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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32146 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Apparently, there is a viral video in Russia of a long discussion between a oppositional blogger and a pro-putin actor. I can only find a German news article on it, but I would love to see the whole interview (subtitled). However, I doubt such a video exists. For me, it is more the lack of effort by western media to gain insight into the thoughts of actual russians than the positions itself that I find astonishing and relevant to the culture war.

Both sides (pro-neutrality right and pro-ukraine left) have no interest whatsover to shed a light on the internal discussions in Russia.

Edit: The video exists on youtube, linked in a comment below. I feel dumb and incompetent now.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/russland-gespraech-zwischen-putinisten-und-regierungskritiker-18626426.html

Oskar Kuchera is a 48-year-old actor and former host of the pop channel Muz-TV, which supports the Russian army. Recently, Yuri Dud, Russia's most popular blogger and opposition journalist, invited him for a three-hour interview. The interview appeared on Youtube on January 16, was viewed more than fourteen million times in the first few days, and continues to spread virally. For in the conversation, Kutschera reveals the mindsets of Putin's electorate, complete with jumbled ideas and propaganda slogans. On Youtube, he can be viewed like an exhibit in an exhibition about Russia. The Putin-supporting majority, here it is: seventy percent of the population merge into a nice, apolitical, basically peace-loving, not prone to analysis type.

Kutschera claims that Moscow and Kiev are equal for him; as the son of a Ukrainian Jew, he is half-Ukrainian. Like many Russians, he cannot answer the question of why Russia started the war. Apparently, propaganda changed the official purpose of the special military operation too often. Only the basic concept remains: the war started because America wanted to weaken Russia to get out of its economic crisis and arranged a war in Europe. And Russia did not start the war to conquer Ukraine, no! Although the September referenda in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya regions were, of course, a conquest of Ukrainian territory. But Kutschera does not understand much about this war, he is actually against war, war is terrible. But now he cannot turn against his country and its army. He supports Putin because he is on Russia's side, and the longer the war lasts, the more he trusts him.

"The West is waging war against us"

Dud: "Once again. Putin, whom you support, has started a denazification war . . ."

Kutschera: "I don't believe in denazification or demilitarization, I don't understand what it is. I think the real reason for the war is not told to us. I think this war is a global one. The special operation is not directed against Ukraine alone."

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Is it actually productive to try and understand Russian motivations? Regardless of their motivations, they're trying to use force to conquer an independent nation, one that was attempting to align itself with the West. The fact that they might see this as part of a broader conflict with the West isn't news, and it doesn't change matters on the ground.

In addition, it seems like most people in Western countries, including many people here, come at the issue of trying to understand Russia from the perspective of trying to justify war - the Russians are inherently authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish, and therefore must be destroyed. I don't think this attitude is helpful or should be encouraged.

Is it actually productive to try and understand Russian motivations?

Even if only from a strategic perspective, the answer is yes. Knowing Russian motivations allows western nations to better counteract them politically and militarily. I don't know what the specific goals of Putin are (or the Russian security state) or why he chose February 2022 to be the time to achieve them, but presumably the CIA has a decent idea and this is forming part of their strategy to undermine the Russian state capacity to wage war.

Ukraine (and the west) of course might not be in this position if we had better understood Russian motivations, either because an acceptable peaceful compromise was reached, or because Ukraine was better prepared.

Maybe for the purposes of military planners. Is it useful for you and I to try and understand the mind of the lowly Russian serf? Are we going to learn Russia, throw ourselves into 500 years of complicated history, move to Russia and explore the nature of its people? Unlikely. We're going to read a bunch of articles on Wikipedia, maybe a thinkpiece (they all have titles like "How the EU is playing right into Putin's hands"). Is this kind of half-baked understanding going to reflect anything but our own biases, whether for peace or for war?

Is it useful for you and I to try and understand the mind of the lowly Russian serf?

Insofar as one is curious, of course!

Is this kind of half-baked understanding going to reflect anything but our own biases, whether for peace or for war?

It’s better than nothing! I struggle with your intellectual defeatism and know-nothing approach. Tug at small threads for long enough and eventually you will have the entire sweater! (in a pile of spaghetti on the floor)

I don't really agree - I think it's better not to form an opinion at all than to form a really bad one, and I think it's better to stick conservatively to what is known for sure rather than speculate wildly on what's going on in someone's head. This doesn't mean we can't know anything, but what we can know has to have a rock solid base. For example, I think it's reasonable to say that one motivation behind the Russian invasion is that they thought it would be easy. This is so common-sense and obvious that I rarely see people discuss it. It's obvious for many reasons - firstly, it's why we go to war as well. Secondly, we ourselves perceived Ukraine as being vulnerable to invasion in the run-up to 2022. None of this requires us to try and get inside Putin's head, or to develop any understanding of the Russians - in fact, to try and develop an understanding of the Russians assumes there is something to understand, that they differ from us in some fundamental way.

And more broadly, I think that being excessively curious presents it's own danger. Humans are absolutely capable of overthinking, overinterpreting and overfitting, generating patterns and order out of chaos, going back to the astrologers who tried to match events on earth to the movement of the heavens.

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