Ukraine, States and how we learn history

First off: no, there won't be any war over Ukraine. It didn't happen with North Korea, it didn't happen with Iran, and it won't happen now. We are just immersed in American propaganda (at least on our side of Europe), and USA is in the midst of manufacturing consent, as usual. But we can get rid of that, hopefully.

Let's see how.

First off, Ukraine.

If you followed the events of Russian invasion of Crimea/Donbass in 2014, you should already be aware of two things: – This is not the first time Russia threatens conflict along the border; – Ukraine already managed to repel Russia on its own.

Let's not be disingenuous: Russia has a propaganda machine of its own, and these recent moves definitely have some geopolitical purpose towards Ukraine, first and foremost to pressure them into not joining NATO/EU and keep Ukraine as close to the Kremlin as possible. An outright invasion would probably end up with Ukraine doing exactly one (if not both) those, so it would be geopolitically disadvantageous for Russia to just walk in.

Secondly, the conflicts of the past six years ultimately proved not only a huge failure for the Russian side (since they managed to take much less than their intended objective, and at a great cost), but also strengthened Ukrainian democracy by electing a governing body that went beyond the west/east cultural differences. All this was done without requiring USA intervention in the slightest. It was Ukrainian people arming themselves and fighting off Russian-funded separatists. On their own accord.

But why is USA worried NOW, then?

The United States are (and I hope everyone realized that by now) an empire. And like all empires, they mainly need two things: consensus and expansion. Both things hinge on having an enemy or being the target of a threat: that allows the empire's wars to be seen as just and “holy” (in fact, the Crusades powered by the Catholic Church were probably the most notable example of this dynamic).

Cuba, Vietnam, Koreas, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria: it happened multiple times in the last 70 years, and it always worked. The pattern should be clear by now. And given that USA are currently in the middle of a social (and climate) crisis, and their president is losing consensus after failing to deliver electoral promises such as student debt cancellation and Build Back Better policies, the one way to distract the citizens is, as usual, pointing them to a different enemy. Just as soon as their Military-Industrial Complex is receiving an increasing budget of more than 750 billion dollars and people are asking why are those money not being directed to solving the actual issues of the country (and possibly the entire world, given that the climate crisis could be tackled with half of that yearly expenditure.

So what's the problem with learning history?

History is, of course, violent. We all wish it wasn't, but wars and conflict happened (and happen) all the time. What I want to point your attention to, and I can't stress this enough, is not whether that conflict existed or not, but through what perspective we learn about it. Regardless of which corner of Europe or America you're reading this from, chances are that your public schools taught you history through a succession of events led by authorities or nations. So it's only natural that we're automatically interpreting every modern conflict as a head-to-head between personified countries, as if they were real people with clear, uniform objectives and opinions on the possession of land.

What this intrisically hides is every other conflict outside of war: people demanding well-being and representation, workers struggling for rights and citizens asking for easier lives out of poverty. After all, how does the average European or American citizen benefit from a war in Ukraine? Who makes that decision really, if not the small amount of people that are in charge and backed by industries and profits?

To prevent new war propaganda from invading our mental space, we need to re-learn how to read history. We need to use these attempts at swaying our minds to look up the history of the actual people that lived and live in those places in the last fifty or hundred years, and learn about their own conflicts, not their nation's. Nations are not people. People are people, and nothing else.