Finally, somebody (other than me, I mean) managed to articulate one of the reasons why centering the current progressive discourse around the meaningless concept of privilege is a mistake:

For me, though, the biggest problem is that little word “privilege.” Why should precisely tha tbe the key term? A privilege is something extra — and from a very young age, I knew that when something was referred to as a privilege, I was in danger of losing it. How does that make sense, for instance, with something like being free from fear of police harrassment? Undoubtedly, that is part of my privilege as a white, straight, cis, well-dressed man. But when it is called a “privilege,” my initial thought is that it is something unjustified that should be taken away — i.e., we should all have to be stopped and frisked. Something similar came up in my post about how I had some degree of autonomy and dignity in my work — do we really want to say that that’s a “privilege”? In both cases, aren’t we dealing with something more like a right that’s been denied to a great many people?

Think about it, folks. All that this privilege-scratching achieves is justifying austerity policies and making you feel all noble and superior. That’s hardly hugely productive. Let’s stop already with examining privileges because that is a waste of time.

Today the Western progressives are outraged about the persecution of gay people in Russia. They are protesting, boycotting, and denouncing. And it’s something that definitely should be done because Putin’s anti-gay initiatives are disgusting, dangerous, and vile.

However, it would be nice if these same Western activists stopped to consider their own contribution to the absence of any legitimate human rights activism within Russia. How come that 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union there is a big gaping hole in the FSU countries where one would expect to see local human rights watches and progressive activists?

After 1991, hordes of Western activists descended on the FSU countries. They had no patience with the local needs and peculiarities. They didn’t want to invest a second of their time into figuring out what was going on in the FSU in terms of feminism, gay rights, politics, and economy. Instead, they started throwing around massive (from the point of view of a post-Soviet person in the 1990s) amounts of money to get the locals to parrot Western discourses they could neither understand nor use. With 100% of women integrated into the workforce since 1917, I is obvious that post-Soviet feminism will be quite different from the Western feminism that still battles the problem of women being interrupted too often by men when they speak. Yet, the issues that Western feminists were using to organize the FSU activism were all of the kind that the local people couldn’t relate to.

Nothing much has changed since 1991. The progressive Western circles still can only relate to the rest of the world by trying to fit alien realities into the Procrustean bed of their limited worldview. As a result, many people in the FSU countries realized that if you say what the Westerners want you to say, you will get a good handout. The Ukrainian group FEMEN is the perfect example of such pseudo-activism whose only goal is to milk the silly, gullible Westerners for money and popularity (which can then be converted into more money.)

The pseudo-activists are, of course, afraid that the silly, gullible Westerners might finally clock on to what is really happening. So they make sure that no legitimate activist gets to speak out. Anybody who tries to engage in creating the kind of progressive change that the FSU countries really need is stomped by a crowd of “professional activists” who want to keep getting paid by the Westerners. A human rights activist in the FSU countries is a completely unprincipled, profoundly corrupt individual who will say and do anything to get paid.

Had the Western activists kept their money and their inane speechifying to themselves in the past 22 years, today we would be seeing a completely different picture in terms of the defense of human rights in the FSU countries.