Ukraine, Covid-19 and left-wing conspirituality
When our hard-won leftist analyses turn into tropes, conspiracy theories are not far behind and we render ourselves unwitting relays for propaganda and information warfare.
Today, 24 February 2025, marks the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has triggered Europe’s largest and deadliest war since WWII (one million dead or injured according to credible reporting). Back in February 2022 I watched the ominous build-up to the invasion on the news naively thinking that the left would, of course, express solidarity with Ukrainians, who were the victims of Putin’s repeatedly stated imperialist ambitions in the region. While I expected less than savoury elements within the leftist influencer circuit to spread misleading views on the matter, I was shocked to see how many once-reputable individuals, groups and publications toed a specious line on Ukraine that was rife with disinformation and misleading talking points that were in many cases the direct progeny of Kremlin propaganda. At the time I was primed to recognise the dynamics of this kind of information poisoning – we had just been through the first two years of a pandemic, and I had been paying close attention to the conspiracy theories and anti-science fervour that had emerged during that period, much of it an attempt to explain away fear and uncertainty with soothing albeit false mythic narratives.
In retrospect, I’m astonished by how closely the anti-Ukraine disinfo hews to the same conspiratorial structure as the logic of the Covid contrarian crowd. The contrarians had their Anthony Fauci and the Putinists had their Victoria Nuland. Contrarians talked about crisis actors and so too did Bucha massacre denialists. Antivaxxers talked about vaccines being bioweapons and so too did Putinists claim that there were bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine. People outright denied there really was a pandemic just like some influencers denied Putin was planning an invasion (sorry, 'special operation') right up to 23 February. More broadly, we can see striking parallels between other conspiracies and anti-Ukrainian propaganda: between Pizzagate and Ukronazis, for instance, or between the idea the pandemic was manufactured by Bill Gates and co. and the idea of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine being a crude proxy war wherein the Ukrainian elite were busy enriching themselves with endless yachts and mansions. For every ‘false flag operation’ touted by the antivaxxers there is an equivalent in the ‘CIA colour revolution’ rhetoric spouted by the left conspiritualists.
I could go on, but I’m sure my point is clear by now. The narrative structure of anti-Ukraine propaganda that seeks to whitewash Russia’s imperialist invasion is, like other propaganda of its ilk, almost identical to the narrative structure of the conspiracy theories that emerge during pandemics and within other moments of existential crisis. Indeed, we even saw a pivot on some popular influencer channels from Covid-19 contrarianism to Ukraine contrarianism – literally overnight in a couple of cases. The fact that such obviously false narratives have spread so rapidly within the left should give us all serious pause for reflection. Whatever mix of organic Twitter poisoning, malicious intent, useful idiocy and paid propaganda has given rise to this situation, it is sad and shameful that so many people’s politics have been weaponised in this manner. I’ve pointed out many of the worst culprits over the past few years, fascinated as I am by these dynamics, but the more troubling issue is that for every left-populist influencer and ‘geopolitics expert’ who has jumped the shark there are thousands of silent followers sagely nodding along to – and occasionally sharing – crudely conspiratorial garbage that is presented as coherent geopolitical analysis and thus serving as unwitting relays for a form of contemporary information warfare that we have yet to adequately countenance.
Stepping back, it makes me wonder whether a kind of conspiratorial reasoning hasn’t in fact been prevalent on the left for a long time. Our usual image of conspiracy theories is that they tend to involve specific people – nefarious, all-powerful Bond villains who conspire in underground lairs, or ‘elites’ more broadly – but the left has often taken a more structural view of how the world works and so it is reasonable to expect that when they lapse into a conspiratorial mode, this too would focus on structures, not individuals. In this regard, think about how certain segments of the left talk about imperialism, or about US hegemony, or about the supposedly all-powerful CIA that is able to unilaterally control foreign politics through various ‘front groups’ like USAID, NED and so on. Frankly, think about what some leftists imagine capitalism to be (think mirror-world version of capitalist realism). Think about the Lego block version of liberalism (the sub-Losurdo take wherein liberalism is inextricably bound to its colonial legacy and ‘Herrenvolk democracy’ and thus the Enlightenment baby should be thrown out with the bathwater). Think about the anti-globalisation to ‘anti-Globalist’ pipeline.
Of course, there are real dynamics in each of these overlapping cases that we need to critically analyse and which rightly form a core part of left critique and praxis. It would be foolish to throw away the powerful critiques of imperialism, capitalism, liberalism, US machinations abroad and so forth just because these cartoonish, conspiratorial versions exist, just as it would be foolish to ignore critiques of the medical industrial complex simply because conspiracy theories about Big Pharma abound. Still, we need to be aware of the tension here – of the tendency of coherent, nuanced and meaningful understandings of oppressive, destructive social forces and historical forms of violence to drift into trope territory and then into outright conspiratorial thinking. In this regard, how do we keep the nuance and uncertainty? How do we stick with the complexities and ethico-political entanglements? How do we stay with the trouble?
I’m not sure how to answer these questions, but in the meantime, I do know that today, on the third anniversary of what is, unequivocally, no matter how much we nuance and historicise matters, Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine, I am in solidarity with Ukrainian people, not to mention with the Russian and North Korean cannon fodder being thrown at them by a bellicose child-tyrant, just like I am in solidarity with all people everywhere who face the violence of neocolonialism and imperial conquest (including Palestinians, whose own cause has been so cynically weaponised by so many people). Last I checked, this was called internationalism and was a fundamental principle in what used to be called the left.