Internationalism at a Cruise Missile’s Point: Mason, Monbiot and the Left’s Love Affair with NATO
(This is a repost from Jacob Winter's Medium page. Visit the original article here: https://medium.com/@jacobwntr/internationalism-at-a-cruise-missiles-point-mason-monbiot-and-the-left-s-love-affair-with-nato-a6348efd8eb6)
“In war, truth is the first casualty.” Aeschylus (525 BC — 456 BC)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown the British left for something of a loop. Although those in support of Russia are few and far between, the reaction by prominent left-wing figures and organisations has been wildly disproportionate. From Labour threatening to suspend 11 Labour MPs for criticising NATO, to Paul Mason and George Monbiot furiously condemning a supposedly large faction of the Left who act as “Kremlin mouthpieces.” This opposition to anti-war Leftists has led many of the Left into the loving arms of NATO, a military alliance that has conducted illegal military actions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya and was set up to contain Russian influence during the Cold War. Just 2 months ago, most on the Left could easily condemn NATO expansion but suddenly faced with the invasion of Ukraine they have resorted to the same hawkish positions that they have furiously criticised in the past.
I don’t think the embrace of NATO is necessarily proof of some sort of moral spinelessness on behalf of these people. The invasion of Ukraine is certainly less black and white than illegal NATO actions and American interventions before. During Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, condemning NATO was a rather easy thing to do simply on the basis of how explicitly these interventions were wrong. In Ukraine, however, it really does seem like Ukraine is for the most part an innocent bystander. Any principled anti-imperialist should likewise condemn Russian imperialism, and some individuals amongst the commentariat are correct to point out that a small contingent of the far-left does embrace the imperialism of China and Russia as a form of kneejerk anti-Americanism. I would argue, however, that the messages of the Stop the War Coalition and other anti-NATO leftists are being openly misconstrued by these members of the commentariat and by some of the centre-left establishment, particularly within the Labour Party.
Almost nobody on the Left is explicitly pro-Putin. Although many groups, such as the various British Communist parties, welcomed their recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk on a Leninist principle of national liberation, all of them that I could find immediately released statements condemning the Russian invasion. The only left-wing Twitter commentator I could find that was explicitly pro-Russian is Josh Jackson, who defends Russian military action regularly (The tweets I initially sourced during this article have since been deleted.)
This is the most prominent commentator I could find on the Left who openly supports the invasion, who only has around 20k followers, which while nothing to be sneered at is still relatively small compared to Monbiot who was 477k followers and Mason who has 623k followers.
So where are Monbiot and Mason coming from? Their accusations of a Left repeating Kremlin propaganda seem to be somewhat baseless. Further analysis of their articles on the topic is warranted.
George Monbiot
This is George Monbiot’s article on the subject, and although he has many Twitter threads on the issue, it is far easier to interrogate this article than it is to trudge through his miles upon miles of tweets to find his opinions.
The first major error Monbiot makes is his accusations against journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, pointing out that his statements align with the Kremlin’s positions.
“At the end of last year, the writer and film-maker John Pilger claimed, “it was the US that overthrew the elected govt in Ukraine in 2014, allowing Nato to march right up to Russia’s western border”. This is a standard Kremlin talking point, dismissing the revolution as a US coup” The argument that what Pilger says is wrong because it “is also what the Kremlin says” is a rather facile argument.
Pilger is wrong to claim that the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014 was a US coup. It was, however, a US backed-coup, and it did nothing but allow NATO to antagonise Russia further. Monbiot does add “Ukraine, of course, is not a Nato member.” in order to try and prove that the pro-Western coup in 2014 could not have been orchestrated by NATO nor used by NATO to provoke Russia. He says this as if it isn’t common knowledge that NATO has been arming and training the Ukrainian army for years and that it has been Ukraine’s intention to join NATO ever since 2014.
Before I continue with this article, I must make some things very clear to avoid any confusion as to what my own position is. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians will die and Putin will let his own population suffer reams of sanctions in order to achieve some irredentist dream of a Russia long since past. At the same time, it is not hard to see that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe would provoke Russia into such an action. This stance was the mainstream position of the American foreign policy establishment for a long time after the fall of the USSR and has only recently been deemed controversial or “Putinism”, as the students at Chicago university who have tried to oust International Relations scholar John Mearsheimer have suggested. This position does not exonerate Russia and still holds them responsible for the invasion, it simply recognises NATO’s complicity in adding fuel to the fire of an already tense situation (the fall of the USSR).
Monbiot does take aim at the Stop The War Coalition as well, claiming that the coalition’s deputy president Andrew Murray has “reproduced a classic Kremlin falsehood: that in Ukraine, “Russian has been banned from the public sphere”.” This is not by any means a “Kremlin falsehood.”
Since 16 December 2015, three communist parties have been banned in Ukraine (the Communist Party of Ukraine, Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed) and Communist Party of Workers and Peasants). Sergei Dolgov, a pro-Russian journalist, was kidnapped and likely killed. Media construed as pro-Russian was banned en mass during the Poroshenko presidency, drawing condemnations from Human Rights Watch and Reporters without borders. Amnesty International has appealed for the release of Ukrainian journalist Ruslan Kotsaba and declared him a prisoner of conscience, while the Ukrainian website Myrotvorets publishes information on the personal details of journalists who are considered “enemies of Ukraine.” They published the home address of Oles Buzina, a pro-Russian writer, just days before he was assassinated. They also published the home address of parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov, just days prior to his assassination also. Russia is infamous for its totalitarianism and suppression of free speech, but by no means should we just ignore Ukraine’s own blatant violations of human rights as Monbiot does here.
Something Monbiot fails to do in the article is recognise that Putin does, at least to do some degree, have a point. Anything that Putin or Russian outlets say must be immediately assumed to be propaganda and anything corroborating or supporting these claims must be assumed to be so as well.
Monbiot isn’t wrong to point out that Stop The War and other anti-war groups are being unnecessarily harsh towards NATO and are maybe condemning the wrong people at this specific time, but they aren’t by any means wrong to claim that NATO expansion has led to this outcome. As I said previously, NATO expansion eastwards had always been prophesied to be a disaster. As Ted Galan Carpenter, of the Cato Institute, warned:
“History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that NATO expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow…We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.”
This leads directly to Labour Party politics and their attitude towards Stop The War. Ever since the succession of Keir Starmer as leader, there has been a pretty clear attempt to purge the far left from the party. Although this may prove well for election results, especially with Starmer’s attempt to desperately prove he isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, it is having disastrous implications for internal party democracy. Even under Blair, interparty pluralism was stronger, and we know the disastrous implications of a Labour Party enamoured with NATO from the experience of the Blair premiership with Iraq.
The threatened removal of 11 Labour MPs who placed their names on a Stop the War Coalition petition is nothing but a clear attempt to force a reasonably large wing of the membership and parliamentary party towards a hawkish party-line. As if from a skewed version of Leninist Democratic Centralism, any dissenting opinions on Labour’s stance are being vigorously suppressed. It is not hawkish to attempt to defend Ukraine, but Keir Starmer’s nonstop suggestions of a no-fly zone over Ukraine (something that would inevitably lead to World War 3) show Starmer’s own clear Blair tribute act to be just that. If Labour becomes the next party of government and continues with their largely pro-NATO foreign policy, it won’t be long until Britain finds itself in another Iraq-type situation.
This is the party line that Paul Mason supports. I am generally sympathetic to Paul Mason, certainly, his social-democratic body with a Leninist soul is something I can also relate to and his commitment to a sort of Humanist Marxism isn’t entirely unpalatable to me, but just as his humanism led to Erich Fromm’s embrace of the West over the East, it has led Mason to also reject his radical roots and embrace Western imperialism, hiding it under an attempt to “reform” NATO.
Paul Mason
In his article for the New Statesmen “The Labour left needs to get serious on defence” Mason makes a series of incorrect and rather odious claims and analogies for why the Labour Left refuse to embrace NATO. Mason is correct to say that anyone who “wakes up angrier at Starmer than they do at Putin” is wrong, but that’s about where his correctness in the article ends. The first openly false claim he makes is that Labour is repeating the mistakes it made in the 1930s with its appeasement of Hitler:
“Those who know the history of the British left in the 1930s will recognise this as a near-exact replay. The Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald pleaded with Europe to “meet Germany’s demands and allay her anxieties about security.” George Lansbury resigned the Labour leadership over its support for sanctions against fascist Italy. As for the Communist Party, it tried to force the British government to make peace with Hitler even after the Second World War had begun.”
Aside from my own personal offence at being compared to a Nazi appeaser, the main issue with this is a complete lack of contextual analysis. The appeasement of Hitler was wrong, but there was never the threat of global nuclear annihilation with Hitler. With Putin, direct military involvement and the expansion of NATO can lead to the end of the human race, or at the very least the end of human civilization.
Mason argues that Putin’s aggression warrants Western rearmament, clearly ignoring the previously established fact that it was this very rearmament that pissed off Russia in the first place. Maybe he’s right that now we’ve already made the fatal mistake, there is no other option but rearming to face Russia, removing any responsibility from ourselves is a mistake Mason makes.
Both Monbiot and Mason, despite any radical pretences, are still fundamentally humanist liberals. They may have sympathies with the radical left, but they never leave what is effectively just social democracy, and if one thing this situation in Ukraine has proven to us is that liberals love nothing more than war. They want to push the big red button to fulfil their own messiah complexes of saving people from barbarism and the “wrong” forms of government.
Sympathy with Ukraine and condemning Russia is one thing, but to reorient our politics around a fanatical love of NATO and our need to further cement ourselves as satellites for the United States will be the downfall of the Left Wing. There is a middle ground between the wishy-washy condemnations of Russia by secretly Moscow-loving Communists and the outright turn to the internationalism by a cruise missile’s point that Monbiot and Mason promote. It is a middle ground that the Left must occupy, and its commitments to solidarity and peace must not be forgotten.