The Hero Narrative Poisoned the West
Ukraine, and the dangers of believing too ardently in your nation’s inherent “goodness”
I live in a heroic nation, or so I have been told.
This image was woven for me when I was young, and World War II loomed significantly in our collective memories. As students, we watched Schindler’s List for school assignments, and stood in the rain every year for Remembrance Day parades. Some took field trips to visit Vimy Ridge or the Normandy Beaches to commemorate the loss of Canadian soldiers. We did this to honour the sacrifice of human lives lost, in the hope for a more moral future.
This—the remembrance and respect for those that died—is not the lesson from WWII that we got wrong. The honouring of our deceased, and the precious lives they lived, is possibly one of the most profound things that we do as a human species. We have honoured our dead for centuries, as long as history can remember. Even those that are atheists may still find themselves holding funerals when a loved one passes on, or at the very least will have difficulty resisting the urge to commemorate their dead somehow. While much throughout history changes, this commemoration of life stays the same. There is something inherently within us that knows its importance—that life cannot vanish from this earth without some sort of acknowledgment that it was there.
But we have spent too much time dwelling on those heroic actions of the past—actions in which none of us living today even participated. We came to believe our Western nations, our Western governments, are inherently heroic. They are not. In dwelling on this past, we removed a part of our thinking that allowed us to look at our foreign policies more critically.
In the 1940s, these lives were lost because our ancestors knew we could not allow someone like Adolf Hitler and his murderous policies to continue. Humanity was at stake in a philosophical sense. Our ancestors were put in an existential moral position. They had to decide—what did life and humanity mean in a very real sense, and what did Hitler’s existence signify about humanity? This is why our ancestors went to war, and they emerged from this war as victors and heroes.
But unfortunately, our relationship and understanding of what constitutes heroism has now been corrupted. We have come to conceptualize our Western nations, our Western governments, as inherently well-meaning, and inherently heroic. But this conceptualization—that our Western governments have already won hero status because their ancestors won it—is not actually accurate. And it has proven to be very, very dangerous. In dwelling on our past, we removed a part of our critical thinking that allowed us to look at our foreign policies more closely. Because we were already tied to the idea that we are humanitarian players for good, our opinions on our current foreign wars were able to be manipulated.
This is why we were able to be tricked about Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the narrative that has been sold to us is a traditional hero-villain story. Drawing on our feelings about WWII and the Cold War, we were told that what is happening in Ukraine is that Putin and Russia are conducting a sinister, black-and-white war, engaging in villainous actions as they attempt to expand their empire into Ukraine and destroy Ukrainian democracy. We are told that the war is a clear, moral battle: between good Western democracy and bad Russian-style communism. We are told that again, we are heroes in this war, because we are inherently good guys.
But this story is a narrative, and a narrative is not the truth. It is, however, the best narrative for obtaining a nation’s consent to enter war. If we are obvious heroes protecting a vulnerable victim in the name of “democracy,” then our governments do not have to sell the war any further. All they have to do is tell us what is “true” with the tools of their powerful media, and we will believe them, as we are primed to believe we’re wartime “heroes” anyway.
But unlike Gaza, which has a clear aggressor in the conflict, the situation in Ukraine is actually messier and more complex than what we are being told.
Here is some history of the Ukraine, which may show why.
During the 40s, the Soviets and Nazis were fighting over European territory. This included the Ukraine, and as both countries entered, some groups of local Ukrainians found themselves becoming pro-Soviet or pro-Nazi sympathizers.
The Nazi influence is not discussed as frequently as the Russian. But there were indeed many groups of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine in the 40s—the SS division Galicia, for example, was staffed with Ukrainian volunteers, one of which was Yaraslov Hunka, the man Prime Minister Trudeau honoured in our parliament last year. There was also the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a Ukrainian Nazi-esque group that assisted Germany with its Holocaust of Jews in Ukraine. Their flag was red and black, which is significant when we note that it was flown frequently after the Independence of Ukraine in 1991, as well as the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2014.
Why is that important?
It is important because it indicates that there still remains the influence of Nazi white-supremacist groups within modern history. And Soviet/Russian sympathizers are still there too, living primarily in the east of Ukraine.
As for the West’s influence, they began exerting more control after 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. In 2005, two candidates with opposing views for Ukraine ran for president. We were told the one of them, Viktor Yanukovych, was more pro-Russian while the other, Viktor Yuschenko, was more pro-Western, and wanted to join the EU. Yanukovych won, but Yuschenko and his supporters alleged that the vote was rigged, particularly in the east. The east, as I’ve mentioned, was largely pro-Russian anyway, but nevertheless, a new vote found Yuschenko, the pro-EU candidate, to be the winner. This was convenient for the West, and feels creepily reminiscent of what is going on in Venezuela right now.
Later, Yanukovych won again, in a new election in 2010. By 2013, however, he was supposed to sign a European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, which would have created stronger ties to Europe. But he backed out, and decided not to sign. Pro-European protests erupted in November 2013, and Yanukovych was removed from power. A new election established Petro Poroshenko as President, a confectionary-owner who curiously had connections to the influential and powerful Rothschild & Co.
As such, we can see that when Ukraine “gained democracy,” it was messier than simply democracy winning over communism. Elections were divided as well as contested, and three major players with very different ideologies were fighting for influence in the country. All of this happened in very recent history.
These dynamics did not just disappear overnight. Ukraine’s pro-European leader was “elected” only ten years ago. So while there are Ukrainians who are pro-Western/European in the Ukraine, there are still pro-Russians there too, and there are pro-Nazis as well. So when pro-European sentiment “won” in Ukraine, it did not mean that they had sorted through all of their issues, or that all people actually wanted to align with the West. It also does not mean that the country ever truly got out from under the thumb of any of these major players. This includes the West.
This feels particularly significant as there was another important player who began to get involved in Ukrainian affairs in 2014, in the midst of the pro-European protests and right before the Russo-Ukrainian war. It was the CIA, who recently acknowledged through the New York Times that 2014 was when their involvement began. The same year a pro-Russian official was thrown out of power, and he and Russia claimed it was a coup. The West’s narrative was that this was Russian propaganda—but now we know how much propaganda the West is capable of in order to maintain hegemonic control, the truth of what actually happened feels out of reach.
The New York Times article provides a narrative for what the CIA was doing in Ukraine. Their claim is that America was selflessly helping the Ukraine gather intelligence on the Russians. But if America had motives for Western hegemonic control rather than “humanitarian,” “pro-democracy” concerns, would this be reported to the public in a New York Times article? And if the West did have less than benevolent motives in the Ukraine, then what influence did the West and the CIA exert during the Euromaidan Protests of 2013 and 2014? And what influence did they exert on the disputed, contested Ukrainian elections of the early 2000s, where the country was deciding between a pro-Russian and pro-European leader, and it is obvious which one the CIA would have preferred?
This, as well as the fact that there is quite a bit of evidence that suggests that the West and Russia are fighting a proxy war at Ukraine’s expense and that NATO provoked Russia into invading knowing it would come at an expense of Ukrainian civilians, indicates that the West is not actually behaving as a hero in the Russo-Ukrainian war. The West behaved aggressively and inappropriately at the expense of human lives.
As that is the main aspect the West is being honest about in this conflict. Innocent Ukrainian people are indeed suffering as larger powers battle over their future. The West acknowledges Ukrainians are suffering, but they do not acknowledge their part in contributing to it. The war in the Ukraine is a proxy war between the West and Russia. The Ukrainian people were put in the middle, sacrificed for a war between more powerful countries.
This is why the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza has so captured the hearts of the world. By comparing the narratives of these two wars, we can see what our Western Empire and media has done. They attempted to craft a hero narrative in Ukraine, but when looking at Gaza, we can see the narratives do not mesh, and reveal them to be complicitous rather than heroic. Western media condemns Russia for the destruction of hospitals and schools in Ukraine while failing to do the same for Gaza. Their governments ban Russia from the Olympics but allow Israel to participate, even as video evidence emerges of torture camps and Palestinians getting raped literally to death. Western media report sob stories of displaced puppies and kittens in Ukraine but do not mention the same thing happening in Gaza. Bibi Satan was even recently featured on the cover of Time Magazine, when he should be charged with crimes against humanity instead.
This illumination shows us that not only is the West complicit in the genocide in Gaza, but they engaged in immoral actions that led to the Russo-Ukrainian war as well. The “pro-democracy” narrative is incoherent when comparing these wars. But the narrative that our governments are struggling for hegemonic control is cohesive in both of these stories, no matter what a “reputable” mainstream source may tell you.
The time has come where we are now forced to face the same existential question that our ancestors faced long ago.
Who are we as humans, and what will humanity allow?
Do we want to be heroes in the sense of what a hero actually is—a person willing to make sacrifices for what is morally right and true? Or will we ignore facts, evidence, and suffering because we are afraid to let go of our familiar, less cognitively challenging narratives that Western governments always behave as heroes, and other governments are always morally inferior?
History does not repeat, as the old saying goes, but it rhymes.
A genocide can happen again. But the heroes may not always be the same players.
Thank you for reading. If you like my writing and want to support me, please consider subscribing to my newsletter. I write new essays every week. To my current subscribers, thank you so much for your support. It means the world to me that you are here.
Writers and articles on Substack I have been reading:
Welcome to Hell: Israeli Human Rights Watch Group Exposes Israeli Prisons as Torture Camps by Michael Feldman
Alas, a Second Pearl Harbor by Alon Mizrahi
The Era of Secession by the Secession Examiner
Who Watches the Watchmen? by the Dissident
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn't care by Drop Site News
And the indoctrination starts so early: children learn about good guys and bad guys in cartoons, and this narrative becomes further developed as they get older.
Thanks for posting, Eleanor. You make very important points.
Regarding Ukraine, you omitted an essential part of the history. In 2014, the mostly ethnic Russian eastern provinces voted, as is their right under international law, to withdraw from Ukraine and declared their independence. Immediately, the Ukraine launched a military operation that continued for the next 8 years and resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. In 2023, Ukraine was preparing to invade the Donbas. Again referenda were held, this time on the subject of requesting membership in the Russian Federation. As with the vote for independence, the result was overwhelmingly "aye". The petition was made to the Duma and accepted, and only THEN did Russia enter the contested territory.