When two million refugees are in flight and tens of millions more are fighting for their freedom or living with the fear of death, now is not the ideal moment to cry “white privilege”. Human suffering is not a competition. But if you insist on organising an oppression Olympics, I suspect you will find the average Ukrainian suffers more than the average leftish commentator.
My survey of distinctly average writing generated by Putin’s invasion included: “the outpouring of support for white Ukrainians while ignoring or even impeding Africans’ escape from the conflict is clearly rooted in white supremacy” (HuffPost). “The warm welcome accorded to white Ukrainian refugees by Ukraine’s neighbours in the European Union is in sharp contrast to the hostile reception experienced by people of other races” (Al Jazeera). “Multiple reporters have been lambasted for implying that it’s unfathomable that conflict of this degree could happen to ‘normal’, ‘civilised people’ from Europe” (HuffPost again).
Human rights are universal or they are nothing. And it is both true and deplorable that European sympathy for Ukrainians is greater than sympathy for Syrians fleeing another Russian war, Afghans living in terror after the West cut and run, the Rohingya, the Eritreans, and the Uighurs.
“Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” reads the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. Its terms do not appear to apply in Europe.
However badly written they are, the accusations of racism contain more than a grain of truth. They feel so crass and sound so discordant, however, because they come from a US political culture, whose primary concern is, naturally, American slavery and its consequences. If its inhabitants understood the horror of European history, they would be a little less certain that racism always means the oppression of people of colour.
American bias is a reminder that people care most about those closest to them. We also fear direct threats more than distant conflicts, and from the Atlantic to Belarus, Europeans are now in fear of Russian power. It is also worth remembering, or educating yourself if you do not know, that Ukraine is at the heart of the region the historian Timothy Snyder christened the “Bloodlands”. In the last 120 years, it has seen Tsarist pogroms, the First World War, the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Leninist terror, the Stalinist terror, the great famine, the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust and Second World War, the return of the Soviets, the stagnation and oppression of late communism, and the invasions by Putin’s forces of 2014 and 2022. Many words describe Ukrainian history. “Privileged” is not one of them, and “civilised” and “normal” do not make the cut either.
I am writing this piece for a British readership largely descended from refugees – perhaps from refugees from what is now Ukraine. We can say with shame and astonishment that the UK government absolutely opposes racial double standards. The Home Office has no time for white privilege. It bars Ukrainians from entering the country as surely as it bars asylum seekers of every other colour. We have a government that welcomes Russian billionaires, who gave sustenance to a regime that has persecuted the peoples of Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Belarus and Ukraine, and crushed the freedoms of the Russian people too, but throws up every bureaucratic obstacle its calculating ministers can devise to stop the victims of Putin’s persecution finding sanctuary.
No one is more dogmatic than ideologues who refuse to acknowledge the shock of the new. The Russian invasion has brought a revolution in public affairs from Berlin to Tokyo. But for some it might as well never have happened. No blow, however calamitous, can shake them out of the insistence that the bee that buzzed in their bonnet did not buzz in vain.
The woke simply fit it into their existing worldview and carry on woking. The anti-woke carry on bemoaning, in the words of the Sunday Times columnist Matthew Syed, a decadent culture that argued about whether “the word curry amounts to cultural appropriation,” while Putin built his power. (A culture war about curry? Seriously? When was that, then, and how did so many of us miss it?)
For people who think of themselves as leftists and for Jews worried about the revival of antisemitism, the failure to understand the change in the world is negligent in the extreme.
It has shaken the extreme right and destroyed its assumptions. Putin was praised by neo-fascist groups, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and far-right leaders across Europe because he led a dictatorial white, Christian power. They saw him as a defender of the nation-state, who hated the EU in particular and globalism in general.
As they destroy the largely white and Orthodox Christian nation of Ukraine, Russian troops are destroying the myths that sustained the radical right as surely as they are destroying the stupid notion that whites form a privileged homogenous block. We are in a new world now, and we will not be able to shape it unless we shake off our dogmas and try to understand it.
