quest to eliminate oppression as such.
With the historical memory of Nazi atrocities that originally inspired a cosmopolitan union in Europe fading, the emotive image of defenseless Ukrainians fighting valiantly for their agency and freedom against fascistic oppressors is in many ways the ideal founding myth for an aspiring imperial nation hoping to baptize its new demos in the cleansing waters of human suffering. As the downtrodden victims to be saved by the enlightened humanitarianism of the ascendant empire’s “good Europeans,” Ukrainians are the perfect subject for this tragic mythopoesis and contrived unity.
The European commitment to Ukraine is a colossal strategic mistake that European elites defend out of a conviction that the ongoing tragedy there can be exploited to advance their enduring political aspirations for a federal European state and engineer a “European” polity from the top down—the most ambitious and absolutist exercise in ersatz nation-building and identity-formation ever attempted. Yet the cost for achieving such unquestioned political sovereignty in Europe seems to be the surrendering of Europe’s other long-term objective: geopolitical independence from Washington.
The narrative of “Western unity” on Ukraine was always a mirage, a “noble lie” designed to hide the imperial nature of the US alliance system, its embedded imbalances tipped against Europe, and its demands on European economies. The European statist project is therefore paradoxical on its face: No modern state can claim to be truly sovereign while being subservient to another—even if that other state has similarly developed in a propositional, imperial, and ideological fashion. For now, however, ambitious EU leaders seem prepared for that sacrifice, believing that creating a solid foundation for their new continental “nation”-state is worth becoming a de facto protectorate of Washington for a decade or two, until such time that they gain the basic capabilities to chart their own course.
Ultimately, the European Union’s ruling elites seek to centralize power in Brussels and disenfranchise member states. If the pursuit of this bureaucratic and totalistic ambition for political sovereignty comes at the expense of economic prosperity and strategic autonomy, this is apparently a price they are willing to pay. In this internal contest, Ukraine is merely a pawn: Ukrainians may be motivated by the defense of their own national sovereignty, but in reality, they are being sacrificed to elevate the new lords of Europe and further their quixotic dreams of a European superstate.
@Laura
If so, please explain the casus belli upon which NATO slaughtered the nations of Serbia and Libya. What free nation was being defended in the slaughter which took place in these gruesome offensives. Indeed, how was NATO acting defensively when they were bombing urban centers, blowing up hospitals, slaughtering civilians, just to achieve their flavor of the week regime change in those pathetic nations, which never remotely recovered from the NATO onslaught brought against them, even to this day. You seem unyielding to explain this point, even as it demonstrates the very point upon which your claim is proven false without any possible explanation. So please address the issue of how an alliance of free nations in common defense conducted these massacres with reckless abandon.
@Laura
You state this in response to my comment that
when in fact that coup was not carried out by anyone’s definition of Nazi’s, but by actual Nazis willing, able, and intent on using murder and mayhem to overthrow, divide and control the country of Ukraine. On the fateful day of the slaughter of the Heavenly Hundred, as the slaughtered came to be named, the Nazi’s held the position in the Hotel Ukraina from which the murdering attack was launched, they carried the arms which were involved in the massacre, and they had a long history of executing political violence both before that massacre took place and long afterwards, without any consequences brought against them since they carried out that coup. Political terror is the means and manner in which fascists seize power, and they do so without having a majority with which to wield that political terror. This was how the US-Russian agreed to constitutional transfer of power from Yanukovych was rewritten into the president of Ukraine literally running for his life in February 2014, just as it is how the Easter truce of April 2014 was broken. So too, this was the means by with the Odessans were massacred in May 2014 which led to the separatists winning the vote and the radicals being authorized as the many Battalions to wield their savagery against the people of the Dombas. These Nazis did not just dress up in Swastikas and hold firelight vigils, they manipulated the national protest, splitting the country into two, and purposefully enveloped their nation into a war which, as it turned out that they could not win, would still fulfill their desire to kill Russians. This is the tool which the Americans weaponized the moderately pro-Russian state of Ukraine into the battering ram with which to provoke a war with Russia.
So it is irrelevant to try to quote Putin’s ‘definition’ of Nazi’s as being relevant to the terrorizing events which the Ukrainian Nazi’s brought to Ukraine. They posed a political threat when they took control of that nation, and they still pose such a threat to this day. This is where their power comes from, not their numbers or their votes. Do recall that fascist ideology has no interest in democracy, but rather it is a very real malignancy which left unchecked and unextinguished will ultimately result in the annihilation of any democracy, which is exactly what transpired in the tragic case of Ukraine.
Ukrainian “nazis” as defined by putin and Russia are simply Ukrainian nationalists who refuse to return to being under Russian rule. It doesn’t have the same meaning as we define nazi. Russia has its own actual nazis to which putin has aligned with.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-22/putins-fascists-russias-home-grown-neo-nazis/100927582
Again, with that canard about NATO “expansion”. NATO is an alliance of free nations for our common defense. Members of NATO are there by choice. You might want to ask yourself why those former east bloc nations choose to be part of NATO. Maybe it’s because they rightfully worry about Russian expansionism. There’s a long and dark history of it. Your language makes it appear that these are conquered nations rather than freed nations freely choosing to be part of NATO. Like I said, your defense of Russia despite its working with hamas, iran and hezbollah is bizarre.
The coup was carried out by Ukrainian Nazis, coordinated by the American State Dept and overseen by none other than China Joe himself. Neocon Nuland made this clear in her nicely recorded conversation detailing the coup well before the coup ever took place. Of course, you will suggest that exposing this tragedy “infantilizing the Ukrainian people”, but I would suggest that it is better described as the Ukrainian people being captured by the Neocons in the State Dept. The Ukrainians don’t want war with Russia. They have never wanted war with Russia and given halve a vote they would elect a new peace candidate to end the war and seek terms for peace. This is why there will be no election.
As I said before, Ukraine is truly a pathetic and sad nation, and one which the US is willing to see slaughtered to the last Ukrainian for the purposes of the twisted psychopaths in the US State Dept. It really is just that simple.
@Laura
The only ones retreating are the Ukrainians, and this is because they have expensed the Ukrainian people and the American weapons while killing Russians, which was always the goal of America in inserting itself within the sad and pathetic nation known as Ukraine.
@Laura
Do you call the expansion of NATO eastward for at east 20 years a retreat. What about the bombing of Syria and Libya? Were they retreats?
I greatly appreciate the measured, dispassionate tone of this debate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0D2_nzuGyI&
I recall when Obama removed our missiles from Poland and the Czech Republic and when he was caught telling Medvedev that he would have more leeway after the 2012 election. I also recall Republicans and conservatives condemning Obama over these matters. Were they just playing partisan politics or did they believe Russia was an adversary? When did conservatives decide Putin was the good guy? Probably about the time of the Russia collusion nonsense. I think much of the support of Putin is based simply on reaction to the democrats taking an anti-Putin position.
That’s a load of crap. We’ve been in military retreat for years. It’s unbelievable that in the aftermath of 10/7, knowing Russia’s ties to hamas, that you have doubled down on your support for putin.
@Michael S, your critique of the article is a fair critique.
@Laura, we disagree on policy, i.e., we are disagreeing on the current US/CIA led policy whose purpose was to destroy Gazprom and furnish Europe with gas from Ukraine, and which made Putin into a monster in order to justify trying to destroy Russia. You see it differently, you suggest this policy is justified because you feel Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression and Putin IS a monster.
When you call my statement “asinine” it stops the discussion of ideas.
I don’t take it personally, because I sense you intensely dislike the idea or ideas I expressed. That is your right. It would help me understand your ideas if you focused on the data that support your ideas.
I welcome all critiques of anything that I express. That is how I learn!
I don’t owe anyone an apology, but those of you defending putin are the ones who owe an apology for supporting such an enemy of Israel. I’m confounded by your defense of him.
No, the Ukrainians decided to get rid of him because he turned out to be a puppet of the Kremlin. Again, stop infantilizing the Ukrainian people.
Hi, Laura
I can’t understand the fetish of some here about the Ukraine and Russia. Hasn’t someone told anyone, that Jewish culture is no longer centered there? Humans are interesting creatures.
I tried reading through the article a minute ago. My conclusion is that Arta Moeini, a young fellow at some New Age European think tank, revels in writing like a social scientist
https://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/comp3160/social-scientist.html
I had to wade through a lot of verbal fluss, before stumbling upon something that could be considered the “opint” of the article. still working on it…
Concerning “ersatz” nation-building, it seems young Moeini, hasn’t looked much into Roman history. The Romans ruled the Jewish nation from 63 BC to 135 AD — around 200 years (after that, they were scattered across the Roman and Persian worlds). Modern NATO and the European Union are just extensions in history from those days. For “ersatz nation-building”, Moeini might have considered that the Roman Empire of those days included all the major peoples of the Western world — from the Jews to the Africans to the Europeans to the Russians to the Turks and Arabs. What we have today, is not some kind of “new” experiment.
As for Europe’s “long-term objective” of competing with the US, this didn’t become an issue until about 100 years ago. Before that, Europe was competing with the British; before that, it was the French, before that, the Spanish and before that, the Germans. None of this is “new”; and America’s part in all this didn’t come about until recently.
The only thing that amazes me, is how so many here are consumed with these things.
Cheers 🙂
I think Laura’s shooting the straightest here.
@Ted
@Laura
The same is true of Poroshenko, who was actually the co-founder of the Party of Regions (POR) which was the largest party in the country til the coup overthrew the POR president, Yanukovych, and following his election, Poroshenko banned that same party in Ukraine.
By every measure which can be measured, Ukraine wanted peace not war, with the ethnic Russians and the real Russians, both. But the anti-Russian malignancy within the West would not allow its newly acquired vassal state to make such a choice on its own. Vassals do not make such choices, which is why the peace terms in Istanbul were rejected, but only after Boris Johnson arrived and delivered Zel his instructions in person.
@Laura.
In your last comment, you got it all backwards. By any standard it is the US who is the predator and not Russia.
Bullshit.
@Laura
You owe Eve an apology. It is you who make the “asinine comments”. It is you, not Eve, who writes the nonsense.
You obviously didn’t know that Ukiraine had a pro-Russian government before the Maidan Revolution, orchestrated by the CIA. Also Zelensky ran on a pro-Russian ticket and won before the CIA turned him around.
@Laura
Really? Because they also voted for Viktor Yanukovych but the Americans chose otherwise, ending the independence of Ukraine, and consequently also its unity.
It is a sad and tragic fate which has been hoisted on Ukraine which had more than 14% of its electorate cleaved from being eligible to vote in all the elections which took place from 2014 til now. Relative to the US, 14% comprises a population greater than that of Texas, just as it comprises a population greater than that of California. So in one swell swoop, Ukraine’s democracy, which was always a plutocratic coruptionship teetering back and forth between the Monists and Pluralists, was rendered into an American holding, which is why the Ukraine has been funded with both state and stolen funds from the US to fulfill a fantasy of a cost-less war against Russia. Indeed, Ukraine became a Potemkin village fulfilling the American obsession with the means to fight Putin with the cost being only the countless lives of other Slavs. As Tom Luongo noted, what the West, and America in particular, would call the loss of a million Slavs in the fighting between the Russians and Ukrainians is a good start. Very sad indeed.
Russia is a satanic predator. The people of Ukraine know who their enemy is even if far right and far left anti-American commentators insist on infantilizing Ukrainians as not knowing what’s good for them, which is according to these commentators, that they would be better off under Russian rule than being a sovereign nation. The truth is though that people like E. Rowell don’t really give a damn about Ukrainians, they just oppose America’s allies and actually very much support imperialism and war when it comes from nations that are enemies of America. They are kind of like the hamas supporters who pretend to actually care about the “palestinians”.
Asinine comment. As if the people of Ukraine aren’t choosing to maintain their freedom and sovereignty of their own free will and if not for us, they would willingly surrender their nation to Russia. I can’t believe people can write such nonsense. This may be hard to grasp, but the Ukrainians do NOT want to be under the thumb of the Kremlin. They voted for independence some 30 years ago and want to maintain their nation’s sovereignty. This may also be hard for some of you to believe, but the destruction of Ukraine and the deaths of Ukrainians is 100% the fault of Russia and no one else when Russia decided to launch an unprovoked imperial war. Russia is a satanic power.