Michael Ignatieff, the Iraq War cheerleader and champion of America’s torture programs, is once again at the service of empire. This time he is busy rewriting history as a pure fantasy in attempting to reduce the Russian war on Ukraine as both the design and actions of a single madman. And what better place for these ravings than the Globe & Mail?
To make his argument hold together, he immediately rejects any notion that NATO’s eastward expansion has fuelled rising NATO tensions. Instead, it is all blamed on Putin's 2007 "Munich Speech" in which he warned that further NATO expansion would threaten Russian security. The following year, George W. Bush and Western elites were busy announcing Ukraine and Georgia were next on the list of NATO members after leaders of both governments indicated such a desire.
Ignatieff turns reality on its head by claiming that it was Putin, in his 2007 “Munich speech”, who refused to accept the “post-1989 settlement”, when in fact it was the Clinton regime which broke the post-1989 settlement of agreeing to not expand NATO east of a united Germany. These assurances are documented fact.
Having turned this point on its head, Ignatieff explicitly argues that the post-war Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland “makes nonsense of the claim that NATO expansion eastward caused this crisis.” You see, lectures the elite “scholar”/propagandist, the Eastern European states are scared of Russia. Apparently, this excuses everything that has happened with NATO expansion. The problem, he continues, is the failure of Russian democracy.
Democracy, claims Ignatieff, has never grown in Russia, and that’s why it is so aggressive. There have been moments of democratic possibility. For example, he lauds his own grandfather, a servant to the pogromist Tsar of pre-revolutionary Russia, as a democratic reformer who wanted “a parliamentary democracy on the British model.” Perhaps this is true, but their project was an abject failure. Why did it fail? Because the "British model" never had any popular support. Ignatieff, a craven apologist for imperialism, cannot understand this. He cannot understand why the British model of parliamentary democracy would be rejected by peasants, workers and oppressed people when the actual-existing British Empire mercilessly exploited workers and peasants, engineered famines, waged bloody imperialist wars and subjugated entire peoples. Of course Ignatieff's tsarist grandaddy would love this model!
Skipping through 20th century and somehow missing both world wars and its devastating effects on Russia and Eastern Europe, Ignatieff’s treatment of what happened to Russia after the end of the Cold War and the failure of Russian democracy is reduced to Yeltsin’s handing over of power to Putin. The role of American imperialism in destroying Russian democracy in the 1990s is non-existent in Ignatieff’s account. Yet another massive critical piece of the historical puzzle vanishes. There is nothing about the US-engineered shock therapy which devastated Russian living standards and created the oligarchs, thus robbing the country of the a broad and secure middling class required to stabilize a parliamentary capitalist democracy. There is no mention of Yeltsin’s 1993 coup against an elected parliament and his wars on Chechenya. The American financing and rigging of Yeltsin’s miraculous 1996 re-election never happened. And of course there is no mention of the Americans approving Putin’s installation in high office.
Having shit out this grand web of lies that would fail to meet the criteria of a grade 9 history essay, Ignatieff goes for what he really wants: the resurrection of Western “hard power”. Now you know Ignatieff has a raging erection.
Ignatieff repeatedly pumps the invocation of NATO’s Article 5 on Collective Defence. War is his goal. He declares that Western responses to the aforementioned Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland are insufficient in today’s circumstances. He even manages to spend an entire paragraph championing a new Western turn to “hard power” as a means of defeating China no the question of Taiwan.
As when he cheered on a war that killed a million Iraqis, Ignatieff wants to wrap this all up in his deluded concept of “freedom” which looks an awful lot like army boots stomping on any leader, state or people that dares defy the prerogatives and designs of the American Empire. Shouting out Chrystia Freeland as one of the Ukrainian-Canadians he met in 1992 in Ukraine, Ignatieff goes on to recount a visit south of Kiev to the gravestones of his ancestors buried by a Russian Orthodox church.
“Yes, my roots are Russian, but my people understood there was a place called Ukraine, with a language and a culture and a tradition all its own.”
Here, as the article comes to a close, we come to the world wars and the intervening horrors. Recalling the Soviet-engineered famine of the early 1930s and the Nazi (but not Ukrainian nationalist) massacres of Ukrainian Jews, Ignatieff positions himself on the side of liberty against tyranny, freedom against barbarism. Has the man ever claimed otherwise?
Ignatieff’s fictional account of history fits in neatly with a myth-making stories of Western imperialism. No doubt a millionaire many times over and having faced no consequences for the millions of deaths he has approved of, Ignatieff is once again working hard for an escalation of this awful war into another global nightmare of incalculable suffering, destruction and death.
Nothing Ignatieff writes offers either Ukraine or anyone else in the world a move towards actual peace. It is the delusional blood and soil imperialism and their deluded ideology of "freedom" that has intoxicated the intellectuals (such as Chrystia Freeland) who waged and won the Cold War. For all their murderous anti-Communism, Cold War architects such as George F. Kennan denounced NATO expansion in the 1990s before Putin was known to anyone outside the world’s intelligence agencies. But this old breed is dead, and the unchecked Cold Warrior kids of the Reagan years are now in the saddle. They're now leading the charge.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the peace dividend we were all promised quickly vanished with the imperialist war in Iraq and NATO’s advance through the Balkans under the guise of peacekeeping. NATO expanded eastward, and was followed quickly by the imperialist wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Do we forget the Afghanistan War was fought under NATO auspices from 2006 to 2021? I’d say Afghanistan is pretty far fucking east. Kabul is over 4,000 kilometres southeast of Moscow! That's 2000km between longitudes. The NATO mission in Afghanistan began in 2006 - a year before Putin’s Munich Speech which Ignatieff cites as the beginning of Putin’s drive to war.
In short, the American and NATO imperialists - including liberal cheerleaders like Michael Ignatieff - totally squandered their victory in the Cold War. The deliberate and decade-long plunder and humiliation of the Russian people in the 1990s buried hopes of Russian democracy and peaceful co-existence.
The Americans and NATO nations faced no rivals with the fall of the Soviet Union. China was still rattled and discredited by the Tiananmen Square massacre. The world was at the West’s mercy. They could have attempted a permanent peace. Instead, the peace dividend was expressly rejected in favour of the same old game of conquest. The capitalist drive to conquest and profits reigns supreme.
After 1989, the American and NATO imperialism planted more seeds for more war, hatred, nationalism and nuclear annihilation. Michael Ignatieff has spent his whole life watering those seeds with the blood of innocents.
