Jackson Lears' Moral Bankruptcy

Photo by James Nachtwey, from his "A Harrowed Land"

One of the most fascinating discussions of the war in Ukraine, so far, is the London Review of Books’ “Day 5, Day 9, Day 16: Responses to the Invasion of Ukraine” (March 24, 2022). What a multiplicity of perspectives! Twenty-eight writers voice their responses. The most absorbing ones, for me, are written by writers experiencing the war first-hand inside Ukraine. For example, Olena Stiazhkina:

These Russians are not people. Now that they’ve had a kick in the teeth from our army, they’re killing civilians with indiscriminate rocket strikes. Children’s hospitals and high-rise buildings, buses and ambulances. During the night, Iskander rocket systems fired on the city of Zhytomyr. They destroyed the Mariia Prymachenko Museum and burned her pictures.

This morning, in Berdiansk, one of these monsters from Moscow shot an old man for refusing to hand over his mobile phone. 

Children are being born in bomb shelters, in the basements of hospitals and in the metro. 

These monsters from Moscow – yes, exactly. That’s my response, too. But there’s at least one writer who doesn’t see it that way. Jackson Lears, in “Day 5, Day 9, Day 16,” says, 

Few journalists are able to report from the east of the country, where most of the fighting is, and there is no acknowledgment of the extensive role of far-right extremists in Ukrainian politics and the military. The irony is that for years American liberals have been obsessed with anything that can be loosely labelled as fascism. Only Ukraine is absolved from scrutiny, perhaps because in current American mythology the world’s leading neofascist is Vladimir Putin. Thanks to this madman, Robert Reich announced, ‘the world is currently and frighteningly locked in a battle to the death between democracy and authoritarianism.’ Rather than face up to the major global realignment that is underway, with the convergence of Russia, China and India, Americans remain attached to visions of Armageddon – the death wish at the heart of imperial hubris. 

What about Putin’s vision of Armageddon? Lears doesn’t say anything about that. He doesn’t mention Mariupol, Bucha, Kharkiv or Irpa. As far as he’s concerned, the US shouldn’t have intervened: let Putin have his vicious way. He says as much in his most recent piece, “The Forgotten Crime of War Itself” (The New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022): “US policy prolongs the war and creates the likelihood of a protracted insurgency after a Russian victory, which seems probable at this writing.” 

As an offset against Lears’ moral bankruptcy, I quote the war photographer James Nachtwey, whose graphic pictures of the cost of the Russian onslaught in Ukraine appear in the May 9 New Yorker: 

The barbarity and the senselessness of the Russian onslaught are hard to believe even as I witness them with my own eyes. Bombing and shelling civilian residences, firing tank rounds point-blank into homes and hospitals, murdering noncombatants in militarily occupied areas are all tactics being employed by the Russians in a war that was inflicted on a nonthreatening, neighboring sovereign state. . . . ‘Ordinary’ people are displaying extraordinary courage and determination, if not downright stubbornness, in the face of tremendous destruction and loss of life. [“A Harrowed Land,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2022]