Ukraine, or the deserving victim?
In Pygmalion—and later in My Fair Lady—Alfie Doolittle explains his condition to Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering as being a member of the undeserving poor, which is to say, an able-bodied man of working age, as opposed to the poor widow who can collect multiple payments from charities for the same dead husband. Doolittle claims to eat as much as the exemplary widow and to drink much more, but wonders who will maintain him.
If this sounds like the sort of aptness that is only possible in fiction, consider an encounter that I had outside Bosco’s Restaurant in Nashville (alas closed in the years since I moved away). A man came up to me to ask for money, an incident that American capitalism makes all too common. His spiel, however, convinced me to give: He said that he would drink away whatever I might let him have. I always appreciate intelligent honesty, and I had enjoyed my own pint (or so) of ale—Olde Fool, if memory serves, whose hops count approached the Absolution Ale that South Street Brewery in Charlottesville, Virginia used to offer—so I was generous.
Back in the day when I still carried cash in any quantity.
All right, one more anecdote before I get to the point, and this takes the discussion back to George Bernard Shaw’s play. The story goes—and I will take no pains to confirm it because if it is fiction, too bad—that when Rex Harrison, who played Higgins, and Stanley Holloway, in the role of Alfie Doolittle, were performing the play on stage, they emerged into an alley one night, only to encounter a woman who wanted Harrison’s autograph. Harrison, who was known by his friends to be a jerk to the general public, tried to blow her off, at which point, the woman punched him.
Holloway’s reaction was to observe that this was the first time he had seen the fan hit the shit.
All of which is to say that sympathy is something that we human beings do not share out unconditionally. Nor could we and be expected to function day to day, given the world’s many sufferings. But who is or is not someone with whom each of us will identify or share feelings enough to aid is not always easy to explain—or to justify to various social tribes.
I point this out in response to the attitude that I have observed held by many on my end of the political spectrum—the left—about Ukraine as the country is fighting to drive back the invading Russians. Some argue that Ukraine brought this upon themselves, thanks to their having sought membership in such supposedly imperialist, capitalist entities as the European Union or NATO. Others point to neo-Nazi groups such as the Azov Battalion, a militia that has been engaged in resistance against Russian forces in territories seized in 2014. And then there is something that should shame anyone who professes the notion, namely a yearning for a restoration of Stalinist unity, ignoring the horrors that this entails. Call these folks tankies and never associate me with them.
This same collection of leftists will often raise other conflicts that have caused the deaths of many ordinary people in countries such as Iraq and Syria, along with working in America’s history of slavery and of genocide against indigenous populations, all of which deserve to be known, to be sure, and that call upon answers to the wrongs, historical or ongoing. The favorite contrast, however, to Ukraine is Palestine, a territory and a group of people occupied by a stronger neighbor and fighting to establish independence.
What is the difference? The Palestinians have their own measure of fascists—of the Islamic variety, of course. Ukraine has corruption to deal with, but so do their Arab counterparts. Both can point to centuries of rising and falling and hoping to rise again in terms of relative political, military, and cultural power in their regions.
What is the difference? There is one that is obvious: race. Ukrainians, by and large, are ethnic Europeans. The Palestinians are Arabs in the same way. Given the manner in which politics and race intertwine in the United States and Europe, composed of countries that historically felt entitled to land that belonged to others, there is an impulse on the left to feel with those who were in the underclass, thanks to the colonizers—the latter generally white and the former various shades darker. This may not seem clearly a factor in the case of the Ukrainians, being closely related to Russians, but the sense I get from one group of the comments on the subject is that if there is a family squabble among Europeans, this should be of no concern to the left.
There is another matter that touches on attitudes held by some American gun control advocates. The Ukrainians are winning. I say this with a bit of hope layered in, but the invaders have been driven away from Kyiv and stalled in the east at great cost; the Russian air force is lighter by dozens of planes and helicopters, and the cruiser, Moskva, having been told to go fuck itself, did so, with the assistance of a couple of Ukrainian missiles. In other words, with good arms and a lot of good will, the Ukrainians have refused to be merely victims, and their acts of self-defense are working. The Palestinians have not been so successful, despite decades of violent conflict.
The explanation for this comes down in large degree to a pair of facts: The Ukrainians are being given advanced weaponry, and other nations who claim to be on the side of Ukraine are not using that country as an excuse for domestic repression and economic hardship in the way that the autocrats of the Arab world treat Palestine. The E.U. and the United States would be pleased to see Ukraine left free of Russian interference and able to rise unimpeded. The heads of state in Egypt, Syria, et al. have long treated Palestine as a justification for enriching their militaries at the expense of internal development and of rejecting open relationships with the West.
But the sin of Ukraine is that the country has eschewed the notions that pacifism is superior to violent defense, that diplomacy is always the better choice than war, and that being an innocent victim has a moral excellence that being an armed defender standing over the body of one’s attacker lacks.
This may be unforgivable to anyone who cannot imagine taking up weapons to deliver an unequivocal no to those who would bring violence without justification, but I see no reason to suppose that the Ukrainians will be asking their pardon.