John Ganz admits that he is “not a scholar of any of the fields in question” on the war in Ukraine, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this; but since he does have a reasonably large platform, I think a brief response in in order. Ganz lays out a collection of alleged “lies and idiocies that have been repeated since the start of the conflict” in his latest post; let’s look at them in turn.

“First, we were told war was impossible, it was a figment of the Western imagination…”

In the days preceding the invasion I argued at length that it was a mistake to rule out the possibility of war. I also predicted that if we did and Russia invaded, it would

become conventional wisdom that the left got it wrong, that it simply does not understand this situation…

That of course is precisely what Ganz is doing here. There is no real reason to believe that he got it right because of anything more than blind credulity about US intelligence.

“…then we were told war was inevitable, because it was provoked by the West…”

Correct. It’s worth repeating (if only because Ganz may not be familiar with the history and literature here) that this was a standard foreign policy premise throughout the Cold War and the basis for all kinds of important initiatives like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The implicit critique here seems to be that since some folks took the opposite position before adopting this one, neither is credible. No point in defending an analysis with this kind of historical pedigree against a non-critique, but you can see the game Ganz is playing. Since the first statement was false, this one must be too!

“…we were told that they intended to trick Putin into a destructive quagmire…”

I am tempted to say that Ganz is arguing with conspiracy theorists because he can’t take on the stronger version of the quagmire point: that it may not be an intentional trick, but that the problems a protracted war creates for Russia do create perverse incentives against the US doing right by Ukraine. Tempted to say this, but it’s still too generous to Ganz, since he hasn’t even provided an argument against the conspiracy theorists; this is just more eye-rolling.

“…we were told this was part of Putin’s grand master plan to defy the West and create a new world order…”

I am really not sure what Ganz thinks this means, among other things because it’s obviously true: Putin is acting in defiance of NATO, and successfully annexing Ukraine would certainly be another step towards multipolarity. This is something that even folks who share Ganz’s politics agree with, so pending some clarification one has to dismiss this as not even wrong.

“…then, that Russia’s total victory was assured in a matter of hours, then days, then weeks…”

Yes there has plainly been a lot of goalpost shifting here, for example by Scott Ritter, who declared back in April that “Russia is well on its way” to destroying Ukraine’s forces in the east. Or by John Ganz, who went from saying “I don’t think Ukraine is winning” in March to declaring today that

The war is by no means over, Ukraine’s success is not guaranteed, but it’s clear that quick, lightning victory and perhaps even a gradual, grinding victory are now out of reach for the invaders.

What is the actual difference between Ritter and Ganz? Both have access to all of the same limited information (because of the fog of war and language barriers); both have been speaking with way too much certitude (even Ganz, despite his hedging); and both have been shifting their assessments whenever history contradicts them.

I could go on, but no need to belabor this. John lands a few solid blows in his piece (for example against “self-avowed Marxist-Leninists cheering on Lenin’s great enemy, Russian chauvinism”), but even those are misleading because he’s trying to use them to legitimize lines of criticism, like those listed above, that are completely unrelated. This just isn’t serious analysis, and frankly I don’t think he takes it seriously either. John is doing stuff like writing a 2500 word “explanation of the path to war” in Ukraine which argued that it “can be understood in the light of preventing a revolution in Russia” — and then, today, pivoting to the argument that

We shouldn’t believe that the war was waged for any more serious purpose than the sum of all its contradictory defenses and rationalizations: it is not really part of either of some civilization-shaping project or cunning realist maneuvering. To indulge in this is to just create more propaganda. In its conception and execution it is identical to its justification: it is a product of brutish stupidity.

This entire Ukraine discourse is the product of brutish stupidity. On one side, crank conspiracy theorists who get all of their information about the war from BasedDuginDude69 on Telegram. On the other, smug “I’m completely out of my field, but” liberals who completely reverse their analysis because the new one sounds even prettier. And the only thing they have in common: both hate the anti-imperialist left.