Forget Habermas, read Victoria Amelina

The German “debate” on Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine feels like Ground Hog Day. One feature is that those who repeatedly come out in favour of “negotiations” have for three years refused to address the obvious question how Ukraine can enter “negotiations” about its very existence or how to “negotiate” with a colonial dictatorship which does not want to negotiate, but is determined to destroy Ukraine and dominate Europe.

The newest addition is another intellectually unsound and mean-spirited long essay (17 minutes read!) by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The whole piece is just ludicrous. Be it, that Habermas once again fails to call a genocide a genocide; be it, that he, in all seriousness, laments the “heated atmosphere against Russia” (Jeez, Jürgen, I wonder where that came from); be it, that he implies that the threat posed by Russia toward NATO might just be “conjured up” by unnamed irresponsible culprits; be it, that he fantasizes that the United States might just have prevented Russia’s full-scale invasion, had they just been prepared to “negotiate” with poor old Russia. The essay is also profoundly dishonest. Habermas attempts to thinly veil the anti-Ukrainian thrust of his text by paying lip service to the idea that the country should of course be supported in some way (without overdoing it, of course).

You get the idea—just another lazy variation of the utter nonsense we have been reading for over three years now. Nonetheless, I have little doubt that in the coming days we will read well-meaning pieces by pro-Ukrainian professors and publicists who will take it upon themselves to counter Habermas’ bullshit with a sound point by point rebuttal. I understand the impulse—I had it myself. But I have come to the conclusion that this one paragraph bashing above is all that this badly argued essay deserves. It is profoundly unoriginal, we have heard it all before. Writing lengthy responses to texts just feeds into the German media’s absurd adulation of men (yes, men) like Habermas. Big names who have little to say.

It’s not the first time the Süddeutsche Zeitung has done this. Shortly before the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion, a large portrait of the supposedly grand philosopher graced the front page of the newspaper, under it the headline “A plea for negotiations”. A friend of mine sent me a screenshot the evening before the edition appeared in print. “The problem is not Habermas' stupid text, but the fact that the Süddeutsche Zeitung published the snot,” I wrote on Twitter. Boy, rarely have I received such outraged reactions from some of my fellow academics. A professor who specializes in Russian politics wrote me a lengthy aggressive email accusing me, among other things, of moral bankruptcy. (I have never seen any article by this person in the media denouncing Russia’s war against Ukraine.) Another professor called me an “aggressive woman” and, when I confronted him, admonished me for being so mean to poor Habermas. According to this logic, trivializing genocide of Ukrainians is a serious position one should discuss respectfully—at least when it’s someone of the public stature of Habermas who is doing it. But calling it out in such a disrespectful manner on Twitter? How dare you “spit in his face”?

While Süddeutsche Zeitung was platforming Habermas, a Ukrainian friend of mine was trying to get a hugely important piece published in the German media about how the full-scale invasion has affected Crimean Tatars. All she got were negative responses, it was never published in Germany. So, I stand by my tweet: the problem are not, or not primarily, intellectually unsound and ethically dubious texts, but the willingness of the media to platform supposedly big names who are still cultivating their colonial views of Ukraine over and over again. At the same time the voices of the colonized are still grossly under-represented in the debates on Ukraine and Russia. Gatekeepers in the media still display a shocking degree of intellectual obedience to established figures and are hereby contributing to the upkeep of the traditional colonialist views towards Eastern and Eastern Central Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Baltic region.

A few weeks ago, I attended Café Kyiv, perhaps the biggest one-day event dedicated to Ukraine in Europe. One panel was about Crimea, more specifically, about the Crimean Tatars and their experiences. Crimean Tatars were at the forefront of the resistance towards the Russian occupation of their homeland in 2014. In fact, that is when many in mainland Ukraine finally realized that the Crimean Tatars were among the most important allies of Ukraine’s sovereignty on the peninsula. They understood all to well what Russian occupation of their homeland would mean—for them and for Ukraine as a whole and of course they were right. At Café Kyiv, Suleiman Mamutov, Crimean Tatar member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues, put it perfectly: “We are not traumatized, we are experienced.”

Forget Habermas, forget all of those self-righteous “intellectuals” who refuse to even acknowledge the basic facts about what is happening in Ukraine and what Russia actually is. Who hereby not only demonstrate the intellectual weakness of their argument, but, more importantly, demonstrate a lack of the most basic human empathy with victims of genocide. If we still engage in the same “discussions” after three years of genocide in Ukraine and the ever-growing Russian threat to Europe, we have less time and energy to tell the stories and make the arguments that we think are important. Don’t honour such outpourings with lengthy, carefully crafted replies. Instead, listen to those who actually know what they are talking about. Read Victoria Amelina, Olesya Khromeychuk, Sasha Dovzhyk, read Oleksandr Mykhed, Serhii Zhadan, listen to Maksym Butkevych. Listen to what they have to say and amplify their voices.