AP,
I read through a comment in this thread by Balancing Act. I'm... well, I'm kind of inclined to think he's right about how this piece is imbalanced.
Given our mutual admiration of Dan Carlin I think I can use him as an example. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure without his example I wouldn't have seen any imbalance here - you're very measured in the point you're making and, as your other commenters have noted, this is a good piece.
Carlin started his series Wrath of the Khans by discussing an essay he wrote in college on the military tactics used by Genghis Khan and his army. It was a great essay. But, he got a low grade for it along with an explanation from the teacher - he had tried to cover Khan's tactics in isolation and hadn't even mentioned the fact that Khan had been responsible for the mass slaughter of tens of millions of people.
Carlin pointed out to his audience that his paper wasn't about Khan’s evil. It was about Khan’s tactics. But at the same time the teacher was right - how could a paper about Khan not be about Khan’s evil, with whatever else the author wanted to talk about worked in around that very important core fact?
It goes beyond a simple propagandistic acknowledgment that Khan was a bad guy. Rather, Khan’s own actions forced the context of how the future would (or, at least, should) interpret him. We owe his victims that but also we owe ourselves that because to forget it is to do a great disservice to the part of our brain that wants to interpret events justly. Khan’s brilliant use of the horse in war and the tactics derived from it were intimately tied with his evil and brutality. Leaving it buried in the pretext and assuming the reader would know the information coming into the paper left Carlin’s essay horribly unbalanced.
I've read your article twice now to make sure I'm doing it justice. In a nutshell, what I see you writing about here -- the core theme that contextualizes the whole argument that you make -- is that we tend to oversimplify the story and that we need to understand the complexities of the situation even when (and especially when) they are unpalatable, because if we don't we wind up stumbling into nasty consequences that we could have avoided pretty easily.
The sub-focus is on how there really are Nazis in Ukraine, with an emphasis on their history and a bit about the danger they pose and the horrible folly of our ignorance about them.
The thing being left buried in the pretext is that Ukraine, by and large, is anti-Nazi and has a president who lost family in the Holocaust. The thing is, you say that - pretty clearly. But the distribution of time and theme in the piece makes it clear that the piece isn't about that. And some readers (myself included) think that if you had made the piece more about that, it would be an amazingly well-rounded, interesting piece to see.
That doesn’t mean that you have to be the one to write it, of course. You have your own message that means the world to you and I think you owe it more to yourself and your audience to get it out. But that other piece, man — that one needs to be written by somebody.
It’s a ripping good story starring a man who follows the Schutzstaffel playbook, who has poisoned vocal dissenters with radioactive tea, and who regularly “disappears” inconvenient political opponents while riding around shirtless on a horse doing photo-ops that the whole world gets a kick out of. And in this story he uses classic Nazi propaganda techniques to turn his country against their neighbors in Ukraine. Because a brigade of the volunteer fighters in Ukraine and an ineffective politician or two are wearing badges that have the Schutzstaffel symbol.
And meanwhile the west misses it and gets all mystified because they're like "No we're the pure, good ones! He must be just making the Nazis up!!"
Nope. It's Nazis all the way down.
It’s about a man who is basically a Nazi telling lies about how people who aren’t Nazis are actually Nazis because some of them are technically Nazis and the west is not seeing it because they can’t see the Nazis since they’re fixated on how the first guy is basically a Nazi.
What a bizarre knot of a story.
Anyhow, you don't have to change a thing in this story, to be honest. It's yours and you've said what you need to say. And also, I think you're right; your audience is generally a thoughtful bunch and I don't think they're going to leave any piece that you write with brains that are simpler than the ones they arrived with.
I think Balancing Act is right to read pieces like this, though, and leave hungry for a piece that gets that additional context. Consider it food for thought, maybe? Sometimes the most basic and simplistic impulse - "We're good. He's bad" doesn't need to be brushed aside to see the complexity. It needs to be embraced and held close to your eyes and scrutinized so you can see the wild, fractal nature of it, getting more bizarre and detailed as you examine it further.
Putin's evil. And he's getting away with accusing Ukraine of being evil. And we're failing to understand why it's working, because all we see is that he's evil. But... y'know... accurately. And not. It's complicated.
:-D
