The horrific war in Ukraine is, in several senses, a lesson in imperialisms: classic versus new, formal versus informal, dumb versus smart. But it is also a general lesson in epistemologies, in the keys that we use to read the world, and their usefulness or otherwise. As such, they reveal intellectual, political, and moral bankruptcies.

The Follies of Discourse Theory in Practice

Once Russia invaded Ukraine, many seemed determined to deduce Russia’s war aims from its sentimental-ultranationalist folklore oriented toward the home front (and pleasing it) rather than examine Russia’s recent history, political economy, its position in the international arena of geopolitics and empire, and its concrete military-strategic approach to Ukraine. This choice, including by many on the Left, meant rejecting solid materialist analysis in favor of cheap discourse analysis, which happened to be in line with Western liberal state propaganda.

Those professionals who would rather look at what is being said instead of what is being done observed that Russian president Vladimir Putin had called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century and had questioned Ukraine’s status as an independent nation-state. They concluded that Russia was obviously not only about to swallow up all of Ukraine but is eventually going to attack the rest of the post-Soviet world, including non-NATO states like Georgia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan, and even NATO ones like the Baltic states and their Russian minorities.

The discourse analysts engaged in this kind of fearmongering and legitimization of Western militarization not only despite the obvious gap between alleged will and capability. They have kept spinning that narrative despite the additional and obvious contradiction that — much like the Russian historical record of (geo-)political interests and verbalized demands — the Russian military-strategic approach at the beginning of the war pointed to rather different war aims.

Few would set about to conquer a nation-state of, at the time, still forty-four million people and 233,000 square miles, which is almost twice the size of Germany, with 190,000 soldiers. By comparison, in 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland (which was comparatively smaller in size and population and much less well defended) with 1.5 million soldiers who were supported by air attacks conducted by almost nine hundred air-raiding bombers and more than four hundred fighter planes. When Germany started its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, it deployed three million soldiers, the largest invasion force assembled in world history, which nevertheless soon fortunately failed in its objectives.

For those whose idea it is to study history in real time instead of the real-time history of ideas (or, to be precise, propagandistic words), the Russian troop deployment underscored Russia’s war aims. Painting over domestic dissatisfactions was part of the story, but only part of it and, ironically, everyone who hates Putin and wants Russia’s regime to change would have had to embrace a politics of détente a long time ago in order to allow the internal contradictions to unfold. But beyond that: Putin sought to (1) enlarge and formally annex the mineral-rich Donbas as well as the future Russian oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia (for which new maps had already been printed), thus (2) establishing a land connection to Crimea, annexed in 2014, and, most notably, (3) effecting “regime change” in Kyiv, which would guarantee that Ukraine, torn apart between East and West, remains neutral and is not turned into an outpost of NATO and US empire.

But why take the time to engage with global and regional history, international political economy, imperialism theory, and war studies just to find oneself in the uncomfortable position of being at odds with the propaganda and power of Western liberal states and state media and their interests? It’s easier to follow and perpetuate the Holocaust-relativizing narrative that Putin is like Adolf Hitler, his war in Ukraine is a “war of annihilation” (as German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Berthold Kohler relativized Nazi Germany’s Eastern war of annihilation, which in less than four years killed twenty-seven million Soviets); that Russia plans to invade Europe; and that, unless Europe becomes “fit for war” and “prepared for war with Russia” by 2029, turning itself into an authoritarian garrison state, Russia will be conquering Poland and marching toward Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, as the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (a Green) predicts.

The same liberals who argue that Russia, despite its botched war effort in Ukraine, is omnipotent enough to attack NATO and conquer the EU are also the ones who have kept arguing that Russia is about to collapse any second and that Ukraine’s victory in the war is inevitable — trust us, it’ll take just one more round of Western weapons deliveries, massive gunpoint recruitment, and economic drafting of Ukrainian working-class youth.

But let us return to epistemologies, the keys to understanding. For some offer “analyses” of the shift of US foreign policy from Joe Biden to Donald Trump and the ongoing clash between the Trump administration and Zelensky in terms of references to personal ideology, individual will, and even irrational personalities, characterized by childish stubbornness, narcissistic vanity, and egoism.

In one example of many, Katrin Eigendorf, senior international correspondent and Eastern Europe war correspondent at German national television station ZDF, who is followed by close to 70,000 people and who probably, like 99 percent of the liberal commentariat did not watch the entire forty-nine minutes, stated that “rarely had Trump and [J. D.] Vance shown so clearly who their friend and who their enemy is.” According to Eigendorf’s posting, shared 400 times and liked a quarter of ten thousand, “the US president is Putin’s man who is adopting his lies.” Such readings are intellectually vapid returns to early-nineteenth-century Great Man theories of history.

So, how do we find ourselves after Friday’s staged Oval Office clash between Trump/Vance and Zelensky? There, Trump catered to his MAGA base and Americans more generally, Zelensky catered to his ultranationalist base, which may still kill him, and especially the Europeans luring them into prolonging the forlorn proxy war forcefully recruiting the Ukrainian working class and senselessly butchering both it and the Russian one.

But some refused to see that Trump was doing just this. The most ludicrous liberal takes readily blamed the US president’s move — i.e., the colonial exploitation of Ukraine at this historic juncture of geopolitical rivalry, state formation, and war — on Putin, i.e., the leader of a country with an economy the size of Italy, “having the United States in his pocket.” In other words, analytically liberals let the tail wag the dog while politically still barking up the wrong tree — and doing so in the dumbest kind of binary reductionism imaginable.

No matter how intellectually self-defeating these arguments were, they spread wildly across social media. From Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook to Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, hashtags trending internationally included #TrumpIsARussianAsset#TrumpIsANationalDisgrace, #PutinsPuppet, and #PutinsPuppets — showcasing the superiority of Western idiots over Russian bots.

Needless to say, liberals (including those who fancy themselves as left-wing or even Marxists) are shifting in this direction not simply because they have publicly declared intellectual bankruptcy. (Which they have — and for which we should hold them accountable. Because if anything comes out of this horrific bloodshed, it should be a paradigm shift back toward historic and materialist analysis in order to prevent the Ukrainian tragedy from being repeated as farce in some other proxy war).

Yes, liberals actually think like this. Worse, they continue to do so now despite glaring evidence to the contrary, because they have either followed their own imperial states’ propaganda or surrendered to its disciplinary power to a degree where they seek to postpone the inevitable moment of truth. Diving deeper into a world of pathological delusion is their way of not having to admit that they erred politically, and morally, as ever more lives were forcefully thrown into the meat grinder. This refusal is their way of not having to face up to a complete redoing of their academic education (which could lead to an epistemology capable of explaining the reality of war) and thus overhauling the way they make sense of the world.

Instead, liberal leftists double down. As much as they promote diversity and nonbinary thinking, the newest trend is a ridiculous form of binary reductionism. The same kind of liberals who are most outspoken against Trump dismantling DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) apparently cannot live without a world of black and white.

It amounts to nothing short of the infantilization and de-politicization of politics, removed from any basis in society. It operates by an old logic, of my enemy’s enemy is my friend:

We are against the far right, the far right is (or appears to be) against the EU, so we are for the EU.

We are against the far right, the far right is against Kamala Harris, so we are for Kamala Harris.

We are against Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government is against Hamas, so we are for the genocidal Netanyahu government.

We are against Donald Trump, Trump insults Zelensky, so we — #IStandWithUkraine — are for Zelensky, even if he has his people forcibly recruited for a lost war.

We are against Trump, Trump — because he and Biden have already won everything that there was to be won short of a nuclear World War III — wants to end the unwinnable war through negotiations, so we are against negotiations and in favor of continuing the war.

And now we (the very same people who prevent our children from playing cowboys and Indians, who teach them that masculinity is toxic and who train them to verbalize things instead of roughing each other up) also empower the EU to sacrifice the European welfare states and democracies on the altar of war-producers like Rheinmetall, Thales, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. By the end of the decade, this “liberalism” will help ensure we are ruled not just by President Trump and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but also by President Marine Le Pen, Prime Minister Geert Wilders, Chancellor Alice Weidel, and Interior Minister Björn Höcke.