The war between Russia and Ukraine began in earnest in February 2022. It sent the Western political and journalistic commentariat into the shock of its life, making them forget about Covid, Israel, and the many other oh-so-important matters they had been “covering” until then. They finally located Ukraine on the map and discovered that it was more than a source of Slavic brides for Western unmarriageables. Who would have thought…?
Academia—and especially the social sciences—became another arena of creativity. The level of informedness there was generally higher than among the journalistic class, though not by much.
I am a member of several learned societies. Discussions of current affairs are not unusual on their forums and listservs, and the war had an immediate effect. I am a survivor of those discussions. For several months, between February and June 2022, I had to listen to groups of people—supposedly senior researchers of one thing or another—telling each other that Putin was evil, that Russia’s conquest of free Europe was just around the corner, and that Zelensky alone could save the day.
Senior and junior academics alike took part in constructing the public image of Zelensky. More often than not, nobody actually disagreed with anybody. Yet an atmosphere of subdued hostility permeated these discussions. My impression was that the competition was not over whether to say Slava Ukraini, but over who could say it first and loudest. It was the usual academic competition for status, this time in its naked form, utterly devoid of intellectual substance.
Having lived through several such exchanges, I decided to do everyone a favour. To be honest, I decided to do myself a favour. I was losing respect for people I did not want to lose respect for.
I proposed setting up an information service on my personal website—a self-imposed community service, if you like. I would provide primary materials: freshly and faithfully translated statements by Russian leaders, interviews given to various media outlets, and summaries of what Russian-speaking commentators around the world were saying.
The need seemed obvious to me. The discussion around me rested on a very poor factual foundation, while the Western media ecosystem offered little access to these primary materials. Parenthetically, this situation was miles away from what later developed during the Israel-USA-Iran conflict, when Iranian leaders, including Araghchi and others, appeared on British television almost daily, delivering lengthy interviews that were then served to the British public in prime time.
I announced this service on one academic discussion forum as follows:
“A new project is announced, dear colleagues. I could call it What They Really Say There, but that was too long, so the project will run under the title Politinformation. I am officially announcing the launch of the Politinformation Project on my website, Facebook, and Twitter.
Years of living in Israel and the Christian West convinced me that Russian was the most useless language one could know. What was it good for, apart from the undiluted appreciation of Tolstoy?—or so I thought. Then the war in Ukraine happened, and suddenly the status of the Russian language changed. It became a vehicle for understanding the political realities of Eastern Europe that, at least in theory, mattered to the West. If I am honest, the need for such a project had existed long before the war. Several interviews with Russian and Russian-speaking politicians and public figures had already been translated so badly, and represented so inaccurately, that I almost asked myself whether there was more than incompetence at work. While that important question remains unanswered, I am going to do something useful. I will, to the best of my ability, obtain and translate primary materials in Russian that relate to issues attracting public attention at any given moment. Consider helping me by suggesting material worthy of translation.”
How did this go? I can almost hear you asking.
Within about nine minutes of posting the announcement, I received a personal email from a senior academic who, for now, will remain anonymous. The subject line was “Indoctrination.” It read:
“Daniel, to me the question is the following: Since February 2022,
How many Russian civilians have been killed by the Ukrainian military on Russian territory?
How many Ukrainian civilians have been killed by the Russian military on Ukrainian territory?
Normally the answer to both questions should be: none.
Any other answer is unacceptable.
[…] no country has the right to attack its neighbour unless it was previously militarily attacked.
I do not suggest you disseminate this kind of advocacy on this channel. It is not relevant, and it may raise some opposition.”
That, I repeat, was a collegial recommendation made on an academic forum.
I did not reply. Instead, I saved the email in a folder titled I Do Not Believe It, where I keep documentation of things that should never have happened, deleted it from my inbox, and moved on. Today, I think its time has come.
It is hardly original to observe that the role of scientific inquiry is to study the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The latter belongs to religion and ideology. I was trained as neither a priest nor a political activist.
The suggestion that discussion of a major war on Europe’s doorstep should be reduced to the normative proposition that “wars should not happen” is extraordinary when made on what purports to be a scientific forum. Equally remarkable was the barely veiled warning that pursuing factual inquiry might provoke “opposition.”
The implication seemed unmistakable: in the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war, anything other than moralistic exhibitionism was considered inappropriate. To me, that represented not merely a failure of scholarly judgment, but a collapse of the social-scientific enterprise itself.
My response, four years later, is a new series on my YouTube channel, Census & Civilization: a critical reading of Emmanuel Todd’s The Defeat of the West. Through this series, I hope to show how demographic reasoning and statistical analysis can help us understand the war on the Eastern Front, and how careful cross-examination of competing scholarly arguments enlightens public debate rather than impoverishing it.
A friendly, like-minded academic asked me recently, looking me straight in the eye: “Do you think the social sciences should simply be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch? Are they beyond repair?” I did not know the answer. But I understood exactly where the question was coming from—a place very close to my own.
This channel, and this series on Emmanuel Todd, is my answer. For now.