Publishing in Russia Today, Assange, and Universal Critique

AM I NOW ASHAMED OF ONCE PUBLISHING IN RUSSIA TODAY?

No, absolutely not! Here is the main reason. While our attention was focused on the Ukrainian war, a news item went largely unnoticed. On April 20, 2022, Julian Assange moved one step closer to being extradited to the U.S., to be tried under the Espionage Act. A London court issued a formal extradition order in a hearing, leaving UK Home Secretary Priti Patel (who proposed sending refugees who arrived in the UK to Rwanda) to rubber-stamp his transfer to the U.S. If convicted, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison. So yes, we should fully support Ukrainian resistance, and yes, we should defend Western freedoms—imagine what would have happened to Chelsea Manning if she were a Russian! But our Western freedom also has limits, and we should never lose sight of its boundaries, especially in moments like these.

People are demanding that Putin be brought to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to be tried for Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Okay, but how can the U.S. make this demand while refusing to be a member of the ICC? And, to add insult to injury: How can the U.S. demand the extradition of Assange to the U.S. when he is neither an American citizen nor was he involved in spying on the U.S.? All Assange did was make U.S. war crimes public. Recall, for example, the famous video clip of U.S. snipers killing Iraqi civilians. Assange could receive 175 years in prison for simply disclosing indisputable U.S. crimes, which are not even inclusive of the long list of crimes committed by U.S. presidents! If Putin belongs at the Hague, why not also Assange? Why not George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld (who is already dead) for the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad?

It appears to be a weird reversal of the well-known motto “act globally, think locally.” This contradiction was best exemplified in 2003 by the two-sided pressure the U.S. exerted on Serbia. U.S. representatives simultaneously demanded the Serbian government deliver suspected war criminals to the ICC and sign a bilateral treaty with the U.S. that would forbid Serbia from delivering U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity to any international institution (i.e., to the SAME Hague court). No wonder the Serb reaction is one of perplexed fury.

There were topics—not only Assange, but also the weaknesses of liberal democracy, Israeli apartheid politics in the West Bank, the aberrations of Political Correctness—that I frankly was only able to publish in English in Russia Today. If I were to publish on a marginal site in the West, the texts would have had limited impact. We have more freedom in the liberal West, but that’s why prohibitions are all the more conspicuous. Western democracies also have their dirty side, and their own types of censorship, so the Left has the full right to ruthlessly play one superpower against the other. What I wrote for Russia Today and what I am now writing, about my full support of Ukraine, are part of the same struggle—in the same way that there is no “contradiction” between the struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle against what Israel is doing in the West Bank with Palestinians. If we see Ukraine and Assange as a choice, we are lost; we already sold our soul to the devil.

Such a common struggle is not a utopia; what makes it necessary is the deep interconnection of different forms of extreme suffering. In a memorable passage in Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, Ruth Klüger describes a conversation with “some advanced PhD candidates” in Germany:

… one reports how in Jerusalem he made the acquaintance of an old Hungarian Jew who was a survivor of Auschwitz, and yet this man cursed the Arabs and held them all in contempt. How can someone who comes from Auschwitz talk like that? the German asks. I get into the act and argue, perhaps more hotly than need be. What did he expect? Auschwitz was no instructional institution … You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my voice rising, and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for? They were the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable.

In short, the extreme horror of Auschwitz did not make it into a place that purified surviving victims into ethical non-egotistical subjects. On the contrary, part of the horror of Auschwitz was that it also dehumanized many of its victims, transforming them into brutal insensitive survivors unable to make balanced or ethical judgments. The lesson to be drawn here is a sad one: We have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to clear the mess and open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. Or, as Arthur Koestler, the great anti-Communist convert, put it concisely: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”

NOW is the time to insist on equal treatment and to address the same critical questions to Russia and to the West. We are all Ukrainians in the sense that every nation has the right to defend itself like Ukraine.