Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time to finish it before Lunar New Year (Chinese New Year) which will be coming up later this month. I don’t personally buy into stuff like astrology or zodiac signs on any kind of serious level, but I do think it’s fun to look at annual predictions (The Chinese calendar rotates in 60-year cycles based on 12 animals and 5 different elements) and it looks like 2023 is the year of the Water Rabbit—which I’m relieved to see being defined by characteristics like “relaxation”, “quietness”, and “contemplation”. Those sound like qualities all of us could probably benefit from after the chaos of the past few years.

I was thinking about doing a retrospective on 2022, or at the very least an art summary, but if I’m being honest, I feel like I’ve been stuck in a time warp and my perception of the passage of time has been totally screwed since the start of Covid, so I’d rather just leave it in the past and not try to make sense of how much or how little I accomplished. I saw this take on the Blinking Man meme the other day and I dunno about you guys, but it feels like there’s no better summary of the last 3 years:

Instead, I’d like to focus on what I’m looking forward to in 2023, and share a few of my personal goals for myself. I’d love to hear what all of you are hoping for this year as well!

Firstly, I’m hoping to take on a bit less client work in order to make time for personal art beyond just sketches or simple sequential drawings—I’ve had so little bandwidth to create original works in recent years and I’d like to be more intentional about dedicating the necessary time to creating finished illustrations that are for me, not for work.

Secondly, and this isn’t something that’s necessarily unique to 2023, but more of an ongoing goal of mine that I keep failing at; I’m going to try to be less of a perfectionist when it comes to my art. I waste a lot of time just noodling away at drawings, trying to make each detail accurate, and I know objectively that it’s usually to my own detriment. Not only is it really frustrating process-wise, but it actually often results in worse-looking final results. Anyone who’s drawn before knows that with every “clean up” pass over the initial sketch, it becomes harder and harder to retain the original energy/fluidity/dynamism and I am mega-guilty of this. I need to reprogram my brain a bit to be more accepting of looseness and selective rendering in my own work, instead of feeling like everything has to be perfectly accurate (and therefore, stiffer, less improvisational).

Lastly, I want to make more narrative work that prioritizes storytelling. I’ve obviously drawn comic interiors/sequentials many times now in my career, but it’s always been in the service of someone else’s story. In 2023, I’d like to tell my own by doing every stage of the work myself—from writing all the way to lettering. Well, maybe not lettering.. that really is a separate skillset that I don’t think I have a ton of talent for, haha. We’ll see.

Now, as far as stuff I’m looking forward to, I’ve got to mention the absolute bonkers lineup of upcoming video games on the horizon—2023 is going to be absolutely stacked with a ton of majorly anticipated titles, from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, to Yakuza: Ishin, to Street Fighter 6, to Hades 2 (!!!) but obviously, I’m most excited for Final Fantasy XVI. Covid-related delays might have made 2022 a bit of a quieter year but it looks like 2023 is going to be an absolute feast.

My favorite Final Fantasy game of all time is (of course) FFVII, but FFXII, FFIX, and FFVI are basically all tied for my second-fav, so I am thrilled to see a return to a more classic FF world and I’m beyond hyped for everything I’ve seen of the new battle system and the gameplay in general. Really looking forward to spending some time with this one.

I’m also looking forward to some of the shifts happening in regards to social media—I know it’s kind of a nerve-racking time right now because things seem very uncertain, and I’ll expand on this in a separate post soon, but I think there’s more to be optimistic about than people might think. Change is always scary, but it’s not always bad.

Finally, I’m (tentatively) excited to (maybe) begin traveling again. I’ve never been a huge fan of the act of traveling itself, but I sure do miss seeing old friends and getting to try new foods. I don’t know how things will go when it comes to the pandemic—it’s certainly not over, we certainly shouldn’t be ignoring it or pretending it isn’t a problem anymore—but I do feel like at this point, I’ve done all I can do to protect myself and others from it and I’ve pretty much avoided leaving my house for 3 years now, so perhaps it’s time to (slowly) get back out there. I think all of us have lost an awful lot since early-2020 in terms of human connection, and I’m looking forward to at least trying to rebuild some of that in 2023.

Let me know what your goals are, what you’re anticipating, what you feel hopeful about—things are admittedly bleak out there, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s probably going to get worse this year before it gets better—but that’s why I’m more curious than ever where people are finding space for optimism. Fingers crossed we all accomplish at least some of what we’re striving for in the new year!

• ANDOR •

The show I’ve been enjoying most this fall has definitely been Andor (Disney+) which feels weird to say, because I’m generally not a huge Star Wars fan and although I thought The Mandalorian S1 was fun and entertaining, nothing within the franchise has really gripped me (and if I’m being honest, that includes the original trilogy). But I very much enjoyed Rogue One back when it came out, and Andor has been a huge breath of fresh air within the modern media landscape; it doesn’t feature space wizards, or laser swords, or magical aliens—it’s instead the story of the non-chosen people, without special powers, who have always existed in the background of the movies, shows, and games, but have never been the sole focus of any other Star Wars story.

It asks questions about how real rebellions are formed and funded, what level of sacrifice is required to resist a tyrannical empire, and what kinds of people are capable of leading a genuine partisan effort. The costume designs are on a whole other level—not only do they feel “real” and lived-in, they’re aesthetically beautiful (not to mention interesting), and they also do a ton of heavy lifting in supporting narrative story elements and character development. The writing is incredible, the acting is 100% on point, and on top of all of that, it’s got the best droid in the entire Star Wars galaxy, B2EMO:

B2EMO, better known as “Bee”, is a droid well past his prime—with a battery that runs down quickly and a stutter that has developed no doubt as a result of an outdated operating system. I love that this show raises the question of droid mortality. Anyway, even with 2 episodes still left in the first season, I can’t say enough good things about Andor and highly recommend checking it out!

• HOUSE OF THE DRAGON •

I, like millions of people in the mid-2010’s, was an avid Game of Thrones watcher and, like millions of people, was heavily disappointed in the direction of the later seasons—especially S7 and S8. House of the Dragon (HBO) is not GoT, and I think it’d be a mistake to tune in expecting it to fill that same exact void, but it does feel in many ways like GoT walked so HoTD could run.

The show takes place roughly 200 years before the events of Thrones, and is based on the book Fire and Blood, which is a fictional history book about the Targaryen dynasty—told through accounts from several unreliable narrators. What I find most interesting about it is that because of the nature of the book it’s based on, one could interpret the show as the actual, canonical, “true” history of the Targaryen civil war. Because of this, even if you’re a book reader, there’s no way you’ll know every single thing that will happen in the show, which adds a really fun and interesting dynamic.

The first season has ended and we won’t be getting more HoTD until 2024, but it was heartening to see folks make a return to live-tweeting episodes and fervently creating episode reaction memes every Sunday while it was airing. Just like with GoT, the fanbase is hilarious—and some of the memes have been absolutely stellar. The one thing I need to stress though, is that just like Thrones, HoTD is a show featuring a high number of grey characters; it doesn’t really make sense to pick a side, because every character is probably gonna end up being a war criminal to some degree. And that includes the dragons. So if you’re gonna watch it, just enjoy the ride and don’t worry so much about picking a favorite character (at least, not based off of their moral values, lol… because spoiler alert: they’re all pretty bad in one way or another.)

• INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE •

I am such trash for the original 1994 movie, and when the trailer for this show dropped I immediately got myself an AMC+ subscription just for it. It was a short first season (only 7 episodes), but they established a ton and made some really interesting changes to the source material that make the show feel like a fresh take on an old story. Also it’s unbelievably gay. If you’re trashy like me and not squeamish about blood/vampire violence, it’s well worth a watch.

• THE SANDMAN •

The Sandman (Netflix) came out back in August, so it isn’t technically something from my “fall” watch list, but I had to mention it regardless because it was just so good, especially since it was recently announced that the show will be getting a second season. The casting was brilliant, and I always appreciate a comic book adaptation that actually allows the creator of the source material to have some say-so in how the final show turns out. Can’t wait to see what they do with the next season!

• THE RINGS OF POWER •

It feels a little weird recommending The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime) because I’m not sure I actually… liked it, lol.. but I will say this: it’s hard not to at least be curious what the most expensive TV show of all time looks like. I believe the budget for this first season was just over $700 million, and with marketing expenses, overall spending for it came close to $1 billion, which is absolutely insane. There are certainly scenes that look stunning, especially some of the wide shots of new environments, and obviously the CG is all very impressive, but despite this it’s still a little hard to wrap my head around why each episode cost $60 million a pop. I don’t think throwing more money at it necessarily made it better.

I’ve seen all of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, but I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the franchise. It’s.. fine. It’s fine! It’s entertaining enough. But I’ve always found the heavy reliance on “fantasy tropes” to be kind of boring and The Rings of Power certainly doesn’t stray from that model whatsoever. It’s overly predictable, and the story payoff is pretty lackluster, if I’m being honest.

All that being said, I still think it’s worth a watch if you’re into high fantasy spectacles, and it’s super family-friendly (unlike a lot of the other shows I’ve recommended in this post) so if you have kids who have the attention span to stick with long episode run times, I’d wager they might enjoy it.

• THE PATIENT •

I’ve basically seen no one talking about The Patient (FX) but it’s been an absolutely wild ride and I haven’t been able to peel myself away from every single episode. It’s probably the most opposite to TRoP in that it clearly has a very low budget, short episode run times, and a limited cast, but good grief it’s gripping. I don’t want to spoil anything because I think the less you know going in the better, but I highly recommend this one if you’re into suspense and/or psychological thrillers.

What have you guys been watching this season? Any recommendations for me?

Generated by DALL•E 2

There’s been a lot of Twitter discourse around AI art in recent weeks and months. I’ve mostly refrained from weighing in, partially due to an incredibly packed work and travel schedule, but also because it’s a discussion that requires a level of nuance and length that Twitter is ill-suited for. After considerable research and many discussions with other professionals, I’m going to try to to collect my thoughts on the subject in this post.

I draw pictures and hate numbers, but I nonetheless think it’s important to have an understanding of how something works before forming an opinion on it. I’m going to attempt a simplified description of how modern AI algorithms generate images through a process called diffusion. I want to preface this by saying I’m obviously not a computer scientist, this is just my takeaway from my own research.

Imagine we create a sequence of 50 pictures, starting with a simple line drawing of a triangle, and progressively add noise to each image until we reach a final image that is only noise.

Next, we tell a computer to look at each image we’ve generated and come up with the equation needed to produce the next in our sequence. Since the only difference between a given image and the image after it is the small amount of noise we added, the computer is actually just learning how to generate the noise needed to produce the next picture, not how to generate the entire image itself.

This process is called training, which is a fancy way of saying you provide the computer with some input data and it keeps tweaking its metaphorical knobs until it can produce something that best approximates it. The important thing to note here is that the computer does not actually keep the images we provide as input, it only creates an equation that can be used to roughly regenerate the noise in the images it was provided.

Now we’re going to spend thousands of hours doing this process for every image of a triangle we can come up with. We’re talking right triangles. Isosceles triangles. Gay triangles. Gay isosceles triangles. Any kind of image containing a triangle we can find, it’s going in our training set. And with each image set we run through our program, the computer gradually refines its process for producing the noise needed to transform the current image into the next image in its sequence.

Congratulations, we’ve just built the world’s worst program. 🌞 We can pass it an image of a triangle and get an image of pure noise in return.

But if we can train our computer to take an image of a triangle and turn it into noise, is it possible to take an image of pure noise and turn it into a triangle? The short answer is yes—using the power of math I don’t understand, we can reverse the process. Now, instead of adding noise with each step, we’re asking the computer to remove it gradually. It doesn’t “know” what a triangle is, but the noise removal process it taught itself always produces a triangular shape as a result. If we provide it with a large selection of training images, we can cause it to denoise into almost any pattern we want, including art shaped ones…

Now that I’ve thoroughly frustrated any AI-focused computer scientist who may be reading this, I want to underscore that modern, diffusion-based AI is doing more than just collaging bits of pre-existing images; it’s developing a process whereby it can produce new images based on the characteristics it’s identified as belonging to the giant set of categorized images it’s been trained on.

A more in-depth thread that details some intricacies about diffusion that I’ve excluded for brevity.

With a basic understanding of how it works out of the way, let’s discuss the consequences. In my view, these fall into two buckets: the philosophical ramifications and the economic ones. The philosophical questions—are the resulting images even art? is the person who prompted the generation considered an artist? and so on—have already been discussed at great length by other professionals, so this line of questioning feels unnecessary for me to spend much time wading into personally. Instead, I’d like to consider the second set of concerns: the economic ones.

Adult behavior can often be understood through one question: how will this affect my livelihood? And when your profession is so associated with precarity of employment, that the word it’s most commonly prefixed by is “starving”, anything that introduces additional uncertainty is going to be a sore subject.

The pending automation of labor has been a topic of discussion for as long as I can remember. Those discussions often center around its inevitability, but more notably ascribe an order with which it will progress: it will be the “unskilled” or “low skill” jobs that are the first casualties. Truck drivers, garbage collectors, warehouse workers—of course, it was only a matter of time before self-driving vehicles and automated forklifts did away with their necessity, right? “What do they expect?” one professional might say to another, before suggesting these workers move to an urban area and retrain themselves with a modern, irreplaceable skillset.

This imagined order in which automation unfolds reveals the fable many in the modern professional class have internalized regarding the worker-employer relationship. The concept of “skilled labor” has grown from economic jargon into a powerful cultural narrative, in which we’re incentivized to believe in a hierarchy of workers that share no common concern and, more importantly, no common fate. This is, of course, false. In my opinion, this is where mixing philosophical critiques with economic ones becomes problematic, because it continues a tradition of artists viewing our labor as a fundamentally unique pursuit, distinct from other forms. Almost everyone would agree that a delivery is a delivery, whether it’s a postal worker or a drone that drops the package on your doorstep. But art? Commercial artists tell ourselves that at the end of the day, our employers can never replace us, because you cannot, by definition, create art without an artist.

While this has historically been true (and I believe will largely remain so, even in the era of AI generated imagery), the following is the only truth that ultimately matters: under the economic system of capitalism, an employer's job is to generate the greatest amount of profit using the fewest amount of employees paid at the lowest acceptable rate.

That doesn’t mean the individual people that employ you are bad humans—we’re all functioning under the same system, after all—it just means it’s important to remember that it’s not their job to ensure you retain yours. If there’s a machine they can use to achieve the same outcome at a lower cost, it’s in their interest to do so. To a balance sheet, you are not an artist, you are an expense and under capitalism, your labor does not create art, it produces a product.

Given this, the question is not “will AI replace human artists?”, rather it’s “will our employers?”

The atomization caused by the competition required to succeed in creative fields, on social media, and in art school has broken our brains. While it’s understandable to fixate on how this may hurt our individual career opportunities, we’re currently in the narrow window of time where AI art and the culture around it are still malleable enough that we can actually contribute to shaping it. We cannot afford to simply take a principled stance against it and refuse to interact with/ignore it. As long as we remain under an economic system which prioritizes profit, all workers will remain in competition with technology looking to make them redundant—that is fundamental to our system’s design. The struggle is not against a specific technology, nor is it specific to our industry. The struggle is a generalized one against the way companies wield and profit from our labor and the anti-democratic nature of our current economic model.

My hope is that this will encourage some of us to begin exploring the creation of small art collectives, co-ops, and employee-owned studios, so that we can collaborate with one another to bring our ideas to life—not as self-contained “brands” who are in competition with each other, but as teams that can complement each other’s unique skill sets. We can advocate for policies and regulations that stop exploitation in creative fields, but nobody is immune to where this is ultimately heading and we have to see ourselves as part of a larger struggle all workers face for economic agency. We must participate in advocacy and action to support generalized rights for workers and a democratic economy.

Even if automation is inevitable, neo-feudalism is not.

Thoughts on the Near-Term

I think the immediate effects on commercial artists won’t be quite as dire as some have predicted. Yes, these programs can generate some impressive images right now. Yes, it’s getting better every day. But there’s a huge cloud of legal ambiguity over AI generated imagery at the moment and that will remain the case for quite some time. Most of these legal questions are not going to be preemptively answered through legislation, especially here in the U.S. It’s going to be a long process of litigation and appeals, likely producing no broadly applicable ruleset, only loose guidelines based on legal precedent. There will certainly be projects that use AI imagery in lieu of hiring a human artist, but these are likely projects that would’ve opted for stock imagery or attempted to hire a gig worker for offensively low wages. I don’t think it will be the companies primarily responsible for employing many of us, as their decisions will not be made by executives, but instead be mandated by their legal departments.

That’s not to say that the job landscape won’t change. What I believe is more likely to happen in the next few years is AI tools integrating into existing workflows to aid in rapid conceptualization of mood and tone, before being refined by in-house artists. However, the practically limitless and immediate nature of diffusion-based AI means that whatever time is saved conceptualizing is traded for time spent on curation and refinement, as choice fatigue becomes a very real problem.

It may surprise some to know that many tools and features that have become mainstays, such as Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill, are either driven by or have been improved using the same sort of machine learning algorithms that have created diffusion-based image generators.

Dynamically relighting a static image. An example of the way AI assisted tooling can be used to the benefit of visual artists.

There will be new positions created within the industry that center around knowing how to skillfully interact with the AI to produce usable results. Even if a manager or director can technically prompt the AI themselves, that doesn’t mean they will. Many can attest to the boss who insists on walking over to your workstation and explaining things face-to-face that would’ve been better done by email.

That human factor is something a lot of professional artists have glossed over when discussing the likelihood of our obsolescence: draftsmanship, technical skill, taste and talent—all the factors that come to mind when we think about “what makes a good artist”—are only 50% of what most creative jobs actually require. The other 50% is purely soft-skills: how much of a team player you are, how well you take direction, how effective your problem-solving skills are, whether you can make positive contributions during stressful periods, and frankly, whether or not you can form bonds with your colleagues/collaborators by being trustworthy and likable. All extremely *human* factors, all much more important than “how good of an artist” you are. (In my opinion, anyway.)

The reality is that the fallout of this technology will not be equally distributed. How automated image generation affects you is going to vary a lot based on your age, location, specialization and professional relationships. Although we speak of artists as a collective, the same stratification present in the broader economy is present in our own creative industries. What this technology means for students versus entry-level artists versus established professionals is very different, further compounded by whether you’re working an in-house job or as a freelancer.

Established professionals are the least at risk of immediate turmoil, in my opinion. These are artists that entered the industry in a different era, even if it was only 3-5 years ago, and whose professional relationships have been built and maintained through an extended period of work. When you’ve reached this level in your career, your influence is enough that there are likely already multiple artists working in a style similar to or inspired by yours, so if a client’s goal is simply to have the aesthetic rather than the artist at the lowest possible price, there are already options.

Professionals at this level, and I include myself in this category, really need to inspect the way we engage with aspiring and emerging artists. Condemning those who experiment with new technology or demanding they refuse employment/define rigid contractual language comes across as very out-of-touch. It also places the blame on the wrong people and frankly gives me flashbacks to the professors and professionals who told my graduating class all of the things to never do and the jobs to never take, ignoring the incredible amount of leverage and influence it takes to make any demands of a client.

That’s not to say seasoned pros aren’t making valid points—they’re often coming from a place of genuine concern, informed by years of exploitation themselves. But when you’re at this point in your career, you’re no longer actively looking for an “on-ramp” and the landscape has shifted so fast that we’re bound to give advice that is outdated, if not insensitive.

For aspiring artists and students: don’t be afraid to experiment with new technology, even if your seniors approach it with skepticism or derision. There are clearly tons of ethical questions raised by the rapid emergence of A.I. generated imagery, but that shouldn’t prevent you from finding interesting ways to work new technology into your workflows.

Thoughts on the Long-Term

In terms of what I think this means for the future of creative storytelling, visual arts, media, entertainment, etc.: we need to recognize that AI is, at this stage, still fundamentally a tool. And more than a tool, it’s an incredible advancement in technology that will make the act of creating visual media more accessible to everyone, which I think will ultimately prove to be a good thing in the long term.

It’s worth noting that art has historically been a profession that only the wealthy could pursue. Setting aside the upfront financial costs of supplies/materials and access to dedicated space, the time needed to train and develop the prerequisite skills practically necessitated access to wealthy patrons or family. The introduction of commercial art produced for mass consumption made it possible for a wider range of people to work in the arts (myself included), but it also meant the artists in these fields were not working in service of personal vision, but executing other people’s ideas for increasingly low budgets.

And as media becomes more complex and its audience more sophisticated, production of interdisciplinary media like blockbuster films and AAA video games require teams of hundreds of people working exploitative hours for years at a time. This requires a financial investment only a handful of conglomerates can manage and is reliant on a global audience to generate a profit, which translates to incredible risk aversion by decision makers. Even on smaller productions, character design and aesthetic decisions are made around what’s merchandisable, as recouping expenses and generating a profit always takes priority over creative vision.

AI generated/assisted imagery has the potential to fundamentally change this dynamic. For as much uncertainty that individual illustrators face, media companies will reckon with a new world freed from their creative monopoly, where a small group of artists can make incredibly complex media that would’ve previously been impossible without their resources. Consider a few creators being able to make a completely self-funded feature-length animated film, a co-operative indie studio developing an enormous AAA open world game, or a lone teenager creating cinematic short films without leaving their bedroom. Large, profit-focused production houses will be making media in a world where equally elaborate projects can be developed and distributed independently at minimal cost. While I don’t expect this to result in their demise, it may fundamentally alter the balance of power.

There will always be low-effort media. This predates AI images (think “Pop Art” filters imitating Warhol), and will continue to exist after. But just because a technology can be used to produce low/no-effort images doesn’t mean it can’t be used to create legitimately compelling art when put into the right hands. The antagonism of some in the AI art community is saddening and frustrating, but these types are just extensions of those that have been tracing images, removing watermarks, and reposting uncredited artwork for years. We cannot let the attitudes of users be conflated with the value of the tools; we should not hold curious creators responsible for the ethical failings of the companies involved; and we must not buy into the idea of a caste system of labor, where artists exist as an insulated class of worker detached from the larger whole.

I’m proud of the artists who have put effort into directly engaging with the companies and teams developing this tech and with the lawyers and policymakers who may help design guardrails. But we should be careful that our guardrails do not become gates, and remind ourselves that there exists the potential for a radically different future, where artists can create elaborate works independent of the profit-focused systems we must work within today.

It’s been a difficult week and a half (month? year? years?) for most of us who live in the USA. 10 days ago, the Supreme Court overturned its landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, which affirmed the constitutional right to abortion for all Americans. Even for those of us who knew this was an inevitable outcome of the Trump presidency and the unrelenting Republican effort to roll back human rights for the past 49 years, it has nevertheless been an exceedingly bitter pill to swallow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a person who now has less guaranteed rights and bodily autonomy than I had just a week and a half ago, and about how we got here as a country. The longstanding tradition of historical revisionism in the United States has managed to not only hide a lot of important context around abortion in general, but it has also contributed to convincing people that Roe V. Wade was some kind of isolated niche issue rather than a bellwether for freedom in this country as a whole.

Well, if anyone was still confused about where the Supreme Court stands on civil rights in 2022, here are some of the other decisions they made last week (on top of the 6-3 ruling on Dobbs V. Jackson Women’s Health Organization mentioned above):

• Struck down a longstanding NY law requiring a special need to carry a weapon, claiming that Americans have the right to carry handguns outside the home.

• Rolled back the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to reduce the carbon output of existing power plants; kneecapping the EPA and Biden’s plan to combat climate change.

• Blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine -or- testing requirement for the USA’s largest employers, leaving covid response up to individual states

• Invalidated a tuition program in Maine, ruling that religious schools cannot be barred from receiving public grants extended to other private schools.

• In another blow to the separation of church and state, the SC sided with a former high school football coach who was leading prayer circles on the 50-yard line, claiming that his actions did not violate the prohibition on government endorsement of religion.

• Ruled that state officials have the power to prosecute non-Indians for crimes against Native Americans within a tribal reservation—a decision heavily criticized by tribal leaders due to it limiting the reach of a 2020 ruling that reclassified roughly 40% of Oklahoma, including the city of Tulsa, as ‘Indian land’.

These decisions all point to one undeniable fact: the Supreme Court is now officially acting as an arm of the GOP by rapidly pushing through policies that are unpopular with the majority of Americans. And for those of us who grew up in a post-Warren Court USA, these new developments have been jarring, even panic-inducing; but the truth is, the SC is actually just returning to the status-quo it upheld for the majority of American history.

I think, in order to understand the mindset of the Supreme Court though, we really need to go back to the very beginning of American Republic. There has always been a fundamental tension at the heart of our government; a disagreement on its purpose, and what expectations average citizens should be allowed to have of it.

For most logical thinkers, the obvious purpose of government (and on a larger scale, society in general) is to better coordinate efforts to accomplish widely beneficial tasks that would be insurmountable for individuals. For example, common sense projects like building roads and bridges, creating affordable public transit, providing clean drinking water, making sure fires and other emergencies can be taken care of quickly, offering good public education programs, etc.

But this kind of thinking has actually not been very “American” for that long. For most of our country’s 233-year history, people in power have largely fought to preserve the rights of the wealthiest and most privileged, at the expense of the poorest and most marginalized in society. The American Mythos is that we are a country built on freedom and equal rights for all, but in reality, our system of Democracy-Lite™ was designed to prevent direct democracy as much as possible and to make sure that wealthy men would be able to secure positions at the top of a hierarchical system that in many ways, mirrored the monarchies in Europe that our founders claimed to want to be free of. In actuality, all 3 of our founding documents betray their inherent desire not to destroy hierarchy, but rather to create new ones, not based in familial ties or hereditary entitlements, but rather on personally amassed wealth and power.

This is how it was possible for these men to deny human rights to enslaved people, Native Americans, women, and disabled people for the majority of our country’s existence. And it’s this desire for a rigid hierarchical system that motivates the GOP (and if we’re being honest, a not-insignificant chunk of the Democratic party, as well) to take advantage of every possible loophole in our constitution to revert the Supreme Court into a version of itself that harkens back to the 1850’s, or the 1930s.

There have been a few rare moments in our history in which a progressive-minded President challenged the will of the Supreme Court, and both times it has created a furious backlash that rolled back human rights and caused us to take many steps back as a country. The first time this happened was when Abraham Lincoln ignored the SC’s Dred Scott decision in order to pass the 13th amendment at the end of the Civil War. After the (short) period of Reconstruction in which formerly enslaved Black people began to actually be able to enter into government, obtain small levels of political power, and amass some amount of generational wealth, the KKK rose out of the south and began terrorizing them.

The backlash to the federal ban of slavery in the United States was so harsh, in fact, that it resulted in the creation of Jim Crow laws, allowing for nearly 100 years of white terrorism against Black citizens and the actual revocation of their constitutional civil rights. Most of these rights were not officially regained until after 1968, and there’s a strong argument to be made as to why even today, they have yet to be fully restored.

The 2nd most notable moment a President pushes the country forward against the will of the Supreme Court is when FDR introduces his New Deal policies in 1933. He also has to deal with a SC that keeps blocking him from making any kind of real progress, despite his policies being incredibly popular with everyday Americans—and finally, after having bill after bill shot down, in an effort to secure Social Security and Labor Union Protections, he threatens to expand the court. As this idea begins to gain steam in the court of public opinion, the SC finally backs off and Roosevelt wins his game of Chicken. He never actually does expand the court though, as his presidency ends up outlasting enough of the Justices to allow him to eventually appoint 8 out of 9.

This is when the Supreme Court actually begins to shift into a more progressive-minded entity, one that actually sides with popular demand and makes an effort to expand rights for the majority of Americans rather than to revoke them—and this culture is more or less maintained on the SC all the way through Obama’s presidency until Mitch McConnell blocks his 2014 appointee, Merrick Garland, from ever even being interviewed by Congress, much less taking a seat on the Court.

The backlash to FDR’s New Deal and later, LBJ’s Great Society policies have been a much slower burn than the backlash to the Emancipation Proclamation. It has taken conservatives in this country well over half a century to fully execute their design, but the 2016 presidential election sealed the deal, and now, in 2022, we’re finally seeing the culmination of their decades-long efforts. They’ve been slowly and methodically chipping away at the concept of a functioning government for the people, but now the floodgates are fully open—so it’s important to understand what the end goal of the GOP is, because without extremely deliberate and coordinated resistance, I have no doubt they’ll achieve everything they wished for and more.

What you need to understand about the American Conservative movement is that their goal has always singularly been to prevent the maximum amount of equality possible—and I know that it’s human nature to want to assume positive intent and to expect logical choices that benefit the most people, but you need to set all that aside because for American Conservatives, the concept of “equality” has always been a zero-sum game that is ultimately existential for them. Understand that their end game is to 1. create a defined hierarchy according to theocratic, paternalistic standards, 2. maintain minority rule by controlling education and indoctrinating from an early age, and 3. rid any and all opposition to this over time by limiting or revoking political, civil, and economic rights.

In order for us to fight for true equality of opportunity in this country, we need to first recognize that inequality has always been built in to the very foundation of our nation, and that stubbornly holding on to things like “tradition” or “constitutional norms” only creates an artificial cap on how much progress we can make. We’re now effectively dealing with a rogue Supreme Court, a hostile Senate, a very slim House majority, and a weak President that are all working together (voluntarily or not) to prevent the people’s will from being executed. We need to recognize that all 3 branches of government are dysfunctional and are not upholding their end of the social contract; and that when human rights are getting rolled back or outright revoked, it becomes the duty of all citizens to resist, to protest, and to take radical measures to prevent further backsliding.

The 5-decade endeavor to revoke Roe is a good case study in how much dedication and coordinated effort was required to actually move the needle—but the reframing of “abortion rights” in this country that happened well before the official Roe ruling is perhaps worth learning about even more than what happened in more recent times, as it truly does illustrate how much damage a single historical revisionism campaign led by just a handful of men can do. I highly recommend giving these 2 episodes of Throughline a listen if you aren’t familiar already:

Last week, I posted a thread on twitter in response to Ewan Mcgregor’s video addressing the racist harassment Moses Ingram has been getting from people who identify as Star Wars fans—I’ll embed the first tweet here so you guys can have a direct link to see comments if you’re interested, but I’ll be formatting all of my tweets below (and adding some additional thoughts that were too lengthy for the 280-word limit) so you don’t have to click through just to read the thing.

I’d always been confused as to how some Star Wars fans could misunderstand the franchise they claim to love so much, but reading the work of historian Heather Cox Richardson really opened my eyes to the fact that the original movie served as a kind of Rorschach test for viewers in 1977.

Many of the (majority) white male American fans identified with Luke (or Han, who I’ll get into later), who had rare, god-given abilities that made him special, but was simply unable to achieve his true potential because of circumstances caused by a tyrannical government—after all, Star Wars is essentially a Western; and in the spirit of Westerns that were dominating TV channels in the 70s (there were 29 running series that decade alone) it was perceived to be a story glorifying many of the same themes: rugged individualism, bootstrap ideology, serving a power higher than the rule of law, etc.

The original trilogy was released just after the height of the Cold War, after McCarthyism had caused the USA to officially adopt conservative-movement (white) Christian/Puritan culture into the mainstream—and it had permeated into every pocket of society, including how audiences perceived these movies about space wizards. Even though non-white, non-male, non-American fans of the original trilogy very likely interpreted the story differently, they were in the minority as the fan base was mostly dominated by men and boys who had internalized Western Cold War ideology: much of which continues to dominate our society today.

This didn’t start to change until 1999, when Episode 1 hit theaters. And this was when the first waves of backlash really began to hit—when fans of the original trilogy started feeling like maybe the new movie wasn’t exclusively for them. And as the franchise has grown, this fervor has only become more pronounced. The irony of course is that George Lucas modeled the villains of Star Wars after Republican politicians of the era—Palpatine was inspired by Nixon and the Empire grew out of a highly corrupt oligarchal republic. (Hmm!!) The political subtext of the franchise as a whole is pro-socialist.

I would actually argue that the original trilogy took a far more leftist stance on topics like asymmetrical warfare (Lucas has talked at length about his views on the Vietnam War and how Apocalypse Now influenced him) but post-Mouse, all of Star Wars became significantly less political. So even with the newer movies and shows taking on a much more middle-of-the-road stance on pretty much everything (except TLJ of course) the subset of fans who misunderstood the subtext of the original trilogy continue to prove their complete and utter lack of media literacy.

Star Wars wasn’t ever supposed to be a Rorschach test—it was instead meant to show audiences that a diverse range of people (and other lifeforms lol) in every economic class could find a common bond in their shared struggle against political oppression. That’s what resonates even today. And that’s why the SW fandom will continue to grow far beyond the narrow-minded, media-illiterate, conservative-valued, culture-war-obsessed dudes who (mis)identified with the Western influences of the original trilogy. They haven’t been the majority for a long time now anyway.

(And yes obviously Star Wars was also inspired by Samurai movies—that goes without saying. There’s a lot of common ground shared by Westerns and Samurai flicks, but this thread is already long enough so I won’t unpack that here.) Anyway thanks for reading. ✌🏼✨

In all honesty, I wasn’t expecting too many people to actually be interested in what I had to say about this particular topic, and I certainly didn’t expect folks to engage with my tweet thread to this level. I was asked repeatedly to elaborate further, but twitter is generally a horrible platform for any kind of longer-form writing, so I’m expanding on the above thread for you here instead. If you’re a normal person and my thread was enough for you, no hard feelings if you check out now. But if you’re like me, and you want to explore how Star Wars is actually very deeply connected to our current political landscape via a historical throughline that’s been unfurling since the Civil War, by all means, read on.

I’m going to run through this stuff as briefly as possible, since American history is not really the point, but it is very important to understand if you want a full picture of what’s going on in the Star Wars fandom today. I obviously won’t be able to go into great detail, so if you want a full rundown of the history of the Republican party and how it relates to today’s culture wars, I recommend reading this book and then this book, as a starting point.

What you need to know is that the USA was founded on a fundamental paradox: that “all men are created equal”, except of course, (enslaved) Black men, Indigenous men, non-white immigrants, disabled men, poor men, and of course, all women. The tension that was immortalized in our constitution is that white men can only have equality with one another, not with anyone else. The “natural order” of foundational American culture is a hierarchical one: one in which white (land-owning) men belong at the top, and everyone else belongs beneath them—their station largely depending on race first, then wealth, then gender, and lastly religion, in that order.

For nearly the entire first century of our country’s existence, the aforementioned tension within this fragile experiment we called Democracy was allowed to exist in its original, imperfect form, largely unchallenged. That changed when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, ran for the presidency in 1860, on a platform of “Equality of Opportunity”; the radical idea that every American should be given a fair shot—access to the same starting line, regardless of race or social station. Southern Democrats vehemently disagreed with this concept, naturally. We ended up fighting a war over it. And when Lincoln’s ideas won, an aggrieved white man literally murdered him.

So after the Civil War, even though the Confederates had lost on the battlefield, they were able to extend the ideological fight well beyond the turn of the century through rapid Western expansion. The Eastern states might have been totally taken over by the “Establishment Elites” (Coastal Elites?) but as Americans continued to migrate westward in search of opportunity, much of the South’s original ideas about a “natural hierarchy” took on a new form: one of rugged individualism, of bootstrapping cowboys, of pioneer men who protected their prairie wives and daughters and looked to god over government—eventually resulting in a complete party flip in the 1960’s that firmly aligned Democrats with the Civil Rights (Equality of Opportunity) movement, and the Republicans with Conservative ideals (American Hierarchy).

The “culture wars” truly began in this era, and have been going on ever since. The Republican party of Barry Goldwater, Nixon, and eventually Reagan—of cowboys and pioneers and conservative white men, then set out on a path to undo New Deal and Great Society policies, many of which, ironically, were put in place in the post-WW2 era by President Eisenhower (a Republican). They repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which removes safeguards that had been in place to protect the public from immoral media practices, and create the conditions for Talk Radio to flourish all across Conservative America, with personalities like Rush Limbaugh catapulting to the top of this new medium. Limbaugh and others like him go on to shape American culture outside of urban centers at large all throughout the Bush (W) presidency.

And as the pendulum swings back toward liberalism during the Obama years, white male grievance increases in the USA. The TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party forms in response to Talk Radio’s assertions that Obama is a socialist who intends to “redistribute wealth” (read: take money from “hard-working, tax-paying” white people and give it to Black people and immigrants). Obama is, in actuality, a Neoliberal capitalist who proposes policies that look nearly identical to Mitt Romney and other moderate Republicans’. He actually represents exactly what Lincoln and Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans had once hoped for: proof that if given equal opportunity, even a Black man can make it to the White House. And Conservatives absolutely could not stand it.

Ok, so, why have I given you an (extremely) simplified crash-course on recent American history? Because all of these events create the roadmap for the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which happens just one year after Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters. During (roughly) this time, we see the rise of both GamerGate and ComicsGate, accusations of “Fake Geek Girls” and anger over having to share space with women in nerd entertainment, as well as Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement—both causes further amplifying that white male grievance I mentioned earlier, and contributing to a real backlash once Trump is officially elected—one in which many white men feel emboldened to go full Joker-mode; real mask-off stuff: full on misogyny, racism, and an absolutist adherence to the myth of (white) American Exceptionalism that has been so carefully woven into the tapestry of the Republican party over the past 54 years by Conservatives.

⚠️ Spoilers Ahead, if you’re reading this post and… haven’t watched the latest 3 Star Wars movies, somehow.

When the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit the internet, a (very) loud minority was absolutely incensed—not only did this long-awaited Star Wars movie seem to center a female protagonist, it also prominently featured a Black stormtrooper. It had historically always been accepted that the main cast of each Star Wars movie would include a woman, but to have her be the main character? Preposterous. Outcry and conspiracy theories of Woke Disney™ began permeating in conservative circles (laughable, considering The Mouse is notorious for avoiding making any real political statements in their films and shows and has adopted a policy of *~representation~* to avoid having to actually take a meaningful stance on anything that has the potential to be perceived as political).

When the movie finally came out, all signs pointed to the plot moving in an unusual (for Star Wars) direction—that Rey was a nobody, un-special in every way; that Finn was a mere Stormtrooper, a grunt, and yet both characters appeared to be Force-sensitive enough to clearly be setting up the next movie to show at least one of them, if not both, becoming Jedis. Conservative SW fans were not amused by this idea. They wanted to relive their childhoods—to get a new Star Wars film that was exactly like the original trilogy, just with better graphics and production; one which featured a (white) (male) protagonist being a special hero with special powers fighting bad guys on the backdrop of a Western set in space.

In retaliation, they adopted a strategy of full on racist, misogynist online harassment campaigns directed toward the actors themselves. The fervor really didn’t die down for the next 2 years, and by the time The Last Jedi came out, they had perfected the formula. Disney had brought in Rian Johnson to direct, and while I obviously don’t know any details about that movie’s script approval process or how we ended up with the final product, my educated guess is that in an effort to appease angry fans, a directive to gently shift gears a bit from what got the conservative fans all riled up around TFA was implemented.

The usual strategy on major high budget blockbusters like this tends to be Radical Centrism; telling a story that glazes over any inconvenient truths and doesn’t address any issues that can be related back to actual real-world societal problems, and makes people feel just good enough at the end that they don’t question any of it. But somehow, despite the messy storytelling and admittedly high number of cringey scenes (that I’d be willing to bet were caused by too many focus groups designing the movie via committee due to backlash, but I digress), TLJ ultimately managed to embody a message of equality, hope, and living up to our own ideals.

The movie closed on a shot of a little boy, of no apparent privilege or importance, using the Force to pull a broom toward himself. The message of this new trilogy was undeniably: “Anyone can be a Jedi”. That special lineage was not a prerequisite to achieving greatness, that if Equal Opportunity is provided to these “nobodies”, they too, could be protagonists and heroes in the biggest and most widely consumed stories of our time.

So naturally, when the credits rolled, every white, male, conservative, Americana-Cowboy-Myth-believing, TEA-party-aligned franchise fan looked kinda like this:

The backlash was so extreme, in fact, that The Mouse freaked and removed TLJ director Rian Johnson from the next movie and brought back JJ Abrams (a clear sign of Corporate Damage Control Mode). And based on how the final movie in the new trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker turned out, I’m willing to bet the original script was totally and completely scrapped. It was…. the embodiment of Radical Centrism: so much compromise that nobody ended up happy in the end—all because the backlash and harassment from conservative original trilogy fans was so intense that it scared the powers that be into attempting to kowtow to their demands.

Rey of course, ends up finding out she’s a Palpatine. Destined by blood to be a powerful Jedi, blah blah blah, it was a major bummer. It completely undid the work of both TFA and TLJ, and made audiences feel like they had wasted both their time and emotional investment. I actually tweeted about how I would have handled “fixing” TRoS back in 2020, and after digging up what I said, I still stand by it. 😂

Jokes and my Fake Geek Girl spelling aside, the reason so much of the outcry we heard from conservative SW fans ever since 2015 contained sentiments like “Keep politics out of Star Wars!” is that those fans weren’t able to really detect or accurately identify the politics of the original trilogy. George Lucas himself plainly states in the video clip below (a must-watch—it’s only about 3 and a-half minutes long) that the rebels were meant to evoke the Viet-Cong, and that in the larger allegory of Star Wars, the Empire represented us. As in, the USA. If conservative fans saw themselves in characters like Luke, or Han, or any other member of the rebellion, it was only because of their own media illiteracy and utter lack of self-awareness.

And since you made it to the end, here’s a WIP-shot of a drawing I started (literally) 2 years ago—I posted this video of myself working on it and then it promptly fell into a black hole that many of my illustrations fall into when I get overloaded with client work. Some day…. maybe I’ll actually finish it.

Let’s get this out of the way: Ukraine is not a country run by Nazis. The current parliament actually passed a law just this past February officially criminalizing antisemitism; when committed by an individual it’s now punishable by a fine or prison sentence up to 5 years, and any public officials in violation of the law will also be banned from holding certain offices for a period of up to 3 years on top of standard punishment. Organized groups or acts even by an individual that have severe consequences are now punishable with prison sentences of up to 8 years. Ukraine now has an actual legal framework for handling any such cases, which is more than we have here in the United States. Here in the USA, we consider everything from racist symbols to racial slurs to burning effigies “protected speech” under the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court has actually repeatedly ruled that what would be considered “hate speech” in other countries is legally protected on a federal level—just to put this into perspective.

A recent poll published by the Pew Research Center showed that Ukraine was the most accepting of Jews among all Central and Eastern European countries—the survey found that only 5% of Ukrainians would not wish to accept Jewish people as fellow citizens, compared to 18% of Poles, 22% of Romanians, and 23% of Lithuanians. Ukraine is estimated to have the world’s third or fourth-largest Jewish community. If we look at the USA, a separate survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation league in 2019 found that 19% of American’s support the antisemitic canard that Jews control Wall-Street, and that 24% of surveyed Millennials and Gen-Zers said that the Holocaust might be a myth.

Yes, there are Neo-Nazis in Ukraine. This statement is both 1. Russian Propaganda, and 2. The Truth. This might be inconvenient to admit today, but after 8 years of Western journalists reporting on the Far-Right movement in Ukraine, we only stand to damage our own credibility by denying it. And I’ve seen many neoliberal types dismissively hand-wave this subject entirely since the start of Russia’s invasion, which is not helpful. The problem here, as with Russia’s framing of all information it presents to The West, is that it draws attention to this fact as if to imply that Neo-Nazis don’t exist within their borders and that they don’t have a far-right extremist movement of their own that is not only significantly larger than Ukraine’s, but it’s been reported since 2014 that Putin has directly financed far-right movements both within Russia as well as all over Europe. Even worse, this information is presented as a justification or even a rallying call in hopes that it will motivate people in The West to support Russia or at the very least, not support Ukraine.

My question then, is why didn’t Putin begin with the Nazis that exist all across his own country? If he was actually on a mission to rid the world of Naziism, and if there was truly a Fascist Nazi Regime in Kyiv, Russia could have rallied Western European countries to help conduct a formal investigation—Especially considering some countries in the west base their entire personalities on being WWII champs and Nazi hunters just as much as Russia does. Perhaps the problem is that the narrative Putin has crafted is fundamentally twisted. His claim is essentially that any Ukrainian who is not pro-Russia must then be a Nazi, and Nazis are traditionally killed by Russians, who defeated them in the Great Patriotic War. Therefore, the “Denazification” of Ukraine = getting rid of any Ukrainian who is unwilling or even unenthusiastic about rejoining Russia.

The truth is, the word “Nazi” is used in Russia the same way that “Commie” was used here in the United States at the height of the Cold War. It’s a vague but scary accusation that can be lobbed at anyone Putin disagrees with that can mean a multitude of things to different people. To this day, there are Americans who still unironically use “Commie” as an insult, and half the time they don’t even know what they’re actually mad about. Most of the time it’s because they believe they’re living in an otherwise meritocratic system that would be perfectly functional if only it wasn’t being threatened by immigrants, or that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, or something equally stupid.

As far as his own political views, Putin has proven that he’s staunchly conservative. For most of his presidency, he has worked to dismantle left-wing Soviet-era policies—instead of following the USSR model of dedicated atheism, he revived the Orthodox Christian church in Russia, and has since instated a wide range of right-wing, anti-LGBT, anti-feminist, pro-state-capitalist policies that have nudged Russian culture ever further into close-mindedness, bigotry, and chauvinism. It’s also why Putin appeals to our own increasingly fascistic Republican party; the model he has created within the Russian Federation is every paternalistic political conservative’s wet dream.

The Kremlin’s other, more important reason for claiming that Ukraine is overrun with far-right fascists is that it stirs a very real sense of generational trauma within Russians by reminding them of their direct confrontation with the German army in WWII—which, again, through the implementation of Memory Laws, has crystalized into a dishonest narrative about how the Soviets singlehandedly beat back the fascist Nazi regime in the Great Patriotic War by allowing narratives from both World War Two and the Russian Empire’s Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon converge. This new story has served as a reliable source of nationalistic pride for many Russians, who celebrate Victory Day on May 9th—another Putin-era tradition, not a Soviet one.

But the truth is messier than that; in reality, it was the American Lend-Lease Program that supplied the USSR with modular war factory designs and schematics straight from Detroit, tanks, bombs, and additional materials, but not any troops, because The Allies were counting on Stalin to use his most abundant resource against Hitler’s army: his people. The Red Army was the only fighting force in Europe that could go toe to toe with the German army in terms of scale, and much of the most brutal fighting happened when they met on the Eastern Front. (And yes, it’s the very same Lend Lease Program that is now being activated for the first time since WWII in Ukraine, that Congress unanimously voted through recently, and that has allowed Joe Biden to magically make over 40 billion dollars worth of aid materialize out of thin air. Meanwhile, Flint hasn’t had clean drinking water in a decade. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be doing everything we can to support Ukraine, but it is telling how eager our government is to throw the kitchen sink at military spending while refusing to spend a penny on badly needed domestic social programs. Perhaps these things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but what do I know. 😐)

Anyway, what the modern narrative in Russia today leaves out about the “Great Patriotic War” is that at various points during WWII, Ukrainian men accounted for anywhere between 40-80% of the Red Army’s fighting forces, and along with the Belarusians, made up the majority of the first line of defense against the Nazis. During 1943-1945 about 4.5 million Ukrainians became Red Army soldiers. The losses of the Ukrainian people, many of whom were Jews, during World War Two accounted for 40-44% of the total losses of the USSR, and the territory that was most heavily occupied during Operation Barbarossa was in Ukraine. This might be why “Victory Day” isn’t celebrated on May 9th there, but instead is a somber remembrance of the trauma and sacrifice of WWII that occurs on May 8th instead.

“Ok, but what about the Azov Battalion?”

Alright, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The Azov Battalion, now formally named the ‘Azov Special Operations Detachment’ (but also known as the Azov Regiment) is a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine that is famous for its ties to Neo-Nazi and far-right ideology. The group uses controversial symbols such as an inverted Wolfsangel and Black Sun, and both were insignia used by Nazi SS divisions. Numerous members have been identified bearing SS tattoos, including swastikas. Sure, we can talk about the shifting meaning of symbols over time or the way the Nazis co-opted existing symbology, but regardless, the optics here are undeniably bad.

The Azov Battalion started out as a local “self-defense force” in the eastern Donbas region primarily made up of football hooligans and ultras. At the start of the War in Donbas, Viktor Yanukovych had just recently fled Ukraine after the Maidan Revolution and while an intermittent government had been put in place to maintain stability ahead of formal reelections, there were a severe lack of procedural standards in place that revealed an extremely weakened and dysfunctional State. The official Ukrainian armed forces were incredibly ill-equipped and ill-prepared as they had been intentionally dismantled by previous leadership over many years, and predictably, they were unable to fend off Russian forces during both the Annexation of Crimea and the attack in the Donbas.

As a result of this precarious situation, the Ukrainian government officially requested the help of local defense forces like Azov. It has to be recognized that only a weak and/or dysfunctional State has to ask for help from outside forces, and that if there was a functional government throughout the years that Yanukovych was in power, the actual Ukrainian army likely would have been able to mobilize to defend against the Russian invasion. But in 2014, there weren’t many other options outside of the handful of local defense groups and militias that had started to form, and when someone starts a fire, the natural response is to reach for the nearest source of water to put it out. Even if that source of water is the sewer.

But hold on—as we’ve seen in the Ukrainian War of 2022, it’s pretty clear that some significant changes have taken place over the past 8 years. The Ukrainian Army has transformed into a professional fighting force that has shown itself to be capable of holding off a full-scale Russian invasion for 80+ days. Since its founding, Azov has gone through many member cycles and reforms, taking it from roughly 2500 members at its peak to a reported 900 members in 2022. Today, the Azov Regiment is comprised of Ukrainian citizens from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds: Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians, Belarusians, Jews, Greeks, and even Crimean Tatars. Their members are mostly Russian-speaking, and they were based in Mariupol.

Azov's founding member, Andriy Biletsky is a Ukrainian white nationalist and founder of several other far-right groups such as Right Sector and the Social National Assembly (SNA). By September 2014, he left the Azov Battalion to start the National Corps political party, through which he was able to secure a seat in the Ukrainian Parliament. He was a member of Parliament from 2014-2019, though he was unable to write any laws that were actually adopted during this time. In the 2019 Parliamentary election, Biletsky’s Svoboda party only received 2.15% of the vote, which did not clear the 5% election threshold and thus did not gain any parliamentary seats.

So here’s where I land on Azov, personally: I don’t know how many Nazis exist within their ranks, kind of like I don’t know how many Nazis exist within the ranks of my own country’s armed forces. And while I find the thought unsettling, I ultimately don’t lose sleep over it, because I live in a country with an established chain of command and a (somewhat—this is becoming more debatable by the day 😑) functional government that holds soldiers to a set of standards that prevent them from carrying out coordinated attacks or forming into informal battalions based on any kind of shared fringe ideology. Countries with strong democracies tend to have professional militaries rather than ones made up of football hooligans and larpers—And all evidence points to Ukrainians risking life and limb for nearly a decade to fight for the right to be a democratic nation, so… I believe that much like our own country, there are definitely Neo-Nazis, and like our own country, they don’t have any real institutional power. (Again, this might be more debatable in the USA than in Ukraine, sadly.)

Here’s the thing about Nazis: even though they’re historically famous for referring to various racial and ethnic groups as vermin, they are actually the ones who behave like cockroaches as they seem to be capable of surviving just about anywhere in sub-optimal conditions. After WWII, Germany went through decades of very intentional reconstructive efforts, educational reforms, public apologies, ongoing reparations payments, implementation of laws banning Nazi insignia and Naziism, etc. And yet, there are still Nazis in Germany and a very real growing threat from far right extremists. The only method that has proven effective at dealing with extremism of this nature to some extent is to have a strong civil society, a capable government, and official peacekeeping forces with an accountable chain of command, who abide by the rule of law (as opposed to paramilitary groups or militias); and Ukraine has proven that it is committed to this exact model.

Lastly, when it comes to the Azov regiment, I think the most important thing is to ask Ukrainians themselves. I found this Reddit post explaining Azov from the perspective of an actual Ukrainian citizen to be pretty insightful, and I recommend giving it a read. It links to some other interesting posts and the replies are worth looking at, as well.

“Ok, but what about the Banderites?”

Again, “Banderite” is 1. A Russian Propaganda Term with flexible meaning and 2. A real moniker for supporters of Stepan Bandera. After the Bolshevik revolution and the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, Bandera emerged as a defining voice of Ukrainian Nationalism. He became radicalized after the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-1919) and was even sentenced to life in prison after orchestrating the 1934 assassination of Poland’s Minister of the Interior. He was released from prison in 1939, following the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. (Oh yeah, did I mention Hitler and Stalin agreed to split Poland between them, like some kind of horrific friendship necklace?)

Bandera joined the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and began collaborating with the Nazis, and when Germany invaded the USSR, he created the 1941 Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood in Lviv, in which he pledged to work with Nazi Germany. He was immediately arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By 1944, with Germany losing ground to advancing Allied Armies, Bandera was released in the hope that he would help deter Soviet forces. He instead settled in West Germany where became the leader of OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations until he was assassinated by KGB agents in Munich.

Stepan Bandera was an antisemite and a Nazi-collaborator, who held far-right nationalist beliefs and was largely responsible for the massacre of Polish civilians, as well as the Holocaust in Ukraine. After former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushcheko was poisoned during his election campaign in 2004, he managed to stay in office until he was removed in 2010—and as a parting act of defiance against Russia, he awarded Bandera the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine. The award was largely condemned by the international community, and when Yanukovych returned to the presidency, he annulled the award. A proposal to confer the award on Bandera was then rejected by the Ukrainian parliament in 2019.

Bandera remains a controversial figure in Ukraine. Some hail him as a liberator who defied the Soviets, the Polish, and the Nazis while fighting to establish Ukraine’s independence, while others condemn him as a fascist war criminal. There are several statues of Bandera throughout Ukraine that were erected to replace monuments to Lenin that were destroyed between 1991-2017, which continues to be a point of contention. We’ve also built monuments to problematic figures in the USA, and in my opinion, we shouldn’t idolize or immortalize individual human beings in stone and should instead build monuments to ideas that inspire us and remind us of our collective strength, not just one (extremely) flawed man’s.

On Ukrainian Nationalism

A part of the world that is famous for its White-Separatist and Neo-Nazi movements but doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is: The Pacific Northwest. Yeah. Just outside of both Seattle and Portland you will find far-right militias and extremist groups like the Aryan Nation, which long predates any current geopolitical trend lines. Americans understand that these demographics are not representative of Washington and Oregon as a whole, and we can clearly see that the majority of the people who live in the surrounding areas do not share these kinds of destructive views. “Nazis” is not a valid justification for indiscriminately shelling and killing the civilian population of a sovereign state, which is exactly what Russia is doing to Ukraine today. And when someone’s kneejerk response to this war is to go down a whataboutism rabbit hole that perfectly aligns with Putin’s talking points, I have to wonder exactly what their end goal is.

If we look at the post-WWII behavior of the major players in the Eastern Front, the only country that has yet to acknowledge its own atrocities that were committed during this time is, well, the Russian Federation. And the longer true historical facts are hidden from Russian people, the harder it will be to ever actually reckon with their own identity. Americans know this better than most, as we have collectively avoided fully owning up to our own sins for centuries now, and as a result, our own national wounds continue to be unable to actually heal.

As I said in my previous post, we Americans are notorious for not having a solid grasp on world history and we often assume that our own definitions and narratives are the standard worldwide, which means that more often than not, we dismiss important cultural or historical context in favor of defining things in black-and-white terms like ‘Good and Evil’ or ‘Right and Wrong’ because we like easy, uncomplicated answers—but Ukraine’s history has more shades of grey than that; the reality of being a country surrounded by conquering empires on multiple sides is that different people have been subjugated by different invading forces at different points in time. And in the years between WWI and WWII, Ukraine ended up in the crosshairs of not 1, not 2, but at times, 3 aggressive countries simultaneously.

It’s understandable that Ukrainian Nationalism was born out of the fight against those conquering forces—especially in retaliation to the one that has subjugated them for the longest period of time: Russia. That being said, I hope that sooner rather than later, this war is ended and the Ukrainian people can go back to shaping their national identity and pride around the wider range of other articles that unite them.

The truth of war is that individual people are capable of doing both extremely good and extremely bad things, and that just because a group of people is fighting for a moral cause does not mean they’re always doing it for moral reasons. Soldiers follow orders that come from leaders in the ruling class, and the people who suffer the most are always the ones who have the least power and resources to begin with. So while it’s understandable to want to attach a simplified narrative to try to make sense of the horrifying images we’ve been seeing since February, that inevitably leads to assigning moral judgements on individuals, which inevitably leads to Hero Worship, which in my opinion, is never a good thing.

I’ll leave you with this DN interview featuring Timothy Snyder, who specializes in Eastern European and specifically Ukrainian history. I think historians are especially worth listening to in this moment as they generally do not frame their assessment of current events within the confines of modern politics, and they’re able to provide a level of context that might be hard to see if you’re not zoomed all the way out.

By far, the most common sentiment that I’ve seen at the heart of online discourse about the war in Ukraine is that, ‘NATO is actually to blame because it provoked Russia by expanding further east’. And full disclosure, I find this line of thinking to be equal parts patronizing and absurdist. The implication is of course, that the Ukrainian people shouldn’t get to have a say in their own destiny and that smaller, less powerful countries should just naturally be subject to the whims of their larger, more powerful neighbors.

The thing is, Putin is being earnest when he says "The security of the Russian Federation is threatened by NATO expansion." But to understand the true sentiment he's expressing, we must read between the lines of its usage within Russian propaganda. "NATO" is often used as an ambiguous catch-all for "The West", "The United States", "Europe" and even Western-allied nations that aren't a part of NATO, such as parts of East Asia. It's a term that serves as a versatile boogeyman to the people within Russia.

There are other acronyms that Russian propaganda utilizes in this way—“Nazi” was initially used by the Russian government to describe Ukrainians who didn’t want to speak Russian or live in the Russian Federation, but at various points since 2014, different signifiers have been attached to tweak the meaning based on who the target audience was. Sometimes they were Gay Nazis, at other points they were Drug-Addicted Nazis, and nowadays, they’re Genocidal Nazis who want to wipe out Russians. (More on this tomorrow—there is of course, much more to discuss when it comes to far-right extremism and nationalism in both Ukraine and Russia.)

When Putin says he wants to “Denazify Ukraine”, what he’s actually saying is:

• Ukraine is not, and should never have been, considered a separate country; by extension, “Ukrainian” is not a valid identity. They are actually Malorussians (translation: Little Russians) and it is a great tragedy that the collapse of the Soviet Union fractured what should actually be one unified group of people into different countries

• Ukrainians are simply dealing with a case of mistaken identity: it is a great privilege to be Russian; therefore, sharing Russian history, language, and culture with them is actually restoring their true heritage and liberating them from a 30-year experiment imposed on them by fascist separatists

• Any Ukrainian who rejects our “offer” to be reintegrated as a single people is siding with the fascists and committing cultural genocide against Russians

Here’s the thing. I grew up in Seoul, roughly 30 miles from the de-militarized zone separating North and South Korea (more on that later.) I can tell you from personally witnessing the dynamic shifts that happened in Asia during the 90’s and 2000’s: the biggest threat to a dictator is when neighboring countries start doing too much democracy and participating in too much global trade, because if said countries prosper and improve the average quality of life of their own citizens, it magnifies the failings of the dictator’s regime. Even worse, it becomes near-impossible to hide that success, even in an information black hole like the Hermit Kingdom. And that greatly complicates the methods dictators have to use in order to keep their own countries under their rule.

Putin wasn’t lying when he said that NATO expansion (along with Ukraine’s aspirations to join the EU) were a threat to Russian Putin’s security. These two things would absolutely lead to Ukraine, resource-rich as it is, becoming a thriving member of European society. And if that were to happen, Russians living on $300 a month might start questioning why it is that the “Little Russians” are doing better than they are. That potential questioning of leadership within Russia is the actual threat to Putin, which is why, from his perspective, NATO expansion is a real problem.

And ultimately, this is why Putin cannot simply let Ukraine join The West.

But Ukraine is a country whose citizens have painstakingly spent the better part of 30 years building an independent civil society, and who have been committed to democracy since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ideals like liberty, anti-corruption, and opportunity for future generations have driven a steady cultural shift—first noticed by the rest of the world during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and then again during the Maidan Revolution in the winter of 2013-2014. The Russian media machine responded to the first event by coining the term, “Orange Virus”, and the latter by ramping up a propaganda campaign that framed the protests on the Maidan as an “Ultra-nationalist coup backed by the United States and The West”.

On the contrary, there is so. much. evidence. to prove otherwise.

Now, Putin is one thing. Obviously he’s gonna do everything he can to point the finger at Western countries. But when westerners claim that Russia felt threatened by Ukraine wanting to join NATO and/or by NATO expansionism in general, what tends to conveniently get left out is the timeline of events—I imagine deliberately, in the hopes that you don’t actually know them. Let’s consider:

Ukraine did not amend its constitution with a requirement for future commitment towards full NATO membership until February of 2019; 5 full years after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of the Donbas region with secret military troops (aka “Little Green Men”) which began an undeclared war that followed a near-identical playbook to the one used in Moldova in the 1990’s and Georgia in 2008 . It was a direct result of Russian aggression that Ukraine moved ideologically further toward the West, which is exactly what happened with other former USSR territories like Finland in 1917, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980, and what we can now see being fully cemented in Ukrainian public sentiment today.

In addition to covertly sending in ground forces and funding separatist militias, a major Russian strategy was, you guessed it, to flood Ukrainian citizens with targeted disinformation campaigns. Propaganda ran 24/7 on 3 Russian-language Ukrainian TV channels widely believed to be owned by Viktor Medvedchuk, who is a Ukrainian politician and one of Putin’s closest allies. (Well, maybe not anymore.) In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament banned Russian propaganda from airing on Ukrainian television, but it wasn’t until 2 years after being elected as the president of Ukraine—in February of 2021, that Zelensky was able to officially shut down these 3 channels in an effort to plug the steady stream of disinformation.

At the time, the EU responded with alarm, stating concerns about Ukraine encroaching on free speech rights. A year later, just 4 days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all EU member states announced that they would be following suit by banning “Russia’s Toxic Media Machine”. Those of us who live in the United States can attest to the devastating effects of Russia’s information war—in partnership with FOX News and other comparable outlets, it’s been successfully driving wedges between family members, friends, and colleagues for over 6 years now. We watched as this formula permanently damaged many personal relationships and successfully broke down lines of communication—just like we’ve seen happen between Ukrainians and Russians now. It’s not a surprise to me that EU Nations had to witness it up-close or even personally experience it in order to take it seriously.

Ok, so. Post-2014 Russia-Ukraine relations matter most of course, but in order to really get a full understanding of what’s currently happening and why NATO has been such a point of contention for Russia, we actually need to go all the way back to its founding in 1949, when the organization was just 12 countries and Ukraine was still a territory of the Soviet Union. This idea that NATO is an aggressive imperialist force that poses an existential threat to Russia is objectively false (every time it expanded, it’s because countries asked to join, not because NATO conquered new territories and forced them to be a part of it) but like most disputes between these 2 countries, once you start unpacking all of the details, it never actually turns out to be that simple.

After 2 World Wars, virtually all of the individual economies that made up the European Continent were devastated, and the United States quickly filled the power vacuum. The US had made it through both world wars relatively unscathed and with a significantly stronger industrial economy than the one it entered with, thanks to its optimal geographical location (sandwiched between 2 giant oceans and with friendly neighbors on either side by this point) and arguably, the deliberate calculations of FDR—who took advantage of WWII to bypass his own New Deal restrictions in order to set a precedent of offering government-contract partnerships to domestic industrial titans, effectively creating the Military-Industrial Complex 2 full decades before Eisenhower formally coined the term in his farewell address.

Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had fought alongside the Allied Powers during WWII, it must be acknowledged that this realignment only occurred after Hitler broke his 8-year alliance with Stalin and sent the German army in to attack the USSR. In an effort to reshape history and prevent the Russian public from acknowledging this inconvenient truth, Putin’s regime officially banned any form of admission that the Soviet Union did in fact partner with Nazi Germany in its Memory Law of 2014, better known as the ‘Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism’, aka Yarovaya Law.

A lot of what we see happening today in the United States regarding CRT (and what we’ve seen from Lost Cause/Civil War revisionists, Holocaust deniers, Japanese denial of war crimes, etc) follows this model of first cutting down on public outcry through legal measures and then gradually filtering out evidence within textbooks and public education systems. Russia threatening up to 15 years of jail time for calling the war in Ukraine anything other than a “special military operation” is just another iteration of Yarovaya Law.

So, back to 1949: Tensions between Western Europe and the USSR led to NATO signing Article 5, which officially guaranteed that an attack on one member state would be treated as an attack on all. This pact was specifically intended to act as the main deterrent to any potential future Soviet aggression, and first serving Secretary General Ismay would popularize the unofficial NATO mission statement: “Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” (Yikes 😬)

Leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, then-American Secretary of State, James Baker, informally said to Gorbachev, “How about you let your half of Germany go, and we say that NATO will move not one inch eastward?” Over the years, this one single anecdote evolved into full on Kremlin-fueled mythology, despite the fact that declassified CIA documents along with a direct quote from Gorbachev reveal that there was never any ambiguity about what was agreed to. Ultimately, he gave up all of East Germany for financial incentives and an official treaty that allowed NATO to extend Article 5 eastward was signed to this effect by all parties.

By the end of the Cold War, NATO had grown to 16 nation members, but when the Berlin Wall came down, there were significant disagreements between members on what their next steps should be. Several Eastern European countries proposed dissolving all military blocs, including both the USSR and NATO. At the time, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia had all played an integral role in overthrowing the Soviet Union and they wanted to pursue a path of pacifism—they proposed a plan to turn all of Central and Eastern Europe into a perpetual neutral zone, to actually dissolve all their borders and completely demilitarize + denuclearize the area and make it a “Bridge of Peace between East and West forever”.

The United States and West Germany opposed. Then-President George H. W. Bush insisted that the West needed to not only retain NATO, but needed to ensure its right to enlarge. As a result, the Eastern European countries that had originally pitched the idea of the Bridge of Peace realized that their vision would simply not be accepted by the Americans or Germany, so they ended up pivoting 180° on their strategy and began actively pursuing NATO membership.

Flash forward to 1994, 3 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then-President Bill Clinton had just guaranteed $1.6 billion to President Yeltsin to bring his soldiers back from the Baltic states and provide them housing. The West shared a tentative optimism that in the post-Cold War era, the Russian Federation would become a modern 21st century democracy that would build its economy on the talent of its scientists, artists, and visionaries rather than fall back into the established authoritarian model of exporting of natural resources and prioritizing its military over the needs of its citizens.

Contrary to his predecessor, President Clinton was originally against any additional expansion due to military leaders and intelligence agencies within his administration opposing the idea, so as a compromise, a different initiative was created: The Partnership for Peace. Russia became the first country to join the program, which included joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries and was designed to support the initiative of Eastern European countries to join NATO if they desired. Shortly after, Ukraine finalized their own framework agreement under Partnership for Peace, making it the 2nd country to join the program, right after Russia.

Later that year, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Budapest Memorandum—an agreement that guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in return for giving up its entire nuclear arsenal. It’s important to remember that at that time, Ukraine had the 3rd largest nuclear arsenal in the world. And less than 2 decades after giving up this arsenal, every country that individually made security guarantees to Ukraine failed on that promise in one way or another.

Like many decisions American presidents make about international politics, Clinton’s stance on NATO expansion eventually shifted because of electoral politics at home. The Republicans had won the 1994 midterms on the platform of NATO expansion, and in an effort to appear more palatable to moderate voters ahead of the 1996 presidential election, Clinton ended up changing his tune on membership for Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, effectively leaving Ukraine to fend for itself.

In ‘95, NATO agreed to add Russian troops to official Peacekeeping Forces that they had in Bosnia, and in ‘97, the NATO-Russia Founding Act led to Russia’s entry into the G7, transforming it into the G8. Finally in 1999, both the United States and the Russian Federation agreed to destroy 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium each, and both nations along with European NATO countries agreed to pull back conventional military forces from borders—however, Putin declined to move forward with this agreement once he assumed the presidency in 2000.

In 2002, Ukraine’s relationship with NATO came to a screeching halt in the wake of the Cassette Scandal (aka Tapegate) in which the then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma was caught on tape ordering the kidnapping of a journalist, whose corpse had recently been discovered. This scandal served as a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s history, resulting in a dramatic shift in political orientation from Russia to the West, leading to the Orange Revolution in 2004 and subsequent constitutional changes, which shifted primary powers from the President to the Parliament.

Over the next decade, Ukraine continued its domestic political struggle amid continued interference from the Kremlin, including targeted cyber attacks that actually compromised the Central Election Commission network in 2014. Evidence of continued election meddling through the 2019 Presidential election was shared by the Ukrainian Election Task Force. American officials described the Kremlin’s information aggression as “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg ever seen in the history of information warfare.” Shortly after, another official called that assessment, “something of an underestimation.” Despite this, Ukraine continued to defy Putin by holding democratic elections and remaining committed to the rule of law.

In summary, the NATO thing is… really kind of a Rorschach test, as in: how you feel about it really boils down to your world view. The Soviet Union and the USA have always been highly suspicious of each other, and the only real opportunity for meaningful diplomacy The West might have had was in the brief period where Gorbachev and then Yeltsin were in power—as the USSR dissolved and Russia became a solitary country again. But we blew it. And then they blew it. Regardless, none of this is acceptable as a valid reason for Putin to invade Ukraine and raze its cities to dust.

Russia’s hold on Ukraine is sort of comparable to that of a possessive, jealous, abusive ex-boyfriend who refuses to let go and would rather harm it than see it date someone else, and from Ukraine’s perspective, NATO is the only institution that can give it a restraining order.

I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to create this section for months now—whether “blog posts” needed to be separated from art posts, whether I even wanted to get into the weeds and start sharing more than just the occasional tweet thread, whether what I think even matters—but after everything that has happened over the past couple of months, it’s become impossible to limit my thoughts to just 280 words.

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for even a short amount of time, you’re probably aware that I’m not shy about sharing my views on a range of topics, but I do try to keep the focus on art and art-related things because I’m aware that most people aren’t following me for amateur punditry or even my personal opinions in general. And that’s ok.

If you’ve decided to follow me here, you also have every right to want to just see art posts; everybody has different levels of bandwidth for current events and I understand that not all of you are going to want to spend what little free time you have reading wordy posts from a comic artist. And that’s also ok. I’ve created this separate section of JBC in an effort to keep things organized, but also to allow you to be selective about what kinds of newsletter emails/notifications you want to receive. Just like JBC [After Dark], if you want to opt out of a specific section without losing notifications on new art posts in the main feed, you can.

That being said, I don’t believe one should (or even could) separate art from artist, and I hope that you’ll consider me a package deal. I’ll be using this section to talk about topics I feel are worth discussing—so if you stick around and read these posts, just know I appreciate you, and I promise I’ll be back to posting art on a regular schedule this week. In fact, here’s my latest that I didn’t send via email because I didn’t want to spam you guys: Black Cat for Marvel PRIDE #1 🐈‍⬛✨

Like a lot of people, I’ve been closely following news about Ukraine since Russia invaded, and while I’ve done my best to stay away from Online Discourse™, it has been virtually impossible to avoid seeing a wide range of spicy takes from a growing number of armchair geopolitics/military experts online. And, like many domestic issues within the USA, chatter about Ukraine has been heavily steeped in a targeted 8-year disinformation campaign—which has created an additional layer of murkiness within the fog of war that makes ‘the truth’ ever more evasive.

Many times over the past 63 days, in an effort to examine even seemingly straightforward claims, I’d find myself pulling on a piece of thread that was much longer and much more intricately woven into a larger tapestry of information—leaving me with a tangled mess to sort through in order to get a clearer picture. It turns out that when two 1000+ year-old countries go to war, there’s a lot of history that must be unraveled in order to gain enough context to truly understand what’s happening. Everything is connected in one way or another, and in my opinion, rampant misrepresentation of the past is one of the biggest disservices being imposed on those of us living in the present.

So, instead of contributing to any additional haze being kicked up online, I decided to keep my mouth shut and my ears open. And I began to notice a strange paradigm shift; of course there were the usual warmongering types who were practically salivating at the prospect of entering into WWIII, and there were plenty of reliably anti-war types who blamed The West for everything—but what I found surprising was the steady stream of hand-wringing coming from folks who usually don’t mince their words—often along the lines of, “Obviously what Putin is doing is wrong, and what’s happening in Ukraine is terrible, but..” ahead of an essay or tweet thread parroting a litany of Russian Propaganda.

I grew increasingly confounded by the bizarre romanticization of the USSR I kept seeing, which always culminated in a failure to acknowledge that the Russian Federation (which is a neoliberal, capitalist, imperialist nation run by an autocrat) is not the Soviet Union (which, for the record, was also, at best, a state capitalist oligarchy that did not achieve communism). People I never would have seen as Useful Idiots kept revealing themselves to have massive blind spots.

And what became devastatingly clear is that a lot of self-identifying leftists actually don’t have an established system of ethics and instead simply start at “America Bad” and work backwards from there. More often than not, this formula works because it often is the truth, America is to blame for much of the world’s injustices, and if it’s not us, it was probably Britain, and if it’s not them, it was likely France. But the war in Ukraine is more complicated than that, and many of the factors that led to Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24th predate “The West”.

I do want to be clear that I think those of us who qualify as Westerners—especially Americans—should first seek out information and opinions from Ukrainian voices and practice a healthy level of humility before speaking on international conflicts and/or geopolitics, as we’re notorious for having an incredibly narrow view of the world and a very limited understanding of history outside of our own borders, if not an outright warped one altogether.

Those of us who are lucky enough to actually have some level of wider exposure to world history will know that the USA rarely (if ever) has the moral standing to point our finger at other countries without sounding extremely hypocritical. Yes, it’s true, the USA is also a neoliberal, capitalist, imperialist nation that has invaded other countries. It’s also true that despite this, or perhaps because of it, many of us are able to recognize modern imperialism when we see it.

But frankly, everyone should be able to recognize what’s happening when it comes to Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, as the situation is remarkably cut and dry: The Russian Federation is attempting to subjugate and subsume a sovereign nation through violent and destructive means. That dynamic between the two nations can actually be traced back centuries, to a time well before the USA even existed, so regardless of whether you’re pro or anti-USA, there is absolutely no reason to make excuses or false equivalencies on Russia’s behalf.

Obviously, the part that is less clear is what role The West should play in this, because even if we weren’t involved in forming the original dynamic between the Russian Empire and the Cossacks of Ukraine, in a post-WWII sphere, the United States is the global hegemon and we cannot detach ourselves from the effect that has had on intercontinental relationships since the mid-20th century. And because of this reality, Westerners, especially Americans, should do everything in our power to pull back the veil of our own propaganda that paints us as champions of democracy and actually try to understand how we’ve historically failed both Ukraine and Russia—so we don’t repeat the same mistakes that contributed to circumstances today.

However, as embedded as American propaganda is, it doesn’t even begin to compete with modern Russian disinformation warfare. Russia has been ramping up its disinformation machine since at least 2008, but it wasn’t until 2014 that it actually started making an active push toward erasing Ukraine through historical revisionism. And in just 8 years, it’s made a lot of progress in this area. So doing proper research and sharing actual facts feels like the only defense any of us have against falling into Putin’s funhouse mirror alternate reality that seems to have trapped so many otherwise logical thinkers.

Disinformation campaigns don’t actually bare the burden of having to provide plausible or even believable alternate viewpoints—they instead function mostly by creating a cacophony of lies that cause so much confusion it takes a herculean effort just to try to find the truth. The obvious problem this creates is that most people cannot dedicate hours of each day to researching and comparing different sources, especially since most news agencies in 2022 have a heavy political slant in one direction or another, leading to a growing lack of confidence in journalism and ultimately disengagement from news as a whole.

Luckily for me, my favorite types of media to put on while drawing are historical documentaries, nonfiction audiobooks, podcasts, interviews with historians, and college lectures. Pretty sure my Netflix profile is that of a 63 year old man who collects stamps and substitute-teaches a high school geography class, lol. I never thought my dry taste in work background noise would actually turn out to be useful in any capacity, but I’ve actually had a big interest in Eastern European and Russian history for years now, so in an effort to combat disinformation and persuade folks not to disengage, I’m gonna do my best to provide verified information along with my perspective on some of the most common pieces of propaganda I’ve seen online in the hopes that I can at least give you guys some extra context to serve as a starting point for you to do your own research if you wish.

So here’s the deal: I’m gonna split this up into multiple posts, because the amount of misleading or just outright false information that has been circulated for 8+ years now is actually insane. Rather than tackling all of it in one giant, meandering essay, I’ll address the most common bits of disinformation I’ve encountered individually. If you’re feeling a little like “Yeah I’m not gonna read all that, happy for you tho” I get it, but before you check out, I’d like to impart just one important reality that should inform your perspective:

Russia’s war in Ukraine is what colonialism looks like in a post-colonial world.

Back when Ukraine was ‘The Ukraine’, it was conquered by Catherine the Great in a series of partitions that began with Crimea in the east and went all the way out to Odessa in the west. This evolved into the goal of making the entirety of what today is modern Ukraine, “The First Great Colony of Russia,” an idea that later grew into the concept of Novarossiya.

The vision of Novarossiya was not dissimilar to how Britain viewed its many colonies, but it especially mirrors how they viewed North America before it became the United States and Canada, how Spain viewed Mexico and South America, how France viewed its territories in the West Indies and North Africa, and how Imperial Japan viewed Korea, Manchuria, and the South Pacific. From the Ukrainian perspective, Russia is its colonizer, oppressor, and occupier—and the Ukrainian people have endured countless atrocities at the hands of Russian rulers for literal centuries.

There is an unequivocal moral imperative to end this war now. What that actually means, and how that can actually be accomplished, is something politicians, military experts, historians, economists, and pundits will continue to debate as long as this goes on—but for those of us who are average citizens of the world, who viscerally feel a sense of urgency but lack the power to enact immediate change—the best thing we can do is get educated and apply collective pressure to our representatives.

I hope by sharing my thoughts with you, I’ll be able to help identify which pressure points are worth targeting together. Thanks for sticking with me through the end of this one. More tomorrow. 💡✨