Good and Evil and the Russia-Ukraine War

Part I

Americans (and, perhaps, all human beings) seem to feel the need, when it comes to any collective conflict, to distinguish between “the good guys” and “the bad guys,” so they can know who to be for and who to be against.

The term “bad,” in this case, stands in for evil: “the bad guys” are evil-doers, just as “the good guys” are on the side of justice. The human compulsion to distinguish “the good guys” from “the bad guys” suggests that the human spirit, the mental energy that animates human aspiration, is inescapably moral.  

In the case of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US political-and-media establishment has absolved Americans from having to make up their own minds about which side qualifies as good and which as evil. The media-designated bad guys are clearly the Russians, led by Vladimir Putin, and the good guys the Ukrainians, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, and (reassuringly for Americans) the Americans, who support Zelensky and the Ukrainians. Putin is the aggressor, bent on expanding Russian territory, and Zelensky (along with his American supporters) the defender of “freedom and democracy.”

War itself is unquestionably (at least for most of us) evil, even when it is the last resort. But do the categories of “good guys” and “bad guys” really apply, when it comes to the activity of governments, whether in times of war or of peace? And does the good-guys-vs.-bad-guys paradigm serve to reveal or, alternatively, to conceal what the war in Ukraine is about?

The Amorality of Governments

Governments, unlike individual human beings, do not operate according to the rules of morality. Governments operate, instead, according to the rules of systemic self-interest. Whether any given government’s self-interest is good or evil, morally right or wrong, in any given case is incidental, as far as that government is concerned. If a government must lie, cheat, steal or kill in order to advance its self-interest, it will do so if it can get away with it, without regard for where its behavior falls on the moral spectrum between good and evil.

Which is not to say, of course, that governments don’t tell their own citizenries (and whoever else will listen) that their behavior is good and right, that they are on the side of the angels, whatever the particular conflict. And that opposing governments are devils who care nothing about right and wrong. But this is only because they must justify their behavior to their citizenries in order to acquire public support for that behavior. (This, of course, is called “propaganda,” in which every government engages.)

Governments, then, do not play by the same rules as individual human beings. The individual who pursues her or his or their own self-interest without regard for moral values is called a sociopath: one who, by definition, lacks conscience. And that is just the point: individual human beings (as a rule) possess conscience: the internal judge, absorbed via the influence of the authority figures (i.e., parents, guardians, religious leaders, school teachers, etc.) who shaped their sense of self-and-other during their formative years. Governments possess no such internal moral mechanism. And the process of individual advancement to governmental positions of power requires so many moral compromises that, once in position, elected government officials have been assimilated into the system, their consciences neutralized, conditioned to place amoral governmental self-interest before whatever individual morality they may once have possessed, or may still, under other circumstances, possess. (The few exceptions to this seem to prove the rule.)

None of this is to say that governments shouldn’t be judged by moral standards, but moral judgments are made by human beings on governments, not by governments on themselves. Except rhetorically, for public consumption, and the moral judgments governments make on themselves are always self-justifying; that is, unless so much time has passed that negative self-judgments, demanded by popular opinion, are required to stay in power. Moral standards determine the legitimacy of actions governments take in their own self-interest, but that is not to say that governments themselves have moral concerns. Their concern is that their actions be perceived as moral and, therefore, deemed legitimate by their own citizenries (to keep themselves in power) and, if possible, by the international community (to preserve their economic interests), both of which are, of course, in their own self-interest.

All of which is to say that because of the amorality of governments, government itself is, at best, a necessary evil. (Except for anarchists, for whom government is an unnecessary evil.) Which is to say that the only possibility for anything resembling “good government” is when governments are constantly being supervised, held accountable for their behavior, by their citizens, aka “democratic government” (of which precious few have ever existed, and none for long).

If governments operate by the rules not of morality but of self-interest, then, how can the legitimate self-interest of a government be determined in any given situation? How in the case of the Russian and Ukrainian governments, respectively, in the current crisis in Ukraine? And how in the case of the US government (USG), which is supplying weapons to the Ukrainian government?

Evaluating the Legitimacy of the US Government’s Self-Interest in Ukraine

In that the USG’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military preceded and has perpetuated the war (which, without US arms and advisors, would either never have started or have ended in surrender well before now), what is the USG’s self-interest in selling arms to the Ukrainian government (UG), as it is doing currently and has been doing, at least since 2014? And is that self-interest legitimate?

(It seems appropriate for me to begin not with the Russian or the Ukrainian government but with the US government because, as Noam Chomsky has observed, as a US citizen, I share with the rest of the American public the democratic responsibility for what my government does, not for what other governments do.)

The liberal argument is that the USG’s military support of Ukraine is humanitarian (presumably, then, not purely a matter of self-interest), in that Ukrainians would otherwise be left defenseless against a far more militarily powerful foe.

This humanitarian argument ignores, however, the USG’s support for governments that habitually and blatantly violate the human rights of their own citizens, as well as the citizens of other nations (not to mention the USG’s unhumanitarian—some would say, inhumane—refusal to provide its own citizens with affordable healthcare and housing and living-waged employment). Two of the most prominent (though far from the only) examples of egregious human-rights violating regimes armed by the USG are Saudi Arabia’s government (under the authoritarian MBS), which has long been beheading and, otherwise brutally repressing its own citizens (along with dismembering a dissident journalist in 2018) and is currently engaged (with the indispensable aid of the USG) in the virtual genocide of Yemeni citizens of all ages; and Israel’s government (under the authoritarian Netanyahu), which has long been oppressing its Palestinian citizens and militarily occupying, and periodically invading, their home in the Gaza Strip. What is the difference between the suffering and deaths of Saudis, Yemenis, and Palestinians (for all of which current USG aid makes the USG culpable), on one hand, and the suffering and deaths of Ukrainians (at the hands of Russians), on the other?

One cannot factually argue that the difference is “war crimes” on the part of the Russian military (notwithstanding the mainstream media’s habitual reporting as fact of alleged Russian responsibility for war crimes, while ignoring and obscuring the alternative possibility). The Yemeni and Palestinian homelands-turned-killing-fields have been littered with war crimes, as have all the USG invasions of foreign lands since WWII (including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq). None of this is, of course, to justify any wartime atrocity; it is simply to point out the illogic of using Russian “war crimes” to attribute the USG’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military to humanitarian concerns.

USG actions—military invasions, regime-change operations, drone warfare, economic sanctions and armament sales—have proven and continue to prove lethal for millions of human beings (mostly brown and black), who are every bit as human, and every bit as dead, as the unfortunate (white) victims of the war in Ukraine. The point of this comparison is not to undervalue or diminish the very real suffering and death this war has imposed on so many Ukrainian citizens, nor to absolve the Russian government (RG) of any responsibility. Once again, the point is to show that humanitarian concern cannot rationally be considered the motivation of the USG’s arms sales to the Ukrainian government (UG).

In view of this decided absence (in fact, opposite) of humanitarian concern in the USG’s affairs in other parts of the world, it’s much easier to explain the USG’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military in terms of its self-interest: the USG supports and arms those governments that cooperate with its economic and geopolitical (i.e., corporate) interests, regardless of how they treat their own citizens or their neighboring countries, and the USG opposes, threatens, and acts against those governments that refuse to cooperate with its interests, regardless of whether or not they pose a threat to US national security.

Moreover, as an alternative explanation to the liberal insistence on the humanitarian nature of the USG’s military support of the UG, the USG’s sale of arms to the UG is indisputably further enriching US arms manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, among the kings of the US military-industrial-complex. The USG ranks first in the world in the dealing of armaments to other nations, and war is always good for business. While these facts are never mentioned in the pronouncements of the US political class and the reporting and opining of the US media class, they nevertheless seem directly relevant and pertinent to the question of the USG’s self-interest in regard to the war in Ukraine.

Regarding the USG’s interest in arming the UG for war with the RG (for, let’s be clear, war is waged by governments, not by their citizenries, who serve as various forms of “cannon fodder”), another corporate interest that must be added to the enrichment of the US arms manufacturers that run the military-industrial-complex is the enrichment of the US liquid natural gas (LNG) manufacturers of the fossil-fuel industry. The nations of Europe, with Germany at the top, had been receiving 40% of their energy from Russia via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. The recently completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline was ready to double that amount, supplying affordable energy to virtually all of Europe and (unacceptably for the USG) expanding the cooperative economic relationship between Russia and Europe. But to punish the RG for its aggression, that deal has been cancelled, requiring European nations to purchase their LNG from the US, at economically and politically cost-prohibitive prices. (This is a perfect illustration of the function of NATO, as articulated by its first General Secretary in 1952: “to keep the Americans in, the Soviet Union out, and the Germans down”; just replace “the Soviet Union” with “Russia” and nothing has changed.)

The fact that humanitarian concern demonstrably plays no part in the USG’s arming of the UG against the RG should not surprise once the reality is acknowledged that the USG (like the UG and RG) is an amoral entity, operating strictly, like all governments, on the basis of its own perceived self-interest.

Be that as it may, the liberal argument is that the UG needs those arms to protect its own national security and independence, now being threatened by RG aggression.

Evaluating the Legitimacy of the Ukrainian Government’s Self-Interest

Regarding Ukrainian independence, or “sovereignty,” the events surrounding the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” coup and its aftermath call into question whether or not it actually exists.

First, the leaked 2014 call between then-US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Pyatt (available for all to hear online) reveals that the first replacement of Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted Ukrainian President, was hand-picked by the USG (subsequent Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk), the authenticity of the call never having been disputed by the USG. Nuland had already proudly revealed (in a 2013 speech available for all to see online) that the USG had sent some 5 billion dollars to support the opposition forces to Yanukovych (who was both democratically elected and corrupt, as Ukrainian politicians, and their counterparts throughout the political world, including in the US, typically are; the cause of the coup, however, was not his corruption but his unwillingness to eschew neutrality and align his government with NATO and against Russia).

Second, the video (available for all to see on YouTube) of the 2016 bipartisan congressional visit to Ukraine (by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar, none of whom was elected to represent the people of Ukraine)—shows the US politicians urging an assembly of Ukrainian soldiers to ready themselves to fight the Russians and win. Difficult to find clearer evidence that a Ukrainian war with Russia had been on the USG’s agenda since at least 2014 (which US politicians will now be happy, in the words of more than one former USG or NATO official, “to fight to the last Ukrainian”).

The question, then, is whether a government that was funded and installed by the USG, and has remained subservient to it thereafter (the quid of funding and arming one government by another never coming without a pro quo), can be called, in any real sense, “independent” or “sovereign.” In other contexts, it would be a called “a puppet government.”

Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine in a landslide vote in 2019 (opposing the reelection of the US-preferred anti-Russian Petro Poroshenko) on a peace platform, which committed to the fulfillment of the Minsk agreement of 2015, guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality (i.e., barring membership in NATO) and a degree of self-government (i.e., democracy) for the Russian-speaking then-Ukrainian cities, now-independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. With the mediation of representatives of the governments of France and Germany, both the UG and RG signed the agreement, which was nevertheless thereafter repudiated by the UG, Zelensky himself coming under threat of coup or death by Ukrainian Nazi elements if he sought to enforce that agreement.

The existence of Nazi forces in Ukraine is now denied or, failing that, minimized by the same US and European corporate media that reported the Nazi presence in and influence over the Ukrainian military in the years leading up to the war. (The fact that Nazis comprise a small percentage of the Ukrainian military and police does little to mitigate their outsized influence, due to their demonstrated willingness to use extreme violence against Ukrainian officials and civilians.) And why should it surprise that the USG, since 2014, has been arming and training a Ukrainian military that has indisputably incorporated Nazis into its ranks to fight Russians? The USG has a documented track record of supporting brutal Central and South American, Middle Eastern, Asian and African dictators who protect US corporate interests; and then there was the CIA’s arming of the Islamic fundamentalists who gathered in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s (and who, thereafter, became the Al Qaida of 9/11); and Nazi collaboration itself is not a USG innovation in that thousands of former Nazi scientists and intelligence officials were protected and recruited by the CIA after WWII for service in the anticommunist crusade of the Cold War.

In any case, whether Zelensky ever intended to fulfill the Minsk agreement may never be known; what is known is that he is now caught between, on one side, the Russian forces that are routing his military (contrary to corporate-media propaganda but, sooner or later, to become obvious) and will only withdraw if the provisions of Minsk are fulfilled; on his other side, the USG and the Nazi elements in his military are demanding that Zelensky rebuff the RG’s national security demands and prolong the agony of this war.

But why would the USG wish to prolong the war in Ukraine? (Besides to sell more arms to the UG, that is.)

The Not-So-Hidden USG Agenda

Indications of the USG agenda for Ukraine include, first, the previously referenced 2016 video of Senators McCain, Graham and Klobuchar promoting a Ukrainian war with Russia; second, the USG-requested report, released by the Pentagon think tank, the Rand Corporation, in 2019, that identified the arming and agitating of Ukraine against Russia as the foremost strategy for destabilizing the RG; third, the Zelensky interview with CNN in March, 2022, in which he said he’d been told by the US/NATO that Ukraine would not be officially admitted to NATO but that “publicly, the doors will remain open,” revealing that USG support for Ukraine’s membership in NATO was a ruse to force the RG’s hand; and fourth, the supposed Biden “gaff” concluding his March, 2022, speech in Poland that “Putin cannot remain in power.” These factors combine to leave little doubt that for years, and to this day, the USG’s agenda has been regime change in Russia and, therefore, that the war will continue, at least if the USG has its way, until that objective is achieved.

Another indication that regime change in Russia has been the USG’s agenda all along is the fact that the US political-and-media establishment’s demonization of Putin began long before February 24, 2022. It began, at least on the liberal political-and-media establishment side, with what came to be called “Russiagate”: the liberal establishment’s effort to blame Putin—rather than its own embrace of corporatism and militarism at the devastating expense of American workers—for the election of Donald Trump. After which the Democratic Party originated its own stolen-election conspiracy theory, which ran throughout the Trump presidency, resulting in the failed attempt to force Trump from office via impeachment on the grounds of a collusion with the RG for which the liberal-media-exalted Mueller investigation found no evidence. And this Keystone-Cops-like campaign by the Democratic Party establishment to reverse the legitimate (albeit misbegotten by the electoral college) election of Trump in 2016 was no more valid than the similarly bogus and bungling campaign by the Republican Party establishment to reverse the legitimate (if only slightly less misbegotten) election of Joe Biden in 2020. But ousting Trump wasn’t the point of Russiagate.

The objective of Russiagate (clearer and clearer in hindsight) was to instill in the hearts of (especially liberal) Americans a venomous hatred for Vladimir Putin, who, for teeth-gnashing liberals, will forever be unforgivably guilty of giving us Trump. And that seething hatred for Putin has easily morphed into an irrational (media-stoked) terror of Putin’s diabolical designs for the US. And this, so that when the time was right, he could be portrayed as the newest version of Hitler, based on his “absolutely unjustified invasion of Ukraine,” in order to justify the latest, and by far the grandest, US regime-change operation of them all.

While the Putin animus ignited and fueled by the US political-and-media establishment since the Trump election in 2016 has been manufacturing consent among the American public for regime change in Russia, Americans should ask themselves which ones, in the extensive track record of US regime-change operations, have improved either the condition of the regime-changed nation or the condition of the world. (As bad a guy as was Saddam Hussein, can anyone but the most unapologetic neoconservative claim that Iraq, or the Middle East, is better off than it would have been had Saddam remained in power? If so, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and the failed state in which surviving Iraqis currently reside would argue otherwise.)

In any case, given the years-long Russian-regime-change agenda of the USG, and the USG’s use of the UG to effect it, the question of the legitimacy of the UG’s self-interest is rendered moot: the ability of the UG to act in its own self-interest, whether legitimate or not, expired in 2014, when it was absorbed into the international self-interest of the USG.

Learning From USG History

The self-interest of the USG has always transcended the objectives of national security and independence. Even slave-owning founding fathers George Washington (who called the newly founded US “a nascent empire”) and Thomas Jefferson (who called the rapidly expanding US “an empire of liberty”) envisioned a destiny for the US (later called “Manifest Destiny,” at the deadly expense of the Native tribes) that would be exceptional.

After the Native genocide (unmitigated evil anyone?) and the conquest and annexation of northern Mexico secured as much continental land as was attainable for the nation, the USG’s self-interest led it offshore to Hawaii, to Cuba and Puerto Rico, to the Philippines, and downland to Central America and into South America, all becoming the locations of US military “interventions” and, in some cases, occupations.

With the end of WWII, the USG’s self-interest gradually subsumed the former British Empire under its economic supervision and turned its attention to the rest of the Third World, invading Korea and Vietnam and regime-changing Third-World nations (like Iran, in 1953; Guatemala, in 1954; Congo, in 1961; Indonesia, in 1965; Chile, in 1973; Haiti, in 1991 and 2004; Honduras, in 2009; Libya, in 2011; Bolivia, in 2019; and Pakistan, in 2022) via CIA-engineered coups and assassinations and no-confidence votes (not counting failed regime-change operations, for examples, in Cuba, in 1961; in Nicaragua, in the 1980s and since; in Venezuela, in 2002 and since; and in Syria, since 2011).

Having already secured the dependence, post-WWII, of Western Europe, economically via the Marshall Plan and militarily via NATO, the major obstacle to the USG’s international self-interest was the Soviet Union. (The USG had tried, along with a dozen other European capitalist governments, albeit unsuccessfully, to nip the Russian experiment with communism in the bud via invasion, from 1918 to 1920). Despite the fact that the USSR, whose military had proved decisive in defeating Nazi Germany, had lost 27 million, both soldiers and civilians, in WWII (as compared to fewer than 1 million US and UK casualties combined), the USSR was, nevertheless, put on notice—along with the rest of the world—by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the mushroom-cloud message was that the USG was now in charge of the post-WWII world. The subsequent Cold War (1949-1991) eventually de-revolutionized and, finally, bankrupted the Soviet Union into extinction.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USG engineered the rise to the Russian presidency of Boris Yeltsin, an anti-communist who welcomed US corporate interests into Russia, giving rise to the pillaging and plundering of the Russian economy by US capitalists and Russian oligarchs (and the accompanying drop of six years in Russian life expectancy). Yeltsin’s only drawback, as far as the USG was concerned, was that he was a drunk. But he had an extremely effective righthand man named Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official who knew how to get things done. (If Putin’s KGB background seems disqualifying for national leadership, one only need compare the KGB body count in the USSR with the massive Third-World body count of the CIA, and note that US President George H.W. Bush was himself a former CIA director; moreover, all US Presidents since JFK, whose assassination was arguably a CIA operation [documented persuasively by Oliver Stone’s “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass,” in 2021], have lived with an awareness that acting against the designs of the military-industrial-complex was to risk the same fate). Putin was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, approved by the USG in the belief that Putin would follow in Yeltsin’s footsteps sans Yeltsin’s drunken public relations liabilities. What the USG hadn’t counted on was that Putin would rebuild the Russian military and economy and assert Russian independence from the USG itself. Once Putin made his agenda clear, he found himself at the top of the USG’s blacklist of national leaders destined for Hitlerization and regime change. And this, because the USG’s agenda does not allow for any other government to assert its independence from its own international self-interest.   

All of which is to say that, unlike the unexceptional governments of the world, the USG’s self-interest would not be limited, either voluntarily or forcibly, to merely its own national security and independence: the USG’s self-interest (no matter which party or what president occupies the White House) extends to the international security of its military and economic supremacy, ensured by the military and economic dependence of all the governments of the world on itself, subsuming the self-interest of all other governments into and under its own.

The Unnecessary Evil of the USG

The understanding of government itself as a necessary evil is the indispensable moral framework for limiting the legitimacy of every government’s self-interest to the protection of its own national security and independence. Limiting the legitimacy of governmental self-interest in this way cannot make a government good, but it is the only way to limit the plethora of unnecessary evils that would otherwise be (and, indeed, have been) unleashed on the world.

That the USG conceives its legitimate self-interest as requiring that the national security and independence of all the nations of the earth be subsumed under its own international hegemony in the form of its rules-based “new world order”—for which the USG alone makes and enforces the rules—has necessitated that the USG become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Words spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr., one year to the day before his assassination.)  

Nevertheless, the standard liberal narrative is that Putin is “insane,” if not the devil incarnate, and must not be allowed to “win”; instead, he must be punished at all costs (by who else?), even if the cost is a nuclear apocalypse. This sentiment is the product of a USG propaganda that has crossed the border from rationality into utter madness.

(Next: “Good and Evil and the Russia-Ukraine War” Part II)