DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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There is nothing wrong with admiring the bravery of Ukraine’s stand against Russia. In fact, I don’t think I’d felt that much ebullient pride, seeing the Ukrainians turn back the Russians from Kyiv, since the time I saw the once iconic but now forgotten ink-stained fingertips of Iraqi voters defying terrorist threats to go out and vote in 2005. In both cases, the West seemed to stand for the universal aspirations of all. In an age that oscillates between radical nihilism and a natural yearning for certainty and purpose, it was such a joy—and a relief—to see that Western values stood for something: something others wanted; something others would die for, when many of us can’t even muster the courage to speak up at the office watercooler to the woke ideologues who police pronouns and see ‘phobias’ more often than your average hypochondriac feels the onset of an illness.

Ukraine and the Ukranians, to some extent like the Iraqis of the millennial aughts, have unfortunately become the West’s—particularly America’s—panacea for our own civilizational fecklessness. Whether you call them ‘globalists’ or ‘neoliberals,’ or as in America the ‘uniparty’ of Democrats and Republicans, the West’s promoters of endless, contingency-free, lethal aid to Ukraine suffer a proximity infatuation of purposiveness—of trying to find one’s own meaning through somebody else’s existential struggle. At the same time, Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression serves what is arguably a much more delusional, if not dangerous, illusion for a certain kind of American and pro-Atlanticist conservative in Europe: the illusion that Ukraine’s patriots can fill the West’s spiritual and cultural void.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2023 at 09:34 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.