The American Woke Machine and the Kremlin War
(Jewish Journal with Monika Osbourne) It should come as no surprise that once progressive American social justice paradigms, brewed in the guts of academia and activism, weighed in on the conflict in Ukraine they quickly became instruments of the Kremlin’s agenda. For the American woke, Ukraine can be no more than the occasion for one of its favorite forms of outrage. In the middle of a war in which one of the main targets has been the civilian population, and where daily reports include the shelling of kindergartens, the American academic and militant left showed first a pathetic irrelevance and then a dangerous susceptibility to the moral proclamations and justifications of the Kremlin. The war and its horrors became yet another opportunity to peddle pet ideological projects. Ukraine became about sexism, about racism and about transphobia—and not one thought spared for Ukrainian families slaughtered under the Russian shelling. And for some, the inhumanity became just another episode of white-on-white violence.