Alexander Zevin, New Left Review:
This bravado extends to the culture industry at large, where signs abound of a moment akin to that which followed 9/11, when renaming French Fries occupied the dead time between Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. Then as now, to set the attack in context was to excuse it; and there is the rush to do something, which takes a certain pride in not having thought through the consequences.
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The result is somewhere between war as the health of the state and war as self-care – with ballerinas, pianists, painters and scientists disinvited from fellowships or shows, against blue and yellow banners and emojis, at no cost to Americans doing it. Warner Brothers will deny Russian teenagers Batman, Twitch will stop paying them to play video games online, Facebook will allow some users to call for their deaths.
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The largest cohort – the DSA and Squad left, writers for Jacobin, Dissent, Jewish Currents, The Intercept, and other smaller publications – lies somewhere in between. Their positions differ only by degree and nuance from the State Department line: against broad sanctions, most also object to pouring arms into Ukraine. But their stance is basically defensive, trumpeting their condemnation of Russia rather than criticising Biden or NATO, in part to pre-empt accusations of ‘tankiness’. DSA’s initial statement was meandering and vague, though Democrats lined up to disavow it anyway. AOC, whose star it helped to launch, issued a communiqué a few days later, topping off a denunciation of ‘Putin and his oligarchs’ by insisting that ‘any military action must take place with Congressional approval’. As a rallying cry, this one – in effect, ‘no war of annihilation without congressional approval’ – leaves something to be desired.
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Within days, Washington rolled out measures to induce a socioeconomic crisis of ordinary savers and earners, while leaving the rich relatively unscathed. ‘We are going to cause the collapse of the Russian economy’, explained France’s finance minister, matter-of-factly. Closer readings of books by two architects of the modern sanctions regime, Juan Zarate under Bush and Richard Nephew under Obama, might have cleared up some illusions about their purpose. Iranification is the order of the day, not sanctions with a social democratic twist.
