The Exploding Head Blog & Podcast
by Justina Poskeviciute
Can we talk about the war in Ukraine and its complexities without being shut down or accused of minimising its horrors?
I think that is possible indeed – yet not that easy.
In my second episode, I talk about (1) racism in the media, (2) the overtness of racist and xenophobic immigration policies when it comes to accepting refugees, and (3) the difference between what-about-ism and saying, “this, too” when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
Can we talk about the war in Ukraine and its complexities without being shut down or accused of minimising its horrors?
I think that is possible indeed – yet not that easy.
In my first episode, I talk about (1) NATO expansion, (2) the extreme right in Ukraine, and (3) what we have to know about how sanctions work.
No matter how you saw the situation in Eastern Ukraine before, it is clear now that a full-scale war in Ukraine has started. Putin did something that might have seemed incredible – just too massive – even for him.
If we are anti-war, we have to condemn this aggression, call for a ceasefire, and ask how people in Ukraine – in all of its regions – can be truly protected, under what arrangement.
What right does one country have to freeze the assets of another one?
What about when the country sanctioned is undergoing a major crisis?
These are the questions we have to ask about what the U.S. has been doing to Afghanistan.
The military escalations between NATO (well, the U.S., really) and Russia over Ukraine are no joke.
The price of war between two nuclear superpowers is as terrifying as it is clear. So what is it that can get in the way of saying NO to military escalations?
The grimmest predictions came true: Afghanistan is in an incredibly acute crisis. More than 20 million people are experiencing food shortages and over 8 million are facing starvation.
Poverty is rampant and growing.
But that doesn’t have to be the story of Afghanistan – and there is one major move the U.S. can take here.
It is not an exaggeration that the West, in particular the United States, is escalating a new Cold War, or hybrid war, with China. In fact, it is quite the opposite: to not acknowledge or warn against it would be taking a completely ahistorical position.
It always seems a bit dystopian: the military investigating its own actions. To be more precise, what seems dystopian – or simply completely corrupt – is that same military concluding that “everything’s OK.”
Unfortunately, dystopia is what we find in what we like to call liberal democracies.
Seven years after Protective Edge, we find Gaza and its children living in conditions that are even more dire than before. The trauma inflicted by Israel’s attacks and by its total siege on the region continues. In fact, it is unfolding as we speak.
The Taliban has taken power in Afghanistan. It finally happened and it’s terrifying. “Kabul has fallen,” the press tells us.
But what’s next? How do we assess what happened, learn from it, and find the best ways to help the Afghan people now?
The Exploding Head Blog & Podcast