Elia Ayoub is joined by Leila Al-Shami, British-Syrian activist and co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Romeo Kokriatski, Ukrainian-American managing editor of The New Voice of Ukraine and co-host of the Ukraine Without Hype podcast, and Dana El Kurd, Palestinian-American assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Richmond to talk about an essay the four of us wrote.
The essay, “A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery,” was published by the south/south movement as part of their south/south dialogues: Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022. I recommend giving it a read before listening, but this is not necessary.
Mentions
- Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
- Too Like the Lightning Book I by Ada Palmer
- Commons journal, including the interviews with Elia Ayoub and Dana El Kurd
- Sumoud-Washing: A Queer-Feminist Analysis of the Syrian and Palestinian Struggle for Liberation by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Razan Ghazzawi
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Episode Credits
Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Artin Salimi
Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
People were more concerned that we were leveling criticism against the left and might damage the left, than that we were trying to raise awareness of problematic narratives that were actually contributing to continued attacks and continued genocide against civilian populations in our context.
Elia Ayoub: Today we’ll be talking with three guests—Dana El Kurd, Leila Al Shami, and Romeo Kokriatski—about a piece we all did together for the south/south movement website entitled “A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery.” The essay was published as part of the south/south dialogues—Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022. The date refers to what’s called the full-scale invasion or the second invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
That event kickstarted for Dana, Leila, and I a bunch of different reflections that brought us back to what we were thinking about related to Syria, Palestine, and the default, hegemonic attitude we’ve been seeing on the left. Best case, [the left] tends to be hesitant on the matter, and worst case, it overtly whitewashes or supports regimes like Putin’s in the name of a pretty vague, ill-defined, and contradictory anti-imperialism.
We saw this with Syria before, and it’s still ongoing. Folks tend to forget Syria is still a thing, but the regime is still bombing; Russia is still bombing, despite supposedly having its hands full in Ukraine.
We have reached a point where we need to find different terminologies, and this essay is an attempt to do so. I’ve been quite keen on using the term “the periphery,” not as a replacement for “the Global South” (because I know there’s an entire history of this term) but as a supplementary concept, something that adds, that makes it a bit richer. Because the “Global South” often does not include “post-Soviet” countries.
(I’ve been recently made aware of how the term “post-Soviet” is a bizarre term, because we don’t call Germany a “post-Nazi” state. It is, but we don’t use those terms. The “post-Soviet” space also needs to be questioned.)
I would like to ask the three of you to introduce yourselves, for those who haven’t listened to previous episodes.
Dana El Kurd: My name is Dana El Kurd, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. I write about Palestine, authoritarianism in the Arab world, and international intervention. Pronouns she/her.
Leila Al Shami: I’m Leila Al Shami. I’m an activist involved mainly in human rights and social justice issues. I occasionally write, and I’m the co-author of a book on Syria called Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.
Romeo Kokriatski: I’m Romeo Kokriatski, I’m a journalist in Ukraine and the managing editor of the New Voice of Ukraine, a Ukrainian English-language news site. I’m also the host of the podcast Ukraine without Hype, which is Ukraine news with hopefully less bias and hype than you would otherwise find.
EA: In the past couple of years, the four of us went through different trajectories and conversations—we’re in a number of different groups together, and we’ve been seeing parallels between our contexts: how the places we come from, cover, think about a lot, or have some connection to are discussed and represented in political spaces that are not unfamiliar (circles we used to hang out in, have some kind of connection with). It’s broadly defined or talked about as ‘the left.’ More specifically, we would call it the tankie left or the authoritarian left.
Crucially, the authoritarian left’s essentialist anti-imperialism or pseudo-anti-imperialism or alt-anti-imperialism (the idea that America is the only imperialist game in town and therefore anything that can supposedly weaken America or be against America, or can vaguely be argued to be so, should be supported or at least whitewashed or downplayed)—the reason this works is that there’s an already-present idea-space in which it’s the default within the left. This insight is from a friend of ours, Adnan, given his experiences as a survivor of the Bosnian genocide.
By “default” I mean it’s not very complicated or difficult to be pro-Palestine on the left—it’s almost like how you get your card when you enter the club, almost like being for Irish independence. There’s a history to being pro-Palestine in the left, and of course Dana, your contribution in the piece was partly about that history, which is a rich one, and has a lot of pros in it, obviously. But the flip-side of that coin is that other contexts that are not Palestine, and other oppressors that are not Israel, are often seen in comparison to those oppressors—and in comparison to America, with Israel being an extension of America in that discourse.
This is what we’ve experienced with Syria and Ukraine. Russia is the obvious example here, but honestly China is another example, and of course Iran in the context of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. So I want to get some initial reflections on your sections of the piece, and on the project that the south/south movement is doing.
RK: Since the full-scale invasion, one of the biggest changes I’ve seen on the Ukrainian left—and yes, Ukraine has a left, this is not a purely Western invention—is the discovery by many Ukrainian leftists that the rest of the world, and specifically the rest of the left, hates us.
Since I grew up in the US and I had experience with the American left prior to moving back to Ukraine, it was less surprising—although there was vitriol and vehemence in the way Ukraine became an identifier card for people. Elia, you were saying that when you enter the club you get an “I support Palestine” card; the flip-side of that is: “Ukrainians are all Nazis.”
It was a weird thing for the Ukrainian left to discover, because we always had this idea of internationalism, where the left should not be bound by national borders or ethnic divisions. This is an explicitly universalist worldview, where we think everyone should have rights regardless of who they are. But that doesn’t apply to some! This is something Syrian friends have brought up: the meme of the guy being hung and asking the person next to him, Oh, first time?
While this kind of depersonalization and dehumanization was new to Ukrainian leftists, there were people who had gone through this process years ago (especially Syrians and Bosnians), where we are declared by wide swathes of the western left not to be worth it, or that we fundamentally cannot be leftists. It is such a weird thing to go through.
For me it wasn’t weird that people had this position; it was weird when people refused to learn anything or listen to left voices from Ukraine, refused to educate themselves at all on the topic. It quickly devolved into memes of Ukrainians—Bandera—Nazis! Just purely regurgitated Russian propaganda.
Intellectually I understood it, but at the same time we’re presumably talking to people who share our goals. We share a goal of an anti-capitalist world, where people are free to do what they want to do without oppressions upon oppressions being piled up on them, where we believe people have inalienable rights. You’d think that would be enough of a bridge to convince people—Listen, I am Ukrainian but all this stuff you’ve learned is incorrect or flawed or just an outright lie, please listen to us—but the refusal is, still to this day, pretty confusing to me.
I’ve made my peace that the ideal of internationalism in large parts of the western left is basically non-existent and probably impossible to revive. But it’s still a struggle to comprehend how people you would otherwise agree with have such utterly abhorrent and imperialist ideas about you.
For listeners who don’t know and can’t see me, I’m not a pure Slav—my dad is from Bangladesh and I look more South Asian than Slavic. It’s really weird when people accuse me of being a Bandera lover or a Nazi, or that I want to destroy socialism. By the way, the Soviet Union destroyed socialism! Don’t put that on me, put that on Lenin! It’s so tough to wrap my mind around the inability (or the non-desire) of these people to learn anything outside their preconceived notions.
That’s what drove my thought process when I was making my contribution to the article. I want to lay out how absurd it is to claim you have anti-imperial, anti-racist, and anti-fascist ideas, and still buy into this essentializing, reactionary worldview when it comes to some people.
LS: I relate a lot to what Romeo is saying. We each came to an awareness of problems with the authoritarian left through the lens of our own struggles. For Syrians and for myself, a big wake up call was April 2018. We saw large protests across the western world that were bringing together people from the left and people from the far-right to oppose the “war on Syria.” But the war they were opposing was not the genocidal war Assad had been waging on the Syrian people for so many years—it was targeted air strikes by the US against the military capabilities of the regime which had just carried out a chemical weapons attack and massacre in the Damascus suburbs.
What Romeo says about people calling this out in Ukraine being tarred as Nazis—we also went through that in Syria, where many people who were trying to raise awareness around problems of this discourse were targeted as being jihadists, Islamists, and terrorists. People were more concerned that we were leveling criticism against the left and might damage the left, than that we were trying to raise awareness of problematic narratives that were actually contributing to continued attacks and continued genocide against civilian populations in our context.
We’ve all come to these realizations through the lens of our struggles, but what’s nice is that we’ve all met each other through our own experience that brought us towards something united, and that we’re continuing to build those links and bridges of solidarity across struggles. We’ve seen the same discourse play out in Hong Kong and numerous other struggles; we’re opening this space for debate, and hopefully we’re getting much bigger, those of us who are trying to bring in an internationalist and anti-authoritarian perspective to political struggles. I think we’re growing all the time.
I don’t understand how we build power with this kind of fragmentation, in accepting allies who harbor anti-Ukrainian views or anti-Syrian views. I think this is morally repugnant, and also strategically very poor.
DK: I was just reflecting while you both were talking on what Elia said at the beginning about how being pro-Palestine is easy in these spaces. What I wanted to bring to light or to discuss in my part of the piece was that fact. Not to downplay anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Palestinian bias in the larger liberal space, which still exists. But in leftist spaces, like the DSA or other organizations like that, being pro-Palestine is more accepted.
Something I noticed, and how I fell into these discussions, is that I was for a time in the Arab world, in the context of an institution that’s pan-Arab, that has different kinds of people from all over the Arab world, and the tankie mentality was seen as fringe. Even if there were a few individuals associated with that institution who may have harbored certain ideas about Syria, they genuinely could not express it. This institution is not just Palestine-focused; it discusses the issues around the region, and many of the people I worked with there had directly been impacted by Iran or by Russia. So it seemed like a no-brainer.
And then I start going online, and I move back to the US, and I’m flabbergasted at the differentiation in the discourse. What was considered completely fringe, like the Max Blumenthals of the world, are seen as valid in Western leftist spaces. I was really outraged by that, because as a Palestinian I don’t see Palestine as separate from any of these other issues occurring in the region or in the world. All these struggles are connected in various ways. That comes out in the themes of my research, and in any activism I have engaged in.
It may have been easy for me just to talk about Palestine, and a lot of Palestinian activists do that, but I couldn’t understand how we could build power in that kind of siloing and fragmentation, in accepting allies who harbor anti-Ukrainian views or anti-Syrian views. I thought that it was morally repugnant but also strategically very poor.
Just to be clear, the fact that among young people aged eighteen to twenty-four in the latest polling here in the United States, thirty percent would vote for somebody like RFK Jr.—that tells you how much damage this alt-imperialist viewpoint has done to leftist spaces: so much that we risk Trump again, or even worse.
Lastly I wanted to comment on Romeo’s discussion of how Ukrainians and Syrians are seen as outside the fold. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian activist and theorist, talks about the ‘Syrianization‘ of the world: you’re in this periphery and you’re outside of the fold of humanity, and the rules that exist for human rights and human dignity don’t apply to you. The danger is that this is spreading: it’s not just Syria, and it won’t be just Ukraine, and it won’t be just Palestine. But leftists don’t make those connections.
EA: There’s an amazing term I learned after we published our piece: sumoud-washing. There’s a piece published on Kohl Journal by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Razan Ghazzawi which coins this term, sumoud-washing, pretty specifically in terms of positionality: it is a Syrian, Palestinian, queer, feminist, and decolonial lens. Sumoud is Arabic for ‘steadfastness,’ and it used to be (and to some extent still is) associated with the Palestinian cause, and different types of resistance against Arab regimes at the time, especially those that were seen as allied with Israel.
The Arabic language has these terms; they already exist. For example, in Lebanon it doesn’t make sense to say ‘tankie’—that doesn’t mean anything. But we can easily identify the “left,” the parts of the Communist Party and so on, who are pro-Hezbollah or whitewash Hezbollah, and we just call them “mumena’a.” We have that term. And the “moqawameh,” obviously, is the “the resistance,” and now it’s basically synonymous with Hezbollah. I may still use it without meaning they are the resistance, it’s just the title they use. In the same way al-Qaeda—
DK: They’ve appropriated resistance; that’s how they identify.
EA: Exactly.
That’s why I’m grateful for the term sumoud-washing, and I’ll definitely be using it. It’s very specific to the Arab world, and it is connected at the very least to the Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon sections we were covering in that essay. I’d be interested in looking at the parallels with the Ukrainian context, and the differences—maybe that’s something we can pin for now. But essentially it means the Syrian regime (pretty notoriously, for those who are from Syria, or Palestinians who grew up in Syria) uses this narrative of resistance against Israel to effectively justify everything.
People on the anti-authoritarian Lebanese left know this history quite well, and I’m glad the piece in Kohl Journal mentions that the Syrian regime intervened in Lebanon in order to crush the Palestinian resistance at the time. This is something many people already know, but it’s been siloed into a part of our brain, compartmentalized—we don’t want to think about it too much.
But this facilitated the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982! Because by then, ’76-’77, the big coalition was pretty much winning what is now called the Lebanese Civil War, and had like ninety percent of the territory between them: the Palestinians, the Lebanese communists, and the pan-Arab nationalists. They were the biggest alliance by far. The minority called themselves Lebanese nationalists, but they were right-wing Christian militias associated with the Maronite bourgeoisie at the time. They were losing, that small elite group of people.
It was Hafez al-Assad who, either directly or indirectly (we don’t know for sure, because these things are not exactly transparent), let the Americans know that he would take care of it. And you would assume this was done with Israel’s knowledge or approval as well: we know for a fact that after ’82, after Israel invaded—Israel was kicked out in 2000, and Syria wasn’t kicked out until 2005, so there was an eighteen-year overlap between the Israelis occupying southern Lebanon and the Syrian regime occupying the rest of Lebanon. I still remember the checkpoints. They had obviously made a truce to make that possible.
Throughout that entire period, and continuing today, Israel has been occupying the Golan Heights—al-Jawlan. Razan and Nayrouz’s piece on Kohl talks about that very specific positionality of the Jawlani, the Syrians from the Golan Heights, and their positionality vis-á-vis both Israel—which has annexed the Golan Heights—and the Assad regime. Jawlani activists and leftists would always describe how the Assad regime would always be hostile to them, because they’re seen as ‘too Israeli’—they’re seen with contempt if not with suspicion.
Those are the positionalities that drew me into the Syrian context before even knowing much about the Golan Heights. It was the Yarmouk experience: the Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus that was utterly destroyed, virtually eradicated by the Assad regime, in a way that we in Lebanon hadn’t seen since Israel tried to do the same to the entire city of Beirut in 1982.
Yet there was this complete disconnect in some people’s minds, which I discovered later on. At the time, I was still in Beirut and what was happening in Yarmouk wasn’t part of some online discursive battle, it was just like, This shit is happening, and we are seeing photos and videos, and people are leaving, and people were telling us. Because it’s not that far—Lebanon is tiny, one of the smallest countries in the world. So it was a lived experience, in the same way that if this were possible from Gaza, geographically, people would be fleeing and coming to Lebanon and telling us the same things.
But there was easier communication between parts of this mumena’a side of the “left” in Lebanon. I don’t know how to define them—or if they’re even technically on the left, because they’re really rightwing on a lot of things as well.
DK: I mean, they’re not on the left if we think about the left morally—but they claim the left and they’re accepted by the left.
EA: They are the reason why in Lebanon there’s almost this exception (now less so since the 2019 revolution) when it comes to Hezbollah. When you say Kellon yaani kellon, “All of them means all of them,” there is a: But do you really mean all of them? It’s a bit more difficult to criticize Hezbollah than it is to criticize the rightwing parties like the Lebanese Forces. Now less so, now it’s much more open, but at the time it was definitely much more difficult.
All of which is to say: the mumena’a types had a direct line of communication with a lot of people in Gaza, and obviously you physically can’t go to Gaza from Lebanon because Israel has the blockade, but it was there. Whereas with Yarmouk, the border between Lebanon and Syria was technically still open—you can’t close it, because that’s most of Lebanon. And there were all these stories left and right, but they’d be falling on deaf ears. That’s one of the things that led me to question a lot of the assumptions I had vis-á-vis the left: that we are the moral side, we’re the good guys, we hate oppression—Not our thing, we don’t like it!
In the beginning, I got into it through my Palestinian background and activism, and I assumed very naively that it’s the same logic that would be extended to those other contexts. Of course what Israel is doing to Palestine is bad, and what Assad is doing to Syrians is bad, and that’s the end of it, we should be talking about other things now. The fact that it was a sticking point always bugged me, before I was thinking about it politically and trying to make sense of it. After reading Syrian accounts (Yassin al-Haj Saleh was a big one at the time, Al-Jumhuriya, Leila’s writings, a bunch of other folks’ writings), I started understanding.
We should have consistency with our values and principles: that we’re against oppression, that we’re against injustice, that we support people in struggle against oppressive regimes, that we support people in struggle against imperialist powers, whether those imperialisms are Western imperialisms or whether they’re Russia or Iran.
And of course on Twitter and Facebook a lot of Syrians talk about this. Romeo, I wish there was a way of getting these archives very efficiently and quickly, because instead of the word “Syria” you could just put the word “Ukraine,” or “Hong Kong.” The complaints were so similar, I felt insane. I felt I was losing my mind at how similar these things are and how obvious they were in my brain, and how not-obvious they seemed to be elsewhere.
This is the background of my motivation, and it followed from there, this podcast and other stuff. There’s a Ukrainian who is saying this exact same thing, and because of how the algorithm works on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, they would meet a Syrian and hear about this experience, or in the replies Hong Kongers saying, We went through this as well! or Taiwanese people saying, We are talked about this way as well!
LS:One of the problems is that instead of having a copy-paste or consistency on moral values and standards that Dana related to, what you actually have a copy-paste of is narrative, and that narrative is that the US is always evil and that anyone opposing the US is good. That’s the reason you could copy-paste any of these statements written about Ukraine from Syria or many other struggles. Because the narrative doesn’t change. It’s completely irrelevant what the local context is, what the politics is, what the history is, what the economic situation or the culture is. The narrative stays the same, it doesn’t adjust according to different struggles.
What we should be having consistency with are our values and our principles: that we’re against oppression, that we’re against injustice, that we support people in struggle against oppressive regimes, that we support people in struggle against imperialist powers whether those imperialisms are Western imperialisms or they’re Russia or they’re Iran.
RK: It’s funny: when you started talking about how Assad’s bad, let’s move on, it’s pretty obvious, I had a very clear flashback to the beginning of the regime’s war against its own people. I remember sitting in college and discussing it with a couple of my classmates, and saying, Well, he’s a dictator bombing his own people; it’s pretty clear that he’s an asshole and should be removed. There wasn’t even the thought that there was another way to evaluate this, that I had to look at American geopolitical interests and think, Is this bad for America? No, that doesn’t matter. The moral lesson here is completely clear.
I didn’t draw that connection with my experience in Ukraine until just now, but I had the exact same feeling now that I think about it. It’s morally obvious that you shouldn’t invade your neighbor in an explicit war of conquest. That’s obviously evil. The fact this isn’t the end of discussion, and we keep having to explain kindergarten-level morality to people who are basing their whole ideology on We are the good guys, is mind-boggling.
EA: I have a theory that I need to elaborate at some point, that in essence this is not that different from what we call Realpolitik of the Kissinger variety. I hope this variety doesn’t last as long as Kissinger lasts, because he’s already a hundred years old. But I mean things like Owen Jones, the British leftwing commentator, describing Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence.” That’s Kissinger’s terminology; that’s a Fukuyama situation! Dividing the world into those camps is by definition a campist worldview. And that has never really been outside of the Stalinist worldview with all of its echoes around the world.
I’m not trying to romanticize the left’s history necessarily; lots of fucked up things happen in leftist spaces. But in terms of basic understanding—you go on Wikipedia and write “leftwing politics”—that sort of thing should be non-negotiable. I’m not saying there can be no room for discussion of what to do and what not to do. But it’s the same way that in the US right now, the transphobic shit by the right is non-negotiable—this is not something we can or should be compromising on. The same thing in Europe: it should be non-controversial to say We support migrant and refugee rights. Though these days it’s not as uncontroversial as it should be. There are lots of left-wing parties that are not pro-migrant.
Dana, you wanted to say something.
DK: I was just absorbing what you guys were talking about, how you’ve lost the motivation to explain. I totally get that, but we should differentiate that leftists who are active, even minimally, as organizers or in these kinds of organizations, are different from the rest of society, from normal people. And even among leftists, there are people who are confused and don’t know, and then there are people who are actively taking this position.
The reason I say that is: if you think about Palestinian public opinion, it was quite pro-Syrian revolution. But when it comes to the Ukrainian issue, it’s very polarized: forty percent blame Russia, thirty percent blame Ukraine, some people don’t know. The exact numbers are in the piece. The point is, for most normal people who aren’t part of this milieu of discussion, it’s very clearly a moral issue. But because of Russian disinformation, the narratives by thought leaders and organizers who have outsized voices, even if there aren’t a lot of them, it starts to muddle the picture for normal people.
Even among people who consider themselves actively part of the left, there are some people who just don’t know and absorb that confusion. Then there are some who are such Western chauvinists that they center themselves without really critically thinking about that, and who genuinely believe that US intervention is the worst evil, and anything that might facilitate a discussion on US intervention should be shut down.
They know everything about Yarmouk, they know everything you just mentioned, but they’re going to pretend like that didn’t happen; they’re going to play the game of narratives and disinformation because they have a higher goal, which is to stop any kind of US intervention.
Like you, I really went through some mental health struggles when I started commenting online, because I was being harassed so often about things that I thought were so simple. People were scoffing at me when I used the word “authoritarian.” I thought, Am I in a parallel reality? Does authoritarianism not exist in your world? But that’s the level of discourse we have to deal with.
There are certain people who are doing this on purpose; they are doing it to muddle the discussion. Unfortunately, those people have winnowed their way into major organizations, and have done damage, especially to younger folks who are absorbing this information. But I thought I should differentiate between “normal people” and “non-normals.” I count myself as a non-normal here, just FYI.
RK: It’s so weird to me because I definitely remember—maybe I’m hallucinating, maybe we did all cross into a parallel reality! I have pretty distinct memories during the US war in Iraq that people on the left would criticize dictators like Assad for cooperating with the US. It was public information that Assad allowed the US to operate black sites in Syria. This was not some hidden thing; this was one of the main critiques of many of these regimes: that they worked with the US to do all its horrible illegal torture bullshit on their territory, in exchange for dollars.
Then you fast forward not really that long, and it’s like that shit didn’t happen. If you bring it up, people accuse you of parroting CIA talking points. Like, what happened?
EA: It’s just a decade. There are those books describing the interwar period—as in, between the First World War and the Second World War in Europe and the rest of the world—as a special period, because of what happened before and after. There’s something to be said about that decade, because between 9/11 and the Arab Spring it’s just ten years, which is kind of insane given everything that happened basically in my teenage years.
It’s something I’ve been pondering, and with a bit more distance maybe I’ll be able to reflect on it a bit more. A lot of the things we’ve been talking about now as being almost taken for granted, the tankie stuff or whatever, were a bit more in flux at the time. There was a bit more confusion, I’m not sure what the term would be.
DK: Well, there was less direct international intervention in these discussions to weaponize them. There was less Chinese funding, and Russian funding.
As Moishe Postone once said, the right are always better nationalists than the left. We shouldn’t be playing that game, we should be changing the rules of the game.
EA: Exactly, and the example I always think of (to go back to the whole mumena’a thing) is that in the beginning of the Arab Spring, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, gave a speech celebrating our brave Arab brothers on the streets—because that was before it really came to Syria (though it was starting there)—and there’s an interview he did with Julian Assange, which is still online, which is a fascinating thing as a document. He was saying, We’re negotiating between the opposition and the government, and calling them “the opposition.” There was a sense of: We’re not fully on board, necessarily, and that’s why a lot of Syrians (and Palestinians for that matter) were still on the fence about Hezbollah. Are they going to be on our side? Are they not? We’re getting mixed messages here. Of course, many others had no illusions about that.
Also, Hezbollah supported the intervention in Libya—which is a whole controversial thing, I don’t want to get into it. But Hezbollah supported it. Lebanon was one of the signatories to the resolution at the UN to allow intervention to prevent Muammar Gaddafi’s threats against the population. Lebanon had no problem with that, because there’s a internal Lebanese thing (which I won’t get into) with Hezbollah and Amal hating Muammar Gaddafi.
This is something that gets lost in these discussions. At the end of the day, Gaddafi is romanticized as a pan-African figure in pan-African spaces. The guy was an open racist and misogynist who was chilling with Berlusconi, but facts just don’t matter in these spaces.
I find it fascinating that we are at a time now where you can almost predict: if there is some kind of normalization discussion with Israel among Arab states, there seems to be, afterwards or in parallel, a re-normalization with the Assad regime. They’re almost following one another. There’s something happening, and I’m not saying this in a conspiracy way—
DK: No, it’s just that the Western establishments’ agreement is that the way to deal with these pesky peripheries is authoritarian conflict management. Whether it’s Israel, whether it’s the Syrian regime being normalized. It’s the same underlying policy, which is: These people can’t have democracy; they won’t have human rights; maybe they can have subsistence.
RK: The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is a perfect encapsulation of this. In real time, you see the West basically turning a blind eye to the genocide of Armenians in Karabakh, in Artsakh. Regardless of what you might think are the merits of the Armenian or the Azerbaijani side, people shouldn’t be starved—that’s a pretty easy thing to see. But there’s basically no pushback from anyone, any country, any leaders in the West, against these actions. It’s like, Okay, we cut off Russian oil, but we still need Russian oil, and Azerbaijan is willing to sell us Russian oil and claim it’s theirs, so that means we’re not going to say a word. Whatever they do, we don’t care. The Armenians brought it on themselves.
When you bring it up in a left perspective, people are just like, Oh, these are uneducated mountain peoples, they’re just going to kill each other. There’s no left-wing analysis, apparently—which is insane. How can you really see yourself as the good guys if you’re willing to ignore clearly moral judgements on ongoing events. Every time I think about this, I’m just stunned by the doublethink that’s become so commonplace.
LS: We’ve heard so many times: Arabs aren’t ready for democracy and they need an authoritarian strongman to keep them in power. It just shows the absolute disconnect between the discourse and the reality, because what we saw in Syria was when the state was pushed out of two-thirds of the country, people implemented themselves a very grassroots participatory democracy; it was democracy that people were fighting for. So actually the only obstacle to democracy we have in Syria (and I imagine in many other countries in the region) are these authoritarian regimes.
EA: To bring us back to the headline “Anti-Imperialism from the periphery,” as a way of slowly wrapping up—this is one of those conversations that can last for ten hours, and I’ve been told listeners don’t want to listen to my voice for ten hours—what is it about the periphery?
“South/south movement”—there’s something about that. It’s a south to south movement. There’s this other term, “the Global East,” to use for the “post-Soviet” space as a related but different thing—almost in between the Global South and the Global North. All of these concepts are questionable, problematic, to be criticized. But they may at least in the short term help us think through certain things. Because the term “Global South” has its critiques, obviously, and I’ve tried to make them as well. It’s not that I don’t use it, or think it’s completely useless. But when you think about China, the term Global South doesn’t really apply anymore in the same way; there are other qualifications that need to be added—
LS: There’s a south in the north, and a north in the south.
EA: That’s it. There are centers and peripheries in the north. The banlieues of Paris are technically part of the Global North, but they aren’t treated as such by the Paris government. We saw that with the recent uprisings, with ex-colonial subjects being treated similarly to how colonial subjects would have been treated, because they are themselves descendants, for the most part, of former colonial subjects.
There’s something about the way Russia and Putin talk about Ukrainians: it’s not that dissimilar from any kind of dominant political power—for example, how the Chinese Communist Party has talked about Uyghurs. Of course, there are differences here and there; in China, for example, as long as you stop being Muslim and stop being Uyghurs you’re welcome to become Chinese. With Putin, it’s Novorossiya, like, Oh, well, they’re actually Russians in denial.
There is that dimension to it, which, if folks don’t take into account that this is a very violent and authoritarian way of seeing the world, the rest of the -isms are pointless.
I know you’ve mentioned this a number of times, Romeo, that at the end of the day, the whole debate about What kind of weapons should Ukrainians take and where should they say no?—well, give them the options in the first place. Where are the warplanes? I understand clearly they’re not good and they’re very bad for everything, but still, where are the warplanes? What can be done in that situation, given that what they are asking for is either not given or is given very late? At the same time we know of course that a lot of Western diplomats are still complaining that Ukrainians are asking for too much.
At the beginning of this entire thing I said that what Ukrainians need to immediately understand is that they should not be asking the West, they should be demanding, and to remember at all times that whatever solidarity and support is coming from the West is always fragile, can stop overnight—as Trump did with supposed allies in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria. This has always been a thing with the Americans especially, but with Europe as well.
All of the discourse that misses that aspect, that it’s very ephemeral, that this is about stopping Russia as much as possible as quickly as possible because the Ukrainians don’t know how long the support will come, and if the support stops it will get worse, it’ll make things more difficult—that sheer pragmatism for me, that survival question, if it’s not at the forefront of any debate of what we should do, then it’s saying the geopolitics, the realpolitik, can always trump other questions.
That’s why the question of the right to intervene, the duty to intervene, is a complicated one but is one that the left should be engaging with. For the most part, we pretend it is not there. There are no contexts, ever, in which Western states in theory capable of doing so should intervene—which makes World War Two an awkward example for people wanting to think about it; that’s why they end up not wanting to think about Bosnia, the Rwandan Genocide, Kosovo, or Libya for that matter. It brings up those questions.
It’s easier to say, It’s all like Iraq! Libya 2011 is like Iraq 2003. If you say that, you don’t have to think anymore, you don’t have to think about Libya or Gaddafi or the people on the ground. You can just think, It’s close enough to Iraq on the map; they had it good clearly, and it’s all a conspiracy, a Color Revolution.
It’s an easier way of thinking about the world, it’s maybe comforting for some to think in those simplistic binaries, but I keep on worrying that if there aren’t these basic values that are non-negotiable, that have to do with the sanctity of human life—these very basic things, if they are debatable, we’ve already lost the debate. Because the right is always going to do a better job at that. As Moishe Postone once said, the right are always better nationalists than the left. We shouldn’t be playing that game, we should be changing the rules of the game.
I’ll leave our guests to end on their thoughts and recommendations, calls to arms, propaganda, and all of the above.
RK: I wanted to address one of the things you said, Elia, which is this idea that aid is very conditional. In fact, some of the biggest criticisms from Europe and even from the UK (which has been shockingly one of the more stalwart partners of Ukraine) has been that Ukraine has asked too much. You heard this pretty constantly from French and German diplomats especially, in the first year of the full-scale invasion, that Ukraine wants too much, that they’re not grateful enough.
There was just a scandal a few weeks or months ago, where the former UK defense secretary Ben Wallace gave an interview with some Lithuanian paper where he was also seemingly complaining that the Ukrainians were asking for too much, that we were not grateful enough for the help that we’ve received. This is one thing that Ukrainians are very aware of, that aid can dry up at pretty much any moment. We’re very aware that democratic countries can change governments, and those new governments can have completely different priorities with regards to us. There’s no stability there.
To tie it to an earlier point you made about the Global East—I hadn’t heard that term, but it makes sense—one of the big differences between the “post-Soviet world” and the Global South is that by and large these countries want to become “more European,” but what they see Europe as is not quite how Europe sees itself. We see Europe as transparent, anti-corrupt, with a level playing field, rule of law. Europe is not conceived of as a colonial oppressor that has grown fat off the blood of its slaughtered subjects, it’s seen as a troubled region that managed to rebuild itself while we, after thirty years of independence, haven’t been able to match their speed.
For Ukraine, this is especially resonant because we just look at Poland. Poland is not just our neighbor geographically, but a lot of Ukrainians have ties to Poland, there’s a lot of cultural connection, they left the Soviet Union in about the same situation that we did—but they are remarkably better off than Ukraine. They’ve managed to build themselves into what Ukrainians consider a “European” nation.
This is something that I hope discussions like we’re having now will examine more thoroughly. Things that Ukrainians think are European are not exclusively European. European chauvinists might say, This is a uniquely European thing, but these values are universal—people want transparent governments, people want rule of law. These are things that objectively make life better for Joe Schmuck, the average person on the street. These are not magical European values that can only be adopted if we throw away all of our identity and say, We’re European now. Stressing the universality of those ideals is going to be very important to continue to build solidarity and connections between the Global East and Global South.
My recommendations: I recently started reading Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. A fantastic book. If you are white in the West and want to know why us uppity People of Color get so annoyed and upset and frustrated when you try to talk to us about this, read this book and then never talk to us about it again! And if you are a Person of Color who has never been able to really articulate the constant frustrations, read the book and you’ll get a very clear sense that you’re not alone, and why we feel this, why it’s so difficult to get through your white friends’ heads the frustrations and indignities we face on a daily basis.
EA: It’s important to add as a caveat or disclaimer that we do not hate white people. Some of my best friends are white!
DK: I’m right now just reading novels, but everyone should check out Commons, which is a Ukrainian platform and journal. They had an interview with Elia, an interview with Kavita Krishnan, and there’s an interview with me coming out. They touch on a lot of the themes discussed in this podcast.
LS: I totally forgot to prepare a recommendation, even though I’ve been on this podcast before and knew that it’s coming.
EA: I’m currently reading a novel called Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer. It’s a trilogy set in the twenty-fifth century, and I won’t do it justice here, but different societies have been built by then, and it’s one of those things where the worldbuilding is what’s really good about it. It’s a fascinating thing that I highly recommend.
Thank you all for doing this. It was really great having you.
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