Another Quick Reminder that Colonialism is Bad
In 2017, Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, published an essay entitled “A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad.” The piece was written in response to a notorious article by the political scientist Bruce Gilley that was published in Third World Quarterly entitled “The Case for Colonialism.” As the title suggests, Gilley’s article was a bad faith attempt to demonstrate why European colonialism was a net benefit to the colonized and that the colonial project should be rehabilitated and restarted. Unsurprisingly (and probably by design), “The Case for Colonialism” sparked a firestorm of criticism and the article was controversially, though rightly, retracted from Third World Quarterly.
Written in the aftermath of the Third World Quarterly affair, at a time when Gilley was attempting to position himself as a victim of “leftist” intolerance, “A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad” exposes Gilley’s essay as little more than cheap trolling masquerading as scholarship. Robinson demonstrates, for example, how Gilley routinely distorts, or simply elides, inconvenient facts that might complicate his tidy narrative. Racism, barbarity, and oppression simply do not feature in the story that Gilley tells.
Not content to illustrate how “The Case for Colonialism” was bad scholarship, but also how it was morally outrageous, Robinson also rightly takes issue with the way that Gilley grounds his conclusions about the virtues of colonialism in an ethically bankrupt “cost-benefit analysis,” the only purpose of which is to demonstrate that colonialism actually provided a “net benefit” to the colonized. “We should observe,” writes Robinson
that this is a terrible way of evaluating colonialism. It is favored by colonialism’s apologists because it means that truly unspeakable harms can simply be “outweighed” and thereby trivialized. We can see quickly how ludicrous this is: “Yes, we may have indiscriminately massacred 500 children, but we also opened a clinic that vaccinated enough children to save 501 lives, therefore “the case for colonialism is strong.”
Colonialism, after all, functioned not just as an ideology or as a system of political economy: it also operated at the scale of individual bodies, and Robinson recounts the grave human rights abuses perpetrated by colonizers, including beatings, sexual assault, torture, and starvation. The essay’s most powerful moment is the haunting photograph of a shattered African man staring blankly at his daughter’s severed hand — his punishment for having failed to meet his daily quota on a rubber plantation. It is impossible to see such evidence without experiencing profound revulsion, both for the barbaric act itself, but, even more viscerally, for colonialism itself.
“A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad” is a good essay, and I often assign it to my students. Robinson’s argument is persuasive and, crucially, he takes a firm moral stand and refuses to equivocate about the cruelty and inhumanity of the colonial project. Indeed, as one reads “A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad,” it becomes clear that the essay actually transcends the promise of its title: Robinson does not merely show that colonialism was “bad” — he demonstrates that it was, in fact, monstrous.
I mention all of this because it is in light of his previous work that Nathan Robinson’s writings on Ukraine, most clearly encapsulated in a recent Current Affairs essay called “Is the U.S. Actually Trying to Help Ukraine?”, have been so painfully disappointing. The moral clarity that animated “A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad” is largely absent, replaced with cheap polemics and an overweening sense of self-congratulation for being the only person in the room willing to speak up to “save Ukrainian lives.”
Well, bravo.
Unfortunately, throughout Robinson’s various musings on Ukraine one is struck by a profound sense of unfamiliarity with the country, its history, or its people and an equally profound lack of interest in learning more. He therefore relies primarily on the opinions of people like John Mearsheimer and Noam Chomsky to fill in the yawning chasm in his knowledge. Unfortunately for Robinson, however, neither Mearsheimer nor Chomsky are experts on Ukraine either, with the predictable result being that his writings mostly avoid discussing Ukraine as such at all, because he simply doesn’t have much of interest to say. Ukraine and Ukrainians are cast, at best, to bit players in their own existential war; at worst, they’re reduced to unwitting puppets in a US-managed proxy war against Russia.
At best, such a position fundamentally misconstrues the conflict. At worst, it deliberately turns a blind eye to Ukrainian history and denies the agency of Ukrainian people today.
Ukraine, after all, is a post-colonial state, one whose population still bears the scars and inter-generational traumas of centuries of oppression. The Russian Empire, in addition to colonizing Ukrainian land, denigrated Ukrainian people as nothing more than “little Russians,” denied them their political and cultural sovereignty, and forbade the use of their language. And although it is not fashionable in some quarters to describe it as such, the Soviet colonization of Ukraine continued apace, murdering Ukrainians en masse through successive waves of purges, collectivization, “dekulakization” campaigns, and organized mass starvation. In “A Quick Reminder…” Robinson writes of “the various psychological wounds inflicted on colonized people by a dehumanizing ideology” and argues that “one of the cruelest aspects of colonialism is the way it forces the colonized into servility and obedience.” He may as well have been writing of the Ukrainian experiences of colonization and russification.
I do not know whether or not Robinson is aware of this history. He is not a fool and so I suspect that he is, at least on some level, but simply chooses to avoid it because it would complicate his narrative. Like his influences, Chomsky and Mearsheimer, the latter of whom has repeatedly opined that “the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis,” Robinson’s views on the war in Ukraine are preoccupied instead with the United States and NATO.
Robinson, for example, has pointed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24th address as definitive proof that Russia’s invasion was provoked by NATO, in keeping with Mearsheimer’s warnings. However, he has largely ignored another, more substantial address from February 21st in which Putin elaborated a revanchist, imperialist historical narrative in which “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country…It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” The speech, which covered much of the same ground as a much longer essay from 2021 entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” argued that Ukraine’s very existence as a sovereign state separate from Russia is the unfortunate result of Soviet nationalities policies in the 1920s. Since 1991, Ukraine, which, according to Putin, “actually never had stable traditions of real statehood,” began “building their statehood on the negation of everything that united [Ukrainians and Russians], trying to distort the mentality and historical memory of millions of people, of entire generations living in Ukraine.”
Putin does eventually get around to talking about NATO, deploying absurd falsehoods and conspiracy theories, which he repeated in his Feb. 24th speech, that “the Ukrainian troop control system has already been integrated into NATO” and that “NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads.” He also complains that NATO troops have, “over the past few years” begun training Ukrainian forces, but conveniently fails to mention that this was largely a response to Russia’s unprovoked annexation of Crimea and the brutal occupation of Donbas, which dramatically shifted Ukrainians’ attitudes toward NATO.
A now-infamous article published in the Russian state-owned RIA-Novosti on Feb. 26 under the title “Nastuplenie Rossii i novogo mira” (“Russia’s Offensive and the New World”) provides further insight into how NATO relates to Russian imperial geopolitics in Ukraine: “The issue of national security, that is, the creation in Ukraine of an ‘anti-Russia’ and an outpost for putting Western pressure on [Russia]” is described as being of secondary concern. Rather, the primary mission of the Russian state is “solving the Ukrainian question” by “returning Ukraine to Russia.” NATO is only important insofar as it might complicate these ambitions: “In the event of the consolidation of full geopolitical and military control of the West over Ukraine, its return to Russia would become impossible — it would require a war with the Atlantic bloc.”
NATO membership, in other words, would have provided Ukraine with a guarantee against renewed Russian colonialism. And in case you needed a quick reminder: colonialism is bad.
In the end, “Nastuplenie Rossii i novogo mira” was swiftly pulled from publication once it became clear that its triumphalism was not being borne out on the ground, where the Ukrainian defense failed to collapse as predicted and Russia failed to “restore its historical unity” with Ukraine as hoped. Since then, Russia’s narrative about the war has shifted, and “the new world being born before our eyes” has evolved into “securing the Donbas” or maybe, somehow, “creating a corridor to the breakaway republic Transnistria,” or, you know…something.
At any rate, in light of Russia’s rather clear imperial ambitions in Ukraine and the shrug with which the Kremlin has greeted the decision of Finland and Sweden to join NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to put much credence in the narrative that “NATO expansionism” is to blame for the war (though one suspects that proponents of that story will stick with it regardless).
Indeed, Robinson, following Chomsky, has already moved on somewhat, now more intent on analyzing the war in Ukraine as a proxy war in which the United States is “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.” This turn of phrase, attributed to the former diplomat Chas Freeman, has become something of an axiom among a certain cadre, but it is as misguided as it is distasteful. As I have observed elsewhere, Ukraine is plainly not fighting this war on behalf of the United States, nor is the United States “fighting to the last Ukrainian.” Ukraine, quite simply, is fighting for its continued existence and the United States is helping it. That it is doing so not out of charity but for its own reasons is so mundane a point to make that it is barely worth mentioning, and yet the idea that the United States may have ulterior motives in helping Ukraine fight against Russia is presented as some sort of uncomfortable truth.
Robinson might object that his real problem is with the “evidence that the U.S. might actively prefer the continuation, or even the escalation, of the war to a diplomatic settlement” — but this claim is currently supported by little more than innuendo and unattributed quotes. He goes on to argue that the United States should “be crafting policy right now on the basis of what helps Ukrainians, rather than what helps (vaguely defined) ‘U.S. interests.’” This is a bizarre sentiment, considering that Ukraine has loudly and consistently asked for precisely what the United States has been supplying in large quantities: weapons.
“I need ammunition, not a ride!”
At any rate, if transferring weapons to Ukraine is unhelpful and escalatory, what sort of American policy does Robinson believe Ukraine actually “needs?” The answer appears to be “pushing for a diplomatic settlement.” What this settlement is actually supposed to entail — besides “stopping the war” — is left mostly unexplained. Chomsky came perhaps the closest in his April 13 interview with Robinson, in which he explained that “the basic framework” of a settlement would include the “neutralization” of Ukraine, federalization and special status for Donbas, Crimea off the table, etc. — in short: a list of Russian war demands that would cripple Ukraine, with little proposed in return except for giving Putin “an escape hatch.” In “Is the U.S. Actually Trying to Help Ukraine?” Robinson mentions a similar proposal that was outlined in Fair Observer:
First, Russian forces withdraw from Ukraine. Second, Ukraine promises neutrality and becomes an independent buffer state between NATO and Russia. Third, all Ukrainians get the right of self-determination, including those in Crimea and Donbas. Finally, all parties conclude a regional security agreement that protects everyone and prevents new wars.
With the exception of the addition of the “regional security agreement that would include all parties,” presumably also Russia(!), this is essentially identical to the list proposed by Chomsky.
But the question that none of these interlocutors seem prepared to face is: why on earth should Ukraine accept these terms? Why would Ukraine consider even for a moment joining a “security pact” that includes Russia, a revanchist imperial state that has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for Ukraine’s security and sovereignty? Why should Ukraine accept the forced federalization of its territory? Why should Ukraine, which only formally abandoned neutrality after being invaded by Russia in 2014, commit itself again to neutrality? These sorts of proposals are naïve, at best, and mendacious at worst.
If Ukraine believes — as it indeed appears to — that further assistance from its allies will help it win a more advantageous — and, ultimately, more just — peace, is that not what Ukraine actually needs? Or is Ukraine somehow undeserving of justice?
Incredibly, though, Chomsky, has gone even further. In a May 11th interview with Owen Jones, he argued:
If we look at what’s happening, Zelensky — who’s as much of a voice of the Ukrainian people as we can… as we have any idea about… has repeatedly — repeatedly — called for a political settlement in which Ukraine will… a very sensible settlement… in which Ukraine will abandon… in which Ukraine will commit itself to neutralization… No NATO, no NATO membership — a crucial point — will put off the issue of Crimea to some future, because they can’t deal with it right now, and will move towards some kind of accommodation on Donbas. That’s what you don’t hear in the US-British propaganda system.
It is difficult to understate how cynical and nefarious this narrative is. Not only does it ascribe to Zelensky (!!) the very list of Russian war demands that Chomsky previously claimed should be constitute “the basic framework” of a settlement, but it deliberately ignores the fact that Zelensky has openly asserted that Ukraine would require, at a minimum, the “restoration of preinvasion borders, the return of more than 5 million refugees, membership in the European Union and accountability from Russian military leaders before Kyiv would consider laying down its arms.” Elsewhere, Oleksiy Arestovych, a close adviser to Zelensky, has clarified that “the core position of the Ukrainian president is that Ukraine must be recognized within its international borders as of 1991.” A far cry from the “very sensible settlement” that Chomsky puts in Zelensky’s mouth.
In the same interview, moreover, Chomsky confidently asserts that the claim that Ukrainians are clamoring for weapons with which to prosecute the war is merely an invention of Western propaganda. This is an utterly bizarre lie that pretends as if Ukrainian public opinion were actually as mysterious and inscrutable as his weird suggestion that Zelensky is “as much of a voice of the Ukrainian people as we have any idea about” implies.
But inscrutable it is not. While Chomsky would likely dismiss it as an arm of the “US-British propaganda system,” a recent poll by the International Republican Institute shows that 97% of Ukrainians believe they will win the war and only 37% of Ukrainians have said that they would personally accept “Ukraine declaring neutral status and not pursuing joining NATO” to put a stop to the fighting. 44% of respondents said that no concessions should be made at all. Large majorities, meanwhile, approve of the way the Ukrainian government is handling the crisis. Notably, the poll was conducted between March 30th and April 2nd, before large amounts of heavy weaponry began arriving in the country, further strengthening Ukraine’s ability to liberate occupied territory.
Furthermore, it’s not as if the negotiations that Robinson and Chomsky are calling for haven’t been happening! It’s just that they haven’t been very productive. According to a recent report in the New York Times, the primary reason that talks between Ukraine and Russia have fallen apart is “Russia’s insistence on maintaining control of large swaths of Ukrainian territory…and Mr. Putin’s apparent determination to push ahead with his offensive.” At the same time, “[Ukrainian] successes on the battlefield, combined with anger over Russian atrocities, have the Ukrainian public less willing to accept a negotiated peace that would keep a significant amount of land in Russian hands.” In short, Ukraine is more confident in its ability to prevail and understandably appears unwilling to accede to the further dismemberment of its territory and the subjugation and russification of even more of its population.
What this suggests is that, despite smug finger-wagging about “prolonging Ukrainian suffering,” Western commentators like Nathan Robinson and Noam Chomsky are simply unfamiliar with and largely uninterested in what the very Ukrainians they claim to be concerned with actually believe about the war. Both Robinson and Chomsky insist that they are first and foremost interested with “saving Ukrainian lives,” but by bracketing the wider colonial context of the war and by ignoring the voices of Ukrainians themselves, they fall victim to what Ukrainian author Stanislav Aseyev calls the ”childish self-centeredness of ‘What does it matter, as long as there’s no war.’” Perversely, every new atrocity perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine is subjected to the same morally bankrupt “cost-benefit analysis” that Robinson himself denounced in “A Quick Reminder…”: a “negotiated settlement” that dismembers Ukraine is good as long as it stops the killing.
But…it isn’t quite simple as all that, is it?
After all, Ukrainians’ collective memory of centuries of colonialism, oppression, and extermination at the hands of the Russian state, as well as the ideals and ambitions they expressed during the Orange and Euromaidan Revolutions, have only been reinforced by the sickening realities of Russian occupation.
The Russian Army’s retreat after being defeated outside of Kyiv laid bare the rampant torture, rape, and mass killings that had occurred in cities like Bucha and Irpin, atrocities that scholars of mass violence, including Fran Hirsch, Eugene Finkel, Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder, and Anne Appelbaum, have all described in terms of genocide. Meanwhile Russian troops have been busy effacing the Ukrainian names of villages in occupied territories and replacing them with Russian-language toponyms and destroying museums and libraries devoted to Ukrainian culture, an unambiguous process of colonial displacement and erasure. Elsewhere, as in Kherson, the Russian ruble has been introduced, along with Russian state media and Russian school curricula. Occupation authorities are said to be preparing an appeal to the Kremlin for annexation to Russia itself, not even bothering with the sort of sham referendum that supposedly lent credibility to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And in the ruined city of Mariupol, a once-bustling port city that has been bombed into rubble, thousands of civilians are being “evacuated” into “filtration camps,” where ideologically “suspect” Ukrainians disappear into horrific prisons while the rest are sent, without money and without passports or any other documentation, to settlements across Russia.
The brutal realities of this war are precisely why Ukrainians are fighting, and why they would be still fighting even absent any support from the United States whatsoever. For them, this war is an existential war against a revanchist imperial power that has declared its intention to “de-ukrainize” Ukraine. People like Robinson and Chomsky would understand that if they had even the slightest interest in listening to Ukrainians. Strangely, though, not a single Ukrainian person is named, to say nothing of quoted, in Robinson’s essay at all, not even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Like Chomsky, he prefers the silence of the Ukrainians whose lives he claims to be advocating for, because their voices are inconvenient.
But Ukrainians are not stupid, nor are they callous. They do not need Nathan Robinson or Noam Chomsky to lecture them about the costs of war: it is, after all, their friends and their family members who are being murdered, and their cities that are being razed to the ground, their language that is being erased, and their heritage that is being burned. They continue to fight, and they continue to demand help in that fight, because anything short of victory — on their terms — means giving over even more territory to Russia, likely permanently.
And colonialism, in case you needed a quick reminder, is bad.
So “Is the U.S. Actually Trying to Help Ukraine?” is a profoundly disappointing essay, both in substance and in spirit, and I say that as someone who agrees with Nathan Robinson on a great many issues. In the past, he showed compassion with the colonized and insisted on a factual accounting of the real human costs of colonialism. Now, he seems content to recycle the lazy and condescending opinions of famous men like Mearsheimer and Chomsky, whose interest in Ukraine begins and ends with American foreign policy. The history of colonial brutalization and cultural erasure suffered by Ukrainians at the hands of Russia–a history that has traumatically irrupted into the present–takes a back seat to a grotesque “cost-benefit analysis” that confidently ignores that history altogether in the name of “saving lives”–as if Ukrainians need reminders from the safe and privileged about what is actually at stake.
But then again, Nathan Robinson is likely interested neither in writing about Ukrainians nor for Ukrainians. As Jan Dutkiewicz has remarked, he is engaging in a “performance for a very particular American audience,” one whose politics were indelibly marked by American mendacity in the lead-up to the Iraq War and (rightly!) disgusted by the decades of aggression and brutality that have accompanied the “War on Terror,” among other things.
Unfortunately, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the fact that this audience’s justified cynicism of America’s supposed “goodwill” has ossified into a grimly reactionary posture that, combined with a general unfamiliarity of anything east of the Oder (or, worse, captivation by a sort of second-hand Ostalgia) denies solidarity to oppressed and colonized people in Ukraine because “NATO expansionism” is, in the end, the real problem. Ukraine should have been wise enough to avoid “poking the bear,” as it were, pushing Russia into a corner and provoking an invasion by allowing itself to be manipulated by the United States (the Fair Observer article that Robsinon links to in his essay repeats the ludicrous and plainly false assertion that the Euromaidan revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, was a US-sponsored coup). Like Chomsky said, after all, “You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, ‘I don’t like hurricanes,’ or ‘I don’t recognize hurricanes.’” And Russia’s defense of its legitimate security interests is the hurricane.
Right…?
And so it happened that the guy who wrote “A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad,” without bothering to ask any Ukrainians about what they think, somehow stumbled his way into taking the position that the best way to “end Ukrainian suffering” is for Ukraine to concede to remaining part of Russia’s privileged sphere of influence, to abandon, at last, any ambitions, paid for in blood, to pursue closer ties with the West, to federalize and give special status to the Russian proxies that have controlled Donbas since the Russian invasion in 2014, and to accept the annexation and russification of Crimea and whatever other territories, like Kherson, that Russia manages to hold onto.
…Right?
Would that Robinson understood a bit more clearly why Ukrainians might wish to avert such an outcome to this war. After all, Ukrainian history serves all too well as a quick reminder of why colonialism was not just bad, but monstrous.
