Thread by Mart Kuldkepp

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A thread on Western appeasement propaganda: 🧶

(1/25)

Everyone following Russia’s war against Ukraine has come across Western thinktankers, academics and ‘intellectuals’ expressing their concerns about likely escalation of the hostilities and advocating immediate ceasefires and peace negotiations.

In this thread, (2/25)
I will go over some of the characteristic features of this discourse of anti-Ukrainian defeatism disguised as pacifism. It is important to recognise it for what it is and to judge it appropriately.

The appeasement narrative includes two separate components. These are 1. (3/25)
repetition of Russian propaganda, and 2. wishful thinking. Together, they amount to a case of moral failure that benefits Russia by discouraging collective action against Russian aggression. Make no mistake: advocacy of Ukraine’s defeat (i.e., (4/25)
increased overall Russian gains compared to pre-war status quo), even if presented indirectly through a rhetoric of ‘peace’ and with some (inconsequential) lip service being paid to Russia’s war crimes, is a pro-Russian stance. (5/25)
The propaganda of Western appeasers exhibits many of the same features that can be seen in ‘normal’ Russian propaganda. Firstly, and most importantly, Ukraine does not appear as an independent actor in the analysis. Instead, (6/25)
the war is depicted as being between Russia and the West. Within this framework, various Western ‘provocations’ are made responsible for ‘escalation’ or even the fact that there is a war at all, (7/25)
while Russian agency is reduced to a series of reactive responses to the actions of the West.

Secondly, the appeasers engage in unsubstantiated scaremongering about Putin ‘doubling down, (8/25)
‘unleashing all-out war’ or ‘directly attacking NATO’ with no acknowledgement of limitations that Russia is facing in terms of its material resources, the political vulnerabilities of Putin’s regime, or calculations of likely pushback from its enemies. Instead, (9/25)
the impression is given that Russia is a land of inexhaustible military might and boundless resilience, allowing Putin to undertake any actions without needing to calculate their domestic and international costs. This, again, is repeating Russian propaganda. (10/25)
The wishful thinking component of the defeatist-pacifist narrative consists of slogans advocating steps that 1. cannot be taken at all (the case made for them hinges on the way that the war is being mischaracterised), or 2. (11/25)
are presented with no acknowledgement of their likely immediate costs, necessary pre-conditions, or possible long-term negative effects. At the same time, the costs of a pro-Ukrainian course of action are usually wildly exaggerated (cf. the previous paragraph). (12/25)
A common unrealistic slogan of the first kind is ‘the West must stop escalating.’ This is a fallacy resting on a deliberate wish to ignore Ukrainian agency and – what should be the obvious truth – that the war is between Russia and Ukraine. (13/25)
It is therefore not possible for the West to escalate, because the West is not a party to this war. Ukraine’s Western supporters are not fighting Russia: there are no NATO boots on the ground and the Western states are only providing limited assistance to Ukraine. (14/25)
They are non-belligerents, rather than belligerents (see my thread here:

). Similarly, (15/25)
Belarus and the few other supporters that Russia has left are not fighting Ukraine: they are merely providing assistance to Russia. They cannot escalate either. (16/25)
Pleas to not to escalate should therefore be directed to the belligerents – Russia and Ukraine – not to the West (or to Belarus). But Ukraine’s agency is being deliberately ignored by the appeasers, (17/25)
and they most likely don’t think that Ukrainians would listen anyway if told to stop asking for more weapons. Instead, they would like to force Ukraine’s hand by undermining it through Western pressure.

At the same time, (18/25)
the appeasers are not interested in subjecting Russia to the same treatment: they ignore any Russian escalatory or deescalatory potential by making its agency purely reactive. Russia is portrayed as hapless victim of the West, (19/25)
lacking its own will and capacity for independent action. In the unipolar, Western-centric world view of the appeasers, it is only the West that has true agency.

The second unrealistic slogan takes the form of recommendations for ceasefires and peace negotiations. (20/25)
This idea, while superficially appealing, is invariably presented without the appeasers clearly showing why Russia would be ready to negotiate, what kind of leverage the West would have in these negotiations, (21/25)
what the costs of this 'peaceful' resolution would be in terms of Ukrainian territory and lives, and how to diminish the risk that this resolution would not hold given that Russia has broken the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, (22/25)
the Budapest memorandum and various other treaties that directly or indirectly committed it to respecting Ukrainian territorial sovereignty, not changing international borders by force and not launching wars of aggression. (23/25)
Presented as dangerous and militaristic in one part of the narrative, Russia is assumed to be dovish and rule-abiding in another, in one of the central contradictions of appeaser propaganda.

By repeating Russian propaganda and by engaging in wishful thinking, (24/25)
the Western appeasers make themselves guilty of moral failure. In my second, follow-up thread, I will take a closer look at it.

Do also check out my previous thread about Russification of brains:



END.

(25/25)
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