Tag: Chomsky

Ukraine: A Rebuttal of Chomsky’s View

~ The Koboi Project

A group of Ukrainian academics has written an open letter to Noam Chomsky critiquing his commentaries on what they categorically define as the “Russian war on Ukraine.” The critique is in fact addressed to Chomsky and “other like-minded intellectuals.” As I have featured many of these intellectuals and their views on my blog, I feel it is important to share this critique.

7 key errors are identified –
#1: Denying Ukraine’s sovereign integrity
#2: Treating Ukraine as an American pawn on a geo-political chessboard
#3. Suggesting that Russia was threatened by NATO
#4. Stating that the U.S. isn’t any better than Russia
#5. Whitewashing Putin’s goals for invading Ukraine
#6. Assuming that Putin is interested in a diplomatic solution
#7. Advocating that yielding to Russian demands is the way to avert the nuclear war

While I recognize the validity of this critique, and the nobility of the national perspective it represents, I would like to suggest that this view might be tempered by the acknowledgment of the enmeshment of Ukraine, by virtue of both history and geography, within the geopolitics of Imperialism, both Russian and American. I suggest that this crisis arose as a result of a disregard or misjudgment, by all responsible parties, of the forces at play. I further suggest, that there can be no solution, no peace, without a realistic reconciliation and containment of the now unfurling forces. The longer the conflict ensues, the more it deepens, and the more irreconcilable the situation becomes.

Image: https://apimagesblog.com/russia-ukraine-war-drafts/2022/4/6/day-42-rows-of-body-bags-in-ukraines-bucha

https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war/

Ukraine: Chomsky’s view 2

~ The Koboi Project
1901 Political Cartoon

In his interview with Noam Chomsky in Truthout dated March 1st , C.J. Polychroniou asks, with reference to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of another state, “Can you comment on Putin’s legal justifications for the invasion of Ukraine and on the status of international law in the post-Cold War era?” Chomsky says, “There is nothing to say about Putin’s attempt to offer legal justification for his aggression. Its merit is zero.. Chomsky ranks the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in September 1939.”

In essence, there is no enforceable legality and certainly, no universal sense of right, on the geopolitical scale. There are only actions and consequences. Chomsky sums up the very narrow range of accepable geopoltical outcomes that remain, now that the threatened invasion has occurred, “The options that remain after the invasion are grim. The least bad is support for the diplomatic options that still exist, in the hope of reaching an outcome not too far from what was very likely achievable a few days ago: Austrian-style neutralization of Ukraine, some version of Minsk II federalism within. Much harder to reach now. And — necessarily — with an escape hatch for Putin or outcomes will be still more dire for Ukraine and everyone else, perhaps almost unimaginably so.’

I worry that Western leaders are unanimously displaying a lack of understanding in the matter of this ‘escape hatch’. They are either intentionally provoking Putin into a quagmire that they believe will be his demise and/or they do not understand the consequences of ‘driving the bear into a corner’ in the way that Chomsky does.

Image https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-russia-anxiety-by-mark-b-smith-review-should-we-fear-the-russian-bear-rjv76qzft

https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage

Ukraine: Chomsky’s view

~ The Koboi Project

In an interview recorded on 10 Jan 2022, Chomsky unpacks the crisis that has sinse led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He echoes John Mearsheimer’s vie wanout the necessary neutrality of Ukraine with regard to NATO-Russian relations. He decribes the decision by the USA in 2008, taken against the wishes of France and Germany, to invite Ukraine to enter NATO as being utterely unacceptable to any Russian leader (ie this is not a question of Putin’s megalomania). Like Mearsheimer, Chomsky implicates the expansion of NATO contrary to gurantees given to the Soviet Union at the time of the unification of Germany as an significant cause of the present crisis.

He also suggests that the implementation of the Minsk 2 agreement (2015) which would establish the neutrality of Ukraine, as a possible way forward. However, as Duncan Allan notes, “Minsk-2 supports mutually exclusive views of sovereignty: either Ukraine is sovereign (Ukraine’s interpretation), or it is not (Russia’s interpretation)” he calls this “the Minsk conundrum”.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/05/minsk-conundrum-western-policy-and-russias-war-eastern-ukraine-0/minsk-2-agreement