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It always shocks me to see the arrogance with which some “public intellectuals” allow themselves to talk about Russian war in Ukraine from what they think to be a universalist position and how actively they can avoid any direct dialog with the first concerned.
It seems to me that a schematic geopolitical thinking and a methodological egocentrism are the main obstacles for building any type of international solidarity.
One of the most common expressions of methodological egocentrism that I meet in Europe and the US is to think that the West is behind all wars on this planet, being the only real actor. Even the Russian ruling classes are deprived of their agentivity, let alone Ukrainian citizens
Very often, those who think of themselves as “progressive”, in reality, don't give a damn about peoples in struggle. And the only reason why they symbolically support, for example, Palestinians but not Ukrainians ...
... is because the Palestinian struggle allows them to assert their “anti-mainstream” identity in the eyes of their western “progressive” counterparts. Neither Ukrainians nor Palestinians are acting subjects, but only objects of one’s fantasies and projections.
It’s a very self-centered identity issue and it's very scary. Because you can not fight a psychological self-defense mechanism with rational arguments.
It also has something to do with deeply internalized individualism – an invisible pillar of capitalist system – that transforms one’s opinions into a symbolic capital whose asset value needs to be constantly maximized, making any collective political action virtually impossible.
This is a huge issue, for ALL of us (Ukrainians included) how to get out of one’s identity bubble and develop empathy and humility in order to build a genuine dialog and active solidarity among the oppressed.
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