Thread by Mart Kuldkepp

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A thread about Western parochialism and privilege-blindness 🧶

To understand Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is not sufficient to consider only its kinetic and political impact from February 24 onwards, or even from 2014 onwards. (1/21)
We also need to consider the deeper, historical roots of Russia's culture of brutality against its neighbours and against its own people, (2/21)
as well as the long-term impacts of home-grown colonialism and orientalism on Western collective consciousness that have skewed its response to the war in ways that ultimately work against its own interests.

This is a thread about the latter. (3/21)
From an Eastern European point of view, the attitude of an average Western person towards the war is a combination of parochialism and privilege blindness. The parochialist lack of knowledge about Ukraine and Eastern Europe more broadly, (4/21)
and the corresponding tendency to see the war as being somehow remote and irrelevant to their own lived experience, creates an impression that people have a personal choice between either engaging or not engaging with the war. (5/21)
This apparent ‘right to disengage’ in turn directly relates to Western privilege blindness: limited acknowledgement of the fact that victims of Russian aggression do not have any such choice, and that for them, needing to fight – if not in the battlefield, (6/21)
then certainly in the information space – is something that has been forced on them, no matter how much they’d rather be doing something else. For victims and their true allies, disengagement means rewarding the aggressor. (7/21)
Yet most people in the West have no scruples about disengaging, seeing it rather as a matter of personal priorities and preferences. With their Eastern European friends or neighbours, they often avoid the awkward topic of war altogether.

Furthermore, (8/21)
many Westerners who do engage with the war and do stand up for Ukraine, do it from a narrow position of privilege that sees Western economic and military assistance and the willingness to accept Ukrainian war refugees as a form of charity that should elicit gratefulness (9/21)
from the recipients, and carry with it a Western entitlement to discontinue this aid in case Ukrainians take any actions or display attitudes (particularly towards Russia) that they don’t understand or don’t like.

This sense of entitlement, (10/21)
grounded in the belief that the West has a meaningful choice between providing such ‘charity’ or not, means that their engagement with the war remains superficial and still distinctly privilege-blind, (11/21)
prioritising the supposedly more enlightened Western point of view over that of the people directly affected by aggression and with far better, first-hand knowledge of what needs to be done to counter it. (12/21)
The narcissistic discourse thus generated includes everything from social media outrage over Vogue photoshoots to fanciful peace proposals that Ukraine is somehow expected to consider in exchange for Western support. (13/21)
The colonialist and orientalist overtones in these attitudes become easily apparent when one considers how comparable Russian aggression against another country – but this time a Western one – would have a different cognitive impact and elicit a different kind of (14/21)
international response. It is likely that in the latter case, the genocidal nature of Russian actions would be recognised with far less hesitation, victim-blaming and openness to Russian propaganda lies would be much more limited, (15/21)
and the sense of trust that Ukrainians have established with other Eastern Europeans would be mirrored by a far deeper sense of international solidarity against Russia than is the case now. (16/21)
By failing to recognise and appropriately respond to the fact that Ukraine is not just fighting for the liberation of its own territory and the lives of its own citizens, (17/21)
but also for everyone else standing in the way of Russia’s imperialist goals ‘from Vladivostok to Lisbon’ and its multifaceted undermining of the rules-based international order, much of the West is doing itself a disfavour at the cost of Ukrainian lives. (18/21)
Whatever the outcome of the war, Russian aggression will not be eliminated in Ukraine, and will remain a systemic challenge to the West for the foreseeable future. But whether this challenge can be successfully contained or not, (19/21)
and whether the supposedly enlightened Westerners themselves are going to die in torture chambers or not, is a matter of whether the West has enough foresight to act decisively now, rather than later. (20/21)
See also my previous thread about Russia's war against Ukraine and its hybrid war against the West:




END. (21/21)
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