Narrated version
Mass intrahuman murder starts with a zero sum agrarian view of life: my gain must be your loss. All resources have been already divided and accounted for, borders have been drawn, might is right. There is no new wealth so we must fight over what there is if we want to turn around the hierarchical order of what we inherited from the past. The past trumps the present. With that false start, we use our language skills, developed to collaborate and bond and increase our odds of survival, to demonize each other instead. War is sinners punishing other sinners for sinning differently.
Since its founding, America was conceived as a new-world nation. The American revolution defied the system of imperial colonization and monocultural regime control that replicated agrarian patriarchies on cross-continental scales since Alexander the Great conquered three continents and merged Greek culture with local custom. Medieval humanity woke up to the reality that the earth was round and a vast mass of fertile land lay on the “other” side of the known, thus “civilized,” world. With America’s discovery, the world woke up to the mind-blowing reality of a vast, resource rich and energy independent, landmass on the other side of the known and divvied up world.
America was conceived as an enlightened nation, different from the old hierarchies that generations of us immigrants escaped. From its founding, America contradicted the old model of limited-resources, your-gain-is-my-loss, all-borders-have-been-drawn, god-given-right-to-rule nation. America changed human consciousness. The new nation inherited patriarchal injustices like slavery, female and indigenous oppression but ended them, at great cost to itself, one at a time. Then in the 20th century, America learned that if it put aside its founding principles and adopted the methods of the tyrannical bullies that ran the Old World, it could rule the world. In WWII, wars where the “theater” was an ocean away. America learned that by virtue of its size, diversity, state system and immigration-driven heterogeneity, it was better at world warring than other nations. Victory gave America global prestige and entry in the Great Powers club that ruled the world. What Woodrow Wilson had failed to achieve with ethics and ideas, Henry Truman achieved with military technology and atomic science. America, war-weary and war-fevered, fell into temptation in 1945, ushering humanity into the nuclear age. It’s been corrupted by patriarchal lust for power since. Being the leader of the world (more kindly called “maintaining world order”) has become America’s self-destructive addiction.
Since WWII, America has become addicted to proxy wars. It fights to sustain the feeling of global control that feeds its high, even though it is antithetical to its founding mission. Whether it’s North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Libya, Bosnia and Croatia, Columbia and El Salvador, Ukraine and Russia, the proxy allies and foes are culturally inscrutable to America so it depends on their leaders’ proclamations to pick a side. They have ancestral resentments and territorial or economic contests and make themselves the proxy to get help. America advertised itself as the safest, strongest, richest nation on earth every time it won another war. It’s a Faustian bargain.
I woke up today to this Reuters headline: Ukraine Says Russian Shackles Worse Than Missiles Six Months after Invasion. Of course, by “Ukraine,” Reuters means the government of current ruler Vladimir Zelensky, who said last Wednesday that “Ukraine was “reborn” when Russia invaded six months ago,” as he marked 31 years of independence from the Soviet Union with a vow to drive Russian forces out. As a gift for its Independence Day, President Biden gave Ukraine another billion dollars. And President Putin sent another 137,000 Russian troops into it.
Drama is addictive because it triggers our fear and awe. It turns out Game of Thrones is even more exciting when it’s “real.” Drama is more intense if we gain or lose, if we have a team to cheer and a villain to dread, even vicariously.
That is why, having just pulled out of a 20-year wasteful proxy war and nation building in Afghanistan, America turned around and enabled another proxy war. Three months after the awkward optics of withdrawal, America resumed its habit. When it's at war, it pounds its chest on the global mound and feels powerful: the dopamine release is exhilarating. That rush is why America, a nation that has never been invaded, keeps getting entangled in the fistfights of the Old World. America encourages the old addicts to act as its stand-ins so as to get weapons and dollars to keep fighting sectarian vendettas the old world has been addicted to for thousands of years.
America was supposed to absolve us from these ghosts of the brutal past. Millions like me came to America to be postnational. We risked privation and loneliness, humiliation and deracination to live in peace. But the heady action-reaction, tit-for-tat excitement of war grabs and keeps our attention on newsscreens where it’s readily monetizable so the corporate economy pays for the drug in exchange for the PR.
This is why we are spending US tax dollars to destroy Ukraine, missile strike by missile strike, and defend 31-year-old borders drawn by Soviet bureaucrats. We bloat our deficit and don’t care who will pay to rebuild Ukraine or how Europe’s relapse to ultranationalist, intragenerational hatred will end. Western war feels more real so the high is more intense.
Vladimir vs Vladimir
Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 after its population voted in a referendum. Ukraine became a democracy in name, and a kleptocracy in fact. Strongmen fought over the resources that had belonged to the communist state. Zelensky provoked invasion by shutting down the opposition press and arresting its owner who was his political rival and Putin’s associate. Putin went in to de-Zelensky Ukraine. That’s what “denazify” meant. But Zelensky, an actor, played a superb sacrificial martyr taking on our collective sins so we don’t all have to hang on the cross. America was hooked. In Zelensky’s nightly story, Ukraine is saving the rest of us from Russia’s imperial tanks, and America is saving Europe from the Nazis again. In both Vladimirs’ narratives, everyone acts a WWII part. Meanwhile the black market is getting flooded with cutting-edge weapons, people are getting killed and maimed, tortured and raped, and America is financing it.
America’s addiction to grandstanding on the global stage, even at risk of nuclear war (since the higher the stakes, the better the high), is how the old war is subsuming the new world and, with it, our hopes for a better future.