Cohen’s current predicament, and to a lesser extent Chomsky’s, is a geopolitical cognate to Nietzsche’s famous maxim about what can happen if you battle monsters and gaze into the abyss. Spend too much time focused on the Manichaean worldview of Cold War disorder — the belief that there are only two sides, and if one of them is evil the other must be good — and it sucks you in at last. Personally, I’m inclined to think that anytime somebody stands up on a barrel with a flag waving behind them and proclaims, Dick Cheney-style, that you’re either with us or against us, the correct answer is almost always: “Well, I’m against you, at any rate.” Our brains are capacious; we contain multitudes. There’s no reason we can’t resist both sides of a false dichotomy. We can see that the disastrous consequences of U.S. foreign policy – which are also the policies of the global capitalist elite — created the context for the Ukrainian crisis and that Putin is a latter-day czar who has resuscitated the most odious and repressive features of the Soviet era, but without the universal healthcare or the free universities. Radical commentator Nikolas Kozloff quotes a left-anarchist Ukrainian group urging Westerners to get over the “so-called anti-imperialism” that produces Cohen-style Putin-smooching. A real “independent yet radical politics,” he adds, would forge international solidarity between those who oppose the drone war and the security state in the U.S. and those who oppose autocratic rule in both Moscow and Kiev.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 22:24:34 +0000
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