(If you’d rather listen to me read this instead of reading it yourself, click here.)
This is a postcard to you, left-adjacent underground music friends. I’m one of you, and I think we’re making some world-historical mistakes right now. If you’re open to hearing me out, read on.
14 minutes after arriving in Lviv, two off-duty soldiers, “Saint Nick” (the hand with blue paint) and “Volodymyr” (the happy man singing and playing my guitar) clocked that I was an unusual foreign guy with a guitar. They joyfully ran up to me and asked to jam, which we did. Then, babushka-style, they gave me Roshen candy (Choco Lapki for those who know what’s up), and invited me to a party at 11am.
After we goofed around playing music by the streetcar tracks in the city center, they asked me why I was here. I told them that mainly I’m here for the same reason I go anywhere; to meet and perform for the micro-communities who respond to niche music like mine with openness and generous curiosity.
But I am in Ukraine specifically right now because I set myself a goal of using an Emperor X tour to explicitly (rather than implicitly, like last time) challenge fatalism and pacifism in the left-adjacent music scenes of North America and Western/Central Europe. To make sure we’re on the same page about what I mean by fatalism and pacifism, here are some examples, with the gist in italics.
A fatalist take:
“Liberal states can never make the world better, they just kick the can down the road at absolute best, and usually not even that. It is better to put energy into replacing them, rebuilding society from the ground up. Trump axing USAid seems sad on the surface, but who cares. USAid was really just a fig leaf to launder the CIA’s imperialist ambitions. Foreign aid can never do real good, because the whole liberal system it stems from is rotten. Trying to fix it, or save the so-called good parts, just wastes effort plugging a tiny leak in a sinking ship. I’d rather sink the ship faster so we can swim to shore and start fresh.”
A pacifist take:
“State-level violence is always immoral, even when one state is defending itself from an invader. The US and EU arming Ukraine against Russia, or the SDF against Turkey, or anyone against anyone, is always at root an attempt by a global hegemon to dominate the periphery. Sending weapons and troops does nothing but pour gasoline on the fire and prolong human suffering. It would be far better to focus on diplomacy that opens the door to a constructive, nonviolent path out of conflict. The most effective way to use weapons is to abstain from using them at all — or better yet, to never have them in the first place.“
Here’s one last colorful example for you, photographed yesterday on the streets in Kreuzberg, just to drive the point home:
If you run in the circles I do I’d wager you have seen many similar fatalistic or pacifistic sentiments, radically skeptical of liberal democratic capitalist society’s ability to use its industrial-strength power for good. You may agree with them, too. Or, maybe you hold what you see as a more moderate position, sympathetic to the terrible predicament Ukrainians are in but reluctant to add fuel that risks escalating an already-dangerous conflict with a nuclear-armed great power.
If so, you and I have so much in common, and you are the reason I am making a video blog series on the topic (the first of which you are reading now.) Maybe you’re a Christian; maybe you’re a socialist; maybe you loathe war and state violence and injustice against marginalized groups; maybe you are deeply suspicious of militaristic nationalism; maybe you are motivated by thrilling dreams of a humanist future without poverty, without war, without tanks and mines and thermonuclear ICMBs. I’m just like you in those ways, but I’d like to show you why I moved away from what I now regard as counter-productive reactionary anti-Westernism without shedding any of those commitments.
Towards that end, as I travel across Ukraine to sing this week, I will post a series of video blogs to present underground music scenes in Lviv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv which almost completely lack the fatalism and pacifism of Brooklyn and Berlin and Philadelphia and Portland, despite surviving nightly drone raids and the draft and losing hundreds of friends to missile strikes and artillery fire for three years and running. The art and music communities in these cities provide informal, organic examples of what I have come to think of as liberal civic mutualism, a uniquely-2020s hybrid sociopolitical position that blends some of the virtuous aspects of civic nationalism (self-sacrifice communitarian goals, belief in a meaningful collective narrative, neighborly social cohesion in response to pressure) with some of the virtuous aspects of liberalism (the primacy of individual rights, especially speech, concern for marginalized and/or disadvantaged groups) and progressivism (an intentionally optimistic belief in the possibility of a positively unpredictable future that is better than the present). I will say more about what I mean with the term liberal civic mutualism as the week goes on; for now it is enough to say that I think it, or something like it, can serve as an antidote to paralyzing fatalism and pacifism, and might even reinvigorate a sense of confidence on the left.
I doubt very much I will get all the political philosophy right; I dabble but I’m no scholar in the field. But getting things conceptually perfect is much less important than reasserting civic creativity during what increasingly seems to be a slow-motion but high-stakes global sociopolitical emergency. I’m a musician with first-hand experience playing all over Earth for many kinds of inventive people in many kinds of difficult circumstances. Liberal civic mutualism is a shape to pour thoughts into, and you can take it or leave it. All I want this blog series to convince you of is that we in Western Europe and North America have a lot to learn about creative resilience, hope, and moral agency from our music friends in Eastern Europe as they combat the explicitly patriarchal, hypercapitalist, antidemocratic Russian Federation. I also hope to convince you that our Eastern European friends might not be around to teach us anything at all if we, both as individuals and as citizens of powerful democracies, fail to help them rid their region of imperialism.
More from Lviv tomorrow — time to go sound check and sing.