A Ukrainian troll and Count Nikolai Tolstoy
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The above propaganda cartoon is a troll aimed at the Western right—everyone knows that the Ukraine War has its partisans on the Western left and right; and this cartoon is for foreign consumption, as the (English) language tells us.
The Western right wants to defend its borders, so the cartoon carries out a sneer-burn (“sick-burn”) in that it says “well if you care about borders so much what about our borders nah-ne-nah-ne-nah, who’s the hypocrite now?”.
It’s a false equivalence, somewhat obscured by the Western right’s rhetoric about an “immigration invasion”, because mass migration is not an invasion—it’s a policy implemented by the Western left. Hence it’s not the same issue—the Ukraine is a foreign policy issue, not a domestic security issue.
The left often uses the false equivalence a bit like a teenager who stutters “But, but you and dad get to stay out all night and it’s totally the same as if I want to go a Slasher concert…there is literally no difference between going out to a restaurant and going to a Slasher concert. These are both nights out. This is so unfair.” The logic is about the same—because the sophistication level is about the same.
As you can see, the Ukrainians who are concerned about the “illegal immigration” into their country are a “diverse” lot—in relative terms, I mean there’s a gay but no blacks. You could imagine a similar picture published in London in 1990 with perhaps one black man at the end. Anyway, you’ll notice that everyone, even the soldiers, are drawn in a children’s book style—because they’re child-like victims, and they are being “raped” and “abused” by masculine Russians.
So we have the adorable old couple, sentimentalised, who potter about their garden (when Russian shelling lets up). “It’s just like my father told me the Great Patriotic War was like,” says Granpaw Vava, “nothing to worry about.” Inspirational—practically Captain Tom lapping his garden under the menace of Covid-19…and then we have what looks like a “single dad” (the left loves to play tricks like that—talk about the exceptional “single dad”) and we have someone in a wheelchair. So, it’s pretty “victim-centric”—all white, of course, but what can you do…
So these characters in a children’s book have had their “borders violated”, the “immigration situation” is out of control—we, in the West, are big children, we still read Harry Potter; and so we understand that the Ukrainians inhabit the some cosy storybook world. Don’t the characters look like they all inhabit the same idealised town? Perhaps it’s a series of books…
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Ukrainian nationalism is, in substantial terms, like Catalan nationalism or Welsh nationalism or, indeed, Irish nationalism—it is run by the left on Leninist lines, the idea being you back the nationalists to come to power and then coup them and implement socialist internationalist policies (so you end up like Ireland—who attained a gay Asian leader before Britain, despite their “national liberation struggle”, and are subject to full population replacement through migration).
It’s the same deal in the Ukraine, although there are some “nutcase” nationalists out there, like Azov, these formations do not lead or control the Ukrainian state—blood nationalists are out; in other words, the real nationalists are out. It’s just like the gender-sex divide, the left will endorse ethnic nationalism but not racial nationalism (which is the correct sense of the word). It’s to do with how mutable it is.
Hence, if the Ukraine wins this war, they will, within a decade, produce a similar propaganda poster for some other issue—some public health campaign—and alongside these innocuous families there will be, per London in 1990, one black man (plus a transgender person); and that will only be the start—because, just like the Irish, the Ukrainians will receive migrants in a rapid flow; and it will be “rational”, because the Ukrainian demographics are the most cratered in Europe, with Ukrainian women whoring themselves out en masse throughout the 1990s.
As with a Biden-like Irish Bostonian circa 1982 who, with resentful glee, sends money to the PIRA, the organisations that purport to be Ukrainian nationalists are far from it—just as the Bostonian would be surprised to learn that far from the PIRA being about “the auld country” it was more like the Irish version of Students for a Democratic Society, more about links with the East Germans and the KGB, so too the latter-day Ukrainian nationalist would be surprised to learn that Ukraine’s future as “an independent nation” may involve her, as with the Scottish National Party, with an Asian premier.
The “nutcases”—the Azov types—will bleed out at the front, being the most gung-ho for action; but the regime itself is left nationalist to the core—and it’s an ironic situation because the Russians are more nationalist than the Ukrainians and yet their propaganda effort relies on old-fashioned progressive propaganda from Soviet days; so their whole invasion is a putative “anti-fascist” action against “the stooges of Western imperialism”—but that’s just because people aren’t consistent and the way the Russian state legitimises itself still leans, even 30 years later, on watered down Soviet ideas. But the Ukrainians, meanwhile, have the aesthetics of nationalism but not its content.
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It is a frustration, though, to see people taken in as regards the Ukraine. It’s not just nationalists who fall for it—what happens is that people sleepwalk and continue to fight the last war, and the Ukrainians rely on that. So Count Nikolai Tolstoy, for example, a man whom I admire because he has written about Merlin and Hartsfell—has been to Hartsfell and Merlin’s Cave several times—continues to talk as if it’s the Cold War, as if Putin is Khrushchev.
He’s too old to move from the Cold War position—the Russians are still the Soviets, in his mind, and it’s just like that episode in The Simpsons where, any moment, they’ll press a button under the desk and the name toblerone on the desk at the UN will spin round from “Russian Federation” to “USSR”.
So Tolstoy speaks for the Ukrainian cause, even though he is for Holy Russia and aristocracy—and I can assure you the Ukraine is for neither; and, as it happens, it is notable that its propaganda puts little emphasis on Christianity—and that the Ukrainians persecute the Russian Orthodox Church. Nationalists always have a positive outlook on religion—unless they’re left nationalists like PIRA or the SNP.
Yet Tolstoy continues to talk as if it’s 1977 and the Ukrainians are just another branch in the diaspora White dissident movement against the Soviets. Far from it, the Russians may not be perfect but, compared to the Ukrainians, they have moved in the right direction in numerous aspects (not just in the material sense, but in the sense that their outlook is less materialist than the West and more orientated to virtue)—and Russians have certainly seen their lives improve under Putin, whatever his deficiencies.
Unfortunately, too many men like Tolstoy are fooled by the superficial nationalist propaganda put about by the Ukraine and by an insistence on not moving with reality and trying to fight the Cold War again—and, in the end, it will all turn out to be a delusion.