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Hello and welcome to Behind the News.

My name is Doug Hanwood.

Three segments today will hear from Richard Seymour

in the cultural politics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

from the Liberian Emily Dribinski on the war on libraries,

and from Annie Levin on the Cold War style of fiction writing,

which is still with us.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has produced an amazing mobilization

in what is reflexively and uncritically called the West.

It's like a revival of the Cold War, with the anti-communist Putin

in the role of communist ogre, accompanied by something of a witch hunt

against those who don't immediately join in full-throated denunciation.

We're even seeing a revival of an old-style left-end ecomenism,

where any complexity in your analysis is denounced to sympathy with the enemy.

What is going on here?

To explore that question, we're joined by Richard Seymour,

the writer, broadcaster, one of the founding editors of salvage magazine

and author of the twittering machine and the disenchanted earth.

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