Beyond Selidor

Jumping into this discussion as an Anglo-Ukrainian because it really accords with a lot of my thinking on the subject - as someone whose mother grew up in the last days of the Soviet Union, one thing that really irritates me about a lot of Western progressive spaces and discourse in general is the assumption that a) only Western countries have agency and b) Britain/America/insert Western nation here is the root of all evil in the world (which in its own way is as harmful a form of exceptionalism as intense nationalism). This kind of perspective is so pervasive in the sort of humanities academia spaces I used to inhabit that I was genuinely stunned when my friend referred to Russia's actions in Ukraine as a form of colonialism, because it had never occurred to me to think of it in those terms - I'd assumed that framework could only apply to Western imperialism and conquest!

I do think the war in Ukraine has also significantly complicated my feelings on Western society and democracy: again, I'm so used to seeing those institutions criticised (and often rightly so), that it was only with the invasion that I really started to see my privilege in living in a free society (and being able to criticise that society!); I think a lot of people who have never lived in actual autocracies struggle to grasp how much worse things could be (which isn't saying, of course, that there isn't a lot that can be done to improve democracies). During the collapse of the USSR, my mum was taking intensive English classes with a university professor, and she mentioned to me a while ago that she was afraid the whole time that she might be identified as a collaborator by the authorities - because even if in hindsight it was clear the USSR was going to collapse, people didn't know it at the time. And from my position, I can't imagine having that kind of fear just from learning a language (and that's really just touching on the tip of the iceberg of my family's experiences)...