On Warsplaining, or: How prevailing political assumptions have encouraged a bizarre discourse on human conflict that often studiously ignores what these conflicts are actually about

Winter has returned to Bavaria, and I am slightly depressed about it.

You know them, the warsplainers.

Should you discuss a war anywhere in the world while failing to demonstrate the right allegiances, the warsplainers will come for you. The problem, they’ll explain, is that you just don’t understand. You’re woefully misinformed, perhaps through no fault of your own. Most likely, you’re a victim of Western, or German, or Russian, or Ukrainian, or NATO, or Martian propaganda. If only you read the following books and internalise these carefully curated facts, you’ll come around to appreciating the justice of the cause with which you have failed to ally yourself.

Should you resist these appeals, the warsplainers will become at once less merciful. Your failure to agree with their ironclad arguments must mean that you are yourself a propagandist – a social media manipulator in the employ of dark forces. At this point the warsplainers will cease speaking to you personally and begin to address anyone who might be reading your benighted, misinformed and highly misleading social media posts. “Stop listening to this guy,” they’ll say. “He’s a paid Putin Zionist Palestinian Ukrainian shill,” they’ll add.

Of course I’m presenting only the worst of cases. Warsplaining, like all discourse, is subject to vast gradations in quality and professionalism. There are the NAFO warsplainers, who seem to copy and paste the same canned text over and over, and there are the fact-checking warsplainers who wear out their keyboards typing long tedious articles explaining for state media websites why twelve people are wrong about Putin on Facebook. There are also the personal experience warsplainers (who specialise in explaining why you’re not entitled to your opinion because unlike them you have no direct connection to the conflict in question), the humanitarian warsplainers (who explain why your views are responsible for untold suffering and misery), the leftist warsplainers (who explain what a terrible injustice is being perpetrated in your name against the victims of your country’s colonialism), the think-tank warsplainers (who explain how your beliefs are all the result of complex online disinformation campaigns), and many others besides.

Please understand that I’m not accusing anybody here, or even complaining. Many of you have probably warsplained at some time or another, and that’s totally fine. I will certainly not throw stones from my glass house, though as I’ve gained experience writing for the largest audience I’ve ever had, I’ve tried to minimise my indulgence in this particular recreational activity. I also hasten to add that I don’t generally mind warsplaining; I’ve even learned something from the occasional warsplainer, although their tactics have yet to bring me around on any particular issue.

The dose, however, can now and again make the poison. As you might imagine, I write this after wading through some of the less charitable correspondence that my piece on the Jews and the Germans provoked. Among the angrier emails are those addressing perceived gaps in my knowledge about the Gaza conflict and World War II. The former are entirely my fault; my references to the Palestinian cause proved to be an unnecessary distraction and if I could write the piece again I’d include a less charged historical example. I do, however, admit to dreaming of a universe wherein it is possible to discuss the German role in World War II without receiving a deluge of links to highly predictable Bitchute documentaries from grumpy internet people. But, that is the nature of the job, and actually it’s fine. (Also, please don’t refrain from emailing me if you’re otherwise inclined to do so: I value your feedback and also your tips, even if I can’t respond to everyone.)

Here, I only want to consider warsplaining as a phenomenon. There are at least four interesting things to note about it:

1) The warsplainers police most intensively the chronological space from 1939 to the present day. This, you could say, is central warsplaining territory. They may send a few exploratory patrols, like scouting missions, out into the fertile pastures of World War I, but as a rule if you post a Twitter thread on the intricacies of the Gallipoli campaign you’ll only attract hobbyists and historians. The nineteenth century is terra incognita for the warsplainers, to say nothing of the premodern world. As we leave the present and travel deeper into the past, we also see that beyond the special case of war propaganda, contemporary warsplaining begins to thin out. The Vietnam War, for example, was accompanied by abundant warsplaining at the time, both pro and contra. The Napoleonic wars, not so much, and surely nothing could be more ridiculous than imagining ancient warsplainers distributing leaflets on the justice of the Roman cause in the Gothic wars.

2) The defining premise of most warsplaining, is that there is an objectively correct side in every conflict, and that the failure to line up behind this side can only reflect one’s ignorance. The criteria used to establish the correct side are all too predictable, if sometimes contradictory. Aggressive warfare, unless perhaps it is conducted to spread democracy, is generally bad; defensive warfare, unless perhaps it is waged to protect an unjust dictatorship, is generally good. Preemptive attacks fall in a grey area. ‘War crimes’ and related humanitarian lapses are grave sins and deployed to discredit of one side or the other. For these reasons, warsplaining mostly redounds to litigating the specifics of hostilities, widening or tightening the chronological focus to implicate a disfavoured party, deploring or justifying civilian deaths, and so on.

3) A secondary premise of warsplaining, almost as important as 2), is that your interior disposition is of overwhelming moral importance, however little it may matter materially. This is slightly delicate, but let’s be honest: Whether and to what degree eugyppius believes Germany is at fault for World War II is not of great historical moment, and Putin is probably not very worried about whether eugyppius is ‘pro-Russian’ or ‘pro-Ukrainian.’ I’m not saying that my (or your) opinions about history or current events don’t matter. I’m merely noticing that there appears to be a great disconnect, between the urgency most warsplainers attach to your beliefs, and the actual significance of these beliefs for the political consequences of past wars or the prospects of present-day belligerents. This disconnect is generally obscured with the use of words like ‘support.’ You are urged to ‘support’ the right cause, or chided because you ‘support’ the wrong cause, although in almost every case this ‘support’ does not really amount to anything beyond an opinion and your expression of it.

4) Warsplaining doesn’t ever seem to work. I have read hundreds if not thousands of warsplainer discussions in my long years, and I have yet to identify a single openly persuaded party. Most often, these interactions merely cement everybody more firmly in their prior opinions. On the other hand, I will admit that it is often a great pleasure to read warsplainers whose opinions I agree with. I come away from their elegant arguments confirmed in all of my prior beliefs, and so I begin to suspect that herein lies the real purpose of warsplaining. (Of course, if we are honest with ourselves, this is the case with almost all political commentary, and that is not even a bad thing.)

All four of these points support the same basic thesis of warsplaining: Because war is a deeply uncomfortable matter for postwar liberalism, our institutions have adorned this ancient human activity with a wealth of jurisprudence explaining when and for what reasons it might be justified and how it is to be carried out. The archetypal warsplainer aspires to adjudicate wars and the justice of them more or less within this ideological framework. His enterprise partakes in the myth that there must a legally (and therefore a morally) justified side in any given conflict, and therefore also a malefactor. If only we could somehow do away with the latter, there would be no wars at all.

What dooms the warsplainer’s project is that which the ideology has suppressed, namely the whole thorny matter of allegiance. Since Antiquity, humans were always understood to have prior allegiances that explained why they found themselves on a given side. Suppressing the subject of allegiance (and the tribalism it entails) is not necessary when considering the distant past, but it becomes highly important for any conflict that has a bearing on present politics. This is why the warsplainers are most active after 1939, and it is also why they attach so much importance to which side you happen to be on. Your support, in this case, identifies you as a friend or an enemy, which is the most important distinction in human society. Because allegiances are generally formed prior to all rational considerations, warsplaining has little hope of success, and so we have an explanation for 4) as well.

The proliferation of proxy conflicts since the Cold War, and later adventures to spread democracy to allegedly backward lands, have obviously been a great boon for the warsplainers. These are wars that unfold most of the time in foreign countries, and the rationale for Western involvement is often complex if not outright obscure. Domestic audiences may find themselves inclined to identify with either side in such wars, and the warsplainers are eager to explain why they should. These debates inevitably become occasions for deeper debates about the legitimacy of the present political order, but it’s interesting how often the warsplainers strive to keep this aspect of their discourse implicit, just beneath the surface.