Gogol Bordello: Heidegger, Global Citizenry, and the Rise of Ukrainian Fascism
Let’s talk about globalism. To investigate the problematic philosophy behind globalism, I want to look at the music, lyrics, and philosophy of the self-described ‘gypsy punk’ band Gogol Bordello. Using their music as an example, I also want to look at liberal worldliness in the face of global catastrophe. What does it offer? How does it fail?
Another question I want to investigate is how liberalism retreats into fascism. Why is it that, given the supposed worldly intentions of liberal capitalists, do they support nationalism?
To begin with these questions, the first place that I want to start is the “global citizen.” How does one come to view themselves as a global citizen? From there I will look at the philosophy behind Being-Worldly and Worldliness and then finally arrive at our destination, Gogol Bordello. I will then relate how the band appeals to being a citizen in a global capitalist system. Then we will take a look at how it applies to the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2022.
Global Citizens
To talk about the global citizenry, we must first investigate how that differs from “the State.” The two categories are often in tension. To have a local mind is to imagine yourself as having ties to the local community and getting involved with the State, and tying oneself to the masts of a national project. This local vision needs to see global interests as hostile, a tragic fall from local ethnic languages and traditions, and to see the borders between people as necessary to preserve a way of life that conflicts with worldly minds.
However, a global citizen sees this as the next stage in human development that we have moved past the need for borders, that we are all involved in — not just statecraft — but world-craft. We need to see that we are territorializing the World and stamping out the boundaries that separate State from State, people from others. To maintain peace, we must maintain a unified vision of our collective selves standing relative and in a relationship to differences between people. In other words, we must find a new state, a higher state superseding the development of nations and nation-building to respond to conflict with scientific precision.
The global citizen doesn’t attach himself to one State, one border, or national identity. Unlike the Communist, who views the World as profoundly connected to class interest, the global citizen attaches himself to the industrializing capabilities of technology. In other words, capitalists promote themselves as uniters, uniting the World against all global catastrophes. Their World appears as a marketplace of resources, cartels, and the free flow of global capital.
This is a false promise. Liberal democracy itself is the creator of global catastrophes, not the tremendous uniting force against it. This contradiction is apparent in the interventionist policies against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc., which have resulted in decades of Civil War, populist unrest, and terror. Then there is climate change, which affects everything from local infrastructure to widespread migration. The effects of the industrial revolution and the spread of global capitalism have consumed the world.
Refugees are in the crosshairs of all this worldly turmoil. Whether from the effects of natural famines, civil war, international war, religious and sociological persecution, etc., migration has historically been linked to the political ontology of nation-states. Immigration policies, as codified by law, are not separate from the notions of sovereignty but instrumental in the manufacturing of identity — both of the individual and the nation-state as a whole. Therefore, global identity links refugees to an absence of national law or identity.
Heidegger
There are numerous ways of looking at the question of global citizenship. The first source I want to approach is philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose phenomenological vision of ontology made the “discovery” of “worldhood” — the modern relationship between the World of the Self and the World of the World. His other invention, Dasein, synthesized the spirit and humanness into a human condition in the world. This is how an individual interprets a man coexisting with the World. Despite his membership in the Nazi party (something I’ll cover later), Heidegger’s philosophy has had a profound impact on liberals and leftists since the end of World War II.
For Heidegger, a person is “thrown into” the World. Worldliness calls upon a person as a condition of the ontology of self-hood. This Heideggerian ontology forms the conditions of the “modern” individual — one who is “thrown” into the World and one who is “called” upon by worldliness to act out one’s “potentiality.” This movement grounds Dasein, linking the primordial ‘authentic Self’ to worldhood and setting up a relationship with Others within the World.
Dasein understands itself proximally and for the most part in terms of its World; and the Dasein-with of Others is often encountered in terms of what is ready-to-hand within the World. But even if Others become themes for study, as it were, in their own Dasein, they are not encountered as person-Things present-at-hand: we meet them ‘at work’, that is, primarily in their Being-in-the-world. (Heidegger, Being and Time, pg. 154)
If we are to understand Dasein as the human condition, or at least, some form of humanness, then isn’t Heidegger’s conception of the Other the liberal conception of the immigrant and refugee? The Other who has been thrown into the World by conditional Being-ness is defined by the Self-in-relation-to-the-Other that they cannot? They are defined by those that study them, and become “themes for study” that those who are not Other define them as such. However, what separates Being from Other is primarily, in the case of the immigrant; language, ethnic distinction, racial distinction, customs, religion, and, most importantly, statehood.
And yet, the concept of liberal tolerance comes almost exclusively from the phenomenological understanding of Being-in-the-World — a Oneness and connection between natural conditions and their consequences of their own statehood. The materialism of statelessness creates an ever-present Dasein, a global virtue and moral rightness. However, this Being can be weaponized and contribute to the categorization of the Other. It cannot help but be modern about its modernity and contribute to the increasingly alienating force of capitalism.
Latour and Agamben
In Heidegger’s wake, the other two source texts that interpret worldliness include Bruno Latour’s “Spheres and Networks” and Giorgio Agambens’ The Coming Community. Much like Heidegger’s phenomenology, these are attempts at interpreting the World around the question of what it means to be a Being in the World aware of its worldliness. Worldliness comes with an updated sense of the World itself, and how we should imagine the utopian future of the World itself and those that exist in it (or outside of it, on the margins, as immigrants do).
First, from Latour, our computerized World has made it so the Dasein disappears:
Spheres and networks might not have much in common, but they have both been elaborated against the same sort of enemy: an ancient and constantly deeper apparent divide between nature and society. (…) Suddenly we realize that it is the “profound question” of Being that has been too super-ficially considered: Dasein has no clothes, no habitat, no biology, no hormones, no atmosphere around it, no medication, no viable transportation system even to reach his Hütte in the Black Forest. Dasein is thrown into the World but is so naked that it doesn’t stand much chance of survival. (Latour, “Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization”)
Latour’s idea of Dasein, that it is an unsustainable blip on the radar of modern existence, has a seductive quality that makes it hard to deny from existential thought. The Self is undoubtedly harder to imagine concretely by the computerization of the World, even if how Being imagines the World hasn’t changed much over time.
However, I am deeply suspicious of the implications to this framework. On the one hand, this fantastical drive toward an authentic Self makes Dasein even more coveted by the liberal desire-drive. When liberalism strips itself of tolerance and worldly ambitions, all that is left is a fascist sense of Oneness with Nature. On the other hand, our search for Truth and Authenticity has been impeded by the production of modern living.
One cannot separate these two phenomena that divide humans from Nature, the Self from Labor. Dasein may be thrown into the World, naked and barely able to survive. However, that does not make spheres of influence and networks of atomization any less critical to liberalism. On the contrary, it makes it more susceptible to being stripped away into fascism.
Second, from Agamben, we have statelessness in opposition to a state:
The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest of control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), and insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. (Agamben, The Coming Community)
Like Latour, there is truth and prophecy to this statement. Politics has become a “struggle between the State and the Non-State,” but where Agamben gets it wrong is that “Non-State” is not humanity as such. Non-States are simply other states, other states of Being that don’t conform to the parameters of what I have come to call Democratic Realism.
However, “Non-State” is not “humanity” as such. This Non-State-ness is what became the rogue, the one who is simultaneously above the law and is subject to the law. This rogue is the true meaning of statelessness, which can be applied to religious minorities and vaguely constituted identity groups that are connected by common causes — protesters, etc.
In his example, Agamben was talking about the Tiananmen Square protests, which appeared at first as a type of stateless humanity in the face of tyranny, but in the years since that analysis, statelessness has shown itself to be its own type of State — a state of being-in-the-world independent of nation-building and world-building.
Roma
For a few examples of statelessness, it’s worth mentioning the effects of this on immigrants and the states of those often associated with immigration. An alleged “statelessness” has been the age-old basis for the persecution of a Jewish religious minority — that they were not attached to a nation-state but a global religion. Communists during Red Scares faced similar accusations (that they were traitors to national sovereignty and in service to a global agenda).
Jewishness and Communism share a similar stereotype of being part of the cosmopolitan values imposed upon those with more Dasein — those who live in rural parts of a nation-state and blame cosmopolitanism for alienating social change. Jewish people have, in particular, become the subject of conspiracies as a projection of global capitalist adventurism.
Roma people have been subject to similar stereotypes. The derogatory slang “gypsy” connects ethnic and ill-defined people to their statelessness. Often romanticized, gypsy exoticness comes attached to debauchery, beastliness, over-sexualization, and deep worldly knowledge. In other words, they can not be trusted and are marginalized by the State.
These attitudes are as old as Europe itself, and continued following the end of the Cold War, when several states had many ethnically Romani populations living in the newly formed Eastern European countries: Romania, Ukraine, etc. They have been the subject of mystification due to conditions of precarity. As a result, they are perceived to have a more “authentic” relationship to the land and the spiritual realm — the “gypsy” curse, the “evil eye,” etc.
In October 2021, right wing paramilitary groups (Right Sector, C14, and Svoboda) marched on and targeted Roma people in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin, Ukraine. Early in the Russian-Ukraine conflict, images surfaced of Roma people being tied to lamp posts in Lviv, Ukraine by a local vigilante group called “The Hunters” for being pick-pocketers.
However, here we see a liberal inversion of the Dasein. Instead of an absence of cosmopolitanism that forms an authentic Self, authenticity is attached to groups such as the Roma people, who navigate capitalism as rogues striving to live free of governance. In the absence of governance, there is only worldliness, a worldhood dictated by precarity.
When laws no longer come from nations, ethical orientation must come from spiritual naturalness. This is the Dasein. This is how the modern liberal capitalists see themselves, especially with liberal virtue being the highest commodity.
Gogol Bordello
Gogol Bordello formed as a band in New York City’s Lower East Side in 1999. Made up of several ethnic refugees and immigrants, they pioneered and invented the “Gypsy Punk” genre. Lead singer Eugene Hütz was raised around Chernobyl in the Former Soviet Republic of Ukraine before being displaced by the nuclear reactor disaster, and then moving to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. The music originated from Hütz’s DJ set, blending traditional Romani and punk rock music. Hütz is often seen mustachioed and sporting a pair of suspenders and tank top with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder.
The name Gogol Bordello is a reference to Ukrainian-Russian writer Nikolai Gogol who was best known for the short story “The Nose” and the novel Dead Souls about the liberation of the Serfs. Even with the reference, there is a contention over culture and national identity. Gogol, who lived under the Russian Empire, is credited by lead singer Eugene Hütz for “smuggling” Ukrainian culture into Russia. He goes on to say that Gogol wrote about Ukraine when it was forbidden, and that he wrote about Ukrainian culture using Russian words. There is also a type of classlessness to the name, with Bordello being Italian for brothel, and we have the high literary culture of Nikolai Gogol met with the “low” culture of a brothel.
Immigration has been front and center in the Gogol Bordello projects from the very beginning. Chances are, if you’ve heard Gogol Bordello, then you’ve listened to a song about immigration: “Immigrant Punk,” “Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher),” “Wonderlust King,” etc. All of which deal with the story of the “immigrant” and cultivated Hütz’s persona as a carnivalesque figure dancing through life as he dances through borders. If you’ve ever been to one of their live performances it’s a pastiche of Eastern-European costumes and large ensembles of instruments playing fast-paced punk music. Their music and lyrics use Hütz’s autobiography as the basis for songs and performances.
Gogol Bordello is the imperfect caricature of the Global Citizen. They are wandering idealists without home or ideology, and staunchly pro-western, pro-capitalism. With a bit of orientalism, they are also perceived as wise beyond their status in society (or, in some cases, wise because of their lower status in society, they are filled with Dasein). Their motivations are guided by a Dionysian love of life that seems so foreign to American and western audiences.
Listeners get the sense that Hütz always has his cup full of something as he’s recording these songs. If he’s not singing about it directly (see: “Alcohol”), then there’s a sense that he’s one drink away from toppling over at a local bar or in a back alleyway. This persona has a somewhat facile sense of insincerity because it never seems to end. There’s never a break from the drunken swagger and late-night carnival. The absence of dynamic makes the persona seem farther away from an authentic life and more of a spectacle for the recording.
At the same time, there is a sense that he is only this way due to some world-weariness about the state of affairs. “Why must we be treated as an Other?” or “why must we fight when we could be drinking together over our differences?” This world-weariness springs directly from evil, like a drunk crying to their bartender. In its excess, the band becomes one with the natural World, leaning into the excesses of global citizenry, borderless transactions, and individual pleasure in the face of oppression and alienation: Forget about tomorrow; live for today.
Immigrant Punk
Immigration gets to a fundamental contradiction regarding liberal tolerance for the immigrant. As Slavoj Žižek wrote in Violence (2006), immigration is a double-edged sword where, on the one hand, immigrants are accepted for all their virtues of being people in need. That acceptance is matched by resentment forced to confront the inhumane treatment by their own governments. The end result is political tolerance, but tolerance at a political price:
Today’s liberal tolerance towards others, the respect of otherness and openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the Other is fine insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as this Other is not really other… (Žižek, Violence, 39).
Liberal tolerance of the Other — at a price — is the overarching project that Gogol Bordello rails against in their lyrics of “Immigrant Punk.” When immigrants are categorized and then naturalized into American society it is an important point for the immigrant experience.
Upon arriving to the melting pot
I get penciled in as a goddamn white
Now that I am categorized
Officer gets me naturalized
Now that I’m living up in God knows where
Sometime it gets hard without a friend
But as I am lurking around
Hoptza! I see another immigrant punk!
There is a little punk rock mafia
Everywhere you go
She is good to me and I am good to her…
The Immigrant and The Punk are categories that define people in an idyllic unified counter-culture. This unification has its caveats and is interpretable in multiple ways. The first way is that the immigrant is a punk, a de facto rebel against a cause by having its nationhood ripped from them — thereby transcending Being and becoming a World-Being.
The second way is to view the Immigrant-Punk as a single category, that not all immigrants are punks. Still, immigrant punks relate to an in-group and, as the song suggests, create cultures within themselves along their travels. The ontology of The Immigrant and The Punk presents a Being acting contrary to the dominant interpretation of the World.
However, these two different interpretations of “immigrant punk” do not get to the Corporate Anarchism that lay in my analysis. The Immigrant and The Punk are both marginalized because of their precarity under capitalism. It’s these conditions that rebellion to capitalism thrives because the individualism and, in Heideggerian terms, the Dasein that is thrown into the world naked, is incorporated into the fabric of liberal capitalist society.
The rise of Gogol Bordello also speaks to the spectacular nature in which liberalism identifies itself with The Other — almost constantly portraying itself as one with the struggle against difference and projecting it onto their unifying global vision. Gogol Bordello is acceptable and promoted under capitalism because they make a spectacle of the immigrant experience.
As Žižek pointed out earlier, they do not harass the listener; it allows for passive enjoyment of the Other — it feels good to know that we, the hosts to the immigrants, are listening to the struggles of the Other. As Hütz says in an interview with Mother Jones in 2011, you cannot separate the spectacle from Gogol Bordello:
It’s just like, the “spectacle” of Gogol Bordello is my second nature. I think nothing about it. The whole idea of people expecting a spectacle is getting on my nerves, because for me, it’s an authentic experience. It’s not vaudeville, it’s not cabaret — I hate those fucking things. Getting focused on the timeless qualities of the music was like fresh water straight out of the well. Because that’s how I started. And then I kind of rolled with this whole bonanzatronic madness of Gogol Bordello till the point where it was just getting fucking out of control. I was also in my hedonistic prime, and that was a big part of what was going on. I never saw daylight, you know?
This quote highlights an essential aspect of Gogol Bordello — the separation of the Self from the spectacle. This spectacular existence is codified into the performative element of the band existing. There is no Gogol Bordello music without performance for the Other.
And that is, perhaps, why Gogol Bordello always comes off a bit stale, a bit slapped together. Rarely does the music feel thought out, processed, or constructed with a vision in mind. The idea is lazy because it is supposed to transcend the music. It performs as worldly music for the sophisticated audience without limitation or ideology. It is singular and infinite.
There is a certain repetitiveness that is inscribed in Gogol Bordello’s music. When you’re at one of their concerts it’s often hard to discern where one song ends and another song begins. This even happens on their records as you shift from song to song, with Romani inflected music mixes together with punk music and then back to Romani music.
The music’s failure is due to its over-reliance on ideology and a utopian vision of a world without difference. This ideology assumes several opinions: that morality is a fixed set of hierarchical differences; that there is pure good and pure evil; that all differences marked as good and evil are washed away as they “progress.” Gogol Bordello doesn’t need to make original or new music because the ideology behind the music supersedes the actual music.
You can see this in the aforementioned “Immigrant Punk” where the main source of conflict is found in the violence inflicted by categorization. By the invisible lines that divide human from human. Absent categorization, any loss is an aberration of an individual that lacks worldliness, and thereby, a Godly virtue.
The last aspect of this that makes up the Otherness identity of the Global Citizen is language. Or rather, a multitude of languages allows for worldly knowledge, a transcendent language that is localized and universal to the experience of the immigrant-as-Global Citizen.
Throughout many of the Gogol Bordello songs is an affinity with language play as a border that can be crossed and re-crossed over and over without limitation. In the song “Wonderlust King,” he has a verse that is mainly in Russian:
Я не еврей, но кое-что похоже
Соврать не даст ни Юра, ни Сережа!
Simply because I’m not a total gadjo
Да я шут, я трюкач, ну так что же?
The translation goes:
“I’m not a Jew but something like that” (referencing the Romani people)
“Yuri and Sergey won’t let me lie” (other members of the band)
“Simply because I’m not a total gadjo” (gadjo means a non-Romani)
“Yes, I’m a joker, I’m a trickster so what?” (a quote from the famous 1958 Soviet musical comedy film Mister X).
Here, we have an example of absolute precarity, both in translation and ontology. Skipping from Russian to English speaking about the Roma and non-Roma, it is as if in this one verse, we have all the world and its negation — “I’m not a Jew” and “I’m not a gadjo” acting in accordance to situate the perspective. He is, instead, a joker, a trickster, a rogue, someone caught between an assortment of identities, and ending up a non-identity and full of identity all in one.
In other parts of Hütz’s songs, being multilingual is essential, where he sings in a mishmash of Ukrainian, Russian, Romani, and Spanish (see: “Mala Vida”). Translation, multiculturalism, and the idea of an identity play become part of the ideology of this “gypsy” punk.
It is an identity of non-identity, a person without a home. Their only home is on the road, skipping from language to language, border to border, and seeing the blurring of cultures as the new epistemology of the global World — the global citizen living in the seedy underworld of fluid identity, sexuality, and local heritage.
Anti-Revolutionary Politics
Here, there is a sort of anti-political politics — a pure ideology described as the politics of experience, the political experience through the subjectivity of an everyday-ness. There is no greater project. There is no meta-analysis. There is only living for the here and now and living for hedonism. As a result, and through the experience of living in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, revolution appears as a false promise, as something experienced subjectively.
Therefore, transformation of the mind is the last place for real political change. At its core, this is the purest of pure ideology, a political subject that can only conceive of political change occurring at the individual level. As Hütz says in an interview:
Revolution in our Gogol Bordello language does not mean an act of violence, of overthrowing the state. The first line in “Raise the Knowledge” is “Revolution is internal.” I think that political revolution discredited itself absolutely, once and for all time, in this century. However, I am really interested in things like human capabilities and human advancement and the communal feel of the human race. It’s the antidote to the reactionary politics that are created by nothing but, you know, greedy people who still can’t fucking understand that you can’t take it with you once you’re done.
The key here is the idea that “political revolution” has been “discredited.” That is a classic Fukuyama End Of History logic that presupposes liberal democracy as the end political state. There is no future revolution; there is no progress beyond minor reforms; we have reached the zenith of humanity’s political progression. It is incumbent on the individual to beat back the “reactionaries” by putting up internal defenses against the forces of reaction. In this case, “reactionary politics” are indistinguishable from those that see the World progressing through violence, whether civil war, political intervention, or political revolution.
But what is reactionary about this positioning is that the capitalist ideology is inherently violent. That there is a violent means to the ends of supposedly anti-violent political ideology, and that political revolutions, those that succeeded and those that failed, succeeded and failed due to, well, violence. Political violence. Violent capitalist overhaul of leftist government institutions, which created the conditions where political violence could always be reduced and reframed as individual bad actors rather than rational responses to capitalist neoliberal shock treatment.
What does his antidote look like? To some degree, the subjective and internal revolution is predicated on the external — the reactionary politics of the greedy. It also presupposes a level of humanism to situate the purity of the human spirit. This humanism certainly plays a part in the Ukrainian response to the Russian invasion, where the Russians are regularly depicted as inhuman and anti-human, while the Ukrainians are framed as a metaphor for the European human itself.
Reading over the lyrics of the referenced song, “Raise the Knowledge,” the word that jumps out is “evolution” — “Revolution is internal / Evolution isn’t over” — and then later in the song — “Mystical knowledge is arising” and “Purification fire’s coming.” The antidote to reactionary politics, for Hütz, is raising the consciousness of the mystical and purification of humanity, a return of Dasein to evolve the human race, and a cleansing of difference.
There are certain contradictions found within the political situation of Gogol Bordello even in these few lines. It’s hard not to return to the line “revolution is internal.” What does that mean? How does one return to being more “communal,” if progress exists at the internal level? This progress is a vexing question that needs more investigation to uncover his ideology.
PART 2 — Russian-Ukraine Crisis
Shortly after Russia announced its military actions against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Gogol Bordello came out of semi-hiatus and scheduled a charity concert for the Ukrainian people and its government. During the first concert at City Winery in New York City he said, “this war has been raging for eight years.” He donned the red and black flag of the Ukrainian far-right nationalist party, the Right Sector. He began with a song about ethnic cleansing called “When Universes Collide.”
Later, Gogol Bordello released a metal song with The Cossacks called “Teroborona,” which translates to “Civil Defense,” and was accompanied by a video that would easily be categorized as Ukrainian military propaganda. He collaborated with Les Claypool and Sean Lennon on “Zelensky: Man With The Iron Balls,” and has shown up in music videos with activists donned in Ukrainian flags and exalting the virtues of Ukrainian nationalism. In the liner notes to “Zelensky: Man With The Iron Balls,” Hütz wrote:
The reoccurring chant in the song, ‘Revolution of Dignity,’ honors the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which resulted in the removal of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and lead to Russia’s military intervention against the people of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Donbas War — part of the broader Russo-Ukrainian War. It is our way to show that heavyweights like Les, Stewart, Billy and Sean stand with the people of Ukraine and the country’s sovereignty from the very start of Russian-led terror.
This selective historicization of events surrounding the 2014 Maidan Uprising betrays Hütz’s sympathies with the right-wing extremists in the country. The Maidan Uprising pulled Ukraine into the European Union sphere of influence and out of its historical ties with Russia. The start of the war in the Donbass region was a Civil War following the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic formed and tried to create independent states that would then have closer ties to Russia. The far-right government refused to acknowledge these states and, instead, pushed punitive Russophobic laws on the people in the Donbass region. Some regions were even militarily occupied by Neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion in Mariupol.
The “Revolution of Dignity” line recalls the earlier stated “Revolution is internal,” which cynically argues that true change can only happen within a person, and that those changes can only spread through a collective unconsciousness such as “dignity.” These sympathies for far-right extremists point to an internal contradiction within the question of “freedom” as prescribed by a nation-state or “freedom” as prescribed by a global state. The global state of freedom is impossible and will always be rife with local and international conflict. However, the relationship of the Self to the Self will allow for some mystical revolutionary force to conserve constituent power in the face of outside “terror.”
Hütz wasn’t the only one showering Ukraine with uncritical support. Almost overnight, American and European support for Ukraine became synonymous with a broader global liberal agenda. The incorporation of Ukrainian nationalism has become a flashpoint for political virtue, especially among capitalists and western neoliberals in NATO-aligned countries. Multinational companies began putting the Ukrainian flag in their logos; profiles were replaced with blue and yellow, and Ukrainian flags flown outside their shops. In almost every liberal cosmopolitan center, the blue and yellow colors sprang up like flowers as a way to tell the World, “we stand with Ukraine; we stand with democracy.”
The constant refrain was that Ukraine was this bastion of liberal freedom under threat from an authoritarian dictatorship and that we in a free liberal world needed to come together to beat back the Russian hordes. Of course, this was hardly true — or, at the very least, an obfuscation of truth through an ideological lens in the face of political and material interests. Almost overnight, newly reformed peaceniks who had realized the failures of American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were calling for a new intervention, a new war, a new enemy at the gates of freedom and democracy.
Democratic Realism
At the heart of Ukrainian nationalism is Democratic Realism. Ukrainian “democracy” is a tenuous descriptor — the left-wing Communist parties have been banned, and far-right fascist parties have held a monopoly on power since the 2014 Maidan Uprising. Political representation and autonomy within the Donbas region has led to an ongoing civil war, and this most recent conflict can be seen as an extension of Russian and American/NATO imperialistic ambitions. “Democracy” in Ukraine is only portrayed as such and dependent on their proximity and willingness to work with American and European capitalist interests.
It is telling that Hütz showcases the overthrow of Yanukovych as the moment which kickstarted the current crisis. Specifically, Yanukovych’s refusal to sign a treaty with the European Union led to the American- and European-funded protests, and then his subsequent crackdown on protesters that led to his ousting. This move towards European-ness and Worldliness was driven by a nationalist and fascist tendency to identify with a European project of supremacy that was also integrated into the Ukrainian nationalist identity that Hütz continuously signals.
Russia is the antagonist to this ideology. This may be due to the historical holdovers from pre-Soviet times where the Russian empire was a backwater agrarian Other, whose European identity and inclusion were always aspirational rather than mutually respected. These prejudices continued through to the modern era. See: Russia asking to join NATO, joining the European Union, entering into trade agreements with European countries, etc. Russia is also a competitive capitalist country whose imperializing expansionism threatens Ukraine.
Even as Russia declared its intention of “westernizing” in the 1990s and 2000s, liberals found reason to form the Russian identity as an Other. They eternally became a specialized group of un-integratable authoritarians who would never be free and always be subject to political repressions that continuously marked them as “backward” or “anti-democratic.” But in truth, this is a projection of their position. To privilege Ukraine as “more democratic” or “less authoritarian” than the Russian Federation is pure propaganda. Designating countries “free” or “not free” is a pure fantasy of capitalist sovereignty.
The conditions of Democratic Realism make it so that more or less all countries have the same proximity to “democracy” — it is the only “real” and reality lives dependent upon its simulation. Ukrainian nationalism is equally in the realm of democratic simulation as Russian nationalism. Still, its proximity to the global interests of American hegemony is what “decides” its projection and designation as a “democratic state.” This proximity is to say that the material interest of capitalists frames their alliances as an alliance of ideological solidarity to obscure the material interests at stake. In an era of American hegemony, the foreign policy agenda and capitalist interests will always frame themselves as “defending democracy” despite the absence of a democratic plan. If anything, Ukraine has pursued an explicitly anti-democratic agenda in the name of warfare and political consolidation.
Instead, the media pursues the story of a Russian anti-democratic agenda, which is also true, and the clumsy and ill-fitting designation of “authoritarian” to dismiss the Russian agenda as having any logical basis other than the maniacal and illogical authority of one person. The truth behind this Othering and categorical differencing is that any Realism must have a beastly opposition to maintain sovereignty. Capitalists know that presenting a world as it is, a class war against the working class by the bourgeois, would be the end of capitalism.
Despite the global project of liberalism, there must always be a generating drive for peace that stamps out the specter of war. This drive is the Big Other that haunts capitalists. There needs to be opposition; there needs to be conflict; there needs to be the national difference to justify resource extraction and exploitation of labor. War is a perfect example of this. Working-class people sign up on behalf of governments that protect capitalist interests and then throw their lives away for their benefit. There must be national fervor; there must be a simulation of identifiable conflict to send in the poor. These conditions for war have always been the case, from the time of religiously ordained leaders fighting on behalf of whose God is the correct God. And now, in the twenty-first century, whose claim to democracy is more democratic, whose ethnic minorities are more persecuted, whose reality is ultimately more Real.
As discussed in my piece about Arrival, Democratic Realism doesn’t show up as an example of democracy but rather the absolute removal of the designation of democracy from the description of a nation-state. The Soviet Union was authoritarian until it became the Russian Republic, which was democratic. Until Putin consolidated power after being snubbed by American and European powers, and Russia became authoritarian once again. This term authoritarian has a ubiquitous meaning that is at the center of Democratic Realism. This term aims to collapse the difference between fascism and communism and obfuscate the class conflict at the heart of its bourgeois project.
Authoritarianism has come to mean anything that isn’t liberal, and, even if they are nominally democratic-like, that there is an otherness to its democracy — that it’s not “true” democracy. The designation of what is and what is not “democracy” requires a bit of Schmittian theory of sovereignty — that the sovereign doesn’t offer freedom or rights, but rather, their true power and their proper function is the removal of freedoms and rights. For example, those deemed a threat to the larger project of liberalism — the “terrorist,” the “communist,” the “Antifa supersoldier.” In all of these designations, liberalism invites fascist right-wing militancy, whether through the police or extra-judicial organization, to stamp out the perceived “threats” to democracy.
What does this have to do with Gogol Bordello? In many ways, the crisis in Ukraine is an externalization of all of these dynamics. From the American bourgeois aligning with the State to bankroll weapons shipments to fascist militants in the Ukrainian armed forces to the virulent anti-communism and pro-NATO revanchism among European center-left and center-right parties. The Ukrainian project has become a global project, and those who oppose the project are siding with authoritarians, communists, terrorists, etc. Gogol Bordello and Hütz have been at the forefront of this collaboration between the state, capitalists, and culture.
Think Locally, Fuck Globally
The band’s project of alleged state-LESS-ness belies a more significant state, a state of the World, of global hegemony, and ethical and moral situating the individual for a more prominent liberal, capitalist political project. This capitalist project follows the logic of one of their most rousing songs, “Think Locally, Fuck Globally”:
And if the country we invented will fall from grace
I guess we’ll have to fly away in our own space
Hey, chavorale, think locally
Hey, Palo mande, fuck globally
“Think Locally, Act Globally” is a business slogan that has increased under neoliberalism which promises the key to successful management. It situates the individual into categories — race, class, sex, etc. — and views these master signifiers as opportunities to expand the extraction points of capitalism. In doing so, capitalism is a project producing liberal humanism (“capitalism with a human face”). These cultural products dialectically respond to the negative: the “human face” implies disappearing humanity, and the “global” intentions imply a nationalist project.
The same could be said of “Think Locally, Fuck Globally.” It, too, is always in a dialectical relationship with its shadow. The hedonism of “fucking globally” implies an impotent political future; the “fucking” is not just capitalists’ pleasure trying to save the World by giving capitalism “a human face,” but reducing it to the joy of who’s doing the fucking. The production of hedonism as an antidote to political impotence resembles similar projects (see: Guns N’ Roses). This antidote gets to one of the fundamental truths of the liberal hippies: that their pining for a “oneness with Nature” and removing differences between races, sexes, classes, etc., always had the potential for incorporation into a fascist sloganeering. Especially the class part.
Liberalism — which aims to eradicate class difference — has produced the simulation of a world without class. This “oneness of the world” leads to the perception of a lack of difference between capitalists and workers, bourgeois and proletariat, ownership and consumer. Instead, liberal “oneness” speculates that every worker has the potential to become a capitalist, every prole a bougie, every consumer an owner.
Fascism realigns this oneness as a series of conflicts. For instance: whites seeing themselves as a unified class in conflict with nonwhites; men, as a unified class in conflict with women; straight people in conflict with gay people; cis people against trans people, etc. The unification beneath this essentializing is the belief — shared by Hütz and other liberals — that the World can beat back tyranny, while consolidating the tyranny of capitalists.
Fascists think of the nation as a “body” with an autonomous consciousness that can collectively heal by a dramatic restructuring (a genocide). This restructuring is always in the context of defending the nation’s body from detractors of the grander political project. Capitalist class interests, at their root, are inclined toward fascism as a response to the emergence of communism and socialism. This inclination was confirmed in the early 20th century when fascism developed as a way for the capitalist classes to obscure the relationship between nation and class. Instead, the nation views itself as a holistic project — “one nation, one body,” and any detraction from this project is considered impure and antithetical to the nation’s goals.
Liberalism also views the body as a temple that must heal, be managed, be reformed, etc. This process is through a Lockean and Rousseauean contract between Nature and Civilization, nation and citizen, governmental body and physical body. When liberalism falls away, the social contracts between Nature and Civilization disappear. Fascism is there to offer a solution, a new social contract, between the body of the individual and the nation-state. In the production of removing differences, the justification for discrimination becomes apparent.
In the example of the Russian-Ukrainian war, removing differences became essential to each project and the resulting violence. Following the Maidan revolution/coup, Ukrainian forces, backed by the Ukrainian and American governments, were in the Donbas region, de-Russifying the land. And following the invasion, the Russians were de-Nazifying that same land. The land acted as the embodiment of the conflict, with its conquest further justified by the rhetoric of liberation and genocidal terror.
Fascism roots its myths in the ground, in nature, to purify civilization with a return to a more natural state. That is the contradictory nature of fascism: to build a civilization at war with its corrupting differences (Jews, Communists, Gypsies, Gays) while retaining an essential relationship to the agricultural past before modernism corrupted its purity. What fascism does is merge the liberal social contract with the nation-state’s interests. Liberalism must maintain the illusion that capitalism works for the good of the world. Challenging this is therefore declared fascist or authoritarianism, when in fact it is merely the mirror reflection of their project.
Spirit
“Think Locally, Fuck Globally” fits in line with Dasein. The connection between the Self and the World fills an individual with the Spirit of the nation-state and the land. This phenomenon could only exist within the conditions of modernism and the global conditions that followed after World War II. This phenomenon haunts our discourse around the war in Ukraine, and how much “responsibility” the West has for the preservation and exaltation of Ukraine’s militarism.
The elephant in the room is Nazism, and the spiritual worldliness is attached to supporting Nazis in the face of conflict. Martin Heidegger was a member of the German Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 and wrote about it in his infamous speech announcing his rectorship of the Berlin philosophy department. This direct connection to Nazism has haunted Heidegger’s work since people began studying Heideggerian philosophy as a coherent philosophy.
In that speech, the connection between individual and Worldliness ended with him spiritualizing national socialism. This can be drawn in comparison to Gogol Bordello who has, since the beginning of the Russian military operations, ended up spiritualizing the Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, and Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Jacques Derrida critiqued Heidegger's’ spiritualization of Nazism in Of Spirit in 1990:
But (…) by taking the risk of spiritualizing nazism, he might have been trying to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation (spirituality, science, questioning, etc.). By the same token, this sets apart Heidegger’s commitment [to elevating spiritual legitimacy] and breaks this affiliation. This address seems no longer to belong simply to the ideological camp in which one appeals to obscure forces — forces which would not be spiritual, but natural, biological, racial, according to an anything but spiritual interpretation of “earth and blood” (39).
Derrida goes on to point out that Heidegger appeals to a “spiritual force” and “destiny of the West” which goes along with his strategy of seeing spirit attached to responsibility. This is not just a question of the subject as such, but a question of the World. Derrida then points out that this spiritualization of the world has followed us as its own type of specter into the discourses under liberal democracies, and, in fact, view this spiritual exceptionalism of the West as a project attached to the spiritual project of the World:
What is the price of this strategy? Why does it fatally turn back against its “subject” — if one can use this word, as one must, in fact? Because one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectity, even in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even in the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axiomatic-for example, that of democracy or “human rights”-which directly or not, comes back to the metaphysics of subjectity. (39)
Derrida gets to Hütz’s ideology with his application of Heidegger’s notion of spirit. Liberal worldliness spiritualizes the blood and soil that Ukrainian Nazis fight for in the name of anti-racism and human rights. From this spirit of humanism, which attaches a naturalness to the rights of man, emerges a spiritualization of the ugly militant Nazism that has been recruited on behalf of spreading a worldly liberal democracy. It is from this basic contradiction that capitalists line up behind genocide and war and the reterritorialization of the globe in their interest and making. A crisis befalling liberal capitalism paves the way.
In this way, Heidegger blends into Hütz’s response to the Russian-Ukrainian war. The Dasein can only be relevant to the conditions of the world mediated by its technology. Worldliness is a response to a lack of identity held by individuals. This tracking of Dasein shows us a path from liberal capitalist individualism to a “global community,” identified by Agamben and Latour. Capitalists uphold the imperial core through the petit-bourgeois. American small businesses fly a Ukrainian flag in support of the Ukrainian government.
Conclusion
So, I ask again, where does that leave liberalism? With China on the rise and NATO uncomfortably aligned behind Ukraine, it seems that the global order is collapsing, or a new form of globalism is forming out of the ashes of the old, one with Chinese interests and foreign policy objectives as the new hegemony. This paradigm would mirror the current neoliberal global order but with slight distortions, just as American postmodernism arose out of British colonialism.
Some have even said that the world is ending its “unipolar” power structure where every interest is, in some way, dependent on its proximity to American industry. I find these statements, while provocatively and thought provoking, to be rather premature. If only because the true unipolarity would not be between nation-states or spheres of influence, as Putin claims, but between capitalist countries and non-capitalist countries. Absent that, the end of a unipolar world will only reinforce the unipolarity and logic of Capital.
In some ways, you can see how Chinese post-postmodernism is foreshadowed by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. There will be sovereignty allowed for nation-states, but corporations severely influence the alliance between nations in a way never seen before. War will be intermingled with branding, branding intermingled with war. It has always been this way, under different names: Kings staked their reigns on foreign campaigns just as CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Gazprom are invested in the participation of the war. The Gogol Bordellos of the world are singing their songs and doing interviews on behalf of virtual war and an indeterminate amount of life lost. Those who watch and invest are seeing the theatrical plays on the stones in a cave.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a hinge point of European and global history. It is a merger of Real and simulation. It has some of the most significant land battles since World War II, and the potential for another global conflict. At first, the invasion validated fears after years of Russophobia and anti-communism. Second, the realization that there was no solution but going to war with nuclear power. It is still a world of localized conflicts with material interests over tracts of land and resource extraction. The Zombie of the Real reanimating to life. It has become increasingly clear that advocating for “liberal democracy” cannot be the end-all of political movements. The invasion is a refutation of the political projects of the last fifty years.
But it is also a continuation of the same methods and rhetoric that have plagued the postmodern. No war is declared. Every military action is defensive. A simulation of the actual conflict overtakes the imaginations of the political individual and obfuscates the material reality. Capitalism remains intact. The removal of agency and choice makes it even more evident. We do not live in a world of interventions, but a world of speculation and provocation.
We come to the table in our speculative doom; each must see themselves as liberators and the other as a tyrant. Nobody is a war criminal unless they are a tyrant. Nobody is a freedom fighter unless they are a liberator. The clash between these two camps cannot be more precise. The contradictions between the two cannot capture the relationship between the Self and the Other. Nobody can break free of this contradiction. The triumphs of individualism paper over the destruction of a community, the coming community foretold by Agamben is here, it is a world absent collective action against the state.
These conditions could not foster a swell in support for liberation but rather a reframing of tyranny as freedom — the freedom of capitalism for the benefit of corporations looks like the gig economy, the liberation of Ukraine looks like an invasion, and every Gogol Bordello song sounds the same. We live in an era where the future is unknowable, and we can only make up what a future would look like by living in a simulation. That much is evident in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict: the Real is indeterminable as long as the media mediates the experience. See: The Ghost of Kyiv.
What can we make of the world in light of this new reality? Liberal democracy shades all mentions of worldliness as long as there is a project known as The World. Marxism and the worldwide communist labor movement have an idea of world liberation — a world liberated of capitalism, a project absent of profit and wealth accumulation, and undivided by human alienation from a nature that defines humanness. However, this vision directly contradicts some of the conclusions drawn from Dasein and liberal worldliness.
Marxism does not argue that returning to Dasein will liberate the human conditions under capitalism. Quite the opposite. Returning to will always return us to the nation-state, the Rousseau and Hobbesian social contracts of the Enlightenment where the nation-state conflicts with the people it claims to represent. Instead, one must go through the contradictory nature of capitalism to arrive at socialism. Of course, Marx and Lenin both foresaw this global nature of capitalism, with Marx saying as much in The Communist Manifesto (1848):
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It can nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere (212, Prometheus Books).
Twentieth-century communism’s failure to consolidate power over capitalism was traumatizing, and preserved the world in a marketplace bent on its own destruction. Most of all, it preserved the relationship of humans to capitalism to nature which is at the heart of Dasein — it required a return to and foreclosed on the action going through — where would capitalism and liberalism go through too? Its future has already arrived! The utopia for capitalists is here, and yet, there are still wars, worldly damage, and massive amounts of manufactured destruction worldwide. We should never look to return to this, ever again.
