By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

FROM what one can gather by following the Western Press’s framing of Russia’s war against Ukraine, US officials have turned out to be the most bellicose and most provocative toward Russia, unwilling to concede that Russia has hemispheric interests in Eastern Europe similar to what the US has taken for granted in the Americas since the early 19^th Century.

One reason for the seemingly extreme and war-mongering views of North Americans is that they have not experienced a prolonged attack on their own soil since the Civil War of 1860-1865. 

The nearest episodes approaching the shock and horror of war on their own soil which North Americans can name since the Civil War of 1860-1865 are Pearl Harbour attack in the Second World War and the terrorist bombing of New York and the Pentagon on September 11 2001.

Therefore, North American leaders can afford to plot or provoke all kinds of wars abroad, from Nicaragua to Afghanistan and Libya, without provoking a revolt at home.  

This is so because, for the overwhelming majority, the actual experience of military conflict remains as remote as the occasional television news bulletin. This is the reality which the current leaders of Ukraine seem to have missed in their seeking to join NATO with enthusiastic cheer from the North Americans.

One fact of history which the Western media are not bringing out is that most of North America’s wars abroad have been waged against people who can be described as the alien other; whereas the war between Russia and Ukraine can very well be viewed as a war between cousins or between intimate neighbours.

Therefore, contrasting the Russian ‘special military operation’ on Ukraine with the NATO wars against former Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan should reveal a most important difference. 

Russia shares a long border with Ukraine. 

Russian citizens care about the future of Ukrainians in ways qualitatively different from the ways US citizens cared, or did not care, about the future of Vietnam or even Libya after the 2011 NATO war there.

Professor Noam Chomsky captured this major difference when he was asked in 1989 about Vietnam. 

He said this among other things:

“Don’t forget what we (the US) did to that country, practically wiped it out. You have to bear in mind what happened there. Nobody here (in North America) cares. 

Nobody studies it carefully, but over the course of the Indochina wars, the number of people killed was maybe four million or more. Tens of millions of others were displaced from their homes…There are still thousands and thousands of deaths every year because of the (US military’s) use of chemical weapons. Children are born with birth defects, and cancers, and tumours, and deformities. 

I mean, Vietnam suffered the kind of fate there is nothing to compare to  in European history going back to the Black Plague. It’ll be a century before they recover if then.”

Therein lies one of the major differences: North America’s distant wars are easily forgotten by those who cause them to happen. Their histories are characterised by amnesia on the part of the aggressor nation(s).

But the Russian ‘special military operation’ on Ukraine is the product of memory. Russians say for the last 400 years, Western invaders have invaded Russia through Ukraine. 

The NATO encirclement is only the latest episode in Western incursions into Russian territory.

In short, the people of Vietnam, Cambodia (Kampuchea) and Laos represented the ‘alien other’ in North American eyes. 

But those of Ukraine and Crimea are remembered in Russia as former countrymen and former countrywomen to be brought back home to a ‘Greater Russia’.

One does not have to like or accept this Russian view in order to recognise its reality as a feature of international relations.

In Vietnam and the whole of Indochina, distance and distancing were paramount. 

In the Russia versus Ukraine case, we are closer to the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian scenario as a comparison. 

Intimacy is more dominant in that scenario than distance. This is the scenario of a cousins and neighbours’ war.

Imperial power over Libya or Vietnam or Afghanistan shows the following characteristics of distance and distancing:

• It shows the ability of the imperial power to pick and choose, not only victims and clients but also values, using the media of distance and technologies of retreat and leverage. The Kurds of Iraq and the Kosovars are fetishised into the most deserving receivers of the Western gift of humanity and human rights, while Serbs, Quebecers and Irish nationalists are defined in the opposite way: as subversives and terrorists who deserve repression and stigmatisation. 

• This strategy of distance from the other uses weapons of distance and the media of retreat to make sure the bomber pilot never has to face his victims in person.  That is why there were no ground forces. Where they had to be used, they quickly barricaded themselves behind razor wires and armoured tanks. The victims received cluster bombsand depleted uranium but they were completely prevented from returning anything, not even a glance. This is because anything approaching a human encounter might give the aggressor same suggestion of the humanity of his victims. He might notice that the women are just like his own mother and aunt or sister. He might recognise his own daughter among the school children or the patients in the bombed children’s ward of the hospital.  So-called targeted sanctions also serve the same purpose.  The targeted are so targeted from afar because they might just convince the home population that they have a case.

• This strategy of distance from the other seeks to silence all potential replies before they are uttered; just as the preacher on the mountain top telling the message of the straight and narrow path does not expect a contrary message or path to cross his own, the NATO generals ordered the bombing of television and radio stations and transmitters in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The ‘truth’ was not supposed to receive a reply.

• Lastly, this strategy of distance from the ‘alien other’, maximises deniability and the alibi, which are then presented as evidence of ‘transparency’, truthfulness. Indeed, despite all the documented evidence, both the NATO pilots and their NATO commanders denied that they murdered children and hospital patients while Senator Helms denied that the same pilots and commanders were indictable. Because they really were ‘not there’, they fought the war via remote (retreat) control, they could be guilty of violating international humanitarian law.