I’ve just published a piece at Terrestri(e)alism that summarizes the multiple ways in which the Russo-Ukrainian war is an environmental war, and the reasons why this should be important far beyond Ukraine — in fact, for everyone, as climate change intensifies and wars over land and resources can similarly be expected to get more frequent.
It’s called “How war is environmental: the Ukrainian case.” Read it there: https://terrestrialism.substack.com/p/how-war-is-environmental-the-ukrainian
It’s very nice to see Bernd Herzogenrath’s Spectral Futures anthology in print. Bernd managed to squeeze such a weird and wonderful mix of futuristic fabulations (that are colorful in every respect including type-face) from an entourage of luminaries like Claire Colebrook, Orit Halpern, Bron Szerszynski, and some 20 other authors.
It was a joy to work with Asia Bazdyrieva and Svitlana Matviyenko on a co-authored chapter entitled “Spectres of Solar Futurity,” that ranges across the wild fields and black soils of past and future Ukraine. Here are a few teaser paragraphs from our piece (broken into shorter bits for readability):
To gauge what futures might be envisioned in and on the sun’s yellow rays, we trace the movement of the sun’s white light, perceived as yellow, into the black earth of Ukraine, and back again to the yellow of that country’s possible futures. We do so through a historical detour in which Russian imperial science, and later Soviet science, contribute to making the earth what it has become for Ukraine: foundational, contested, coveted, resourcified, resistant.
Unlike the Russian and Soviet scientists who perceived the earth as resource, and specifically as “Russian chernozem,” Ukrainian artists, from Pavlo Tychyna (quoted above) and Oleksandr Dovzhenko to Fedir Tetianych, perceived it as poetry, as music, as clarinets of the sun. In this way, we follow the circuit of light as it exists in scientific, imperial, and ecopoietic realities: as object, resource, energy, process, movement, and even sound, circulating between the yellow sun (in a blue sky) and the yellow earth (over black soil), with life emerging as earth in formations within which we find ourselves today, at this moment of Anthropocenic, wartime, collective precarity.
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The London Ukrainian Review has published a special issue on “Legacies of Chornobyl” that includes a fascinating interview with historian Serhii Plokhy (who seems to be writing at the incredible rate of a book a year) alongside several articles on the muliple dimensions of the accident and its impacts.
My own piece in the issue, “Chornobyl at 40: Times and Spaces of a Hyper-Event,” is a distillation of a much longer argument, some of which has appeared in print before and other parts of which are still in progress. The final paragraph distills the message into a single sentence:
So we have an event that is multiple things at once: an ‘error’ registering the shadowy underside of industrial modernity; the limit case of a bipolar Cold War order, now transmogrified into a multipolar geo-informational disorder; a cipher of contested narratives including those that would yoke it to Ukraine’s emergent national sovereignty; an emptied yet alluring terrain of the world’s shadow ecology; and a signpost on the accelerometer of the Anthropocene.
Read the editors’ introduction here, my piece here, and the rest of the issue here: https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/
Related to this, I’ll be speaking on Terra Invicta and the ecopolitical continuum that connects Chornobyl to the Russo-Ukrainian war in New York City tomorrow, in Toronto next month (at the Munk School on April 20 and in Ukrainian for the Shevchenko Scientific Society on April 24), and in Montreal at the Jean Monnet Centre on April 22 (Earth Day) and at Concordia University on April 23.
Greek political analyst Sirantos Fotopoulos is one of the more insightful commentators I’ve read on the current Iranian predicament. (His “Open Letter to the Anti Imperialist Left” was published on Triple Ampersand (&&&) back in January.) Alas, much of his writing is restricted to Facebook posts. Two recent pieces, one from March 7 and the other from March 5, are especially lucid and helpful. The first discusses, in useful detail, western leftist responses to Iranian activism — a theme often broached here in the Ukrainian context; the second, the ambiguity of bedfellow-allies when a people is struggling against authoritarian rule.
I’m sharing these posts by permission of the author. You can follow more of his writing at facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos.
March 7 (by Sirantos Fotopoulos)
A Left politics that instructs the Iranian feminist to defer her liberation to the requirements of the anti-Western imperial struggle is not offering her solidarity. It is offering her a transaction. It is saying, in the bluntest terms available, that her body, her autonomy, and her survival are negotiable instruments in a geopolitical calculus she did not author and was not consulted about — and it is saying this in the name of the very internationalism that is, on every other occasion, invoked as the movement’s crowning moral achievement.
There is a sentence circulating from Tehran — written, let us be precise about this, beneath active bombardment — that ought to discomfort anyone who has spent the past several years choosing camps rather than principles: “everyone wants peace, but no one dares to demand it.”
The people who should have made the demand for peace imaginable — the formations, the parties, the journals, the platforms — have instead spent years informing their supposed constituents that to call for an end to the theocracy’s war on women is to capitulate, to hand victory to the enemy, to become, by the alchemy of sectarian logic, objectively complicit in imperialism. This is the identical argument deployed by every warmongering government in the history of governments that make war. The fact that it now issues from people who would describe themselves as anti-war is not a paradox.
Read the rest of this entry »Today marks the 108th anniversary of the proclamation of Ukrainian independence by the Ukrainian Central Council (Central Rada, or Tsentralna Rada) of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, in the document known as the Fourth Universal.
Between March 1917 and March 1921, the People’s Republic was the most prominent of the Ukrainian political formations that emerged in wartime and, for a while, fulfilled the function of an elected Parliament of a multi-party, social-democratic state. The Central Rada was a broad coalition representing workers, peasants, soldiers, and national minorities, whose dominant forces were the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (USDRP) and the Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (UPSR), but which also included various local peasants’, military, and workers’ councils and minority (Russian, Jewish, and Polish) organizations. It was ultimately squashed by the Bolshevik Red Army, with many of its leaders killed, imprisoned, or exiled (the Wikipedia page lists their fate).
Here are some excerpts from the Fourth Universal. You can read the entire text below (as translated by Oleh Fedyshyn, from Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995, edited by Ralph Lindheim and George S. N. Luckyj, University of Toronto Press, 1996, all of which can be read online at Diasporiana).
Four years into the full-scale Russian war on Ukraine, the line “Four years of destructive warfare have weakened our land and exhausted our people” resonates in a particularly appropriate way.
Read the rest of this entry »Much of what Paria Rahimi writes in “Why the Left Is Failing Iranians: Against Campism” (Jan. 15) resonates strongly with the experience of Ukrainians. And it points the way toward something that many Ukrainians I know have been wanting to work toward: a solidarity across struggles that has the potential to become genuinely global. (I write all this while acknowledging Rebecca Solnit’s point that liberal media critiques of “the Left’s deafening silence on Iran” has been a bit over-the-top.)
“This essay,” Rahimi writes, “does not seek to prescribe strategy or to speak on behalf of those engaged in struggle. Its intervention is diagnostic rather than programmatic. It is directed at left discursive formations” — those she calls “campist” — “that have repeatedly rendered mass uprisings unintelligible by subordinating them to geopolitical alignments or state-centred frameworks.” “Opposition to U.S. imperialism,” she writes, “is repeatedly mistaken for a politics of liberation.” And “when anti-Westernism becomes the measure of legitimacy, revolt itself becomes unintelligible.”
“The task posed here,” she continues, is “limited but precise: to reclaim internationalism not as alignment with foreign states, but as struggle wherever one stands, oriented toward a common emancipatory horizon, rather than outsourcing the fate of emancipatory politics to foreign states, geopolitical blocs, or so-called camps of resistance” [emphasis added].
Like Ukrainians, Iranians have risen up on multiple occasions over the last few decades. In Iran, these uprisings have seemingly become regular, more acute, and this time more bloody, its victims numbering in the thousands. What they rise up against is very specific: it is a hardline authoritarianism in an Islamist and anti-western guise — which doesn’t make it representative either of Islam or of anti-westernism (whatever that may mean). It is also an inept rule that has lost its ability to sustain a viable social contract. What they rise up for is also determined by their very specific circumstances. As Rahimi writes, “Revolutions do not arrive in the language we prefer; they arrive in the language people can speak under repression.” That language will not be identical to ours or anyone else’s.
Read the rest of this entry »For all those leftists still sleeping under the rock called “NATO Derangement Syndrome” (sorry, but if you still believe those tales, you either haven’t been reading anything informed about Ukraine or you are unreachable)…
Counterpunch has published a piece by Andriy Movchan, “The Russian Idée Fixe,” that clearly outlines the flaw in the argument that NATO expansion is responsible for the Russo-Ukrainian war. The flaw, in a word, is that Putin himself doesn’t believe it. He is a Russian imperialist who believes in reconstituting a primordial Russkii mir (“Russian world”) that’s existed for over a thousand years and that trumps any modern notions of state sovereignty, democracy, political self-determination, and the like. He says so every chance he gets.
Of course if you believe in those kinds of historical myths, you’ll need to read elsewhere to see how poorly they line up with actual history. (Movchan doesn’t get into that, but any good history of Ukraine — like Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and especially his Origins of the Slavic Nations, which you can read here — gets well into that.) But if you believe those myths, you’re not any kind of leftist, which is who Movchan is aiming to educate.
The US leftist journal Against the Current has just published Ukrainian historian (and soldier) Vladislav Starodubtsev’s “Retrieving History: Ukrainian People’s Republic.” The article presents a synoptic history of Ukraine’s first modern independent (and social-democratic) state. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on Ukraine today, especially from a left-wing perspective.
A few excerpts:
“USUALLY THE HISTORY of the 1917 revolution is told from the perspective of Russia. But its most radical and transformative currents emerged from the empire’s colonized peoples.
“Ukraine was first among equals. It managed to create a majority council based socialist and democratic republic, and provided an example of multi-parties, cooperative-based and decentralized socialism, that was later defeated by Russia. It was the forefront of a revolutionary shift — offering a bold vision of what politics could be.” [. . .]
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The first online book launch for Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth was just held on Zoom, sponsored by the RUTA Association and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. It was facilitated by Professor Epp Annus, and featured seven author-contributors in addition to the book’s editor, me (Adrian Ivakhiv).
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has written about the book that it “deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” I think and hope that my overview of the book’s theoretical framework, and the rich diversity of author profiles and topics we covered — the Anthropocene, colonialism and decolonialism, the role of art in war, multispecies relations with land, the affective sensibilities and soundscapes of war and resistance, and more — captured why that might be so. My introduction focused especially on the question of why and how the Russo-Ukrainian war should be considered an “environmental war,” and why that is relevant to all of us.
The video of the event can be viewed here:
Today marks the 34th anniversary of the national referendum in which 92% of Ukrainian voters approved the declaration of independence made by Ukraine’s Supreme Council (Verkhovna Rada) on 24 August 1991. To mark this date, a manifesto has just been published that was drawn up by a fairly diverse committee of co-authors, with prominent signatories including writers, activists, media people, and academics. (Apparently there was plenty of disagreement on the details, and in the end a certain tension between details and generalities is evident. There’s a venerable tradition of that sort of thing in the history of the Ukrainian People’s Republic with its four “Universals” and other declarations.)
The manifesto, entitled “Survive. Endure. Prevail!” (“Вижити, вистояти, перемогти!”), has been published by Ukraïnska Pravda and can be read in English here. It compares two concepts of Ukrainian victory — “victory at its maximum” and “minimum victory” — and calls for the latter, more attainable one to have three dimensions:
Each is spelled out in ways that sound reasonable, if it were not for the fact that the world they are aiming for — a world of sovereign nation-states, each of which is a land “of opportunity, based on the rule of law and an effective system of public governance” — is an ideal that has never quite existed in reality (at least at the world scale) and that, if it has (at regional scales), is already slipping out of our hands.
That’s not to fault the authors. It’s a vision worth upholding and orienting oneself around, especially when their country is engaged in an existential struggle for survival and is aiming to corral more support from the community of developed western nations on which that survival depends. If it lacks a certain acknowledgment of how the world has changed and the difficulties it is facing, it doesn’t lack them entirely. It acknowledges a “broader global crisis” that includes “the rise of a global coalition of dictatorships, an ambivalent U.S. foreign policy, crises of democracy in multiple countries, a devaluation of international law and of the world order as a whole.” At the same time, by introducing these as part of a “crossroads between exciting opportunities for development and unprecedented threats to human existence” (my emphasis), it fails to capture the actual state of the world.
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