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.
Clarissa's Blog 
One-size fits all Western saviour complexes are funny like that.
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“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”
Hey, they were sure they knew best because…. shut up!
Western (that is US) outsiders with no understanding of local conditions were also complicit in the plundering of FSU countries in the early 90s.
“to get the locals to parrot Western discourses they could neither understand nor use”
With an emphasis on the second. They can figure out the discourse intellectually but not understand how it applied to their circumstances (cause it don’t, no way, no how)
“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”
I want to like this 137 times. The sad part is westerners still don’t get FSU countries (or Warsaw pact neighbors) and have no idea that they don’t get it.
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There is this great true story about a group of American feminists of the Andrea Dworkin school of feminism who organized a symposium in Russia in the early 1990s. The Russian attendees had no use for Dworkin or feminism. They were tired, hassled, overworked women with big families they had to provide for. All they cared about was feeding their husbands and children. So they faked being interested in lesbian relationships to please the organizers and make money for their families. The organizers were happy and paid up. Everybody was content in the end.
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Clarissa I am just curious, but you mention about the women feeding their husbands and children. Did the husbands not work and provide as well? Is this part of what you were referring to when you said you were raised where men were viewed as beings that needed to be taken care of by women?
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Yes, the absolute majority of men took the arrival of capitalism very badly. Many just stopped working altogether and spent the next several years depressed. Others continued “working” at their state companies that either paid nothing at all or a pittance. Women were the ones who started adapting to capitalism. It took men a lot longer to adapt.
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There is a fundamental clash of purpose between morality and experience.
Logically, it ought not to be possible for one person to pronounce on another: “Oh, you could not have had the experience you have had, as that would put you and your experiences outside our ability to take in reality via our moral lens.” It is a most common occurrence for people to seem to be proclaiming that. Perhaps one who perceives such proclamations is not only immoral but almost certainly crazy, for ideally one ought not to be able to see these sorts of things. To perceive everything that takes place with a beneficent eye, whilst resting in the bosom of community spirit, is quite different from this other kind of perception that partakes of reality in a critically-minded manner.
The majority of what I have experienced has taken place outside of the purview of conventional morality. The only reason I am aware of this is that conventional morality does not pronounce on them at all, except for a dismissive, “Oh, that couldn’t have happened!”
There may be cultural matrices that allow for a broader set of events to be “allowed to have happened”, but conventional, Western morality is not one of these. It allows that a very narrow range of events could have happened and that anything that falls outside of its purview is something akin to false perception: It makes it seem that those events it hasn’t already accounted for, as being definitively normal, did not ever occur. Only very narrowly defined events may actually have happened, one might surmise. Nothing horrifying or confusing occurs, unless distantly removed by other skins and other cultures and their barriers. In any case, we cannot sympathetically experience the horrific thing. It has to be kept unreal by some psychological distance and some positing of cultural exoticism. But I am white and just like you, hence my experiences are deemed not to have occurred.
It’s quite simple: one is not expected to paint outside of the designated lines that morality paints within. Experiences occurring outside of these margins are deemed to the work of an unruly eye, that simply will not suckle from the breast of the community, but wants to roam beyond the narrow and constrained, into the world at large. To reject the bulging breast, to reject suckling, is to be an alien, an “other”, possibly a criminal, but something at any rate outside the realm of all that’s good and quiet and pleasant. The willful child is thus punished for its roving eye, by being deemed Satanic.
Perhaps there is another mode of morality outside of the hearth and home of the community and its intrinsic order, but this isn’t countenanced by the community itself. To be deemed to tell the truth is to be willing to suckle. Those who are not suckling in a mode of deep dependency are judged to be untrustworthy liars.
Morality is thereby constructed as a state of being that evinces deep dependency. I throw myself on your mercy and my experiences suddenly take on a different shade and seem to become colored with the views and values of community. To the extent this happens, I am deemed to be more real, less alien and insubstantial than I’d been earlier. My quality of being unreadable becomes significantly reduced, even to the point that my horns and cloven feet start to seem less obnoxious. I may even learn to baaah quite obsequiously — as finishing touches to my new-found redemption.
But my experiences themselves remain outside the purview of the general community. They can’t be allowed in, as they are substantially disruptive in themselves.
The morality of the herd still insists: we will accept you OR your experiences, as your experiences are immoral and cannot be allowed to exist, but please take more honeyed sheep’s milk from this pleasant breast.
This has become a recurrent event — at least one that seems, to me, to regularly occur, in my experience.
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This article is excellent, by the way. The clumsy Western moral fingers have also reached into Africa in the way that the Westerner’s own brain will never allow him to understand. Everything becomes idiotic and superficial at his touch. Sometimes his interventions give local cunning manipulators much more power than they ought to have had. The Westerner upsets the balance of things.
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Thank you! They seem to think that everything everywhere requires a sum of money to be fixed and made good. So they move around pouring a stream of money on every issue they encounter. The reality, however, is that in many cases no money is needed because the situation is about something completely different.
All this approach does is foster corruption. And this only happens because such people are congenitally incapable of understanding that realities exist that are not the exact copy of theirs. Time and again, they spoil everything they touch with their earnest efforts of explaining everything in terms familiar to them. For people who are not hugely smart, such terms are limited.
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That is precisely what I’ve noticed in various ways, too, although you express it better than I. I notice it more in psychological terms, as a fear of understanding the experience of the other. Moral posturing or even morality itself seems like an emotional defense against deeper understanding. Even very intelligent people love to take the easy way out by posturing in a highly moral way, which shows they have comprehended nothing.
Please write more on this topic, especially concerning how knowledge and Western moral aloofness are incompatible. 🙂
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I am always rather amazed when I read this kind of thing. Don’t these people who want to help these countries know that you can just barge into a foreign culture, say, “Okay, this is how it’s going to work…” and then expect everything to work smoothly. I would think one would have to do some in-depth studying of each region to find out what the specific problems are, and do a lot of talking with the people just to find out what their problems are.
There is a book called “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” and in it the author talks some about the kind of Western cluelessness with regard to when the Soviet Union broke apart. He says that Westerners just went straight into the FSU countries with the attitude that they could easily just convert these countries into thriving free-market capitalist societies.
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// The pseudo-activists … make sure that no legitimate activist gets to speak out.
Hard to believe that unconnected to power (Putin) pseudo-activists have such power. Imo, the biggest damage the Western comers have done was in:
A. Create the impression that all activists were bought by USA, to be used in US (not Russia’s) interests
B. Give Putin opportunity to call more tolerant people as being anti-Russia since they get money from America / sold themselves to US whether for money or out of hatred for their mother country.
– el
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This process started 10 years before anybody knew who Putin was. This isn’t about Putin at all.
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Instead “Putin” put “president / Russian government”.
– el
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Yeltsin ‘s government was too weak to engage in anything of the kind.
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