You might think that the problem in Ukraine is the same as the problem in Israel, in the sense that at the local level, these are civil war where one side is trying to push the other out of the country. Could the same circumstances provoke civil war in the UK?
Situations get out of control when, within the one state, a people are divided linguistically, religiously, culturally, along some fundamental line of cleavage, and the sides become intolerant of each other.
So you get to thinking that genocide, ethnic cleansing, deportation ... call it what what you want ...but basically the creation of a second state for one of the two sides to flee to and seek refuge in; or alternatively keep the minority for manual work, but suppress all their civil rights.
The appliction of this logic leads to:
- Bombing or secession of the Eastern provinces of Ukraine
- The two-state solution for Israel or an apartheid state
- And maybe a Homeland for the Hindus or the Sikhs or I don't know what in the UK... a Homeland for the British!
But maybe this is wrong thinking, because the problem is not that the two cultures are irreconcilable, it is that the government has failed to integrate them.
And the case that proves this is actually Russia, because Russia is made up of five different ethnicities (at least, the neocon plan was to break the RF up into five statelets and pillage its abundant resources). But reality is that the Russian government has avoided civil war and all the different and diverse ethnicities are integrated into the Russian motherland.
The best example of this being Chechnya. We remember two facts at the same time : one is the Islamic insurgency or Sunni Jihad, which resulted in Grozny being flattened ; and the second is the outstanding contribution the Chechnyans have made to the war in Ukraine.
So really instead of seeking two-state solutions, with the country diminishing itself geopolitically and economically, perhaps we should ask why Kiev and Tel Aviv failed to integrate the Russian speakers and the Muslims respectively and respectfully. And that would be a useful lesson for our own troubles in France and the UK.
Incidentally, the West does not understand this "talking point" at all. The West thinks that Russia has imperial ambitions and Putin is a monster. It thinks Kiev's bombing the Russian-speakers in the east from 2014 was Russia's pretext for its invasion, but it wasn't a pretext at all it was a provocation, it was what provoked the "unprovoked" invasion and diabolising Putin sets everyone's emotions on edge when cooler, calculating, Russian heads are prevailing.
Western government sources would have us believe the war in Ukraine began on 24 Febraury 2022 and in Gaza on 7th October 2023.
In reality, it seems to be a problem of different identities unable to find their place within one National Identity. At the base of a successful integration is nationalism, a strong sense of common belonging, nuanced by recognising local differences or identities, of being Russian before all else, the motherland, for example.
France could really do with this. France is desperately in need of integrating the 10 to 20% of its population that has an identity from North Africa. Salafism or Wahhabism is dying out in the Middle East, with MBS in Saudi and al Sisi having removed the Brotherhood from Egypt and in Abu Dhabi, Dubai or the UAE generally, you have a greater sense of freedom walking about there than you do in many of the suburbs of large cities in France. Thus Arab or Muslim extremism is receding ... unless we in The West give it comfort.
So perhaps the reason why nationalism doesn't work on these guys in France of Arab extraction is more that they remember the colonial experience, especially Algeria, and feel the mistreatment continues in the metropole, rather than because they're Muslim and are looking to convert us from our own beliefs and rules to Islam and Charia. It is civil rights rather than wars of religion. After, they are human too, no? Want peace, prosperity, free to worship whomsoever, send their kids to a good school, move to the suburbs or a nice house further out with a garden and a swing, no?
And what about America, where there appears to be a moral nihilism on the part of the elite and an existential nihilism on the part of the people? The original Protestant settlers exterminated the native population (hello hello), as being sub-human. And then brought in large numbers of Africans which it has never succeeded in integrating, there has been only trouble since the civil rights movement of the 60s. (Civil rights is real equality of treatment under the law, for blacks, for russian-speakers, for palestinians...).
In our Western democracies, the oligarchs rise to the surface, exploit their power And seem to run Congress as part of the military industrial complex, but in a so-called totalitarian (ie no western style democracy with alternance of parties in power) states like China, noone is beyond the reach of state-defined justice. Jack Ma was getting too big for his boots and he was relegated, as were the oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia - this was one of the first things Putin did to end the post-Soviet chaos and create structures and order.
So that looks like the triumph of equality, to unite ethnically / religeously / linguistically different peoples. Unite through fair and equal treatment into one national identity. You know it's working when Muslims go to fight and die for Russia in Ukraine
Equality. So is it democracy (freedom) v. equality?
Maybe that is what stops the West from integrating its diverse minorities ... here is the irony, or hypocrisy if you prefer. Western liberal democracies drop their border walls to let in diverse peoples whom they proceed to exploit and then wonder why there are these distractions like identity / culture wars and woke parades and civil rights disturbances and cancellations for those outside the box ( like those who've read this far!) and eventually Civil War.
[ For another time, are Liberals pushing individualism too far, at the expense of a stabilising collective identity?]
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