Sides and choosing them

Who decides when and why you have to choose a side?

One of the rising features in the spectre of conflict between Russia on one side and Ukraine, the US, and NATO on the other is the suggestion that everyone is obliged to take a side.

The command is out-of-keeping with thoughts that even political centrists have managed to find their way towards in recent years, including the (accurate) assessment that the goal of extreme actions is often to shrink the grey area in which people are not in fact obligated to take sides.

Whatever the truth of this point, the current command of taking sides strikes me more for its contrast with its opposite state; the command of not taking sides, and the moral condition we are equally or more often reminded of — Both Sides.

Of course it can be imperative to take a side because you are directly threatened by a situation, are complicit in it, or because there is an absolute balance of morality or immorality that is being jeopardised by your non-choosing, with no options to exhaust other than the path that is set without your choosing of a side. There are many reasons why I don’t think the situation in Ukraine meets this criteria, and why a path of deescalation from conflict could have been prioritised but conditions of escalation were created, in multiple ways by NATO and the US — but that’s not my point here.

The same people in Western public influencing who now command taking a side, and who never saw a war they didn’t like, are by and large those who have no concerns about international law or annexed territory in other instances; Palestine being the most obvious example. Palestine moreover sees, on the contrary, a forced abstinence from choosing; the famed moral condition of Both Sides, in which statements of neutrality ensure the preservation of the supremacy for whichever side the US gives $4billion to each year, and with which the West leads on trade and efforts to integrate or whitewash.

The same figures of the UK political centre who now demand a choice also created the impossibility of choosing between the Both Sides of Boris Johnson - despite repeat evidences of his poor character, including his commanding the physical assault of a journalist - and Jeremy Corbyn; the latter of whom only achieved the Labour leadership within the authoritarian internal regime of the Labour party because he was so widely well-liked and respected (until it was made essential that he be made not so). While a war drum now obliges the taking of sides, equivocation and false equivalence is every bit as valuable a tool of elite propaganda machines in maintaining power.

A remote situation, such as the one between Ukraine and Russia, and with a diplomatic, non-confrontational path scuppered in advance (mostly by those who now command taking sides) is rendered as one in which a Western public has no choice but to take a side. Contrastingly, situations in which the Western public might actually cast a vote, or in which their taxes and state policies are directly complicit, are reshaped as beyond the possibility of moral judgment.

The UK government has recently furthered its steps to outlaw divestment campaigns concerning public pensions; a law which would be used to restrict everything from support for Palestine to opposition of the oil industry, thus creating the strange spectre of obliging UK workers to invest their pensions in illegality, and in the same breaking of international law that the Ukraine conflict sees us told is sacrosanct. People, in effect, mandated by law to not choose a side.

In these circumstances, despite a very real moral closeness to a situation, and a capacity to influence it, there is foisted the idea that you not take a side. The moral architecture of a regime mostly requires not the choosing of sides but that the fence be kept warm. We are encouraged by elites to be spectators in our own abuses, and activist in those situations that are less our own, where the role of our own state power is mostly set in advance, and with a goal that is not necessarily constructive.

The taking of the side is compelled not because it is the most moral or prudent path, but because the demand is intended to destroy the capacity for scrutiny in which elite consolidation of thought and action prospers.