When the left is out of step with reality: Why we should totally support Ukraine with all the weapons they can use

It's funny how what the DSA lefties have said about the Ukraine situation is similar to the way liberal Democrats have lost out to Republicans by trying to play fair when the other side doesn't.

Pacifism is delightful policy if the other side agrees. It can be disastrous if they don't. Why would some foreign policy critics on the left assume that it is sufficient to criticize our own government as if in a vacuum? NATO's existence and expansion is the reason Russia has not invaded Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, or Romania. It wanted a compliant regime in Ukraine just as it had throughout Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It wants its neighbors to be either swallowed directly as Ukraine and the Baltic states once were, or compliant 'satellite' powers as all of Eastern Europe was during the Cold War.

Expansionism and military adventures abroad are one thing, a country's defending itself is another. The Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves, and we should help them.

Yes, we should criticize our own government's moral transgressions; no, we should not make doing that the whole of our foreign policy. Governments, including our own, should be treated like adults, who can always be wrong and so worth criticizing, not like children whom some parents might suspect of only being prone to misbehave, nor like parents whom some rebellious adolescents think can either only oppress them on the one hand or be presumed infallible on the other. International political affairs is not an arena of unblemishable heroes and unredeemable villains; ideological wars of religion should have taught us by now that such thing belongs only on a psychoanalyst’s coach.

We've been here before. Stalinism had a wonderful success rate not domestically, but in Western countries including the US. Many American Communists who naively believed Stalin was great helped organize American workers and get better pay and working conditions for them. I salute them for this.

International politics is as much about power as it is justice. That's one reason why there are still wars. You don't stop bullies by professing to them your discomfort with violence; they will find that encouraging. And not all uses of power is evil. Russia's war against Ukraine is morally criticizable (it is repugnant) in a way that the Ukrainian people (and it is them, their own government enjoying their overwhelming and not active support) fighting back are not.

In Rossellini's 1946 film "Paisa," about the fighting of both Italian Communist and liberal partisans against both the home-grown fascists and the German occupation, an American soldier says of one of the partisans, "These men aren't fighting for the British empire, they are fighting for their lives."

The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives and that sort of freedom which is constituted by living in a place where the government represents the people living there, instead of a foreign occupying power killing men, women, and children for purposes of its own. Is there any reason why we should not help them -- by arming them, at least, and as fully as possible?

And is there any reason why we should not also be arming Poland and the other countries in "Eastern Europe" precisely against the possibility of invasion by a foreign power, which obviously would be Russia?

Is the reason NATO’s record of invading, conquering, and dominating neighboring foreign countries in Europe, like Russia in Ukraine now? Quite a remarkable record, isn’t it?

Does the anti-Western left worry that the US and NATO should not occupy Ukraine in order to liberate it from Russian domination merely by replacing it with our own? But that is not in question at all; no one proposes that. I’m not suggesting a NATO invasion of Ukraine from the West; I am suggesting we give what the democratically elected government of Ukraine has asked us for. I am not suggesting that we go there to fight for our own government’s purposes; the question is of sending them aid while they fight.

Is there any reason why the US government and its allies should not offer Ukraine all the weapons it needs? We should offer them any amount of weapons, and almost any kind, that they can use. That is not an infinite amount; the Ukrainians don’t need, and cannot use, all of the tanks, missiles, and rifles that the US and the other European nations could possibly send them, but it can use more than they have.

I wish American leftists like Chomsky and the DSA crowd would get real.

Here is a statement from the DSA, quoted from this an article in this month's Commentary magazine:

"Following months of increased tensions and a sensationalist Western media blitz drumming up conflict in the Donbas, the US government is responding to the situation in Ukraine through the familiar guise of threats of sweeping sanctions, provision of military aid, and increased military deployment to the region. [DSA] opposes this ongoing US brinkmanship, which only further escalates the crisis, and reaffirms our previous statement saying no to NATO and its imperialist expansionism and disastrous interventions across the world."

This is an astonishingly impertinent piece of rhetoric. It seems almost disingenuous. But some people on the left so dislike every form of exploitation, domination, and injustice that they would like it if we all did what Gandhi advised the British to do during WW2: Let them invade, occupy your country, and put men, women, and children to the sword. Only offer passive resistance. Resist, but, in the name of (some perverted or stupid idea of) God, use no force, no violence. For there are no just wars. Or societies in which there is structural injustice, or inequality, as in capitalism, can only fight unjust wars.

Nonsense. There are just wars. That means, in fact, that some forms of social and political domination are better than others, some worse; and it sometimes makes enough of a difference that it is worth fighting for. Some things that should be obvious really need to be said. It is as obvious as, for example, that Black Lives Matter. Sometimes there is a simple, obvious need to speak the truth of a common sense about, if not ‘to’, power.