On the war in Ukraine and social expectations of manhood
What follows is a lengthy comment on the unscrupulous interests that benefit from the endless war in Ukraine as well as a critique of certain narratives about masculinity.
Writing for UnHerd, Marta Havryshko comments on Why Ukrainian liberals love conscription.
The process is brutally simple. Draft officers, often accompanied by police, snatch military-age men off the streets, before delivering them to recruitment centres. There, many are pressured through threats, intimidation, and physical abuse to pass military medical examinations and sign draft papers. Men with serious conditions — including HIV, tuberculosis and even cancer — are routinely declared fit for service. Whether they like it or not, the recruitment officers must meet quotas; the only question is who fills them. Yet with Ukraine’s wealthy elite reluctant to heed the call, Kyiv’s recruitment crisis is becoming a class crisis too, one that could cause chaos long after the guns fall silent.
Marta’s account echoes what the BBC is reporting today on the brutalities of “busification”:
Ukraine’s military ombudswoman says such attacks are now “regular” and “a major problem” as the country struggles to mobilise men to fight in the fifth, draining year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The EU and the UK are content with an endless war
What happens internally in Ukrainian society is largely enabled by policy-makers in the European Union plus the United Kingdom, with the Americans in the distance. They are the ones who provide pampers to the Zelenskyy regime, in the form of diplomatic support and financial aid.
The money Europeans give to the Ukrainian government pays for the essential operational expenses and the remainder is siphoned back to European industrialists in exchange for arms deals. In other words, the European taxpayers are subsidising the European oligarchs while consigning Ukrainians to the meatgrinder.
The EU-UK tandem does not have a vision for how this war will end, other than Russian capitulation—good luck doing what the military juggernauts of Napoleon and the Third Reich failed miserably at!
Russia is clearly winning this war on the ground. They are making slow yet steady advances in the Donbas region while terrorising other parts of the country. Those gains on the frontier occur at what may seem as snail’s pace because this is the nature of modern warfare: when virtually every apartment can be used as a launching pad for drones, you cannot conduct a blitzkrieg.
Western media wants to create a different impression by exaggerating the impact Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory have on the dynamics of the war. Starting fires in civilian infrastructure does not change the realities on the battlefield where Ukraine’s frontlines are falling apart.
The narrative that Ukraine is outsmarting the putative dumb Russians through sheer genius and technical acumen is designed to keep the war on the agenda. At times it feels like Ursula and Kaja only say “Russia, Russia, Russia”. This is beneficial for industrialists and, by extension, financiers who understand warfare as a means of regaining Europe’s lost competitiveness in global markets.
European elites are aware of what is happening in Ukrainian society, including neonazism, and have no scruples about it. They give money and hardware to Zelenskyy on the condition that he brings the meat that feeds the war machine, i.e. the men, which is how we learn of stories such as the aforementioned BBC report or the account of Marta Havryshko.
Looking at the future, Westerners have not been sincere in their intention to sign a permanent peace deal with Putin (and to keep their promises in general, if we go back to NATO’s and the EU’s Easternmost expansion). This means that the Russian regime will likely be emboldened to continue its campaign further south to capture all of coastal Ukraine and potentially connect with Transnistria. They will stop when they want, which is catastrophic for the people of Ukraine and madness for the rest of us.
Yes, this is also costly for Russia. Even the winners of a war, or dominant powers in general, pay a hefty price for their supremacy. Just check the American public debt to get a sense of what that looks like and what sort of odious burden it is for future generations.
Manhood and public pressure
The war shall continue and the poor will keep paying for it with blood and materials. Such are the structures of power in Europe, Ukraine, and beyond, and such is the fate of the peoples who do not control their own politics.
Shifting gears, there is a wider theme about the role of men in society. Taking another quote out of Marta Havryshko’s article (the parenthetic explanation is mine):
This asymmetry [of those who do not fight the war and are shielded from its consequences publicly shaming men who dodge the draft] lies at the heart of growing social tensions. Those who champion moral condemnation often do so from positions of relative safety and freedom. They can cross borders, pursue careers abroad, and retain control over their own lives. The men they shame cannot. From the very first days of the war, Ukraine has cultivated the image of the ideal man: self-sacrificing, strong, courageous, and unfailingly committed to defending his family, his home, his nation. He is prepared, if necessary, to give his life for this cause.
This is an age-old view of manhood which is partially based on biological fact. The average man is substantially stronger and more physically dominant than the average woman. Where biology ends and ideology starts is on the normative implications of this basic reality: what men ought to do and how they ought to feel. That is a matter of culture or opinion more broadly.
Every person needs structure in their life: a framework to keep them present in day-to-day realities and to maintain their readiness for the relevant rigours; an arrangement that helps them direct their life force towards some useful project. Without structure, people are lost. They become wasteful in their actions and self-destructive in their habits.
Structure in life either comes from within, in the form of discipline, or from the social milieu as peer pressure. Discipline, especially the strict kind, is the rare condition, so peer pressure becomes intense and ubiquitous. In our case here, males are expected to do manly activities as determined by culture, such as to serve and to protect and to sacrifice themselves.
The average man needs an outlet for his high capacity for aggression. This will either be some socially agreed upon convention, which has a benign effect on the collective, like work or sport or gaming that is done in moderation, or it shall be expressed as some anti-social form of violence, criminality, terrorism, or self-harm. In plain terms, the good man is the busy man; the best man is the committed man.
All of this covers the positive side of ideology that is layered upon the basic reality of masculine biology: what men ought to do to keep society going.
The negative side occurs once emotional manipulation enters the mix to channel man’s power towards questionable ends. The average man is highly susceptible to questions of his masculinity. That is his weak point: you shout at him, he shouts back, you punch him, he punches back, you doubt he is man enough and he feels something break inside of him. He becomes insecure as soon as you raise doubts about his ability to perform, where performance is once again a cultural construct.
Women who understand this are those who control and micromanage the relationship even in a superficially patriarchical setting. And men who understand this tend to become Internet famous masculinity merchants who belittle other men in order to convert them to paying customers.
Emotional manipulation is how you take a healthy person and convince them that they are fundamentally lacking in some ways which they can only remedy if they take such and such product. Once you brainwash a man to think of himself as a man manqué, you can make him do whatever you want.
It is no coincidence, then, that the public shaming of men in Ukraine is done by plenty of women. This is a super effective form of emotional control. It also reveals the cruel, indeed misandric and oftentimes sociopathic, nature of feminist rhetoric: it hates men, it hates children, it ultimately hates life.
Feminism and its modern masculinist antipode are forms of extremism that equally undermine the moderate expression of egalitarianism. They both have a worldview of structural victimhood, an originary grand conspiracy of sorts, which is in place to suppress the talents of their allied gender. Furthermore, they both cultivate tacit or explicit contempt for their enemy gender and thus both work to tear apart the social fabric.
Both in its positive and negative applications, structure is a matter of control. When public opprobrium happens, it is to enforce the dominant view and to silence any dissenting voices. What one must then look for are the ideocentric underpinnings of the prevailing opinions. Those are never mere biology, even when they are formed around a kernel of scientific truth.
To consider a relevant example, the USA military will start screening its troops for testosterone levels. There is an element of real science there, namely, healthy levels of testosterone are benign for men and too little or too much testosterone becomes harmful. Though the end is purely political: to create the conditions for heightened pressure so as to (i) put men on a leash, while (ii) ramming through other policies under the rubric of health, readiness, “real masculinity”, and so on.
The power apparatus wants to control men at all costs so as to secure for itself a constant supply of soldiers for its endless wars. It is not the nerds congregating think tanks or appearing on TV that will lead the charge, nor the women with plastic all over their face. Those who will be used as fodder for the cannons are men who are impoverished, men who are geographically trapped, men who are emotionally manipulated to die for their masters.
Couched in those terms, we must be extra careful with how we appeal to biology and science at-large. It is easy to see how the gimmick of the “high-T” male is going to be abused as a tool for delegitimising those who oppose stupid wars. They will not take your arguments on its own merits but will instead discern the “biology” between the lines, call you a pussy, and force you into submission.
The use of science to justify ideological ends is not new. The Nazis did it, for instance, to provide credence to their racial theories and attendant eugenics. In more recent times, it was employed in the service of woke tokenistic inclusion and the debasement of skill. US servicemen will soon be pressured to do the functional equivalent of gender affirming care while pretending to only value nature.
Phenomena in Ukraine and beyond exist on a continuum of socially sanctioned values. A useful heuristic in discussions that involve interpersonal affairs is “tell me what you want, without expounding on the science behind it”. There you learn what the goal is and you may begin to appreciate how your wellness is not a factor in their grift.