Hi Ho! I hope your spring is going well. Mine is.
This last week, a reported essay I wrote titled "It's Time to Revive the Nuclear Disaster Film" ran in Blood Knife, a fun little Philadelphia magazine that apparently has more of a zest for foreign datelines than its much bigger cross-town rival, the Philadelphia Inquirer. I'm just grateful that anyone at all wants foreign coverage. More credit still if they're operating on a shoestring budget, as Blood Knife is.
One piece of the essay that didn't make it into the final version was the following bit:
Ukrainians outside of the military demographic have been forced to leave the country in droves as refugees.
It could have been different. For months, the Russian diplomatic corps asked for assurance that NATO would not expand into Ukraine. If the shoe were on the other foot—say, with Warsaw Pact members threatening to expand their reach into Mexico in the 1980s, creating an extensive land border between the United States and a hostile alliance—the U.S. would have almost certainly responded just as violently and preemptively as Russia is responding now, as Noam Chomsky recently told Democracy Now.
And yet for months, the U.S. dismissed any limits on NATO expansion as a "nonstarter," with western leaders having rodomontaded publicly for years before that about bringing Ukraine further into their orbit, in a direct bucking of Russia's interpretation of the Minsk II agreement signed by multiple governments in 2015.
So here we are, with millions of people needlessly dying or being displaced at the hands of an aging, dangerously paranoid Russian strongman who sells his people Soviet nostalgia while delivering them an oil-fueled oligarchy.
There was no significant strife about taking this segment out, as both the editor and I agreed that I had said something similar elsewhere in the piece with more brevity. No, what I want to write about here is my use of the word "oligarchy."
You see, everything I said above is true. All of it.
But it's not the whole truth.
When I say "oligarchy" above, I am lazily falling into the trap of using western shorthand for what we collectively see as the way Russia is run. In the worst case, it denotes for some the idea of a corrupt country of bearded peasants living in drab, rectangular buildings heated by open coal fires, drinking a handle a day of liquor made from rotten potatoes while sing-shouting dementedly along to 170-decibel recordings of the Red Army Choir and waiting for the ends of their short, very cold lives, which are ruled over by plutocrats, or oligarchs, from cradle to grave. They’re also all wearing ushankas indoors for some reason.
But as true as extremely selective parts of that hackneyed stereotype are, they are arguably more true of the U.S.—at least the parts about oligarchs.
(Maybe the part about corruption too. The American chapter of the anti-corruption auditing organization Transparency International, of all groups, was disaccredited a few years ago for—you guessed it—nurturing apparent corruption. But that's a topic for another newsletter.)
What do you think of when you think of oligarchs? Do you think, as I do, of ludicrously unjustifiable income inequality that feeds on itself through the privatization of state assets? Do you think of all the lopsided power that comes with this inequality? Do you think of Russia?
If so, you're not wrong.
The problem, though, is that according to the World Bank's Gini indexing metrics, it's significantly worse in the U.S.
Of the 159 countries the World Bank ranked, the U.S. is the 54th most unequal. That's not nearly as bad as South Africa, Namibia or Suriname, which take spots 1 through 3 on the inequality ranking, but it's notably worse than Russia, which comes in at 76th.
(I'm vicariously proud to say that the Czech Republic, where I lived for nearly a year, is the second most egalitarian of the ranked countries, sitting at number 158 on the list. While it’s not a perfect place—my old coworker loved to complain about how Andrej Babiš owned an absurdly large chunk of the Czech economy—I’ll take small victories where I can get them. Hurá!)
It's worth restating the source of that inequality data. The World Bank is hardly known as a pro-Kremlin institutional cheerleader, being somewhat more closely associated with spreading bromides about unfettered capitalism than with waxing poetic about the glory days of coal mining collectives in Vorkuta. So if they say that Russia is doing something better than the U.S., I tend to take them at their word.
In other words, if Yury Kovalchuk is an oligarch, then we should ask ourselves why certain large western media outlets don't regularly label Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as oligarchs as well. Could it be that western press organizations are not as impartial as they like to say they are?
Make no mistake about this: What the World Bank is essentially saying is that it's quite possible Russia is in some ways a more functional democracy than the U.S. After all, if a person needs to work three jobs in order to feed their family, they're not going to be very civically engaged. Voting—much less taking part in community organizations—will be an afterthought.
Given what a basket case Russian representative government is, with Vladimir Putin having now clung criminally to power for more than two decades, that World Bank assessment should worry us Americans. If the U.S. doesn't want to permanently lose what's left of its moral leadership role to the EU, China or other large political entities, American leaders are going to have to address income inequality, and they're going to have to do it soon. There are several groups working to push in that direction. It may or may not be enough to cause change.
Mandatory disclaimer: It should be completely obvious that none of this post should be construed in any way as support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will be looked back on as a tragic chapter in the history of Europe. Wars of aggression are wrong. It was wrong when the U.S. invaded Iraq for no good reason. It was wrong when Saudi Arabia waged war in Yemen for no good reason, using western-supplied weapons—a war that continues to this day. It was wrong when both Russia and the U.S. turned the Syrian civil war into a proxy conflict, prolonging it in the process. And it is of course very, very wrong that Russia is attacking Ukraine for no good reason.
All I'm saying is that this tragedy could have easily been prevented, and that there definitely seems to be a set of double standards being applied by western governments and their most loyal stenographers, whether it's in regard to the nature of who violent conflict is "normal" for or selectivity in the need to help refugees or—as discussed in this post—the nature of oligarchy.
Anyhow, I thought the World Bank inequality data was interesting. Think twice the next time you hear someone on TV talking about "oligarchs." Unless you live in Scandinavia or one of the Visegrád countries, there are probably more than a few in your backyard.
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Here’s the whole Blood Knife essay on why we need new nuclear disaster films. It doesn't really talk about economics or class disparities at all.
Other output from recent months:
Can a Major City Go Car-Free? Berlin Might Know Soon Enough
OK, that’s enough for this round. Take care, everyone!
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Edit #1: Someone whose opinion I respect a lot made a good point: We can’t be sure that Putin would have acted responsibly, even if he had received a promise from NATO about avoiding expansionism. I agree. We can never be sure about what a foreign leader is thinking, and a reasonably sized NATO has a productive role to play in maintaining balance. With around 750 American bases ringing the globe, however—with many near Russia—and with the U.S. having a military budget that is larger than the next several countries’ arms budgets combined, I would imagine, if I had to guess, that Putin is thinking about the very real possibility of bad outcomes for his hemmed-in country. Or, more to the point, for his own corrupt presidency. Once more: Does that justify him invading a sovereign country? Of course not. But it can inform our assumptions on whether such an invasion would have happened without the virtual promise of a nearby western military alliance expanding.
Edit #2: I have removed an errant link that I had inserted to incomplete World Bank data. The ranking I used in formulating this piece comes from a different, more complete, slightly older data set, albeit also from the World Bank. The error was mine.