Westsplaining

Westsplaining or Westplaining

Westplainer at work

• Wikipedia, Westsplaining

• If we were to write a parody of westplaining, we couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous than a wealthy musician explaining to the First Lady of a country facing genocide about her country’s situation through invader propaganda.

• “The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist ‘Westsplaining ’Ukraine”

• “anti-imperialism” of idiots

• An anti-fascist message from the shadows of Central and Eastern Europe

• Fuck leftist westplaining

• Jan Krepelka, “Agency denial is not libertarian”

• Habermas describes the Cold War as a time of „peace“. This is an example of what non-European thinkers might call „Eurocentricism“, or what east European leftists call „westsplaining.“ [2]

[1]

Roger Waters

“ This leads us to the second point: NATO did not expand into “Eastern Europe.” Czechia, Poland, and Hungary in 1999 and the Baltic countries among others in 2004 actively sought membership in the alliance. This is not just semantics. For the historical reasons mentioned above, the West has been a desired political direction associated with prosperity, democracy, and freedom—despite the limitations of Western liberal capitalist democracies and the implementation of that model in Eastern Europe. Being at the receiving end of Russian imperialism, many Eastern Europeans looked forward to membership in NATO as a means of securing their sovereignty. NATO, in other words, would not have “expanded” into Eastern Europe if the Eastern European nations had not wanted it and actively pursued it.

As 2020 Pew Research Center data show, Eastern European members generally see NATO favorably. Fifty-three percent of Czechs have a positive opinion about NATO, as do 77 percent of Lithuanians. NATO’s most enthusiastic supporters are Poles, with 88 percent supporting the alliance. Fifty-three percent of Ukrainians view NATO favorably, compared to 23 who view it negatively. …

In the westsplaining framework, the concerns of Russia are recognized but those of Eastern Europe are not. This, again, mirrors the Russian line that “Ukraine’s current regime lacks any sovereignty,” which of course also operates within a framework inherited from the bipolar world of the Cold War. Eastern Europe is something that can be explained but isn’t worth engaging with.

— Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz, “The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist ‘Westsplaining ’Ukraine”, March 4, 2022

• “It’s ridiculous how some westerners are saying that our Maidan, when Yanukovich run away was a coup. We were there, we took part in it, we fought for our freedom, and we are doing it once again now. Why is it so hard to believe that we don’t want to be a part of russia?” (Euromaidan)

• Euromaiden was a grassroots movement, a citizen uprising, in Ukraine against Russian influence and corruption. Stop “westsplaining” - telling the Ukrainians that they don’t know what’s best for them. Same with NATO, former communist countries in CE Europe couldn’t wait to join NATO after the fall of communism. Why? They knew first hand the Russian threat, and that didn’t begin after the Bolshevik revolution.