Alberto Garzón Espinosa
Unfortunately, part of the left has an inclination to think, like Trump, that Ukraine was to blame for the war; that the woman was provoking before being raped. That Ukraine has radical right-wing sectors; that the woman slept with anyone. About the aggressor, not a word.
Hannah Arendt recounted that in the 1920s, a representative of the Weimar Republic asked Clemenceau, by then the former French Prime Minister, his opinion on what historians would say about the guilt in starting the First World War. The Frenchman replied that he didn't know, but that he was convinced they wouldn't say that Belgium invaded Germany. That seemed a sufficiently firm and incontrovertible point of support, as it would be contrary to common sense that the idea that the invaded country, Belgium, would be accused as responsible for the war that followed.
Arendt argued that to deny the obvious truth that Germany had invaded Belgium on the night of 4 August 1914 would require "nothing less than the monopoly of power throughout the civilised world". Even so, Arendt saw it as feasible that precisely that could happen "if the interests of power, national or social, had the last word on these issues". That is, for Arendt it was not inconceivable that a time might come when historians would minimise or even deny Germany's military invasion of Belgium. Perhaps by introducing sufficient 'nuances' and 'complexities' that would justify the entry of tanks.
Neither Arendt nor Clemenceau ignored the historical, social and geopolitical context in which German aggression occurred. But in relation to the facts, it was unquestionable that the military invasion had taken place in one direction only and not in the opposite direction. The tanks were moving from Germany to Belgium, not the other way round. However, could what we call 'nuances' be armed powerfully enough for a narrative that blamed the invaded country to emerge victorious?
Writing in 2025, this is a rhetorical question. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has been blaming Ukraine for weeks for the invasion of Russian tanks on Ukrainian territory in February 2022. His argument is not very different from that used by reactionary sexists when, faced with the rape of a woman, they ask the victim about the clothes she was wearing and whether she had previously made insinuations that 'led' to the unfortunate event. In both cases, the focus is on the victim, who de facto becomes responsible for the possible trajectories of the encounter.
The US government, which starkly represents imperialist interests, has chosen to dissociate itself from any moral compass - however cynical, like that represented by Joe Biden's administration. In its place has been installed a crude version of the thinking of Carl Schmitt, the philosopher who put power and the relationship of force ahead of political principles and values. What is important for the US is efficacy in maintaining order, so that the supply of critical minerals and good political relations with those suppliers of raw materials who have military backing becomes more relevant than any political consideration of what is morally right or wrong. And that order, by the way, they call peace.
At heart, the US government acts like a bully. This is not just a metaphor, but operates in a fairly literal way. One only has to see the meeting of Trump and Vance with Zelensky in the White House to recognise all the elements of a public humiliation carried out by conceited aggressors. The verbal and non-verbal communication expressed the relationship of domination and mistreatment that accompanies the narrative according to which, ultimately, the war was the victim's fault. Exactly in the same way as the reactionary judge who, with his loaded questions, wallows in the suffering of the raped woman, showing unlimited complicity with the aggressor. As if deep down he were saying "if you were wearing that skirt, I would have had to act that way too". Similarly, Trump is suggesting to Zelensky that being so weak, it is natural that he has been invaded. And, in fact, that is exactly what Trump's proposal to accept Trump's poisoned and plundering help before losing more territory and lives expresses. The aggressor disappears from the picture.
Trump does not have the monopoly of power that Arendt considered a prerequisite for rewriting historical facts for the benefit of his national and political interests. But he does have enough to impose his narrative in many spaces. The support of the magnates, starting with Elon Musk, makes it easier for him to spread this counter-narrative throughout the world via social networks. And like any discourse, whether based on facts or lies, it is built on a beautiful idea, in this case that of peace. Trump sees himself as the architect and leader of peace, because for him this notion is reduced to the absence of military conflict. It doesn't matter that it is based on relations of domination, abuse, violence and plundering of resources. Trump's peace is inserted into a Schmittian world: where only the game of power-counterpower and the correlation of forces in a savage world that is divided between friends and enemies matters. You have been invaded/raped, accept it now, they were stronger than you, these things happen, it was your fault, you have bad cards.
Unfortunately, there is a part of the left that shares this vision of the world and of politics. Sometimes even clouded by nostalgia and the folklore of the Cold War, this left evaluates the facts in the light of a package of information that seems to have been chosen by Trump or Putin. The key is that, as aggressors and abusers do, they always focus on the victim. It hardly seems to matter that Russia is another imperialist power or that Putin himself has denied the right of the Ukrainian people to exist - explicitly censoring, in fact, the legacy of a Lenin who recognised Ukraine's right to self-determination. This left, on the contrary, has an inclination to think that Ukraine was to blame for the war; that the woman was provoking before being raped. That Ukraine has radical right-wing sectors; that the woman slept with anyone. About the aggressor, not a word.
A victim should never be asked to be pure and perfect. It is advisable to start with something much simpler: recognising that she is a victim and that no nuance, however sophisticated, can change the fact that the tanks that invaded and unleashed the war were from Russia. After all, there will always be people who consider that there was sufficient justification for Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914, Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939, the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, or Israel's invasion of Palestine every few years. Propaganda, lies and manipulation today take new forms and channels of distribution, but they have always existed. The key to confronting them begins with the recognition of basic factual facts and the expulsion from our spheres of influence of those who, in one way or another, end up justifying the behaviour of aggressors and abusers.
The moral compass is not an instrument of absolute precision, but neither can it be an ornament that is used when convenient and abandoned when it gets in the way. In the case of Ukraine, the interested confusion, the rhetoric of power and the complicity with the lie have managed to make some accept the idea that the victim had to justify its existence in order not to be invaded. But the factual truth persists: the tanks did not advance from Kyiv to Moscow, but the other way round. And if we are not even capable of upholding that elementary truth, what is left for us to face the next war, the next aggression, the next excuse with which the powerful will once again disguise violence as political realism?
Alberto Garzón Espinosa is a Member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and since 2003 the United Left (Izquierda Unida, IU). He was also Minister of Consumer Affairs from 2020 to 2023.