The World Order Turns on Ukraine
The invasion of Ukraine in 2014 marked the beginning of a global era marked by rising fascism and crimes against humanity. The most recent invasion may spell the end of it.
Excerpt from The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
The invasion of Ukraine has made it increasingly clear that an era has ended.
Frustrated that he did not achieve the quick victory he planned, two weeks into the invasion when this book went to press, Putin had taken to bombing hospitals, schools, apartments, and humanitarian corridors. The tactics appeared shocking to many, but they were all too familiar to anyone who tracked his starvation and obliteration of Syrian cities. And they were strikingly reminiscent of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. These sorts of crimes against humanity came to signify the brief historical period through which humanity just passed, but the effort to wipe a midsize moderately developed democracy off the map marks a significant escalation in violence. Still, the main difference this time lies less in the escalation of violence and more in the global response.
The moment Putin invaded Ukraine has come to be characterized as a major historical turning point, but the true nature of the era that ended has been almost entirely obscured by our denial of its crimes against humanity. The epoch that is dawning has come to be viewed as a moment of rising fascism and escalating violence as a result of this denial. But really it should be seen as the moment the world banded together to stop it. In terms of the international order it represents, it is a moment of ascendant liberal internationalism, built on a solid foundation of increasingly lasting institutions, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. And they now appear stronger than at perhaps any point in their history, the Cold War included. What should be clear is that we have entered a new historical epoch, and the forces that brought it into being cannot be understood without comprehending what came before.
The only problem is that we will never be able to comprehend what came before without grappling with our denial of its mass atrocities.
This book explores the atrocities, and the collective traumas they generated, that took place during a brief window of history that began with Putin’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and ended with his invasion of the whole of Ukraine in 2022. It was a period marked by rising rightwing nationalism and fascism in every major region of the world. And it was an historical moment in which the free world, as the union of advanced democracies came to be known in the Cold War, fumbled with a response. Viewed in this light, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 did not mark the slide into a dark new age of interstate war but rather the moment the world finally woke up to its metastasizing fascism and decided to fight back.
Putin’s invasion of the Crimea in 2014 was arguably the first in a long train of events that culminated in the rise of globalized fascism. So, it is surprising that it is so rarely identified as the precipitating cause. Yet, a brief examination of the events that followed and the full scale invasion of Ukraine that just got underway as this book was going to press should lead us to reconsider its significance. There is no greater violation of the current international order than the theft of territories from other states. That’s because the territorial integrity of states has long been integral to the international system of states. It has served as a source of stability in a world of ever shifting identities, where each new allegiance risked tilting another state to war. It legitimated the end of European colonialism in the late twentieth century, and it has served as the basis of countless peace treaties keeping the horrors of war at bay. If land grabs based on the claims of former empires were to become normalized, countless big states would immediately arm themselves for the conquest of their smaller neighbors. In this way, allowing such land grabs to occur without serious consequence would have unleashed dangerous forces—which is precisely what followed the annexation of the Crimea.
After taking the Crimea in the winter of 2014, Putin initiated a war in Eastern Ukraine that would see the establishment of two breakaway republics closely allied to Russia. It was arguably the first time a major state had stolen such significant pieces of territory from another in generations, and Putin’s ability to get away with it without serious consequences signaled the start of a new multipolar world order. All of a sudden, naked land grabs could be carried out with little more than slap-on-the-wrist sanctions. Suddenly, after years of foreign policy analysts warning of the chaos of a coming multipolar order, in which several major states would fight over power vacuums in every major region of the world, the boundaries of the liberal democratic world order were about to be tested.
The next domino to fall was Libya, where a democratic transition had been taking place since the fall of Gaddafi in 2011. By springtime, what had appeared the site of a successful humanitarian intervention, which had remained largely peaceful since Gaddafi’s fall, would rapidly slide into civil war. At about this same time, in a sort of final gasp of the old order, the United Nations initiated its last major peacekeeping mission to prevent the Central African Republic from descending into what many suggested might have become a genocide. Shortly thereafter, a seemingly post-apocalyptic religious cult dubbing itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria would take Mosul, a major city in Iraq, and threaten the capital of Baghdad. Then Isis would begin its gradual spread across the Sahel of Africa into Nigeria and eventually Mali, where a successful young democracy would soon be broken. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China would quietly begin laying the groundwork for a genocide of its Muslim Uyghurs.
It was an astonishing train of events to occur in just a few short months. Yet, what first appeared as isolated episodes of violence would soon culminate in a dramatic degeneration of our very idea of how we imagined the world to work.
Before the world could catch its breath, following a three week buildup of tensions with Hamas, Israel began raining down bombs on Gaza in a campaign that ultimately saw 245 Gazan civilians killed for every Israeli civilian killed. And just after it ended in late July, Isis trapped tens of thousands of Yezidis on a small mountain range, where they were threatened with genocide if they did not convert to Islam. While Isis succeeded in kidnapping 6,000 Yezidi women and girls, and continued terrorizing the region for several years to come, their genocide was stopped in its tracks through a partnership between the Kurdish PKK, a formerly communist militia still listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization, and the world’s preeminent capitalist state. It was arguably the first time that a genocide had been stopped through military force in the modern era just as it was getting off the ground—but Humpty Dumpty had fallen off a cliff and it was going to be some time before he might be put back together.
This essay is an excerpt from The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
It was a summer characterized by simmering anger felt across the world as much for the violence that was being unleashed as the hatred it was stirring up on social media. Suddenly, millions of people from across the world found themselves immersed in these wars on social media, as we got our first exposure to troll armies, advertised beheadings, disinformation campaigns, and personal pleas from refugees. But it was not simply the kind of passive exposure that Americans experienced on their television screens in Vietnam. Rather, we were advocates, who identified with the victims, whom many of us were befriending on social media—and we were being traumatized from the other side of the world. Meanwhile, the traumas we were experiencing were animating our responses to our own increasingly polarized political debates back home.
Suddenly, domestic political events were being imbued with a sense of aggression typically reserved for war—and it was happening all over the world. Yet, even the most incisive political commentators seemed oblivious to the impact of these collective traumas on our conceptions of the world. And just about everybody missed the larger pattern of increasing crimes against humanity. Instead, social discord was variously blamed on social media and inequality while the global pattern of abuses was almost wholly apprehended in fragments or else through domestic lenses. Even the first edition of this book would treat these collective traumas as just one contributing factor to the rise of rightwing nationalism and fascism. Meanwhile, my book The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy that followed it focused not on the role of collective trauma in shattering our conception of a peaceful world order but rather the role of globalization in generating an overwhelming sense of complexity from which all too many people were retreating.
It was not as if these diagnoses were wrong, only they missed the dramatic reconceptualization of the world that was taking place in the midst of these unusually visible outbreaks of violence—and the vividness of the violence was key. Amid this geopolitical turmoil, the Assad regime was engaging in a long series of crimes against humanity, which would see large portions of every major Syrian city reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of political prisoners tortured to death. The United States entered Syria in pursuit of Isis in the fall of 2014, but they did so quietly in pursuit of a group that was universally loathed. Russia entered Syria in the fall of 2015 with an aerial bombardment campaign that would level most of its big cities. In much the same way, Saudi Arabia entered Yemen in the spring of 2015, with American and British arms and logistical support, in what would culminate in a condition which for several years running was generally acknowledged to be “the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe.”
Suddenly, an era had ended, which Steven Pinker had dubbed the most peaceful in human history, in perhaps the most thoroughly researched book on violence in generations—and the body counts were mounting.
What followed was a long train of rightwing nationalists and fascists being elected to states in every major region of the world. The first was India’s Narendra Modi, who was elected in the spring of 2014—in spite of having overseen a pogrom that killed thousands of Muslims about a decade previously. Next to be elected would be the Philippines Roderigo Duterte, who would oversee at least 12,000 extrajudicial killings in his so-called “war on drugs,” while threatening to kill millions more. Later, in the summer of 2016, in what was widely hailed as a racist campaign, bankrolled by Russian oligarchs, and infused with disinformation, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. As fall rolled around, Putin would interfere again in the American presidential election that brought Trump to power. And just as his disinformation campaign around an illegally hacked tranche of emails was taking Clinton from an 8-10 point lead to a dead heat in the two weeks preceding the election, Burma began its ethnic cleansing of Rohingya, which would take off once he was elected. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2017, with Trump securely in office, China started its mass arrests of Uyghurs, which ultimately saw at least a million placed in concentration camps. Amid the election of fascists and these crimes against humanity, Vladimir Putin oversaw disinformation campaigns aimed at subverting elections in dozens of states, according to the German Marshall Fund.
It was a full on fascist assault on a relatively peaceful world order, and almost everyone seemed to be sleepwalking into oblivion.
Taking stock of this astonishing history in the making, Putin stands out for continually seeking to gain political advantage by sowing chaos and subverting democracies with the aim of ushering in a more brutal authoritarian order. Putin also profited immensely by selling arms to aspiring authoritarian regimes, manufacturing conflicts through dehumanizing disinformation, and then supplying the needed for them to carry out their crimes against humanity. He continually claimed a right to former imperial possessions in the so-called “Russian sphere of influence” at an historical moment in which no other major state was claiming such rights over their former empires—not France, not Spain, not Britain, not Turkey, not Portugal, not rising powers like India and China, and not even the United States, which had long claimed the right to intervene in anything that happened in Latin America but was mostly leaving its democratic states to their own devices by 2014.
Of course, it was also an era in which multiple bad actors committed their own crimes against humanity. In fact, it was only with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that a narrative might have emerged placing Putin at the center of the story. The only states with clean hands during this transitional period were too small to play a major part in shaping it, after all. Meanwhile, for several years running, the decisive factor in the global rise of rightwing nationalism and fascism seemed to be Donald Trump, who at the head of the most powerful state served as an inspiration for elected fascists the world over. Meanwhile, many Syria watchers mark the start of the era with Obama’s failure to enforce his redline against Assad’s use of chemical weapons in the summer of 2013.
Whatever the moment the exact era began, and whatever the ultimate causes of so many rightwing nationalists and fascists coming to power, the astonishing infection rates and death counts under leaders like Trump, Modi, Putin, and Bolsonaro would tear the mask off of their nihilism, and thereby lead to a rapid decline in their bases of support. It was not simply their erratic responses to the pandemic and their disregard for public health that angered their nations. Rightwing nationalist and fascist extremists prolonged the epidemic and infected millions through their defiance of basic safety measures like masking, social distancing, and vaccinating. Millions across the world arguably died as a result, and it was not lost on the countless people whose lives they risked and family members they helped kill.
In this way, the birth of this new era is not a period of fascist ascent but rather the moment in which it is crashing and burning.
Nevertheless, Putin’s persistent threats of nuclear annihilation, coupled with his attack on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant that might have made large swathes of Europe uninhabitable, should remind us that the new era will come replete with its own potential holocausts whose dangers all too many of us will be tempted to deny. There is only so much that can be said about the opening of a new era of history when so much of it is dependent on countless human choices, but the coming era may prove even harder to predict when a mere flick of the finger might burn the world to ash.
For the past eight years, Putin has been a persistent force in the degeneration of a peaceful world order. Yet, this book is not about Putin, nor is it about geopolitics. It is not even about the crimes against humanity that broke out in the summer of hate, following Putin’s theft of the Crimea. Rather, it is about the collective traumas, and the anxieties they unleashed in this period, and the way they transformed our very idea of the world. The crimes against humanity were indicative of a degeneration in the global order of states, but they also transformed the way we imagined the world to work—and it is here where the book shines a light into a previously dark corner. Suddenly, we came to see enemies all around us, as we steeled ourselves for battle. The crimes against humanity and the degeneration of the world order from which they sprang exacerbated our insecurities and anxieties about the future of the world. But they also highlighted the dangers of denial in perpetuating crimes against humanity.
It is to these crimes against humanity, the collective traumas they generated, their impact on our conceptions of the world, and the transformations that might occur through facing up to their consequences that we now turn.