Ukrainian author and translator Artem Chapeye (Артем Чапай), whose books include the dystopian The Red Zone and the sardonically titled The Ukraine (article intended), has been a perceptive commentator on the Russian war on Ukraine, a war he volunteered to fight in after deciding his previous pacifism didn’t fit the situation. His latest book, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, combines memoir, history, philosophy, and frontline observation in a way that takes on the logic of war whilst rethinking the logic of the pacifism that’s often proposed as war’s only alternative.
Chapeye describes himself as an avowed leftist, feminist, and atheist (as well as a follower of sorts of Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda, after whom he coined the word “skovoroduvaty” — “literally ‘to skovoroda’ — to go walking along random routes, typically through villages and preferably at a distance from well-known locales, conversing with the people you encounter, but listening more than talking”). His son is named after Emiliano Zapata. Among the works he has translated into Ukrainian are Edward Said’s “Humanism and Democratic Criticism,” Gandhi’s writings on Satyagraha in South Africa, and Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”
In Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, Chapeye reprints a short response he wrote to Chomsky in which he expressed his feeling of being “aghast” at the latter’s crude analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian war. (I’ve written about the flaws in Chomsky’s analysis here and especially here.) Questioning further, Chapeye writes, “Isn’t interpreting reality through predetermined theoretical constructs,” as Chomsky and others were doing, “an ‘irresponsibility of intellectuals’?” He concludes:
“I can’t shake off the following impression: Western intellectuals, including Chomsky, are really talking about themselves and their loved ones and their own self-interest. [. . .] Calling on Ukrainians to capitulate to Russia right now would be the same as calling on Vietnam not to resist the US in the 1960s because their war of independence was being fought with weaponry from the USSR and China. Maybe it was true at the time that China and the USSR wanted to weaken the US militarily in Vietnam, but for the Vietnamese it was always a war of independence.”
The entire book is deeply insightful and well worth reading. It can be purchased from Seven Stories Press.
Kate Tsurkan’s Kyiv Independent review of it provides a good introduction to it, especially to Chapeye’s critique of the “abstract pacifism” of many western leftists.
