CAPE TOWN - It is often said that the first casualty of war is truth!
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is just over a week old. Already the false narratives, damn lies and half-truths are piling up on the scrap heap of the dead, the damaged, the destruction and desolation, the desperation of the masses, and the bonfire of vanities of the politicians and their apparatchiks.
Vladimir Putin’s endgame is to turn Ukraine into a vassal as his paratroopers close in on the capital, Kyiv, in an indiscriminate shock and awe orgy of violence which thus far has sent the death toll beyond 2 000, with a chilling last resort threat of the use of tactical nuclear weapons should NATO decide to intervene.
Who says the Cold War ended after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991?
The Cold War has indeed gotten a second and potentially more pervasive wind. Its demography and scope have widened because of the Putin Doctrine of restoring Russia to its former imperial glory, and with the emergence of the cash-rich Xi Jingping, the repressive Chinese strongman with his own territorial ambitions.
The history of Western imperialism and colonialism, including the brutal slave trade, which terrorised the populations of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania for centuries, cannot be airbrushed. That colonialism was a force for good, as some on the far right still maintain today, simply gives succour to the rise of the white supremacist populists in the US, Latin America and Europe, courted even by democratically-elected politicians.
The roots of the invasion of Ukraine lie in the legacy of the chaotic, post-Soviet ‘transition’ to Russia, with its loss of empire, influence and dignity.
Boris Yeltsin’s accession as the president of Russia, complete with his cirrhotic inebriation, is one of the greatest political disasters in post-war Europe.
To think that it was done in the name of democracy is as insulting to the very democratic values that the West is now clamouring for, having mid-wifed the rise of the Yeltsin family and the consequent corruption and self-enrichment, and the rise of the notorious oligarchs that would have made the robber barons of the Wild West proud.
That Yeltsin virtually hand-picked the atavistically authoritarian Putin as his successor was the other major faux pas.
These are the same oligarchs that fuelled political donations to Western democratic parties, including the UK Conservative Party, in recent years, and who have morally and criminally abdicated democratic values in pursuit of and turning a blind eye to ill-gotten Russian largesse.
It is as much a failure of capitalism, with its pernicious inequalities, that has seen Mammon yet again triumph over ethics and the people.
Beware those deluded enough -- such as Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of Ugandan autocrat President Yoweri Museveni, whose reign of terror in the country entered its 36th year in 2022 -- to think that Vladimir Putin’s foray into a neighbouring country is a ‘just war’ to “de-nazify” Ukraine and to protect Russian-backed separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk against “genocide”.
This war of attrition between Moscow and Kyiv started in 2014, and has already claimed more than 14 000 unnecessary lives.
Putin used the ploy of recognising the two regions as independent countries as the pretext to invade Ukraine.
The only other military leader in Africa to publicly voice support for Russia is the Sudanese junta’s strongman, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, who was probably one of the first foreign “leaders” to know about the invasion, since he was a guest of the Kremlin on the eve of the action.
Military regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and the Libyan rebel warlord Khalifa Haftar all support Putin, because he is their pay and arms master.
"The majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia's stand in Ukraine" tweeted Kainerugaba. His naivety is as breathtaking as his appreciation of European history. To equate Western antagonism to Russian totalitarianism as an attempt to hegemonise control over the world’s largest country in terms of area, and abundant in natural resources, especially oil, gas and nickel, and to treat Russia as the underdog and champion of non-European countries in their quest for independence, is as derisory as it is dangerous.
Russia as the champion of the fight against colonialism? Now there’s a thought. Ask the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, one of the few protagonists to defeat the mighty Soviet army and send them packing in 1989 (coincidentally at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall) – an occupation whose brutal consequences are still reverberating today, with the medieval occupation by the Taliban.
Ask the Crimean Tatars, who were brutally expelled en masse by Stalin from their centuries-old ancestral home in Crimea to Siberia in 1944, in the aftermath of World War II, and whose leader Mustafa Dzhemilev was incarcerated for decades in Soviet Gulags just as Madiba and ANC stalwarts were on Robben Island.
Even during apartheid, the Soviets used to have regular meetings with Pretoria in London to discuss mutual interests, such as the price of diamonds and gold.
Today it is the Kremlin-sanctioned Russian mercenary Wagner Group that is rearing its conniving head in African conflicts in Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Libya and Mali.
There is little difference between Western, Russian and lately Chinese imperialism. Those ideologues in our midst who blindly support the unfettered ‘Bretton Woods’ of the favoured ‘isms’ - capitalism, socialism, communism – delude themselves in believing that these are the solutions for our countries.
In the end they all have the same thing in common – self-interest, self-entitlement, hegemonic aspirations and a narrative which suits their respective positions.
The only difference is that in liberal democracies voters do have recourse to change the status quo and checks and balances – up to a point!
As the dramatic decline in the quality of US, British and European politics has shown in recent decades, the first casualty has been a dumbing down, if not capitulation of democratic values, partly also due to the blurring of democracy with business and the rise in populism.
No wonder Western policy leading up to the Ukraine crisis, and for that matter China’s brutal treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, has been a mishmash of appeasement, economic and financial self-interest, complacency, indecisiveness, hypocrisy, contradiction and a weakness of political will that values the lives and well-being of their citizens, especially the elites, above anyone and anything else.
A sense of deja vu reminiscent of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s sleepwalking into the holocaust that followed.
No wonder Ukrainians are castigating the “too little, too late” approach of NATO and the West. The reality is that this latest Russo-Ukrainian War is yet another manifestation of a European tribal war, which so brutalised the 20th Century in 1914-18 and again in 1939-45.
We sympathise with Ukrainians over Putin’s putsch against their sovereignty and the cost in human lives and destruction. They need our support.
The West – both the social conservatives and the liberal consensus – especially in times of crisis, have not learnt the lessons of the last century. Racism and chauvinism are never far away when the chips are down, even if it is a ‘white-on-white’ conflict.
Ask the Nigerian, Ghanaian and Middle Eastern students trying to return home from Ukraine subject to overt racial harassment from Ukrainian officials. Look at the eagerness of autocratic Poland and Hungary opening their borders to Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers – a very action they refused to Syrian refugees just a year or two previously.
Some sections of the Western media were too indulged. CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata on February 26 reported: “This isn’t a place …like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European … city (Kyiv), one where you wouldn’t expect that…” The examples are numerous.
Not even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the darling of the West, comes out unscathed.
As a former comic known for his edgy humour, and a surprise winner at the last election, one of his favourite pastimes was a racist and bigoted lampooning of Turkish and Arab heritage, complete with the archetypal Ottoman fez and belly dancers, which would have made the Hollywood stereotypers proud.
Not that Russia is any better. On my few visits to Moscow, I was subjected to racial harassment on more than one occasion, most likely confused for someone from the Caucasus.
The lesson for Africa is to rediscover its own tried and tested values inculcated in ubuntuism, complete with enhanced principles of consultation, community, dignity, accountability, checks and balances, transparency and delivery!
A spirit which sadly was abandoned by the ANC during the era of state capture, combining a curious mix of cadre cronyism and wanton capitalist self-enrichment!
* Parker is a writer and economist based in London
Cape Times