Fuck the “Putin Warned Ukraine not to Join NATO” excuse
Whenever I read some news on the whole WW3 situation, inevitably some commenter pops up who says something like this:
“Putin warned Ukraine not to join NATO; the West brought this invasion on by getting too involved with Ukraine. Russia has the right to defend themselves from military alliances that threaten them.”
Now.. there are so many reasons why this is wrong (not least of which, most people in Ukraine didn’t even want to join NATO until after Russia invaded in 2014 implying, Putin’s primary motivation is control over Ukraine and the whole NATO thing is an excuse.) However, even if that wasn’t true…
Ukraine is a sovereign nation that gets to choose their own alliances. That’s how “sovereignty” works!
This quote keeps coming up for me from the book Why Do They Kill? about why a man — John — felt no guilt after killing his wife Debra:
John said he’d told Debra before they were married that he would kill her if she ever left him or became involved with another man. He added that he had often reminded Debra of this… John stressed that no one could have talked him out of [killing her] since “I was convinced and felt morally in the right. And I’d gone to great lengths to explain the situation to Debra. That’s why there’s no feelings of guilt or remorse or anything.”
Why do They Kill? By David Adams, p 168 (Note: Amazon Affiliate link¹)
Just because you tell someone that if they do something, you’ll take punitive action against them doesn’t make your action justified. A man is *never* justified in killing a woman who wanted to divorce him, and telling her in advance “if you divorce me, I’ll kill you” doesn’t magically make it ok.
At the end of the day, it is a human right to be able to decide who you are married to. No one gets to take that away from you, ever. No one gets to declare “you divorced me, so it’s my right to kill you.”
The idea that one person gets to dictate another person’s marriage is a violation of the fundamental human agency; we need to create a world where people have the right to choose their own destiny. If jealous men are given the right to prevent their wives from divorcing them, those women are effectively domestic prisoners. They are deprived of the agency that is their birthright.
Similarly, Putin doesn’t just get to declare that he has a right to dominate Ukraine; Ukraine has a right to decide who they do business with, and who they ally with. And, why the fuck would they want to ally with Russia? Russia’s been invading them and annexing their land for almost a decade; of course Ukraine wants to ally with people who are going to respect their borders. This is just common sense; Russia could have been Ukraine’s closest ally, but decided to treat them like shit instead.
I mean… imagine if the US said “Russia having nuclear weapons is a threat to us. We’re going to just do a few ‘special operations’ in their land to deactivate those weapons.” Like, do you think Russia would be like “that makes sense, those nukes are pretty dangerous. Fair enough!”
Absolutely not! That would 100% be seen as an act of war.
At the end of the day, Russia was much more dangerous to Ukraine than Ukraine was to Russia — as we are obviously seeing now.
But this type of hypocrisy, this type of one way risk taking that leads to the “powerful” justifying control over the “less powerful” is fairly common mental practice. What just boggles my mind though, is how many people seem to think it is ok? Like… no, fuck that. The end result of this mindset is a deeply hierarchical society, where the tiny percentage of people at the top get to completely control the lives of everyone else.
At an extreme end, we’d see things like, people not being able to quit their jobs because their bosses (with more power) would be able to kill them, people not being able to protest government corruption because the governments would just “disappear” them. Normal people would lose all bargaining power, and would be completely at the mercy of the rich, the oligarchs, and the politicians. Frankly, we’re already too far in that direction already; but replacing a democracy with a dictatorship because the neighboring dictatorship was offended by it?
That’s messed up.
¹ I’m experimenting with Amazon affiliate links, to see if eventually I can have more time to write without full time work. I’m trying to primarily use them in areas where I would have organically quoted and linked to the book anyway.
