This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
CULTURE WAR IN FINLAND: DEHUMANIZATION DERBY
(blog form)
During the present war the Finnish society has been firmly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian. Both the state and the civil society have found multiple ways to aid the Ukrainian war effort, and likewise expressions of anti-Russian agitation are, if not formally approved, at least given more leeway than previously. 90% of Finns continue to support giving lethal aid to Ukraine, even while the numbers are falling in numerous other European countries.
For some weeks, there’s been a debate over whether things have been going slightly too far. During this time, multiple celebrities and politicians, including Sofi Oksanen – one of the most important current writers in the country, half-Estonian, known not only for gothy looks but also as a longtime active critic of Russia – announced that instead of spending money on traditional New Year’s fireworks, they’d shell out money on shells – in particular, Ukrainian shells with messages on them.
There’s a service, signmyrocket.com, that promises that they’ll write your personalized message on a shell that Ukrainians will fire on Russian troops. (Some have speculated they’re just using one shell that gets wiped clean and a new message written on it every time the service is used.) Oksanen’s message was “Jaxuhalit” – a maddeningly stupid phrase that is hard to translate succinctly (literal translation would be like “I am giving you a hug for strength”, expect it’s obviously used sarcastically and also written in Finnish equivalent of “I can haz cheezburger?” style argot.)
Anyway, this led to a column (link goes to a fairly readable Google-Translated version) in a major tabloid about how this sort of a thing shows that many Finns have entered into a strange state of mind where they treat the war as a game, engage dehumanization etc. After the requisite accusations of Putinism, it hasled to a surprising amount of nuanced debate on whether this is really the case.
After some back and forth, Jussi Halla-aho, the most important nationalist politician in Finland, made his intervention. A little context about Halla-aho might be in order. He started his political career as a popular anti-immigration blogger, who used his blog followers to form a faction that joined The Finns Party, back then only a minor inchoate populist party, in the early 00s and took it over, turning it into a right-wing nationalist party with immigration as its main issue.
Halla-aho muscled out the former leader’s preferred candidate for party leadership in 2017, leading to some governmental drama as the other parties considered him too extreme, but only stayed in this post for a few years until relinquishing this post to a handpicked successor. Nevertheless, he continues to be the chief intellectual force of the party, and whatever he says will surely have an impact on Finnish nationalist thinking. These days his main method of communication is Facebook, not his old blog.
Now, Finnish nationalism has of course never been pro-Russian, but there has still been a certain amount of division on Finnish populist right on the question of Russian relations. After all, the Cold War era idea that neutrality serves Finland the best and Russia could offer trade opportunities if we ignore all the human rights guff and such continues to have adherents particularly in the older generations having grown up in that era, and pro-Russian narrative from the far-right movements in other European countries have also had some minor effect. Perhaps the only vocally pro-Putin politician in Finnish parliament right now is a conspiracy-theorist bodybuilder who was earlier kicked out of The Finns Party for other reasons.
Halla-aho, however, does not share this view – indeed, beyond being anti-Russia, he can be counted as a genuine Ukrainophile, one of the few Western European politicians to speak Ukrainian (his day job is a researcher of Church Slavonic, so it’s natural for him to know Slavic languages).
Halla-aho’s Facebook post is worth quoting here in full, translated by me by running it through DeepL and doing some light editing:
Halla-aho’s statement carries extra significance since he is the chair of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, the highest official post his party carries now. (In some other countries opposition parties might be shut out of parliamentary committee chairmanships as a matter of course, but in Finland they will be allotted posts according to their parliamentary strength, and since The Finns are the largest opposition party, they are entitled to this heavy committee and can nominate whomever they wish.)
Halla-aho’s statement has been condemned by many other politicians, and even the party’s new leader thinks it goes too far. Of course, the most obvious point of criticism is that even if one thinks that war requires dehumanization of the enemy, you know, Finland is not actually at war with Russia. There are no bombs falling here or soldiers desperately fighting in the freezing forests of Eastern Finland. Indeed, what annoys myself about the whole signmyrocket affair is that it almost allows chair-warring celebrities to pretend they’re fighting the war themselves, expect without actually having to get a frostbite while guard a snowy dark patch of a forest somewhere or risk getting a bullet in your throat.
Still, others claim that the whole thing is just being direct about what war entails, i.e., shooting and killing, and that the most important thing is supporting Ukraine whatever way there is, and if getting money to Ukraine involves this sort of a gimmick then so be it.
Since being vocally anti-Russia continues to be a right-coded thing in Finland, and worries about whether the society is getting too anti-Russian (in a way that might lead to, say, violence against Russian refugees in Finland) is similarly mostly left-coded (even if these might be the other way around in current America), the whole debate has some equivalence to various other political correctness debates on the left-right axis. Is it important to Say Things Like They Are, or might that lead to problems? Are things even as the people who Say Things As They Are claim them to be, or are they just being edgy?
Whatever the case is, this war is probably not doing good things for the Finnish psyche, but hey, that’s in the eyes of the beholder – there are factions in the Finnish extremely online right who have basically spent the whole war celebrating how the titanic clash with the ancient enemy is making the society more based. And if making Europe more based has ever been Russia's intention, as the narrative sometimes goes - mission accomplished!
*: Finland’s newspaper of record, which was one of the instances to comment negatively on the rocket-signers. Has been a frequent target for Halla-aho for his entire career.
**: The most famous character of Finland’s best-well-known war novel/film.
Does the idea that disarmament, mutually agreed restraint and maintenance of norms are positive-sum not pop up in those discussions at all? At the very least, it doesn't seem like anyone (in your story, or what I see from Russian telegrammers or otherwise) is trying to seriously expand the game tree one step further and reason about how the balance changes if the other side also starts unabashedly executing POWs or whatever other ways of killing more $enemy are proposed down the line. I thought a standard European history education should have put some emphasis on how the various conventions of warfare emerged from Europe's historical experience in their absence (even if you want to have the edgy 14 year old's cynicism and say that it's just that the elites were spooked that the normlessness may come back to haunt them), but perhaps the connection from "Tired Professional Gentleman-Soldiers in colourful uniforms none of whom really wanted to be there anyway" to "the loathsome enemy right now barbarously rejecting the obvious truth of our narrative" is too much to draw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum has indicated that it works poorly with Russia.
These sorts of international agreements seem to be in a different class from basic rules-of-warfare/human-rights conventions, and anyhow once you go there (as the subthread below yours aptly demonstrates) you just get stuck in a very deep hole of both sides having equal and opposite stories of treaty violations by the other, and why their own violations as alleged by the other side don't actually count. Meanwhile, even in WWII, at least on the Western front both sides (and especially the morally and militarily victorious one!) upheld a pretense of respecting the rights of PoWs, and neither the Ameribrits nor the Soviets followed a principle of "our goal should be to maximise the number of dead Germans". Are you saying they should have?
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence. It stands to reason that they are certainly not killing and torturing as many PoWs as they could. The person quoted by OP seems to suggest that Ukrainians should kill and torture as many Russian PoWs as they could. If they did this, why would Russians not do the same to their Ukrainian PoWs? I can see why the intermediate state where Ukrainians go wild but Russians haven't yet would appeal to him, but at the inevitable new equilibrium where both of them do it, would his side actually be better off than before?
"Here are excerpts from three letters found on dead Germans:
Manager Reinhardt writes to Lieutenant Otto von Schirach: "The French were taken from us to the factory. I chose six Russians from the Minsk district. They are much tougher than the French. Only one of them died, the rest continue to work in the fields and on the farm. Keeping them costs nothing and we should not suffer from the fact that these beasts, whose children may be killing our soldiers, are eating German bread. Yesterday I subjected to light execution two Russian beasts who secretly devoured the skimmed milk intended for the sows..."
Mateas Zimlich writes to his brother, Fr. Heinrich Zimlich: "There is a camp for Russians in Leiden, you can see them there. They are not afraid of weapons, but we talk to them with a good lash ..."
A certain Otto Essmann writes to Lieutenant Helmut Weigand: "We have captive Russians here. These types are devouring earthworms on the airfield pad, they are throwing themselves at the garbage bucket. I've seen them eating grass. And to think they're people..."
Slave owners, they want to turn our people into slaves. They take the Russians to their place, mock them, starve them to insanity, to the point where, dying, people eat grass and worms, and the shitty German with a rotten cigar in his teeth philosophizes, "Are these people...?"
We know everything. We remember everything. We have understood: the Germans are not people. From now on the word "German" is the worst curse for us. From now on the word "German" discharges the gun. We shall not speak. We shall not be indignant. We shall kill. If you haven't killed at least one German in a day, your day is wasted. If you think your neighbor will kill a German for you, you have not understood the threat. If you don't kill a German, the German will kill you. He will take those dear to you and will torture them in his damned Germany. If you can't kill a German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet. If there is a lull on your station, if you are waiting for a battle, kill the German before the battle. If you let a German live, a German will hang a Russian man and disgrace a Russian woman. If you have killed one German, kill another - there is nothing more fun for us than German corpses. Don't count the days. Don't count the versts. Count one thing: the Germans you have killed. Kill the German! - That's what the old mother is asking. Kill the German! - That's the child's plea. Kill the German! - It's the land itself that cries out. Don't miss. Don't skip. Kill!"
More options
Context Copy link
Note that Ukraine allowed contact of independent organisation with PoW held by them, Russia failed to do so.
See also how people released by Russia looks like.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the main reason you haven't heard about it is that Russia's torture of both POWs and civilians is so routine and well-known that it isn't considered very newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3543197-inside-russias-war-camps-ukrainian-pows-detail-torture-abuse/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/russia-ukraine-war-un-report-details-accounts-of-rape-torture-and-executions.html
I find it hard to imagine that this wouldn't be carried by our media with much greater continuing intensity if the evidence situation were actually good enough. More importantly, though, it seems that there are some obvious test cases where PoWs like the top brass of Azov or the handful of international volunteers that were captured came back in one piece as part of a prisoner swap, where disposing of those people would have been a natural choice that would have been very advantageous to Russia if optics of PoW treatment were not a concern (as the Azov leaders and those who would see themselves in their position are valuable to Ukraine by virtue of ideology, combat experience and motivation, and conversely anything from just not releasing them to the full ISIS treatment would have improved Russian morale).
Did you miss what happened at Elenovka? Or do you find Russian version plausible, that it was a Ukrainian strike on their own people because "they started to talk about crimes of Zelensky"? By the way, UN had to disband the group tasked with investigating what happened there because Russia denied the investigators access.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/un-disbands-fact-finding-mission-into-olenivka-prison-attack-in-ukraine/2780833
Just curious, you’re so passionate about the war that you set up a Google ping for themotte when anything critical of Ukraine pops up. (Nothing wrong with that, why not give your POV.) You mentioned last time you are living in Ukraine. Have you considered fighting in the war? I know Ukraine is drafting every young man they can find; I think their recent bill allows recruiters to enter homes to find young men. Or do you have a desk job with the Ukrainian military that permits you to engage in forums from time to time?
Uncharitable, antagonistic, and snide.
Believe it or not, we are actually capable of reading between lines, and just because you write a post in a conversational, friendly tone doesn't mean we can't tell what you're actually saying. No, you are not "Just curious." Don't do this.
More options
Context Copy link
It's false. I read this forum sometimes, but I don't find American culture war that interesting so I rarely post.
I did. But I have a dependant, and some of my relatives including my father are fighting, so if something happens to us, no one would be able to take care of my underage sister. Plus I don't have military experience, my father has. Also I have relatively lucrative job in IT, and I donate most of my salary to AFU. Make of that what you will.
It's false as well.
And that is comical. Interesting that people who laugh at conspiracies involving "Russian bots" fall to the same temptation of accusing anyone of being a "glowie", or an "Ukrobot".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I thought that both the version of the Russian narrative you quote and the Ukrainian version about them shelling themselves was nonsense (Ukraine was pushing the "Russians shelling themselves" thing about every single shelling that may have looked bad in the eyes of anyone on their side at the time, including anti-personnel mines fired into the urban areas of Donetsk and the near-daily shelling of the Zaporozhye NPP). Surely they would have had better ways to dispose of them if they were interested in this, especially since this sort of shelling presumably only actually killed some hard-to-control small subset of the PoWs on site.
The more plausible explanation was that the Ukrainians shelled it by accident, based on false intel, or because the Russians could have also garrisoned military and equipment at the PoW camp (as they were doing in the NPP) and they were indifferent (as in the NPP) or unaware of the presence of the PoWs. Even in these scenarios, the Russians could have any number of reasons for refusing to admit the UN group, ranging from concerns that the report would find against them regardless of facts (see also the irregularities around their investigation of the Syria chemical weapons incident; it seems quite likely that for a lot of the UN bureaucracy, the US and allies have their thumbs firmly on the scale), via concerns that the group might pass intel to Ukrainians (the Russians repeatedly accused OSCE monitors of doing this since the conflict started, and my impression is that well-connected people on their side do in fact believe this), to the circumstance that they might find even an accurate finding that they were garrisoning valid military targets in a PoW camp to be embarrassing (in fact I'd assume there are some agreements against this as well?).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Though the same group proves that PoWs were treated awfully by Russia.
So apparently really bad treatment is happening, though without routine murder of surrendering Ukrainians. Always nice to be passing some standards.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The claimed goal was German surrender. Which is more than the US demands from Russia today, namely, retreat to 2022-01 or 2013 borders. The Russian people also aren't burned alive by tens of thousands, with the alternative being putting themselves at the mercy of a regime as bloodthirsty as Stalins.
I don't think you would prefer this being the goal, and those being the methods.
You're making a series of statements that I think are all correct, but I don't understand what this has to do with the question at hand of whether it is actually advantageous for Ukrainians or their Finnish allies to call for reducing their side's adherence to norms and conventions such as that you should not execute prisoners of war (or, basically equivalently, reducing their efforts to enforce their side's continued adherence; non-adherence can be expected to follow naturally if adherence is not enforced).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link