Grieving Ukraine

Globalization's Robin Hood-style levelling of global prosperity triggers a Western reactive crusade to slay the rising military power of so many anti-Western dragons.

James Meek’s pensive essay, Two Armies in One, is a premature eulogy to the Ukraine War, foreshadowing its looming tragic end. A liberal bourgeois novelist and essayist, Meek’s views are anchored to a pro-globalization perspective. Yet his work reveals streaks of honesty that are rare among his ilk. He mines contradictions and ideological zones of turbulence for veins of richness while avoiding the rote narratives that blemish the work of many of his colleagues.

Meek served as a journalist during Operation Iraqi Freedom and recently toured Ukraine interviewing those suffering through the war. He embraces the morality of the Ukrainian cause, as might be expected as a member of his intellectual club. In this article Meek’s openness to reality seems to have burdened him with a Cassandra-type mission of forewarning his ideological fellow-travellers that the endgame in Ukraine might not be the fairy tale outcome they were expecting. Far from being slayed, the mythological dragon-dictator might just emerge victorious.

On the surface, the title of Meek’s essay refers to the two armies that have fought for the Russian side:

Russia has prosecuted its invasion of Ukraine with two armies in one: an old-style Soviet wartime army of minimally trained soldiers, massed artillery and mechanised divisions, backed up by production lines in the hinterland able to churn out shells by the hundreds of thousands; and a new, emergent Russian army of professional soldiers and relatively small numbers of high-tech weapons which aim to achieve their effect, à la Nato, through precision rather than volume.

A knowing look at Russia’s initial invasion reveals it was more cinematic than military. Soviet and Russian military doctrine dictates that war is to be conducted, not to win battles, but to achieve concrete political goals. Russia and Ukraine are both oligarchies, and these big men have the most to lose in any war. There were pre-war contacts between Russian authorities and Ukrainian oligarchs, game-planning how the invasion would proceed. What followed was a flamboyant martial show of dominance—threatening Kiev with encirclement—by a puny force far too small to actually take the city. But this show was produced to provide nervous Ukrainian politicians the political cover to sign a peace treaty, which in turn would give their oligarchs the peace they needed to further exploit economic dominant positions.

The plan almost worked—in March of 2022 a treaty negotiated in Istanbul edged towards fruition. At the last moment it was quashed by the West in the clownish persona of Brexiteer Boris Johnson. Both the West and Putin knew that in early 2022, the Russian war machine was not ready for the large scale attritional conflict it is fighting—and winning—today.

The post-industrial financialized West decided to throw the dice on sanctions—the only real tool of power they still possessed. Capitalism can be abstracted as a series of flows: capital, payments, natural resources, finished commodities, workers, tourists, and vehicles. By sanctioning Russia the West tried playing God over these abundant and complicated flows, trying to block some to provoke in the Russian leadership an economic “stroke.” But capitalism is far too dynamic a system to be stopped—place a boundary in its way and it will creatively get around it in one manner or another. Far from suffering a stroke, Russia and its leadership class are flush with prosperity despite any sanctions.

The Russian Army’s evolution since the initial invasion that Meek highlights is natural. Armies always evolve during war. At their entry into World War 2, the US Army cut its teeth by fighting limited battles in North Africa and then gained more experience in the slow and bloody defensive campaign in Italy. Only after this crash course in smash-mouth tactics could the US Armed Forces graduate into a mass of men capable of executing the Normandy invasion and subsequent advance into Germany.

Nevertheless, the subtext Meek is employing hints the Russians are now winning because they shed their forceful industrial army and embraced Western-style post-industrialist finesse. Meek is not being deceptive. Rather, he is so emmeshed into a financialized and globalized world-view that success seems only possible through this elite Western doctrine of social organization.

Perhaps somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, there does exist a fear that Russia is winning for exactly the reason that the West is losing. After briefly flirting with post-industrialization, Russia did not abandon productivity and industry. Meek represses the notion that Russia’s productive base—all those filthy factories, full of toxically skilled machinists cranking out artillery shells—is her fount of power. Instead he highlights their soft, post-industrial skilled drone makers. It is these high-tech electronic wonders, produced in clean, corporate cubicles by workers presumably holding Masters degrees, that according to Meek have turned the tide in Russia’s favour.

There is no denying that drones, and its defensive opposite—electronic warfare jamming—have played a crucial role in the Russian war effort. The small Orlan-10 and Orlan-30 drones have destroyed numerous Ukrainian tanks, artillery pieces and armoured personnel carriers. The ultra-inexpensive Iranian suicide Shahed-136 drone has been imitated and upgraded by Russian engineers and renamed Geran-2. It plays a vital role in Russia strategic bombing campaigns deep into Ukraine by saving much more expensive cruise and ballistic missiles for the highest value targets. Russia and Ukraine both have excelled in the use of FPV (First Person View) drones to harass enemy troops by dropping hand grenade-type charges from above.

Cheap and plentiful Iranian Shahed-136 drones.

It’s pointless to argue that one side or another of the force-finesse binary leads to victory. A more enlightened view is that you need both. A healthy society needs the productive force of its working classes to be harnessed by the intellectual finesse of its professional class.

As Simplicius the Thinker explains, Russia is forced by the all-seeing panopticon of US satellite surveillance to employ large amounts of finesse along its front with Ukrainian forces:

This ‘war of the future’ will be won by the most flexible, resilient, and adaptable force—the force which can pull punches, use feints, and reorientations all along the entire combat line in the most expedient manner. Russia is showing this today by utilizing a confounding rotation of active fronts to not only unbalance the AFU, but to stress their mobility and logistics to the extreme. When you have the advantage in logistical infrastructure and facility, you can ‘daze’ your opponent by conducting small operations across a scattered range of fronts, causing them great stress in trying to keep up.

Force and finesse exist in dialectical tension. The ideal is to maximize both force and finesse—to accurately deliver as powerful a blow as possible. A post-industrial force leans too heavily into finesse. A dictatorship of the proletariat will massacre their liberal bourgeois class and in the end only produce aimless brute force.

FAB-500, a powerful but dumb gravity bomb sublimated into a precision weapon through its inexpensive strapped-on wing kit and guiding mechanism.

Meek is correct to indicate that Russia’s military precision has improved greatly, and they do have new high-tech cruise missiles. But the primary game-changer weapon for the Russians is their gliding FAB bombs. In creating this weapon, Russia took their huge existing stocks of big-but-dumb bombs and attached to them unified gliding and correction modules. In a sublation, or upheaval, Russia took the thesis of a big brute of a bomb, attached the antithesis of a dainty guiding system, and created a powerful yet accurate monster to destroy Ukrainian fortresses and morale. If Ukraine does not come up with a counter to this weapon, Russian forces will pummel them all the way to the Dnieper River.

Gliding Past the Denial Stage

The tone of Meek’s essay is grim and lacking in denial but tinged with only slightly disguised anger.

There is of course a theoretical chance that Europe and the US will get round to sending Ukraine the ammunition it needs before it’s too late. But they aren’t going to send soldiers.

Most US officials admit that they have no spare air defense or artillery shells to send, even if an aid package is approved by Congress. As a nation in the throes of post-industrialism, the US just doesn’t make much of anything any longer.

Meek in breaking the bad news, must identify himself within the establishment position on Ukraine and against his political opponents. Here he seems bothered that the Western nationalists are claiming the mantle of peace. Numerous establishment hawks have openly celebrated the fact that Ukrainians are dying to “weaken” Russia and American workers are benefiting by supposedly building the weapons. It is beyond obvious that there is a division of labour in Ukraine: the West supplies the arms and Ukraine brings the meat.

Ergo, Western support is all that sustains the war. According to this line of reasoning – proclaimed in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Slovakia by Robert Fico, in Germany by the nationalist leftist Sahra Wagenknecht and the pro-Russian AfD, and in the US by sub-Trumps like Vivek Ramaswamy – Putin’s invasion was merely regrettable (though Trump himself called the first stage of the attack ‘genius’). In this view, the real enemies of peace, the true villains, are Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, Rishi Sunak, Volodymyr Zelensky and the liberal/trad-right media, who perpetuate the war in the vain hope of weakening Russia by throwing weapons at the poor, simple Ukrainians, forcing them to go on dying.

Meek is on firmer ground when he attacks the Western idea that they can simply call a “time-out” and the war will freeze along its current front lines:

There’s a self-comforting argument made by some in the West which holds that Putin would be glad to stop fighting tomorrow if he could be sure Russia would get to keep what it had already seized, while the Ukrainians would have to stop tomorrow if the West stopped arming them.

Meek is correct here: Russia has far higher aspirations than just territorial conquest. The West has already cut arms shipments to bare minimum and approval of the $61 billion appropriation package would do little to pump more arms towards Ukraine.

As explained in Primal Parity, it is becoming clearer everyday that a “Primal Horde” centred on China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, supported to a lesser extent by the BRICS-10 and Global South, is forming. By launching or threatening wars all across the globe, the horde incrementally spreads thin the post-industrial forces of the US and Collective West. Alone none is strong enough to slay their “Primal Father” but together they have the collective force to destroy the unipolar global order and its mythical icon: the US dollar.

And so Ukraine has to be thought of as a struggle within one country, but equally as one piece of a larger global attrition scheme to demilitarize the heavily financialized West. Meek argues:

Ukraine has nothing to gain from futile attempts to push the Russians further back, the argument goes, and no risk of losing more by letting Putin keep what he already has.

The primal horde hypothesis means that the Ukraine War is a pinning operation that keeps Western minds and arms flows focused on Eastern Europe. Already Hamas, the Houthis, and perhaps Iran have opened new fronts. While Western liberal bourgeois can claim to hold the moral high ground in Ukraine, in Gaza they are in a moral gutter.

Slaying the Dragons: Liberal Bourgeois Quest to Fix Globalization

Once upon a time, in the dark days of Brexit, Meek again explored the contradictions of each prospective camp in his Brexit and Myths of Englishness piece for the London Review of Books (LRB). He starts by explaining the contrasting approaches to English myth:

Of the two​ folk-myths bound up with Englishness, the myth of St George and the myth of Robin Hood, the myth of St George is simpler. Robin Hood is a process; St George is an event. Robin Hood steals from the rich, which is difficult, to give to the poor, which is trickier still, and has to keep on doing it over and over; but St George kills the dragon, and that’s it. Before the dragon is slain, the people are tyrannised. They live in a state of misery, fear and humiliation. When the dragon is slain, their problems disappear. The slaying of the dragon is quick, easy to remember, and easy to celebrate. Robin Hood is justice; St George is victory. Slow, complicated, boring Robin Hood-like achievements such as a national health service, progressive taxation and universal education yield in the folk-narrative of England to St George-like releases, often involving the beating by the English, or the British, of the non-English, or the non-British: the destruction of the Spanish Armada, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick against Germany in 1966. The vote on whether Britain should leave the European Union was sold to the electorate and bought by many as a St George moment.

There is more than a pinch of truth here. The Brexit movement sought to slay the den of dragons in Brussels, but had little idea of what processes they would follow in the aftermath. In hindsight Brussels was the best thing that ever happened to the failing British ruling class. All of Britain’s myriad of problems could be blamed on the EU-bureaucracy. After Brexit, it is the British leadership who now take the blame.

Nevertheless, today, it is Meek’s liberal bourgeois team who is seeking in vain to strike down the evil dragon of Vladimir Putin. He’s not the only one of course. There are a multitude of primal horde dragons that now need slaying: President Xi of China, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

The reason these dragons are growing so powerful is the Robin Hood portion of Meek’s duality:

The failed liberal slogan for the world that sounded so loudly in the afterclap of communism’s fall – ‘democracy and the free market’ – lacks the Robin Hood kicker: fairly shared wealth. The measure of the success of globalisation shouldn’t be how easily the wealthiest can suck rents from the majority and keep the proceeds through a combination of capital mobility, tax havens and wage suppression, by shuffling production and workers between national jurisdictions. It should be how far the world as a whole approaches a high baseline of shared security and prosperity: how far Indonesia, China or Egypt is reaching up to establish universal education, healthcare, housing, water and energy supply; how far Britain, the United States or Italy is levelling down; and where the levels meet.

Here Meek lays bare in stark honesty the true goals of globalization: the “reaching up” of the Rest of the World and the “levelling down” of the West. As war spreads from Eastern European steppes, to the seaways of the Middle East, to the Taiwan Strait, and the Korean Peninsula, everywhere we see evidence of globalization’s Mission Accomplished banner proudly fluttering in the breeze.

Prosperity and military power work hand in glove. As a nation’s prosperity grows, so does its military potential. This basic truth is dawning on Western leaders. Turning on a dime, they are erecting sanctions packages along with weak military campaigns such as in Yemen. Western leaders are turning from compassionate Robin Hoods to so many tyrannical Sherriff of Nottinghams.

The Western liberal version of Robin Hood is to steal prosperity and security from their domestic working classes to then pass down a few breadcrumbs to the global multitudes.

The liberal managerial class grew domestically powerful with the successful destruction of their indigenous working classes—so much so that they started identifying foreign enemies with them. “Putin” became a cypher for Western working class resistance to their Robin Hood project—they blame both Trump and Brexit on Putin’s electoral machinations. Power drunk from their local victories, they fell back into the geopolitical groove from the West’s imperial days: the world of the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. There a relatively small British force, armed with modern rifles, artillery and machine guns wiped out 40,000 long sword and spear-wielding Sudanese natives.

Maxim machine gun used in the Battle of Omdurman

Bourgeois talk of levelling the world was more than just propaganda. How much the multitudes lifted themselves up and how much of a helping hand they had from Western do-gooders is open to debate. But did the Western professional classes calibrate the levelling of prosperity and power? Military potential springs from the class harmony of a professional class designing the weapons and leading the troops, and a working class fabricating the weapons and selflessly charging enemy trenches. A one-sided bourgeois freakshow like the West sheds military potential as it shelves its working class, while still maintaining GDP. This is how NATO nations can have a GDP 10 times higher than Russia and yet are getting beat badly in weapons production. Moreover, recent recruitment shortfalls in Western armed forces recruiting campaigns have left barracks empty. It’s gotten so bad that some NATO countries are contemplating recruiting from the global multitudes to staff their militaries since the indigenous working classes of these nations are refusing to serve.

The grave error that Western liberals made is in switching from a benevolent Robin Hood to the tyrannical Sheriff of Nottingham in an eyeblink. The war in Ukraine was launched by a Western-backed coup d'état in 2014. Russia’s response was minimalist—securing her Black Sea Fleet through an invasion of the Crimea. The Donbass rebelled but Russia hesitated. But Meek sums up this period with the following hand wave:

Putin has been using armed force to try to change Ukraine’s borders since 2014, without ever saying exactly what he wants: he has never put terms to Ukraine that it could satisfy without falling into subservience, and that includes the unworkable Minsk Accords.

In hindsight, those “unworkable” Minsk Accords will seem sober and wise compared to the most optimistic endgame Ukrainians will be able to conjure as the Russian Army approaches the Dnieper this autumn.

The Irreconcilable Desires for Universality and Particularity.

A nation’s war potential rests in dialectical tension and harmony between the professional and working classes. While separation economically in the short term is possible, in the realm of war fighting, neither side can go it alone.

They see themselves, in general, as rational, enlightened people, aspiring to a universal morality. They are liberals. They endorse the principle of the right to cultural self-determination not just for the native English, but for all peoples, the Greenland Inuit included. At the same time, they support other abstract, universal principles: women’s rights, sexual minority rights, ethnic minority rights, animal rights, children’s rights, environmental protection, migrants’ rights, equal opportunities, education for all, democracy, free trade, free movement of people, free movement of capital. These two idealistic strands are in deep contradiction with each other. A belief in the imperative to conserve the traditional, authentic and distinctive in local cultures clashes with a fervent promotion of universal rights and freedoms. This is the liberal bourgeois dilemma: the irreconcilability of the desires for universality and particularity.

Human society can be abstracted down to struggles between universality and particularity. While it is a potent perspective to understand the human condition, the crucial step in any such analysis is to draw a circle of the relevant domain. For example a nation-state can be the domain and the universal defined as the interests of the entire group. Particularity then defines the interests of subgroups, such as the inevitable tension between working and professional classes. Depending on the problems faced, leaning in one direction or the other may best resolve the issues.

The radical move in globalization is to annihilate the nation-state circle and to redefine the domain of interest as the entire globe. With this move, the Western professionals can abort their indigenous or heritage working classes and replace them by adopting the global multitudes. It’s win-win for the Western liberal bourgeois intellectuals, as wealth concentrates into their class coffers and poverty eases for the 3rd World masses.

But Meek’s warnings of the irreconcilability of desires for universality and particularity on the cultural level are even more critical for military power—where the nation-state is still the domain par excellence. The liberal bourgeois desire for a levelling of global prosperity entails the destruction of the West’s 500 year run of dominating military prowess. Globalization’s rising winners are ancient civilizations: China, India, Iran, Russia, Egypt, Ethiopia, etc; who for millennia have existed as discreet universals within a larger multipolar tension field of competing and collaborating civilizations. The idea of a homogenized and atomized global culture based loosely on Western goodwhite virtue-signalling—sang to the melody of John Lennon’s Imagine—is as anathema to them as it is to Trumpsters and Brexiteers.

What globalization has wrought is the shattering of the Western collective soul. The power of the West was fuelled by the communion between the professional and working classes. Public information campaigns, designed by elites, used to idealize the “common” man. Nowadays the common man is castigated as a pile of deplorables and as a result the geopolitical power of the West is in freefall. And yet Western leaders still walk around thinking they rule the world.

Where is Ukraine Headed?

In Meek’s essay on Ukraine, he seems confounded as to what President Putin’s ultimate goals are in Ukraine. It’s not at all complicated. Putin wants Ukraine embedded within the Russian World in a fashion similar to Belarus. That is what the Russian Army is fighting for and is what Western weakness will allow to happen.

And so, as Meek points out, any talk of a frozen conflict is deep cope. Putin has metaphorically cleared the fields, rototilled the soil, dug irrigation ditches, planted the seed and now that the first green shoots of victory are appearing, is he really going to just plough them under to make the West happy? No, he foresees a huge harvest in the autumn, and will continue the war until he reaps what he has sown.

The only way Ukraine can immediately end the war is through unconditional—or very low-conditioned—surrender. A surrender is not a time-out. The victor is not limited to terrain actually captured. In 1945, following Japan’s surrender, the US occupied all of Japan—despite the fact that during hostilities the US never occupied a square inch of Japan’s home islands. Russia may not occupy the entirety of Ukraine, but they will find puppets to do the job for them.

A geopolitical vacuum is what the liberal bourgeois war on their domestic working class has reaped. It will only reverse once the Western professional classes stop trying to slay foreign dragons and get busy engaging in a Robin Hood-process of reploughing their ill-gotten gains back into their domestic proles. Meek has not gotten this far—his piece seeks to limit the reputational damage his liberal bourgeois fellow-travellers will suffer as a result of Putin’s victory in Ukraine. In the meantime the West is missing a people—those who love, build, and will fight for their nation—their working classes.