FIRST WORDS: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN MODERN TIMES:
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN MODERN TIMES: There are No Experts, Only Expertise in Politics
02 March 2025
Chisinau, Moldova
Today, I watched the media coverage of the Trump-Zelensky White House meeting on Friday from Chisinau, Moldova, where I’ve been living for the last ten years. As an American, I first watched media coverage from the U.S., which predictably varied wildly depending on political orientation and favored audience. I then watched it on English speaking media in Europe, which also varied wildly depending on political orientation and favored audience. Then I watched it on mostly Eastern European Romania speaking media, which like other media varied wildly depending on favored political orientation and audience. So, what all these media shared was not “truth,” but variations on truth depending on political orientation and favor audience. The point I’m trying to make here is broad, not narrow, that there are no “experts,” only “expertise” when it comes to talking about international politics.
As happened by accident, I was in Ukraine in February 2014 when the war between Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe began. I had flown to Lviv - Lvov, if your Russian, or Lemberg, if your Austrian, only broadly aware that a civil war was brewing. I also initially thought I would be there only for 10 days. But my assumptions about what I thought I knew began to change at the airport in Vienna, Austria, where I had to change planes.
It began when I was in Vienna trying to locate my connecting flight to Lviv, which I learned from an information officer in the airport was identified by Austrians as Lemberg. I had two hours between flights, so I asked the very friendly information officer, why it was known Lemberg, not Lviv. He smiled and engaged me in a reasonably long conversation, telling me how Lviv had been part of the Austrian Empire, where it was known as Lemberg in part because the Austrian had rebuilt it after it burned down in the 17th Century. He then added that it changed names several times, as it became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, the Soviet Union, then Germany.
When I arrived at Lviv/Lemberg/Lvov, I asked my friends about all this, and it then got even more entangled and complicated with Scythian and Mongol invasions, the Tartars, the Swedes, the Ottomans, the French and, yes, the Greeks and British all passing through and living their marks on the identify of the region. This compressed history lesson ended in late 2015 with a very long conversations with Igor Micek, a highly regarded Polish journalist whose Polish father married his Belorussian mother during the Soviet era, and Nataliia Kuravska, a Philologist and rare cosmopolitan native of Lviv several years abroad living in China, Sweden, and Canada. What these last two contacts provided was context in depth to who and what Ukraine was.
What Igor and Nataliia offered was “expertise” on the subject of Ukraine. They knew the country intimately but also knew what it wasn’t as a consequence of seeing it from afar with open eyes. They weren’t agents of governments, self-interested investors, fly-by commentators who just parachuted into Ukraine and then left, or like me, tourists trying to fit Ukraine into a travel agenda. They knew the history, the language, the culture, and the people often overlooked in the scramble to be an expert on Ukraine. They didn’t elaborate away from what they actually knew. Rather, they always cautioned about what they didn’t know, increasing confidence about the authenticity of what they did know, making what they did know even more impressive.
Although they didn’t appear to know each other, they confirmed the long, dark history of what is now Western Ukraine of intolerance and violence, of pogroms against Jews and Romani (Gypsys) and a persistent feudalism that confined them as agricultural serfs to a life of dependency on authority. They didn’t travel much and rarely out of the area where they were born and grew up. They didn’t know how to effectively work together, requiring that all important activities be closely supervised by others, and mostly outsiders. They lived in family clans dominated by hierarchical authority with everything they didn’t know explained and retained in ignorance of facts. All of this helped explained a past and present composed by extreme nationalists intent on isolating themselves and other Western Ukrainians from the world.
As I traveled Ukraine during 2014 to 2016, all I saw and heard confirmed what Igor and Nataliia told me was a long tragedy repeating itself. In June 2014, I watched a torch-light march by Right Sector to Lviv’s City Hall, across from the balcony of my rented apartment. Right Sector was a Neo-Nazi political organization that had sprung to life a year before with the assistance of Victoria Nuland, Jeffry Piot, Senator John McCain, and then Vice-President, Joe Biden, which seized control of the Ukrainian government in February 2014, even though they had only received 5% of the vote in Lviv Oblast, and much less elsewhere in Ukraine. Then, a few days later when this same Right Sector was holding a rally in downtown Lviv, I heard its leader telling his supporters it would be necessary to “exterminate” (his word) all ethnic Russians, including children, who would just grow up to be like their parents.
In May 2015, my Ukrainian friends in Lviv, none of whom were particularly political, told me about an attack by Ukrainian Nationalist on ethnic Russians in Odessa. Then, in June 2015, I met with a group of university students in Lviv who were investigating World War Two war crimes by Stepan Bandara and his group, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). They had already uncovered multiple sites in Western Ukraine where entire villages had been raised with their Jewish, Polish, and Romani people hacked to death, which coincided with that this group had done to 100,000 Poles in Eastern Poland during the War.[i]
These are all facts available to those who search for facts. But searching for facts is not in the nature of international politics, not because they are desirable but because they are hard to digest without expertise. All the people I met and came to know over the last 25 years I’ve worked and lived in Europe, achieved authenticity and credibility by searching for facts and thought about them independently. Yet, I know they also will say their opinions are merely informed, not conclusive, which leaves room for others who also search for facts and thoughts independently.
I can’t confirm all the details of their knowledge, nor do I need to, because it’s authenticity that proves the value of what they say. However, I can say that the truth depends a lot on what we suppose about it and, as Emmanuel Kant, the great German Eighteenth Century thinker argued, we can only really know what we have personally experienced. Expertise requires qualified, not absolute knowledge, as does being an expert in something. Human experience can’t be captured and reproduced like a snapshot, which even then is only a two-dimensional image of a multi-dimensional reality.
What seems to me most useful, and I’m someone who values utility, in international politics is assembling an overall impression of what appears to be at least and rational picture of things. For example, Ukraine, and particularly Western Ukraine, is historically defined by villages, towns, cities by their ethnicities and the unique identities they formed. The lines between them have been redrawn regularly as one ethnic group shifted and encountered another ethnic group. There are a lot of overlaps, but also important distinctions that form their long histories, some of which go back more than 7,000 years.
The repeated mistake of Western European political and economic elites, and more generally those countries that have formed during the relatively shorter history of “Western Civilization,” is to think of Central and Eastern Europe as a junior rather than senior collaborator in shaping what is now identified as Europe, rather than the Eurasia is more accurately is. The assumptions and interests that has produced have run over, around, and through Central and Eastern Europe without seeing their deeply embedded differences. To put it in a more easily digested way, it would be like going back to the countries from which our ancestors emigrated and try to tell them how to live, work and think, which is not only absurd, but very disrespectful.
Although I can’t say for certain, I think this is the great crisis of modernity everywhere. If we are to achieve peace and prosperity in the world, we need to begin with a great humility and curiosity about what the world is some far away culture, in another state or city, or across the street from where we live. What I have learned in wandering the world for 60 years, is that people have many common interests and shared values wherever they are, making us something of a world community. But there also are wonderful differences waiting to be discovered and appreciated, but only with great respect.
I don’t and can never want to be an “expert” with respect to other people, which is actually quite impossible. But I would like to have some “expertise” about them, even if only because they do affect my life, and I would like to be reciprocated with mutual respect for our differences. Thus, what I saw in the meeting between Trump and Zelinsky today was a vast gap in understanding, with both making seriously bad assumptions about the other.
I also say that with the belief that Ukraine and Zelinsky have very serious problems with internal corruption and their identities, which in the end they, not we, must address and resolve, but which they can’t address and resolve while the manipulation of their societies continues from outside. That same conclusion applies to Europeans and to we Americans, and if we don’t learn that lesson our forever wars will certainly end one day in catastrophe.
Respectfully,
Dr. Darrell Whitman
Dr. Darrell Whitman