STOCHASTIC WAR AND UKRAINE

American liberals of the communo-fascist bent are now fond of tagging ‘white supremacists’ (read: white people and political opponents ‘deluded’ by ‘whiteness’) with the blame for violence from the right (which is far outpaced by that from the left). Such violence is routinely called ‘terrorism’ – though it is not – and is furthermore extended to speech that is alleged to have ‘caused’ the violence. This perverse definition-stretching – so routine on the left so as to be ubiquitous – has produced the idea of so-called ‘stochastic terrorism.’ Stochastic terrorism is defined as “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted” or more simply as “the incitement of a violent act through public demonization of a group or individual” (www.dictionary.com/browse/stochastic-terrorism and http://www.jstor.org/stable/27073433#metadata_info_tab_contents).

Of course, it is impossible to prove when “public demonization of a person or group” has ‘resulted in the incitement’ of a violent act. And that is the point, part of a strategy. The WOKE-dominated US government and media are now routinely applying this term to squelch the constitutional free speech rights of their political opponents in an attempt to consolidate their nascent pro-authoritarian revolution from above.  

In foreign affairs, this concept is now being played with the loosest interpretation of causality in order to promote US foreign policy. We saw the new ‘stochasticism’ applied recently when Chief of the US Armed Forces’ Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as well as a a host of other US, NATO and European officials blamed Russia for Ukraine’s firing an S-300 missile on Polish territory, killing two farmers. The logic was simple (indeed): Russia started the war in Ukraine in February 2022, and so Russian President Vladimir Putin is to blame for the Ukrainian apparent misfire on Poland. By this distended logic, Dmitrii Donskoi, Ivan III, Peter the Great, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev, and certainly Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk can be held responsible, respectively, for creating Russia and present day Ukraine. To be sure, this is rather reductionist stochasticizing, but perhaps God can be blamed for the attack? For the religious, who believe God created the world but does not necessarily act in it, such reductionism might lead one to conclude that God is guilty, because if there had been no world or humankind, then there would be no Putin to start the war that ‘forced’ Ukraine to fire on Poland. It is interesting that the global nature of causality contained in the new stochasticism is missing from the causality chain constructed by the West, which ignores NATO expansion and Ukrainian actions and only finds causality in Russian actions.

This thinking is not new in regard to Ukraine. For example, Western news reports in referring to the 10-15,000 civilian casualties in Donbass as a result of Ukraine’s ATO and during the frequently violated Minsk ceasefire repeatedly attributed those casualties to ‘Putin’s war’ in Donbass. This is claimed even though the overwhelming majority of those casualties were inflicted by Ukrainian forces, who routinely fired (and still fire) on strictly residential areas. Since Putin supposedly started the war (Ukraine actually started it with its ‘Anti-Terrorist Ooperation’ and civil war in April 2014), all its negative consequences, including Ukrainian-inflicted casualties, Ukrainian human rights violations, and Ukrainian war crimes are attributed to Putin. A similar pattern is evident in the use of the label ‘stochastic terrorism’ in the American domestic context.

It is odd how the causality chain in the new ‘stochasticism’ always begins with the opponents of the Democratic Party-state regime, whether domestic or foreign. There are no other data points in the long chain of causality that might make for this or that event? Nowhere, ever. For example, at the same time the Ukrainian bombing of Poland was ‘on the front page’, the court in Netherlands handed down its verdict against those Donbass rebels, who were charged with shooting down MH17 in 2014. To be sure, one causality chain is somewhat clear as far as it goes back. Although the court did not do so, one can certainly lay blame on any in the Russian military or civilian leadership who approved the transfer of the Russian BUK anti-aircraft system to the rebels, who had been shooting down Ukrainian military aircraft for weeks and became the main culprits in shooting down MH17. But this begs another question.

Was the Ukrainian military leadership that declared the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) against the Donbass rebels without even attempting to negotiate [unlike the Russians who negotiated in both Chechnya for 5 years (!) before fighting and in Ukraine/Donbass under Minsk for eight years (!!)] at all responsible? Do they bear any responsibility given that they sent warplanes to bomb civilians in Donbass in 2014, forcing the rebels to shoot down Kiev’s military aviation? Did this in any way ‘result’ in the shooting down of MH17. No, in Western eyes. Once again the causality chain as far as the West is concerned begins only with Russian actions.

But if we pull back from the more outlandish reductionism, we can indeed apply the new stochastcism to the NATO-Russo Ukrainian war.

Stochastic War

Definitions of ‘stochastic terrorism’ stipulate that it involves the demonization or ‘othering’ of ‘individuals or groups. Nations, states, nation-states are ‘groups’, are they not. Russia is a group of people in addition to being a territorial and collection of institutions. Russia has been demonized in the West for centuries and with the arrival of Putin to power he – an individual – and his country and its culture were increasingly demonized once again in the ‘advanced’ West. As I have argued previously, the causality chain leading to the ATO and the present NATO-Russo Ukrainian war is a tale of the West alienating, othering, and demonizing Russia and its, to be sure, flawed but nevertheless popular

leader. The shadow now hanging over Europe’s and the world’s head is precisely a result of the West’s expansion of NATO beyond reunified Germany in violation of a promise Western leaders made to late Soviet Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev. It is a result of the West seeding instability and ignoring if not outright encouraging  ultranationalist Russophobia in Kiev for over a decade. It is a consequence of the West promising Kiev NATO membership in the future against Moscow’s legitimate national security concerns and interests. It is the result of inciting the Maidan demonstrations and denying their increasingly violent, ultranationalist tenor. It is the result of the Obama administration’s recognizing the snipers’ massacre-, false-flag-induced Maidan overthrow of legitimately

elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and throwing away the February 20^th agreement intended to end the Maidan crisis signed by European states and backed by Putin. To be sure, it is also a result of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and support of the Donbass rebels as well as of Kiev’s hasty, even needless declaration of war (ATO) on the Donbass. It is a result of Washington’s support for the ATO, silence regarding civilian casualties inflicted by Ukraine’s armed forces in Donbass, and failure to press Kiev to carry out its Minsk 2 obligations. It is a consequence of American and NATO military training and arming of the Ukrainian military and its neofascist battalions and encouraging Ukraine to attempt an offensive to take back Crimea and Donbass by force rather than through the Minsk 2 or some other process. It is also the result of the West’s repeated rejections, going back to 2008, of Russian requests to negotiate a new security architecture with Russia and abandon plans to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. And whatever comes next will be a result of the West’s failure early on to seek a negotiated ceasefire and peace as well as Putin’s decision to invade in February 2024.

Finally, one would think that the Ukrainian war crimes and rights violations committed since 2014 for the most part by Ukraine’s ultranationalist and neofascist units and organizations such as Azov and Right Sector would be characterized as stochastic terrorism or war. It is precisely the extremist ideology of these groups demonizing Russians that drives their members to commit such crimes, which in fact they train for in order to commit. One might add the demeaning ‘racist’ rhetoric on Ukrainian mass media and public meetings calling for all ‘Moskals’ (derogatory term for ethnic Russians) to be ‘put on the knife’. But no, one will not find this connection being made in Western analysis of the conflict’s causality.

But returning to the Ukrainian bombing of Poland, if the Ukrainians intentionally fired on Poland to draw Poland and NATO into the war, then are they responsible? Is that why the West so quickly agreed to the version of the incident as an accidental air defense firing, to take the issue off the table as soon as possible? Does Zelenskiy’s continuing insistence that it was a Russian attack suggest the possibility that the Polish target was intentional? Well, it doesn’t matter because it’s ‘Putin’s war’ and everything that happens is his and the Russian people’s fault.

The continuing effort to deny its responsibility for the war and  instead blame the entire war indeed everything ‘negative’ that has happened in Ukraine since 2000 on a some Putin plan to seize all Ukraine, recreate the USSR, and seize Europe and simultaneously demean all Russians and all Russian history and culture, as many present and past Western officials and opinion-makers have,  is a continuation of the very same Western demonization of Putin and Russia that contributed mightily to the making of this war and the present threat that hangs over Europe and indeed much of mankind as a result. The West’s ‘stochastic war’ as well as its support for the kinetic war must stop. Otherwise, Russia and Ukraine are unlikely to resume negotiations with the consequences such a result is fraught with.

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NEW BOOK

EUROPE NOOKS, 2022

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RECENT BOOKS

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MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018

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About the Author –

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.