A Serbian friend who is a university student asks me if I saw a video of a young Ukrainian woman throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Russian tank but lighting herself on fire in the process. I told him that avoid videos like that. It’s just morbid war porn. One can pay attention to a war without delving into war porn. I mentioned to him that I had seen a video of civilians in Kiev making Molotovs and that I imagined that would eventually happen to someone. The news story showing this seemed to be making it out that these were people engaging in a heroic act, but they seemed so clueless. There was a young woman, a university student with blue hair. I just couldn’t imagine that she had a clue as to what could go down on her city. But the American news story portrayed all this as heroism. I took it quite differently. To me, it was Volkssturm behavior. In the film Downfall, the Volkssturm is shown as older and younger citizens being needlessly sacrificed for a lost cause. I thought we were supposed to watch that and think that it’s wrong of a nation to sacrifice people when there is no potential for victory.

The Finns developed the Molotov cocktail during the Winter War. They had a functioning military, but they lacked anti-tank weapons. The Molotov was a simple weapon meant to make up for this deficiency. It wasn’t meant as a last ditch method. It wasn’t handed out to women and children or untrained young men who were instructed to charge Russian guns and armor.

The war in Ukraine has repeatedly reminded me of how our society learns not rules but examples. The Salem witch trials are about how crazy people used to be, not a message about the dangers of moral-panics, and America excels at moral-panics like no other developed nation. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a message about how crazy totalitarianism could be, not about how modern government can manipulate the citizenry. Internment of Japanese in 1942, well, we’re all sorry about that, terrible racists the people of the day were back then… but you know, blocking Russian athletes from the Special Olympics, that’s fine. This is coming from a citizenry whose government invaded two countries in the past twenty years, helped destroy Libya and sent arms to Islamic radicals in Syria, and quietly assists the Saudi starvation blockade of Yemen.

An Onion headline could read “Iraq War Veterans Very Confused by all This Moral Outrage.”

Now, going back to the Molotovs: Were the Finns engaging in Volkssturm behavior? I don’t think one could categorize it that way. Were the Rus doing the same in 1941 and 1942? I suppose you could say they were, but the USSR wasn’t without a path to victory, and they knew this at the time. But no sane person could argue, in 1945, that the hurling of old German men and women with cheap rocket launchers and antiquated rifles was going to change the tide of the war. And so, I say it is with Zelensky and his regime. It’s irresponsible, and it seems that their methods are meant more for propaganda and civic mobilization than for effective resistance. If Ukraine has a path to victory, it has nothing to do with blue-haired, blond-eyed young women throwing lit bottles of gasoline at tanks. That’s fine, but why pretend it’s something other than sacrificing individuals without and potential for real gains? And I would add that one can be pretty damn sure that the Ukrainian oligarchs who back Zelensky, that great champion of liberal democracy, aren’t making Molotov’s in their 6 car garages in the hope of turning the tide against Russia aggression.

Imagine this advertisement: The amount of time spent by Ukrainian oligarchs making Motolovs? Zero. The amount of time spent by Ukrainian oligarchs worrying about their wealth and property, of which they have relatively infinite amounts of? Far more than zero.

That general impression we have of Russians viewing life as cheap, well, I’d argue there’s something to that. I know we aren’t allowed to stereotype or hold critical views of a foreign culture… Oh wait, I have just received an official memo saying it’s OK to do this when we’re talking about Russians… But I suppose it could also be said that, as Ukrainians are cultural kin to the Russians, and they’re more than capable of having an equally callous view of individual life. But, of course, it’s different because the Ukrainians are fighting for freedom and oligarchic-democracy (the kind of democracy our Neo-Liberal and Neo-Conservative leaders truly love), for their God given right to join NATO, for their God given right to orient their oligarchs towards Western banks that will funnel their ill-gotten gains towards London and Miami.

So, let us cheer the Ukrainian Volkssturm, led as it is by Zelensky, that honorable man. Yea, they are all honorable men. The news networks that the banks and corporations own that today profit from the arming of Ukraine and hope to someday profit off the pillaging of Ukraine told us so.

Recently, we have learned that the US government has been having fun releasing fake intelligence and reporting it as if it were truth. They’ve admitted to this, saying that it’s a matter of trying to dissuade the Russians from things they might be planning to do (using chemical or biological weapons, for instance), but let’s remember the old Iraq War playbook. The government releases a damning statement that is captured in a headline, the report later turns out to be false, and a small correction possibly put up in the back pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times. Almost nobody sees the correction; everyone remembers the headlines. All the cheering on for another forever war ought to make everyone give pause. It won’t, but it ought to. We’re being told that we and the rest of the world have to sacrifice for an oligarchic democracy’s God-given right to join NATO. We’re being told that we’ll turn Ukraine into Afghanistan for the sake of global democracy and to preserve our way of life. In this struggle, our values and our capacity for reason are actually set aside rather than enhanced.

A final thought: Washington has blocked Russia’s ability to repay its debts. Before the pandemic, the Russian debt to GDP ratio was roughly 15%. At that time, they held enough gold, or nearly enough gold, to repay their debts outright. Washington has now seized assets from Russian oligarchs, and they seem to be saying that they will use the seized assets to repay some of the Russian debt payments. I would be willing to bed that those seized assets will be transferred to American banks and institutions that own Russian debt and that foreign creditors will be left to dry. I can’t say I know this for sure, but I think that I’ve come to know my government, especially since 2001, and they rarely fail to make others pay for their foreign policy decisions and disasters. The rest of the world knows this, and even a centrist Senator doped up on American exceptionalism should be able to see that this is a state of affairs that won’t last forever. As an American, I would hate to see our currency lose its preeminent status, but should it happen, I won’t for a minute think it to be unjustified.

Post-final thought final thought: I recommend that the reader goes to YouTube and finds stories on the Donbas conflict from after 2014. These stories consistently show the situation in Ukraine to be in a moral grey zone, not the black and white that we’re now presented with by some of the same news agencies that made these earlier reports. Funny how things change when democratic governments demand we all get on board with their favorite policies.

Charlie Don’t Serf

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