THE term “woke-washing” emerged in 2018 to describe how corporate PR was being spun for millennial audiences.

My colleagues and I thought it was also somewhat relevant to how conservative institutions like the military, universities and monarchy are “made nice” to suit a new liberal sensibility. 

With the Russo-Ukrainian war, though, “woke-washing” has rapidly become a pervasive aspect of how Western empire presents itself. 

War hysteria is by no means confined to this odd strand of outraged identitarian liberals but “wokery” (by which I mean outraged identitarian liberals, rather than simply those of us alert to prejudice and discrimination) is a serious problem in securing mass support for the traditional anti-war movement.

So, our foreign policy planners are monsters who relentlessly compete for power in the international system — quelle surprise. 

What is so much more notable is that, as a culture of lovely humans, we’ve gone along with it and indeed are pushing even harder than President Joe Biden for a huge escalation in violence.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as the poster-boy for wartime wokery: anti-politics; anti-corruption; sexually progressive. He is the sexiest man of the year. His soldiers are the hottest women on Instagram.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is the ultimate toxic man: younger mistress; nuclear weapons, and crude “gaslighting” propaganda — as though such things are relics of the past. One scholar on gender and violence calls him “the guardian of white, Western, patriarchal values globally.”

At a lawmaker’s lunch, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Bono “has been a very Irish part of our lives” and read out an appalling poem by the U2 frontman, which compares Zelensky to Saint Patrick driving out the snakes from Ireland. 

Artists in Manhattan held an event at the Guggenheim Museum in which they threw paper aeroplanes in support of imposing a Be Kind Zone No Fly Zone. 

On British TV, Last Leg host Adam Hills said Putin is having a midlife crisis due to his breakaway “phantom” limb (Ukraine) and that social media users who aren’t mainstream war journalists in Kiev should just “shut the fuck up.” 

In a comparably preachy cringefest across the pond, Whoopi Goldberg on The View called for the arrest of Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard. 

As prices are set to soar due to our own suicidal sanctions, Stephen Colbert sanctimoniously intones that “a clean conscience is worth a buck or two” — somehow blanking out his own on-point remark about cosying up to Saudi Arabia just seconds earlier.

We’ve woke-washed sports, purged the arts, and banned Russian media stations.

In the 1930s, good people in the West saw Adolf Hitler as an extraordinarily racist scumbag and then dealt with him accordingly, with an eye to establishing a peaceful international system.

They were right. But Hitler was a totalitarian with a huge well-mobilised, well-motivated military, strong economy, and most of the population behind him. 

Meanwhile, Putin is a bog-standard leader in a quasi-democratic state — with aspirations of a consolidated Russian federation — but constrained by the reality that he cannot make territorial gains.

He also has a corrupt state and second-rate military. Not only that but Russia’s actions — horrible and illegal — have been long-predicted (including on the first page of Flashpoint: World War III, a book published three years before Putin came to office, literally by the head of the Stop the War campaign) and consistent with what any leader of a regional power would likely do.  

All sides are to blame in this war but it is the US that was best-placed long term to secure peace. Charlie Manson never murdered Sharon Tate but he was still sent down for stirring the shit.

In the build-up to the 2003 Iraq war, Western civil society stood in opposition to the weirdos who ran the US empire. 

Now, though, we are prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian and Ukrainian nationalists, for their part, will fight to the last living mammal. 

As a civilisation we are in thrall to and infantilised by our own righteousness, wilfully ignorant of how this aligns perfectly with the same old corporate interests — arms, banking, fuel, empire.  

We don’t have to reach far back to see what happens when we throw bombs into a bloodbath. 

If you think arming Ukraine is a good idea, and for some reason you can ignore the prospect of Armageddon, then take a look at Syria — a decade-long war, the launch of an Islamic death cult, and a nation in ruins.

That is what our arms sales and military advisers did for that “resistance” against tyranny. 

About half a mil’ dead.  We were so sure of victory in those early days of the Arab Spring, weren’t we? But we didn’t win. The dictator Assad remains firmly in charge. And what lessons do we learn? If at first you don’t succeed …

The very concept of “woke war,” of course, provokes ire from some sectors of the left. 

No doubt this is all “whataboutery” — or the newer term “Westsplaining,” with an article in New Republic arguing that the Ukraine conflict is about regional forces and that to see it as “a battle between the US and Russia” is “ridiculous.”  

Guardian columnist Owen Jones was actually forced to issue a seven-minute “very sincere apology” for having sent a Tweet that used the term “buffer zone.” 

He called his Tweet “inhumane,” as though any word relating to a neutral Ukraine — specifically an “attempt to craft” one in the 1990s — must now be considered the “N-word” of international diplomacy. 

But why should everything come down to the Ukrainian state’s sovereign right to do anything it likes, anyway?  

This war is quite clearly a matter for its whole population, our continent, our planet, and it’s only being protracted by our weapons. 

Meanwhile, our atrocities against countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Yemen (377,000 dead there — dwarfing the figures in Ukraine) gain no traction with the new liberals. 

Perhaps the idea is to force social justice in nasty old Russia first before bringing the revolution to where we live: “If you can’t change yourself then change the world”… gee, sounds like a recipe for Putinism all round.  

One of Hitler’s many disgusting gifts to humanity was the impression that Western nations must never negotiate. 

As a result, we are acting like it is August 1940 when it’s more like a chimaera of August 1914 and October 1962. 

Zelensky’s vaunted speech played to the Westminster Parliament’s own gormless nationalism — “to be or not to be?” he asked. 

Russian demands still are really not far from Ukraine’s own position. In fact, its main demand is still for Ukraine simply “not to be” in Nato but our facile media keeps throwing shade on talks as though Putin isn’t remotely interested in achieving objectives but rather just seeing things go bang.  

Liberal interventionists and their even more extreme wokerati strand should truly awaken before their own nightmares begin. 

We urgently need a huge international anti-war movement — Vryatuvaty Ukrayintsiv, Vryatuvaty Svit. 

Further resources: cnduk.org/join homesforukraine.campaign.gov.uk www.icanw.org www.facebook.com/TheWriterWithNoHands