Before we start, I want to say that the best thing you can do to help the people of the Ukraine is to donate to appeals that aid Ukrainian refugees or, if you can, volunteer to take in a refugee, or to support groups trying to help civilians inside the Ukraine. These are simple things that can make a much bigger difference than any amount of tweeting, arguing back with talking heads or writing long rambling blog posts. 

There are left-wing policies, which comrades have been pushing for years, which will help the situation, such as not allowing Russian oligarchs to launder their money through London or making it easier for refugees to live in the UK. The Tories are finally doing the latter, better late than never, and making it easier for Ukrainian refugees to come to the UK, but this hasn’t translated into more solidarity to refugees from elsewhere. Now the government has announced plans to send some refugees to Rwanda.

Another thing is to remember arguments we made during previous wars, such as The War on Terror, about all Muslims not being responsible for the actions of a few, or that we should be wary of a wave of Islamophobia caused by the conflict. Now, we need to be wary of Russophobia; a Russian person working in a bar in East London has no say over the action of their country. They shouldn’t be held responsible for it, and they don’t need anyone’s earful about the actions of the Russian military.

Stalinist eye roll

Another thing is to make sure you aren’t inadvertently sharing Russian propaganda online. And no, this isn’t becoming a vague rant about ‘Stalinists’ amongst the online left. There must be almost no-one in the UK who thinks that Stalin was a good idea and implying that there are many leftists who think so is just silly.

I guess the accusation of Stalinism implies that the person is a Tankie or, more accurately, an authoritarian Marxist-Leninist. I’m opposed to authoritarian Marxist-Leninism, but again, no-one thinks that Vladimir Putin is a Marxist-Leninist (unless you just assume he is because he’s Russian and so was Lenin).

If you are far-left enough to call yourself a Marxist-Leninist specifically, or a communist more generally, and you think that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a step towards the worldwide proletarian communist revolution, then you need your head examined. However, this probably only applies to about three people in a pub in Clapham. All this is to say I’m not sure what it really means to call someone a Stalinist today, so let’s park all the accusations of Stalinism.

More disclaimers

Real talk for a second: it is possible to share pro-Putin or Putin adjacent narratives, usually inadvertently, without having to tweet: “Go Putin! Russia is da bomb!” I want to have a talk about how this can happen and what to look out for. If you think I am joining some kind of mainstream media pile-on against lefties for not being sufficiently pro-war with Russia or anything like that then you can stop reading now. I want to have an honest chat about the effects of the stories and content we share online.

Whilst we’re doing the disclaimers, just so that you don’t think that I am joining the chorus of people accusing anyone who disagrees with the Labour Party line on NATO as being pro-Putin, I am aware that some have taken this as opportunity to accuse the left - or anyone even remotely critical of NATO or Western foreign policy – of being one of Putin’s useful idiots. This is an oversimplification. However, I have seen lefties - many inadvertently - sharing Putin propaganda online.

Right, with all that said, let’s get to it.

Pro-Putin narratives

There’s a range of narrative that you can share that supports Putin. Yeah, there are some people who are spreading Putin’s message because they believe it, but these are very rare. Only an idiot can look at Putin - a regressive, conservative Christian, nationalist - and think there is anything remotely left-wing about him.

More worryingly, there are those on the left who are inadvertently spreading Putin’s narrative that Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government are a neo-Nazi regime or have links to Nazi groups. Some on the left are sharing these narratives because they hate what liberals like, which right now is Zelenskyy.

Centrist cringe

Yes certainly, the love for Zelenskyy has taken on a weird edge in some outlets. I find articles like this one as cringe as the next guy does. It’s very strange that he is being treated like he’s a plucky, loveable underdog in a sitcom, not a man involved in an actual war. He’s not Ted Lasso and this war isn’t something to entertain people in between seasons of Love Island.

The centrist liberal stanning of Zelenskyy is more than a little detached from the reality of the war and is not much help to Ukrainian civilians. Yet, that doesn’t mean the people who hate the very online centrists should start hating Zelenskyy, or spread misinformation that he has links to neo-Nazis. Ukraine’s history with Nazism is too long and complicated to get into here, but I do feel some of this is fed by stereotypes of Eastern European people being on the far-right.

We’re all as bad as each other

Then there’s the people who say they’re all as bad as each other: West, East, US, UK, Russia, Ukraine - they’re all just as flawed as each other. This is a Putin narrative as it is something he says himself. He promotes the view that all nations are equally morally flawed to justify his repression of his own people. Don’t share these types of posts. Saying that the West and Putin’s Russia are the same is a massive oversimplification not worthy of any thinking person on the left.

Putin’s Russia is a much worse place to be than Britain or America, which are deeply flawed societies. Putin murders opposition politicians and represses free speech far beyond what happens in the West. At least 8,000 people have been arrested for protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are eight letters in the Russian phrase for “no war” and even holding up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it can get you arrested.

I am opposed to how our class of political and economic elites re-create their own power and use tools, nefarious and otherwise, to influence people to support them. I don’t like how much power muckraking tabloid newspapers, incendiary TV news channels and attention hording social media platforms - all owned by billionaires – have over the range of political views that are considered allowed by polite society. All this is bad, but it’s not as bad as what Putin does in Russia.

A list of war mongers

Saying that Putin’s Russia is a worse place than Boris Johnson’s Britain doesn’t undermine us criticising our own government and society for its many flaws. You can say that you’d rather live in the UK than Russia, but the UK is still rubbish.

Of all the shitty things about the US and the UK, the most relevant to this discussion is that we invaded Iraq on a flimsy pretext, and that those responsible for many thousands of deaths and the collapse of a country have faced no consequences. This is terrible and should not be forgotten. George Bush, Tony Blair and Putin are all war mongers with blood on their hands but that doesn’t make them interchangeable.

Saying Putin is a worse authoritarian and a worse war criminal is not to diminish how bad the invasion of Iraq was and the effect it has had on that country and the entire region: creating instability and misery for millions. The people responsible for this disaster are still part of the legitimate political discourse, a fact which blows my mind on a regular basis.

Enraging and deeply stupid 

Some of these Bush and Blair era politicians show no self-awareness of what they did and the role they had in it. Condoleezza Rice recently said on Fox News: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” She also added: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” This level of hypocrisy is both enraging and deeply stupid.

At least George Bush Jr had the decency to condemn his own invasion of Iraq when he said: “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” The only issue with this is that he was trying to condemn Putin and not make amends for himself.

Criticising NATO and Western governments

The left should be critical of NATO and its long-term strategy. Keir Starmer’s hard-line on NATO criticism isn’t in the spirit of free debate and it doesn’t help us understand how this conflict came about. Besides, you can criticise NATO and still say that Britain should be in it. My view is that it was a mistake to try and expand NATO closer and closer to Russia, but that doesn’t mean we should now abandon Ukraine to be destroyed by Russia.

Criticising NATO is not just a far-left idea. Henry Kissinger said Ukraine shouldn’t join NATO and the Pope has been critical of NATO. People from across the political spectrum have said that enlarging NATO would be seen as a threat by Russia. Starmer would consider the Pope’s and Kissinger’s view too left-wing to be allowed in the Labour Party.

We should also be critical of Western governments’ role in Putin’s gaining his stranglehold on power. He was considered an ally in the War On Terror and we turned a blind eye to his activities in Chechnya, then Georgia, then Syria because we didn’t want to get involved or run the risk of triggering a larger conflict. The British and American governments hold some responsibility for what has happened and the left mustn’t let this be forgotten.

Blaming the left

It’s possible to advance left-wing narratives and not fall into the trap of spreading Putin’s propaganda. It just requires some thought before posting. What the left also needs to be wary of is those taking this as an opportunity to blame the left for the conflict. Apparently, everything from trans-rights to “cancel culture” is responsible for Putin feeling confident enough to invade Ukraine, or has taken the machismo out of the West’s response. As if Joe Biden was thinking of cancel culture when he decided not to fire American missiles at targets in Russia as soon as Putin’s army crossed the border.

You can’t move for some right-wing hack saying that students with purple hair creating safe spaces on campuses, or people in London drinking craft beer and wanting housing to be slightly more affordable and jobs to be slightly better, are the ones responsible for Russian tanks rolling through Ukraine.

I’m not sure what the left is supposed to have done. Neutered the West’s resolve by not loving soldiers so much they want to throw hundreds of thousands of them into the jaws of the mechanised death machine? Apparently, any deviation from right-wing politics makes us militarily weak, so debates about colonialism must be forever silenced so that more space can be created for loving war so much that every country in the world quakes in fear of the West.

A love of war and Putin

Behind all this admonishing the left for the wussification of the West is a disturbing right-wing streak of thinly disguised praise for Putin. “He’s a real man,” they seem to say, when claiming that the problem with the West is that we care about things other than the problems that can be tackled with huge armies and an obsessive, uncritical worship of the military. Putin doesn’t care about toilets for non-binary people, or making universities more open to poor or BAME people, or climate change, they say. That’s what makes him strong and able to invade other countries. How this isn’t praise for Putin and saying we should be like him, is beyond me.

There’s also those on the right that give Putin cover. From Nigel Farage to Tucker Carlson, there is an entire ecosystem of right-wing shock jocks and nationalist politicians eager to praise Putin openly and spread his narratives. These people have big audiences, and they use them to spread disinformation about the invasion. We should make sure that no one ever forgets these people’s support for Putin.

My main response to this conflict is that I don’t want a war that could easily turn nuclear and even if didn’t could leave Europe devastated. Sorry if that makes me a soy boy cuck for not being really up for mass death of a hitherto unimagined scale? Is that really what the right wants? A huge war? And if the so-called man in the street isn’t so keen on massive wars as he used to be, isn’t that because the recent big wars, like the War in Iraq, were started on flimsy pretexts, were badly managed and generally made the whole situation worse?

Condemn Putin and help refugees

The left should condemn Putin wherever possible. He’s a belligerent right-wing nationalist who abuses democracy, represses his own citizens and now is inflicting enormous amounts of destruction on the people of the Ukraine.

We should be vigilant, criticise those who need criticism and do whatever we can, big or small, to help the people of the Ukraine. Remember that anything you can send or give, financially or in goods or services, to help a refugee or a person in a conflict zone will do more to make this terrible situation better than a billion tweets or Facebook updates.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay