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Rage Fueled rant: What is with the intellectual bankruptcy on Ukraine?
I'm not talking about fog of war stuff, or always erroring towards one side... even the most stern eyed realist struggles with emotions infecting analysis...
I'm talking about respected, degree holding, prominent figures... who have built careers around the dispassion of their analysis, engaging openly in the worst, laziest, most childish, intellectual abuses when it comes to Ukraine.
I was listening to a commentator, i had followed for quite some time, and thought of as quite dispassionate (won't link him... he's dead to me) who just opened a video declaring that "The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
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set aside everything else... set aside your faction in the culture war, set aside what you think of the war...
Can you think of another war where this language would be tolerated from an allegedly dispassionate subject matter expert?
"The Second Libyan civil war (2014-2020) was the clearest example of good vs. evil in the 21st century", "The 2014 Gaza War was a matter of Good vs. Evil", "Gulf War 1 was really about Good vs. Evil", "the Falklands was a clear example of Good vs. Evil", "The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was entirely a matter of good vs. evil (though there you could make the case... they were fighting the Khmer Rouge)", "The US invasion of Grenada... really just a matter of good vs. evil", "The Sino-Indian war was really a matter of good vs. evil", "The bay of pigs invasion, when you get down to it, was about good vs. evil", "The French War in Algeria was a clear matter of Good vs. Evil", "The Spanish civil war was a true contest of good vs. evil", "The Irish war of Independence was really a conflict of Good vs. Evil"... WW1? Good vs. Evil. The Russo-Japanese war? Absolutely good vs. evil, had to stop the yellow menace. The Boer war? Entirely good vs. evil (though again there you could make the case... the British, Canadian, and Australian contingent invented the concentration camp in that war to deal with the Rebellious ethnic Dutch colonist...The Boer, the scum race of the Transvaal)
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If you heard any figures saying these were matters of "Good vs. Evil" you'd immediately discount them and probably think them some anti-intellectual freak. In my first year history course I received a D on an essay for an anachronistic, sides taking, argument 1/1000th as egregious. (I argued the attitude expressed by a Ming dynasty diplomat describing India could be interpreted as "Westward Orientalism")
This figure would be embarrassed describing any other war in such terms... hell I'd never even heard him use such language discussing the second world war...
And yet the 2022 Russo-Ukraine war... that's the war so egregious he'll throw intellectual impartiality to the wind in the name of sheer denunciation.
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It's not even the most egregious war currently being fought within 1000km of the Black sea. That infamy belongs either to the reignited Nagorno-Karabakh war where Azerbaijan and Turkey are trying to squelch the young democracy in Armenia, or the ongoing conflict in Syria where turkey is likewise trying to Squelch the increasingly autonomous Kurdistan and its various democratic movements ... We don't hear about these conflicts though, because Turkey is a NATO member and a keystone of Europe's treaties to keep migrants out.
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I could grasp this, though not respect it, if this figure was somehow tied up in the US establishment and had career opportunities riding on it... but he's well independent of that. Just likes the coolaid.
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This trend i also egregious if you consider the rhetoric around the Ukraine war... That its fought for democracy, that Putin is an Autocrat... that this is a war for freedom....
Such as the freedom to criticize your government? Do you? Nope, just criticizing the people the government and media tells me to criticize.
The applause signs around words apparently being more important than any meaning the words themselves might have.
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Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
Or is the Anti-war movement silent because this is Putin and he's now coded pro-trump and Anti-gay... (yet somehow everyone else in central Eurasia isn't)
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Sorry if this is ranting... I actually respected this commentator and this combined with other things was just a remarkable intellectual slide... I feel dirty... like the time engaging with him left me dumber somehow, and now I have to go back through ideas I first heard from him and check for the rot.
I don't think that this has anything to do with woke or anything like that. I am following the war but also internal "debates" on Russian state media with personalities such as Solovyov, and let me tell you it is the most unhinged shit I have ever heard in my life, casually calling for nuclear strikes or more atrocities and so forth. Couple that with horrible conduct of Russian forces on the ground and it really is something. Heck, even pope turned somewhat and he now all but declared military support of Ukraine as part of just war. You may not think that this is war of good vs evil, but look at Russian side and you will see exactly that - only of course US being evil and Russia being good.
Also this is still only proxy war, so far there are no boots on the ground and military support of Ukraine is so far sending mostly obsolete or soon to be obsolete weapons with rare (but important) exceptions like HIMARS systems, but even that with some caveats.
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Yeah, in this case war is so prominent in large part because it is happening in Europe and Europeans got scared. And "because white people are dying this time" is fairly accurate reason for why is so prominent.
And also because Russia escalates and it is a good occasion to reduce its power and plans before in directly attacks NATO member and USA will need to decide whether they want
NATO collapse
credibly threaten nuclear war
Nice to see USA capable of more long term planning than Russia with CSTO that just collapsed (Armenia).
But it is not changing that it is quite clear case of good vs evil. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (doing massive damage to any attempts to give up nuclear weapons by anyone else in future), annexed Crimea, shot down civilian airliner, proceeded to wage war in East. And more recently started full scale invasion that killed thousands (and total death count likely crossed 200 000).
Russia is clear invader and all their stated reasons are lies and in direct conflict in reality. Russia has brought neo-nazi units into Ukraine to hunt down Jewish president, murders thousands Russian-language speakers to protect them and destroys primarily cities where they live. Russia claiming to be threatened by NATO empties bases in Kaliningrad and on border with Finland. 1st Guards Tank Army was recently mauled.
It is a pure imperialism annexation war, with things like deportation of children, declaration that Ukrainian identify is not existing and attempting to destroy it, large scale destruction, looting of anything from washing machines through cars to radiators, widespread rape, torture and murder...
The best that can be said that during WW II they behaved even worse, so there is some civilizational progress.
In this case chronic contrarianism is not helpful.
One of? I agree, though within last century we had a lot of such conflicts. Like Poland getting invaded by Germany-Russia alliance to take example of turbo-evil countries invading really flawed country, which nevertheless can be accurately described as good vs evil. Despite that Poland had a lot of issues. More than modern Ukraine has.
I have seen no evidence Russia wasn't largely supported by the populations of Crimea and the Donbass indeed both regions have recruited large forces in the past 8 years to resist Ukrainian agression against the independent republics, and Ukraine's ethnic and linguistic war against its russian speeaking minority certainly hasn't had made me sympathetic to them.
Ukraine is a corrrupt authoritarian country that has been commiting cultural if not actual genocide against its russian minority since 2014... This isn't Hitler invading Poland
Pre-WWII Poland similarly suppressed the culture and language of their large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities, so the situations are in fact very similar. The Soviet Union justified its conquest of the eastern half of Poland by claiming that they're liberating these oppressed minorities.
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And somehow this forces were recruited mostly among Russian soldiers that visited with Russian equipment, up to anti-air system that shot down civilian airliner (and this specific Buk system with missing missile returned to Russia).
In other words, sometimes negating mainstream media just makes you repeating a different propaganda that is less truthful.
Yes, BBC and CNN are manipulating and often lying. But Lavrov and whatever sources you use are much worse than that on this topic.
In Crimea maybe, but I have seen also no evidence that annexation into Russia had a real majority. To speak nothing about supermajority. And no, "referendum" setup by Russia without oversight with Russian army standing around obviously does not count.
In Donbass? Support for what? Autonomy had serious support, peaceful annexation into Russia had minimal support. Multiyear war and turning Mariupol into mass grave had no support.
[citation needed]
Especially for deliberate mass murder claims (I guess that you mean by "actual genocide"?).
And not some official Russian propaganda.
Ideally, not something where Russians are 10 or 100 times worse. Somehow one side invaded and keeps bombing cities, shot down civilian airliner, deports people and Lavrov claimed that no attack is happening both while invasion was prepared and weeks after it started.
Cultural genocide is defined as the purposeful elimination of a culture with a group of people especially including attempts to break linguistic continuity.
I'm a Canadian who has to hear about how residential schools were "genocide" against the native population multiple times a week at land acknowledgements before events, in PSAs put out endlessly on radio, TV, and youtube ads and you better damn well believe I'm going to hold the woke's puppet regime to the exact same standards of what constitutes genocide that they want to hold white Canadians to... Especially when murder of civilians, often over stuff as simple as social media posts, are rampant in Ukraine.
I am not from Canada and I am not at all responsible neither for residential schools nor ongoing handling of that
Are you claiming that anything even close in scale to what Canada did in this schools for native people is happening in Ukrainian schools?
are you withdrawing claims of "actual genocide against its russian minority since 2014" - mentioned by you in distinction from cultural genocide?
"Especially when murder of civilians, often over stuff as simple as social media posts, are rampant in Ukraine." - I want to remind you that Russia invaded Ukraine, not other way around so it is hard to put blame on Ukrainians for Russia bombing cities.
"woke's puppet regime" - if you think that Ukraine is strongly woke then you are quite confused. And they are getting substantial support but are quite far from being puppeteed by either side.
"multiple times a week at land acknowledgements before events, in PSAs put out endlessly on radio, TV, and youtube ads" - wat.
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Woo, but still, This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Leave the song aside, the Age of Aquarius is traditionally associated not with love and peace, but with the veil being lifted, with the lies of society being revealed and shamed, with new facts viewed in the cold light of day. That's how reading different commentators on the Ukraine war has felt to me, like I'm seeing a lot of people in a new light. The tide is going out and we're all seeing who was skinny dipping. The Ukraine war has revealed to us that so many intellectuals who seemed such brilliant thinkers and contrarians in the easy view of times without consequences are infested with the diseases of identity politics, even as so many of them decry identity politics themselves. We're seeing who had real ideological convictions, and who just played team sports with politics. Who opposed the mainstream because they had intellectual disagreements with how things ought to be, and who were just sour embittered losers, feeling a constant need to oppose anything that mainstream culture tells them to support.
A million trads/manosphere blogs/alt-righters love to talk about masculinity and decry the lack of it. They point back to our history to leaders like Teddy Roosevelt ("I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one") who would probably be raising a detachment of volunteers to fight in Ukraine himself; they point back to the American Revolution fought by Lafayette and Pulaski, won by the French and by men trained by Von Steuben; they ask whether modern men would have the guts to defend their homes. Well here, in Ukraine, you can watch men defending their homes! Whatever the greater geopolitical yadda yadda, if you're all about traditional masculine strength and duty, and you aren't admiring this, then your ideological prattle has no meaning. It is just Green and Blue to you, your enemies like Ukraine so you have to hate Ukraine. Somehow men defending their homes are the bad guys because something something globohomo.
Tens of millions of leftists have beclowned themselves falling over backward to announce that the Ukrainians are honorary PoC or something like that. A single swastika at any anti-Lockdown protest makes it a Nazi rally; a whole semi-autonomous regiment of avowed Nazis is just a bit of fun in Ukraine, or the Wagner Group depending which side they happen to be rooting for. Not that most of them will actually do anything about it anyway, other than whine.
BlackLivesMatter, preceded by Covid and followed by January 6th, felt very similar to me. Libertarians I thought I respected turned out to only hate cops when cops did certain things to certain people. The people have a right to protest, but only when they're protesting things I care about in the prescribed manner, not if they step out of line and disobey a law and protest against something I agree with. ACAB, except the brave defenders of democracy holding back the fascist hordes they're heroes. The federal government is a shadowy cabal of tyrants, but we Back the Blue when they fight leftists. I write essays online about civil rights and police overreach, but when there is a massive protest march against police overreach I'm just going to complain and call them LARPers instead of going AFK to actually do anything about it. I call the Congress a racist tyranny, but I feel for them when they have to hide under their desks, so traumatic!
Sadly, Porn, I've concluded that for a lot of would-be internet deep-contrarians their ideological front is just an excuse, it keeps them from ever having to actually do anything in real life. The perfect is always the enemy of the good, that protest is just LARPing because it doesn't rigidly conform to all the tenets of [ideological view held by less than 1% of the population]. I can't back that war, not every single soldier is perfectly moral and not every enemy soldier is a subhuman rat. When a real crisis happen it shows us who is interested in acting in real life, and who isn't.
Their primary enemy is the US government, NATO and so on. Russia is opposing these forces. Therefore, they are on Russia's side.
During WW2, the Western Allies were happy to enlist the Soviet Union in their 'fight for freedom'. You had all these puff pieces in the press about how Uncle Joe Stalin was a really nice guy. Stalin was fighting their primary enemy - he was their friend.
Being principled in your alliances is not an effective way to achieve your goals. Imagine if the Western Allies had declared war on Russia in 1939 (since they did indeed invade Poland along with Germany, along with the Baltics and Finland). That would be in accordance with their principle of defending countries from invasion against totalitarian, genocidal powers. But it would've decisively lost them the war. There was no way they were going to defeat the German and Russian armies working together!
"Yes, you were consistent in your principles while we compromised with evil. But we won the war and used that victory to push liberal democracy as far as Ukraine. You lost the war and the entire Eurasian world-island is ruled by dictatorships. So which of us is more true to our ideology?"
For the Western leftist, Azov is good when it's fighting Russians. When the campaign is over, they can be discarded and LGBT multiculturalism introduced. The Azovites think the same thing, presumably.
While the former is plausible, the latter is... I can't think how they can hope that.
Yeah, it's bizarre. I don't think these guys are the best and brightest.
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Ukraine is an unusual example not because it's one of the few wars short of World War II that's good versus evil, but because it's one of the few ones that's clearly good versus evil. All the factors lined up in such a way that both political parties in the US and evey foreign country that isn't authoritarian itself are all on the same side of the war.
I don't see "clearly good versus evil" at all. From the other perspective, Ukraine is a rebellious breakaway province of Russia. In American history, the Confederacy dearly wanted to be independent at one time - was it unambiguously evil to fight a war to stop them? (granted the slavery thing muddies the waters considerably, but still). There have been lots of wars all around the world to subdue would-be breakaway provinces of greater powers. What business of mine is it whether Ukraine deserves independence or is an uppity breakaway province when I've never set foot within a thousand miles of the place?
A Russian would say they're on the side of good because they need the buffer space to defend against the next Western invasion, which has in fact happened twice in the last 250 years and been horrifical lethal to the Russian people both times. Do you expect them to believe us when we say we totally have no intention of ever doing that again, while NATO keeps gobbling up countries closer and closer to their border?
"Unambiguously evil" is not a characteristic of breakaway countries in general; it's fact-specific to this one case.
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Needless to say I disagree with your analysis. Ukraine is not only a sovereign country but one acknowledged by Russia, and given specific – broken now – assurances, hell, Putin even congratulated Zelensky specifically with winning presidency, like he did for all his predecessors! It's the perfect opposite of the consistency demonstrated by the Chinese with regards to Taiwan, and the Chinese are piss-poor diplomats themselves. I thought that «no take-backsies» is one Schelling point everyone could reasonably agree on. (The notion of NATO as a rival empire is not utterly useless in practice, but from the perspective of those «gobbled up» countries...)
But it's notable that the more unhinged Russian propagandists are also deploying this analogy.
Egor Holmogorov of RT, September 17th:
Part of the reason why I disagree with the "good vs evil" framing is that, once you have framed a conflict in that way, there is no way to end it except the total elimination of the side perceived as "evil". If you want to find peace, eventually you have to see the issue from the perspective of both sides and be able to come up with a solution that acknowledges the physical reality and the concerns of both sides. This is basically impossible if you see the other side as evil. One of the characteristics of most conflicts is that, presuming they didn't end with the total elimination of one side, they tend to end when both sides become weary enough of fighting that they're willing to let go of calling the other side evil and see things from their point of view enough to make some concessions.
I'm not sure if you're trying to make it a bad thing, but personally I see it as a good thing that I can independently come up with an argument similar to what a Russian Nationalist war-backer would use. Now, I certainly don't agree with this fellow when he makes the arguments that total destruction of Ukraine is desirable or that nuclear war is preferable to a perceived Russian loss. I don't agree that it means the "end of Russia as a state and nation", but he does have a little bit of a point in being concerned about how "Big Bad Russia" will be seen in the region after an effective loss to Ukraine and what their longer-term future will be after that.
Does it seem reasonable to be concerned about how effective the Russian nuclear arsenal would be after the poor performance of their more sophisticated forces in Ukraine? From a Western perspective, I definitely don't think we should see it as, well they probably won't work right so Russia is no real threat - far too dangerous to be even a little bit wrong. But from a Russian perspective, if you perceived an existential threat from the Western powers and saw your nuclear arms as the sole trump card guaranteeing your security, how safe would you feel?
Or seek the total elimination of the side perceived as evil, as you note in the prior sentence.
Well yeah. But if we decide we're going with that solution, then we validate the allegedly paranoid fears of the Russian Nationalists, including the guy that @DaseindustriesLtd quoted above. If that's the plan, then it's their best move to seek to dominate Ukraine and any other neighbors who they view as uppity at any cost as a necessary defensive buffer against our upcoming attempts to totally eliminate them.
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Every war is clearly good versus evil for the first few months/years. It's only later that people begin to take a more nuanced view. Who, at the time, did not view WWI, II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan the same way? I recall the same quivering righteousness over Syria.
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All the non-authoritarian states are supporting Ukraine, that’s true, but the problem with the good vs. evil mindset is the Ukrainian state itself which isn’t good by any reasonable standard
In this case the bar is incredibly low: Didn't attack another country with the explicit intention of annexing it and didn't threaten several other countries that you're going to conquer them? Ok, you're good.
Ukraine may not be super good but Russia's doing all it can to act as a stereotypical comic book villain.
In the event you're serious, rather than habitual and reflexive contrarian #8918944711...
Killing people and taking their stuff is bad. Killing lots of people and taking their everything is worse.
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I try this line with my trad-right pro-Russia friends in the U.S. -- one of whom was a fringe leftist until COVID swung him far right -- and I get the reply, "I know our government is evil, but I don't know that about Russia." The taint of the U.S. elite is so strong that it makes Ukraine look worse than Russia.
I've found this whole thing very ideologically frustrating. But I do think there is some evidence in my friend's left-right pendulum swing: his complaints about the U.S. government are, essentially, Chomskyite. Chomsky acolytes like Oliver Stone (and, I assume, Glenn Greenwald) grew up assuming the U.S. was being mean to innocent Russians, and can't shake the old allegiances -- that same memeplex is alive now on the right more than the left.
The vaccine mandate was ostensibly for the benefit of the people, and those actually harmed by it, I can assume, are much fewer in number than those harmed by Putin's latest geopolitical ambition. Even if I count only Russians and only those who didn't sign up for it.
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True, Russia bad and must be stopped; Ukraine didn’t cross any red lines and will never be a credible threat to the West; supporting it is in best interests of the western countries.
That said, the Ukraine state is corrupt, authoritarian and highly nationalist; think twice before labelling it’s government morally good.
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I wish there were a more charitable way to say this, but the level of anti-war outrage in the US (and, I suspect, in the western world more generally) correlates almost entirely with the party affiliation of the person currently in the White House.
The MIC is a juggernaut, and it rolls every president of my lifetime but one. Yet somehow, mass protests and general media denunciations only happen when Republicans are in office. We saw this most starkly with Code Pink after Obama was elected. They were media darlings for six years, and then unceremoniously dropped, their membership cratered and they ceased being a nationally relevant organization in the span of a few months, coincidentally at the end of the year, 2008. And this without any scandal on their part or material change in the status of the wars they were protesting.
Now, there's different ways at looking at this phenomenon. One is that the right doesn't have much of an anti-war crowd, but do notice the howls of "Putin supporters" that shouted down anyone who was skeptical of the official narratives at the start of the war. There was some energy there, but it was stamped out pretty quickly. The right just doesn't have institutional support for anti-war activity. It's the sort of thing much more organized by the left, but then is turned off when they are in power.
All that said, I do think the Ukraine conflict is pretty straightforward, one country is invading another to take their territory. I'm sure there have been atrocities (probably on both sides, though probably not equally). But that's just war. If anything, the Russians have been notably gentle compared to their own behavior in past conflicts.
Your view may be too straightforward.
The informed view from 2008 https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html was more balanced and nuanced.
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Mass protests and general media denunciations of American foreign policy are quite rare, no matter what administration is in office. People always think about the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, but those were expections; even Afghanistan, I believe, never got a mass protest reaction beyond the usual, ie. the small Communist parties and pacifist groups that kept demonstrating also during the Obama era, like Code Pink. The same orgs generally tend to think that US actions vis-a-vis Ukraine are escalatory, as well.
Iraq and Vietnam, in turn, inspired protests mainly because they led, or had the potential to lead, to mass US casualties. In Iraq, military casualties, despite the "surge", had been high precisely in 2003-2007 period but dropped in 2008 and then became a trickle. Indeed, protesting activity seems to also have subsided right around that era, preceeding the election of Obama, with 2008 only seeing one notable protest with "thousands of protestors" in the US, far cry from earlier tens or hundreds of thousands. The last notable international protests mentioned in Wikipedia take place in 2007.
The war became a standard US conflict where Americans might get killed if they are really unlucky or in specialist tasks where it's obvious to everyone they've fully voluntarily taken a very high risk task. Other than that, the deaths were Iraqi, ie. fundamentally unimportant for American society. In Ukraine, of course, there are no (formal) American troops, so it's even less likely to lead to a protest movement, apart from Ukraine solidarity rallies in the Western world calling for more Western support in the early months.
People's memories are hazy, but Afghanistan was incredibly popular at the time. The US was actually attacked on its own soil. The casualties were even greater than Pearl Harbor.
The anti-war people I knew on September 10, 2001 had reactions ranging from "well, I said the military is only for self-defense, this looks like it" to "shrug I guess we are gonna go to war."
The Onion had a fairly representative debate between pro-war and anti-war factions in the wake of 9/11:
"We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage" vs. "We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage"
That entire issue was brilliant.
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All that can be true, and still does not conflict with what I said. You're looking at the behavior of the relative normies, and I'm talking about the already-ideological. Both can be true, that the true believers are inconsistent and that the general public doesn't pay a lot of attention until their kids start coming home in bags.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
The largest anti-war rallies in history.
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I think that's the only reasonable reaction one can have. Continue the good fight against Gell-Mann Amnesia and update away from anything this commentator said so far.
I actually have a lot of trouble trusting almost any info source these days. They all seem pretty bad. As long as there's no repercussions to lying, oversimplifying to the point of lying, misleading, etc. then there's no reason for it to stop.
Optimally you would now reconsider the rest of your opinions, and what they're actually based on, but I think that's an inhumanly tall order for anyone.
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This is where I'd smugly point out that there's one big difference between the war in Ukraine and the Standard War Template: the aggression is Russians (the goddamn Russians!) and they're blowing up white people (the horror!)
It's the elephant in the room. Pictures of white people suffering sells clicks. It's very powerful in the attention economy. Pair that with a stock villian that everyone who remembers the cold war can point to on a map (it's quite large) and you get lots of engagement.
I don't have an exact recollection (I was very small), but I don't remember serious opposition to the war really coalescing until 2003 (I remember Al Franken's book from that year being huge) leading into the 2004 election cycle. Bur Kerry of course voted for the Iraq war and didn't promise a withdrawal during his campaign. Also, he lost.
You'd have to be very much a quokka indeed to be so anti-war as to oppose bleeding out someone who you're still in a nuclear stalemate with. As an American, every day I open my eyes with a Russian warhead pointed me, ready to slaughter my family. So pardon me if I cheer on Ukraine's humiliation of Russia's armed forces.
Isn't the nuclear warhead fact precisely the reason not to tussle with Russia?
The nuke fear was sky high during portions of the Cold War. Which was why it was important not to make it hot.
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You do realize that things can always get worse? A humiliation of Russia might make you feel better about having a sword over your head, but you might be safer to try and keep the guy holding the sword feeling calm and secure rather than goading him. This isn't a game - if Americans really believe they're on the brink, they're not acting like it.
Of course it's not. People are dead.
Appeasement, in other words? They've been bold enough to push their luck, I don't see why we shouldn't be too.
Any time one side thinks it's not on the brink, the missiles fly. Refraining from annihilation is what 'on the brink' looks like.
If anything, being on the brink would make a nuclear exchange more likely. People are more likely to resort to violence or extreme measures when they feel their back is against the wall and they don't have any options. If Russia does not believe it could defend itself in a conventional war, and that the United States intends to destroy their country (which are both true, btw), they will look to non-conventional means of defense.
Escalation in Ukraine makes nuclear war substantially more likely, not less likely. Russia is more likely to resort to nuclear warfare if other options are not available to it. This is not to say that we should be willing to sacrifice all our interests in order to reduce the risk of a nuclear exchange. However, I do not think that humiliating Russia is actually in our interests, and if it increases the chance of nuclear war, we should avoid doing it. Your personal desire to see others degraded and humbled means nothing to me. Go kill ants if that's what gives you pleasure.
I don't think that the invasion of Ukraine is anything about Russia pushing their luck (beyond the more general principle that war is inherently unpredictable).
In other words, I oppose invading Russia and launching ICBMs at Moscow.
Let me spell it out more plainly then. You don't appease your enemies, you destroy them. The nuclear stalemate means that neither side can destroy the other's forces directly at the moment, but both like to engage in proxy wars, such as Ukraine. When Ukraine blows up a Russian tank, that's one less tank with which they can menace me. And they did it for free, so good on them. Get the picture?
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There's a much more relevant difference: The Russians are blowing up culturally similar people just 1000 km away and they outright announced we would be next. A lot of Americans keep forgetting that Ukraine isn't some distant country but right next to a lot of western world, namely Europe.
I can't really understand this comment with the full context of American action in the Ukraine in the decade leading up to the conflict, nor do I recall Russia ever officially announcing that they would then move on to conquer the rest of Europe after Ukraine (provoking a nuclear conflict and the end of the world in the process). Can you please provide some citations for Russia announcing FIRST UKRAINE, THEN EUROPE? I was under the impression that Russia was taking action in order to prevent the US from setting up a client state next door, as opposed to a world conquest plan.
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Yes but why should Americans care?
Were trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives wasted over that continent not enough?
And why does proximity affect the ethics of it. America arms and funds dozens of crappy countries doing vastly worse. I haven't read of Russians doing anything to Ukrainian civilians under its territorial control comparable to what Israel does to Palestinians...
And as for unmotivated wars of aggression... Russia had a vastly better case for invading Ukraine, right next door/already waging war agianst ethnic russians, than the US ever had for invading Iraq
If they don't care, what point is there to their empire? What claim to moral superiority would they have if they abandoned even Western Europe? You don't believe empires, religions and peoples can have a point. But most believe that some of those are vehicles for genuine values of individual humans to affect reality. Some to good, some to bad ends.
Sure it's mostly bullshit, sure American elites are cynical and exploitative in their own right, sure there's the meta game where unipolarity will probably be catastrophic. Yet Pelosi is making noises supporting Armenia – a de facto unfriendly state – in its time of trial, and Putin is opening a Ferris wheel in Moscow while scores of 200's are rolling into Rostov or are left to rot in Ukrainian soil. It's pretty much impossible to make a coherent moral case for why he's less in the wrong here. As for naked geopolitics, you'll have to invent better epicycles to explain how a hostile empire is better than one you live in.
Kulak. I've brought it up before. My great-grandparents were Kulak Cossacks. They had their own little «revolt» and were curbstomped so hard I only had one blanket and two torn-up photos left as mementos. The folks in Kremlin are institutional, spiritual, legal inheritors of that system. To support them, to excuse them, to downplay their evil is morally bankrupt, and in your particular case plain ridiculous.
Contrarianism is not good enough, because it eventually leads one to contradict oneself right at the core. Please stop doubling down.
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That's one way of looking at it, another is that they are white people. Russians and Germans are compromise villains because they have recently been geopolitical foes and are white, so both the right and left can hate them without compunction.
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The one big difference between the war in Ukraine and the standard War Template of the recent decades is, actually, that Russia is straight-up annexing parts of their neighboring country. It did so in 2014 and it is gearing up to do so on an even larger a scale.
Of course, all of that is particularly dire when one lives in another neighboring country to Russia (and it's only too natural for Finns to join in cheering Russia's armed forces getting rekt, especially as Russia has taken quite a few of those troops into Ukraine right away from the Finnish border), but even taking that into account, Russian behavior in Crimea is expectional compared to nearly all the other wars in recent decades, including the Iraq War. Annexing parts of another country is really one of those things that should be considered verboten in the post-Cold-War world (Cold War world too, really, that's when the standard was formed), and this implicit standard has really been one of the main pillars of stability, such as it is, in the current global structure, the one thing that has been made a horror in the international community.
It doesn't matter whether the annexing country really, really, really feels the territory is rightfully theirs. It doesn't matter if they consider it crucial to their security. It doesn't matter if the initial annexation (Crimea) was connected to a period of chaos within the original country of the territory. It doesn't matter if the original country is authoritarian, or corrupt, or even that there are militias prowling around with Sonnenrads in their gear. It doesn't matter if the population of the annexed territory agrees. Whatever the reasons, this is one cat we still don't want to let out of the bag.
I can think of one potential counterargument - US is behaving hypocritically, since Trump gave his blessing to another notable recent case of annexation of conquered territory, the Israeli annexation of Golan Hills. That is indeed something Trump shouldn't have done, but still, two wrongs don't make a right. Individual cases of the norm being broken, no matter how hypocritically, don't mean that the international norm no longer exists or that it no longer has any validity. It just means it's been broken. Break it enough times, have that breaking sanctified by the rest of the international community, and then it no longer exists, and it's a free-for-all for all countries to start grabbing parts of other countries, and the bad old times can return.
Morocco occupied and annexed Western Sahara in 1975. In 2020, her sovereignty over Western Sahara was recognized by the US:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-international-law/article/united-states-recognizes-moroccos-sovereignty-over-western-sahara/36A7A41EC0BB341D79CE4661EDD8B60E
From 1975 to 2002, East Timor was annexed by Indonesia, as recognized by the US and other nations.
China annexed Tibet in 1950.
Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1973, as recognized by the US in 2019, as you also mentioned. The US also recognized unified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, partially annexed in 1967.
Let's not pretend there is a big difference.
It's true, annexations have happened. However, my understanding is that, apart from annexation of Tibet (where PRC actually just implemented a previous claim by former Chinese states and annexed a de facto country whose independence had never been recognized by other countries), none of these were actually formally accepted by the international community, apart from Golan by US. Western Sahara continues to be on UN's list of unrecognized countries, and my understanding is - if someone has any better info - even though US supported the Indonesian regime behind the schemes, formally it never went against UN's view that East Timor was an occupied territory. Similarly, an important thing regarding Crimea (and Luhansk, Donetsk etc.) is that the international community, apart from some Russian allied states and a handful of Third World countries, has not accepted the annexation of Crimea or the independence of LPR/DPR - there still is a difference between their de facto status and their de jure status in the eyes of the world.
Incidentally, all four of the mentioned causes have been major Western progressive cause celebrés at some point or another, one could barely crack open a book by Chomsky in the 90s without East Timor being mentioned and I have personal experience of Western Sahara solidarity becoming a thing on Finnish left-wing youth circles at a time. As such, that made it easier for many leftists in Finland to take the same stance regarding the illegitimate occupation of the Ukrainian territories by Russia.
That's all true. We can definitely apply nuance if we want to. Of course, we can also say that the annexation of the Crimea was merely the case of implementing the pre-1954 claim of the Russian SFSR.
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Annexation might be the most outrageous way to disrupt equilibrium, but if done bloodlessly, it might cause less suffering in the long run, than toppling/installing governments w/t outward annexation. For some reason civilized world strongly prefers smouldering conflicts with violence and suffering spread -- and therefore, perceptually discounted -- across space and time thinly enough to look almost "natural".
Wikipedia on Syrian civil war: 15 March 2011 – present (11 years, 6 months and 3 days); aside from combatant casualties at least 306,887 civilians killed, estimated 6.7 million internally displaced & 6.6 million refugees.
For Iraq estimates and methodologies range wildly.
Costs of war project: 268,000 - 295,000 people were killed in violence in the Iraq war from March 2003 - Oct. 2018, including 182,272 - 204,575 civilians
The PLOS Medicine study's figure of approximately 460,000 excess deaths through the end of June 2011 is based on household survey data including more than 60% of deaths directly attributable to violence.
The Lancet study's figure of 654,965 excess deaths through the end of June 2006 is based on household survey data. The estimate is for all excess violent and nonviolent deaths. That also includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.
Is that burning slow enough?
This is not to justify any other conflicts. The whole framing of "justification" is hilarious, as it presumes innocence of any geopolitical act, unless you can't make up any excuses at all.
Is the claim here that someone should have annexed Syria or something? Annexation and long-run conflicts aren't the opposites, if anything the initial Russian annexation of Crimea just served as tinder for the larger Ukrainian conflict and eventually the current phase of the war.
I don't really follow.
You singled out annexation as an exceptional threat to international stability. Why do we need that stability in the first place? Not to save lives and to promote well-being in the long run? By this metric, I argue, conflicts w/t annexations inflict more damage than bloodless annexations.
That's absolutely an overstretch. Annexation and the launch of separatist movement were a direct response to revolution in Kyiv (revolution doesn't justify that response, I am just stating the causal link). Without annexation, separatist movement alone would have sparked the protracted smouldering conflict, that we observed till February. Invasion was in no way necessitated by the state of the conflict or status of annexed Crimea, unless you believe Putin's narrative.
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I happen to agree with the framing of the basic conflict, that is, the war itself, as a clear case of good vs. evil.
Putin really is a cardboard villain, and if he doesn't assert his villainy like some Commodus but excuses it, this only underscores his low character. He's begun a war that has killed and harmed an insane number of Eastern Slavs, ruined the faint potential of the EU as a sovereign pole, and, what offends me near-infinitely more, doomed Russia herself to disintegration. Yea, that'll be worse than another ethnic cleansing in the ME – even though many among his detractors will pop open champagne. If not for disillusionment with paranoid narratives that have sent us into this deathtrap in the first place (e.g. the «Ukrainian attack on Donbass», which makes sense in the long term, seeing UA commitments, and which I had believed, but which had proved to be a fake casus belli in the early 2022) – I'd have said Putin is consciously playing the villain's role°, or is manipulated into it. But – Conquest's 2nd Law.
Still. This is only true about the war. Let me piggyback here with my own rant.
Russians are being canceled. Gleefully and unjustly, with all the dynamics of American cancellation, by a coalition of groups with nakedly particularist morality, jeering and exploiting SJ sophistry. Ruskies are learning for the first time what canceled Westerners have felt. I've always sympathized with those – in the abstract, worrying mainly about consequences of their disenfranchisement, from the perspective of a man expecting, unlike them, no fairness and reciprocity. Perhaps I can't feel what they (and many of you) feel, and the analogy is still flawed. But… it's probably a good deal more accurate then their own projections of cultural tribal warfare onto Russian-Ukrainian war.
Of course, current problems of Anglophone right wingers are, in my opinion, a joke compared to what's happening to Russians. Over a hundred million people, captive audience to Kremlin as well as their opponents, not just demonized, but – cut off from the financial infrastucture, put on effective no-flight lists in the first world, like some Fuentes or Torba, much of their property seized (likely for reparations), and that's only starting. Perhaps the whole culture war was rehearsal for this; and COVID for its institutional dimension.
That's cause for dread. But what enrages me is minor specific deceit.
The best exhibit is this story. A
FrenchSpanish girl of Ukrainian descent has created a viral thread on a hate crime:Note the hashtags. She knows Twitter game well.
Our smart British friends, @doglatine or @BurdensomeCount, driven by the traditional hatred of Russia, tend to accept those outlandish victim stories at face value, as confirmations of a tendency, «what we always expected from those swine, uh, not YOU SPECIFICALLY, dear Ilforte, but… you know…»
I do. But I, too, am a Russian swine through and through, jaded as they come, from a caste so hated by smaller peoples of the Empire that our genocide is still OK to celebrate openly, and I know that this smells of more bull than Jussie Smollett, a Noose or Chanting Nigger or Indigenous Graves or some Toppled Tombstones. A Russian in France, now? 20 to 1 that he's driven from home by fear of potential mobilization or generic distaste for fascism, like me – and he's not keeping his eyes down and trying to blend with the crowd, but barbarically attempting a one-man genocide of ethnic Ukrainian culture, against women, and the cops are not doing enough?
What else, «This is SUKA country»?
Indeed:
(Other commenters say, he attacked those women because they were listening to Russian music and he assumed they were Russians, or perhaps wanted to punish them for betrayal of Volk; I can't check so will leave it at that).
106 likes, 27 QTs. The original: 5802/379, with a coordinated endorsement of #VisaBanForRussians hash tag. If you check, many have Doge profile pictures. That's NAFO, a growing pro-UA community with paid membership, headquarters in Discord and a rule against mentioning CIA («it doesn't exist», tee-hee); they credulously retweet all out-there stories demonizing Russia, like Galeev and Sumlenny’s «analysis» of Dugin sacrificing his daughter to Moloch. This is a typical one.
The hole in the narrative is downplayed by the author. A Russian with an anti-war flag says:
Her response? Classical ass-save:
Might as well have gone with this.
…
There may be no pure good in this world. There are blemished things, and things massively worse. At times it's plain to see which is which. The war of aggression started by Russia under Putin is a cut-and-dry case of evil inflicted on people who are innocent in comparison, and specifically not guilty of this evil.
But they are not innocent in all matters. Ukrainians are famed for self-serving narratives with cute female touch, hiding their darkness; ask a Pole or a Jew if they own up to it enough. Northern Eurasia is a blood-soaked graveyard, and it won't become a happy-go-lucky communion of peoples if only The Prison of Nations is torn down at last and those imperialist ruskies are dealt with. Russia propped up South Ossetia and Abkhazia; democratic and NATO-aligned Georgians did ethnically cleanse Ossetians in the past. And the great Georgian thinker Mamardashvili, superstar so kindly treated by the (ostensibly Russocentric) Soviet regime, did pen this Hottentot-worthy masterpiece:
Armenia has committed war crimes, and sides with Russia&Iran. NATO-aligned Turks and Azeris have committed a genocide – the genocide, class-defining one – against Armenians, and are killing Armenians as I type; this is their hero.
Kamil Galeev, with his training in the Holocaust center and his coked-up wordcel power, can ape the rhetoric of Twitter Anti-Fascists and SJWs well, but in Russian he justifies continental-scale devastation effected by Genghis Khan, the deified champion-father of his race, and gloats at goreposting.
An Estonian fella with a cute doge pfp or a checkmark and bio of «expert», complaining of Russian barbarity, may be not some traumatized Anti-Communist but a bona fide Nazi, still butthurt about the Germanic Reich's failure to purge Slavs and Jews.
A self-appointed Russian Anti-Nazi may have powerful takes on the legitimacy of Baltic states...
So it goes. Civilization is skin-deep, there's dirt on every collective body, and the cheapest way to excuse one's group is to dogpile on the common enemy. In the US, that's white people. In Eurasia, Russian people. This is unjust in principle, and unjust in these specific cases. Let's not cancel peoples and races.
Okay?
I agree that reflexive oppression of all Russians and all Russian-adjacent things is a bad idea.
But I want to point out that Russian state IS a common enemy and was for quite a long time. They refuse to disavow tsarist and communist imperialist - but rather try to continue with it. I am from Poland and I would prefer to avoid Russia expanding westward, mostly because I prefer to avoid Russian occupation for reasons that should be obvious. I donated substantial amount of money with direct purpose of killing Russian invaders in Ukraine and my main complaint with large scale military support is that we should do more. I am not unique here, and that is because Russia is a clear enemy, as direct result of their decisions.
And Russian government has substantial support among Russian population.
Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Geogia, Kazachstan by all indicators are not interested in being vassal states.
I would prefer to avoid travel ban from Russia to Europe. But mostly to enable escape for deported Ukrainians and to enable brain drain.
Note what USA did (not sure whether Pelosi visit will have any effects but they are at least trying).
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An untrue sideswipe, especially in light of the example you chose. I am very much a 'Russophobe' in the sense of viscerally disliking the Russian state, and maybe even the Russian nation, but there's a lot more nuance to it than you paint here. For one, I learned my Russophobia years ago mostly from Russian expat grad students, as we'd sit in my college's MCR digesting dinner over a glass of Tokay. They were the one who taught me the names of Berezvosky, Khordokovsy, Lebedev, etc., who informed me that the chavviest Brit is a positive gentleman and intellect compared to the basest of their countrymen, that Putin's administration was Weekend-at-Bernie's for the Soviet Union, a cargo cult nation held together by inertia and oil and gas revenue. No-one is so good at hating Russia and Russians as Russians themselves, so I learned from the best, but the circumstances meant that of course, a special pardon was given to Russian expats, and a lesser but still significant one given to embittered children of the old intelligentsiya class who were still stuck in Russia (every expat starts has to start as a pat, after all). That's carried over to my attitudes in daily life; for example, I've been cautious about fulminating about the war with my son because there are several young Russian kids at his school, and he might not realise that they're almost certainly not aligned with the problem.
Moreover, a lot of my loathing of the modern Russian state comes from its utterly degenerate form (in the true sense of that term, not the Fuentes/4chan misappropriation). I have some actual respect for the USSR, and when I hear Shostakovich's anthem, I get the stirrings of something. That's not to deny the USSR was an expensive and unforgivably bloody experiment in leftist delusions, of course - Stalin in particular was a disaster of a leader and a human being - but throughout much of its history, there was something at least aesthetically impressive there: a grandeur and ambition. Even beyond the aesthetics, it was, at least at certain times and places, a genuine attempt to built a society on fundamentally new lines from those of the West. Of course, it failed, and history can learn from that, but there was still a hint of something honourable and aspirational there, in some respects even akin to the American Revolution. By contrast, modern Russia is a dumb klepto-petro-state feasting on the bones of its predecessors.
In any case, I think events like the one you describe would prompt at least some skepticism on my part, largely because it pattern-matches to other hoaxes, and partly because it seems unlikely in its own terms. Russians are rare in Europe, and comparatively many of them are wealthy or at least well connected. Far more likely to be ethnic Russian from the Balts than actual Russians (no visa required) or generic anti-Ukraine skinheads from Hungary or Poland or Serbia or even France. The actual explanation would probably have occurred to me too, though perhaps far down the list. I don't always apply such high standards of discretion to news when it comes in from Ukraine - I do a fair amount of willful optimism about the battlefield situation. But in operational matters at least, my predictions seem fairly well calibrated thus far, even accounting for my optimism bias, and I have no ability to materially influence things, so I'm happy to stick with my Pollyannaish prognostications of the military situation.
As for Armenia and Azerbaijan - of course, my sympathies are entirely with Armenia. It's barely a third the size of Azerbaijan with fewer allies and no petro revenues. It's an ancient bastion of Christianity in a part of the world that's been hostile to it for the last thousand years. They've already endured one genocide. But there's very little the West can do here - Armenia is landlocked, has no land corridors to the EU, is a CSTO member, and the EU is in no position to start using energy sanctions on Azerbaijan (the US has more freedom to act, and I'm still holding out hope for Pelosi's visit). I have quite strong feelings about the conflict nonetheless, and if anything, Russia's abject failure to protect its own client state from a genuine case of unwarranted aggression and ethnic cleansing further diminishes my opinion. If there was ever a time Russia could deliver on its promise of upholding Christianity in Asia or of constituting an alternate source of global order, this is it: a small long-suffering Christian nation on Russia's doorstep is under attack from a larger richer Turkic Muslim aggressor, and they have every legal right to intervene, and could do so easily. At the current time, of course, they have the excuse (!) that any potential intervention might provide a distraction from their very important and sincere commitment to several more months of sustained militarised slaughter of Slavs up and down the Dnieper. But what of the 2020 war, when they could have quickly bitchslapped Azerbaijan into accepting the status quo, and proven themselves Armenia's saviour? But no, Putin was greedy and stupid and had no real ideological commitment to helping Armenia, so waited until most of Artsakh had been reconquered by Azerbaijan, then belatedly tried to insert himself as a 'diplomat' (except it turns out, people need to take you seriously for that to work, as we're seeing now). Yet more evidence that Russian civilisation would be a good idea.
Did it ever occur to you that they are likely to have huge biases?
That much is implied by the very term 'Russophobia'. Otherwise it would just be called 'having an entirely rational and appropriate attitude to Russia'.
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Maybe untrue but not unfounded. Leaving aside my opinion (no doubt biased by monarch envy and the illiberality of knife loicenses; oy mate, wot you mean I can't stab people in streets?) on many though not all Russians (notably but a fraction among STEM-focused ones) who go to the United Kingdom of all places, people I interacted with as well, that compradore elite class, haughty and simultaneously obsequious children of self-important scum artfully skirting the borders of criminal culpability, spawn of slimy post-Soviet strivers scurrying desperately to plug their dynasties into the lower rungs of your stiffy alien hierarchy as it grows fat on plundered wealth which was meant to uplift my base countrymen; and our near-perfect agreement with regards to the Russian state where even those people can be rightfully called elite and feel indignation over being spurned and threatened by the genuinely subhuman siloviks and their hoi polloi loyalists; and the matter that you delicately affirm the right to assume the worst about Russians so long as they're real Russians and not, like, exiled oligarchs in the City or Baltic citizens with Slav ancestry (in a manner understandable but so typical for Russian-European conflicts, where even the dastardly Huns can be recognized for fellow gentlemen, while us Tsarist Orc serfs evoke zoological disgust) – that swipe was based on specific interactions pertinent to this case, with both of you.
(phew)
For Count it was the case with some light armored vehicle deliberately ramming into a civvie car, and mutterings to the effect that ruskies always go out of their way to murder civilians, heck they even smirked at him over lunch in LSE or something (if memory serves, that specific vehicle proved to be Ukrainian one that lost control).
For you it was the discussion around Darya Dugina's assassination, and Dugin's old viral video distributed by Ukrainians, one where he was supposedly calling for genocide of Ukrainians, when you were in rather clear agreement with the reddit hivemind that there was no context changing the interpretation; or if you were not, there was no way for me to tell. I'll actually go and quote, with one small edit, what I wrote back then:
I remember that interaction! It's always nice to see a familiar face outside of context, and I had been meaning to reply to you (let no sin of omission go unpunished). To be clear, what you were taking umbrage at was a procedural point - I was upbraiding Glideer on his dropping a quote without context, rather than presupposing that the context was misleading or that no such context could be provided. He (and you) provided that context, and I think it definitely diminishes the moral weight of the passage that another redditor had earlier quoted from. As you probably know, Glideer is the resident Russo-apologist of CredibleDefense, and I like to think I give him a fair shout - I actively upvote him as long as he's saying something informative or sensible, contrary to most of the lurkers on the sub. And I remember the Odessa arson quite well - it was a good example of those awful acts that get swept away by the awfulness of other acts at the time. I certainly didn't intend to be an apologist for thoroughgoing Russophobia.
That said... I'm not too disinclined to own the label of Russophobe. I should tell you about my ten days in St Petersburg, and this seems as good a time as any. In short, to get over a girl (and get over some new ones), back in 2008 I decided to fly to Estonia and get the bus from Tallinn to St P. I had a wonderful 10 days in the city, but it was also an extreme experience. On the one hand, the abundance of architecture and beauty was breathtaking - the Spas na Kravi alone is a marvel. But the Hermitage was my favourite: a wonder, full of wonders (many of them plundered, admittedly). But in my time there I was also (lightly) assaulted a couple of times on the street; apparently the English fop look is an invitation to being shoved, punched in the back, and otherwise disrespected. Many clubs I tried to get into thought I was from the Caucasus, amusingly enough, and I had to feign being Italian to get in (apparently I'm too olive-skinned for the English story to be believable). I had my bag ripped off while I was in the subway (another marvel, although perhaps at that point I would have benefitted from doing less marveling). And best of all, I got arrested! I'd met a friend of one of my Russian expat pals at a punk bar, and one thing had led to another and I was drunkenly heading home with her for a night of cross-cultural communication. We were stopped by police, who found my identity documents insufficient (I had a photocopy of my passport, as per Lonely Planet advice, but this was insufficient). The situation probably wasn't helped by the fact that my new friend was outspoken, and from what I latterly gleaned, had told the police they were acting shamefully. Anyway, I was taken into the station, my possessions were taken from me, and I was put in a cell. My possessions were returned to me a few hours later and I was released, though not without all my English and US currency being swiped from my wallet (with enough of the night remaining for some cross-cultural activities, thankfully).
In any case, it left a significant imprint on me, and when I crossed back over the Estonian border back into Tallinn, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But it was the little things that most annoyed me. The fact that everyone in St Petersburg seemed to dress the same way - furs for women, leather jackets for men - and the way that nobody smiled. By contrast, Tallinn was a riot of colour and gaiety. The obsession with the latest gadgets and brands, with very little intellectual substance, despite the incredible weight of history on every street corner. The urban decrepitude alongside gaudy conspicuous consumption. All of this was in stark contrast to my experience in Tallinn, and made me incredibly grateful that the rest of Europe was now being spared the turpitude of contemporary mainstream Russian culture.
All that being said, I think the Russian intelligentsiya are some of the best (and smartest) people I've ever met. As much as you might despise the people I mentioned, I should stress that these were children of relatively modest privilege. My closest Russian friend is the child of a physics professor and a geologist, who managed to snag a British guy and get into an Oxbridge PhD on the back of her monstrously high IQ, rather than connections or money. I have zero patience for the corrupt gangsters of Russia's true monetary elite, but my impression is that - for a time - the USSR genuinely cherished and rewarded at least some scientific minds, and my expats contacts are drawn almost entirely from their sons and daughters.
That's one hell of a story – almost unbelievable, but you're trustworthy. I've had a comparable amount of thuggery and injustice happen to me in all of 2008- early 2022. (Well, plus a couple fights using knives, that were, honestly, easy to opt out of if not for bad temper). Months ago you've said «welcome to Europe», and I've already had worse law enforcement interactions here in Istanbul, borderline-lethal; maybe that's more an issue of culture clash. All said, it's an okay-ish city, a livable, if petty, tumor bursting out of Eastern Rome's fossils. I still think it'd have been better by this point, had we conquered it back then; but Brits had other plans with regards to Orthodox Christians and Ottomans.
It's true that mainstream Russian culture is atrocious (well, we've fixed the part with drab clothing, more or less). But is it even meaningfully Russian or anyone else's? It's another generic segment of disenchanted global squalor powered by racing rats squeezed between street hustling and institutionalized corruption, a shitty shallow pastiche of the West plus some uninspired marketable kitsch reified by tourist eyes; McDonalds and shaverma topped with lubok, klyukva and khokhloma. To me, the symbol of its true form is a gopnik in MARVEL t-shirt; they've switched over to those from Abibas knockoffs. There's more to be liked in the Baltics or say in Germany.
I can't feel that Germans or Balts are alive, though. Prosocial, content, competent last men, serious about all transient matters, wheels of culture busily spinning in the air, smug sense of moral, civilizational and racial superiority serving no point, detached from any lofty ambition. Anglos have more «soul»; they only need like 1 SD and two diplomas extra to come across as real as Russian randos from imageboards and group chats that I've collected as friends over my life, shards of what we were to be as a people.
Maybe that's just nationalist cope. After all, Estonians have made Disco Elysium.
So it goes. It amazes me, and depresses much more, that USSR could be inspiring to anyone, that this sort of sincerity and seriousness proved to be special. Our sort of «soul» is the crudest thing, sorely lacking in dimensionality. But it appears to be a real thing. And it's still suffocating to be surrounded by people who don't have it and only rarely feel the lack, while noticing all of our tangible shortcomings.
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If I may ask... Why do you have so much hatred for the Russian state... A kleptocratic petro-state... but not Saudi Arabia, a vastly worse kleptocratic petro-state without even the pretenses of democracy, that has been commiting Genocide against the people of Yemen for the past 8 years? And which America and the west could bring down in a second by sanctioning?
I really don't get how you can say the current Russian regime is somehow worse than the USSR when the USSr didn't even have the pretense of elections, or any of the basic economic freedoms, that even compromised, the modern Russians takes for granted.
These are really obvious questions.
Russia's a shitty country...but its like 110th out of 200 in the world today in terms of quality... might even crest the top 100.... And the offense that that 110th country might attack the 120th country, when the 120th has been shelling civilians for 8 years and waging war against independent regions...
It is just because Ukraine made fawning noises about the EU and Yemen didn't/wasn't white enough?
When USSR launched the first satellite under Chief Designer Korolev (Ukrainian), many Americans got scared. When Russia wishes to unite (in some way in another) with Ukraine to try making some another scary things this is seen as more menacing than Saudis killing Yemenis with reason rooted in faith differences.
Saudi Arabia currently is only starting to make its own firearms.
There is probably another axis on this. Russians are perceived to be whiter than Saudis and therefore higher standard is applied for them.
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For me?
I am not aware of sympathetic and non-terrible countries fighting with USA. Overall in Middle-East it is quite hard to find sympathetic countries. It is hard to find country where giving them military or political boost would improve things.
My country was repeatedly invaded by Russia and current Russian imperialism is again a direct threat. That is among reasons why Poland accepted over 2 000 000 refugees from Ukraine and gave substantial military and financial support. 230 tanks, 40 IFV, 38 self propelled artillery, including modern Krabs, crowdfounded Bayraktar TB2 and plenty of important but less flashy stuff.
I deeply dislike Saudi Arabia and hard for me to say anything positive about them, but there is nothing actionable I can do there. Unlike in case of Ukraine.
And in case of Ukraine I housed refugees from town shelled by Russian army and donated substantial amount of money to fund killing Russian invaders.
Which country you mean here? Because calling pseuodrepublic in Ukraine "independent regions" is ridiculous.
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This comes rather close to Bulverism, especially given your final question; it reminds me a lot of lines like "Why do care so much about other people's genitals?" that are frequently used to disarm dissenting views in debates around trans issues, implying that someone has scurrilous or questionable motives for their investment in an issue. I will say, though, that I identify strongly as a European, and Russia soldiers squatted on half the old capitals of Europe for a half-century, oppressing, impoverishing, and killing. After throwing off the Soviet yoke and joining the Western bloc, these nations became richer, stronger, and more politically inclusive. Russia, by contrast, has made little to no investment in itself since the fall of the Soviet Union; its economic growth has been almost entirely led by the petrochemical sector, and it has let its excellent scientific and technological gains rot while its physicists went off to work on Wall Street. I would say moreover that it is morally worse to pretend to hold elections and fake the results than to deny them all together; assuming the net result is the same, the former simply adds deceit to coercion.
In any case, that's a sample of my reasons for caring about this conflict. As for Yemen, I know and care very little about the country aside from the fact that it has been fighting civil wars since before I was born, it is extremely poor, and has a crazy high TFR (also that khat use is endemic among men). Whether or not Saudi Arabia wages its war (which in turn involves a complex mix of sectarian and political motives), Yemen is likely to remain an impoverished and dysfunctional place, much like every other Muslim country in the Middle East that doesn't have oil.
But perhaps all of this is indulging your question a bit too much. Rather than turn this into a therapy session, it is clearest and simplest for me to say that as a citizen of the West who identifies with the aims and values of the liberal international order, I see it very clearly as being in our interests to make this war as painful as possible for Russia: we rebut the clearest threat to the LIO this century, we disincentivise China from attacking Taiwan, we weaken a long-term strategic adversary and non-status quo power, we weaken Russia's ability to control its authoritarian and extractive vassal states, we humiliate Russian military might and weaken their ability to compete with the West on arms contract, we reinvigorate the Western alliance and increase NATO's total budget, etc., etc.. By contrast, we should stay as far removed from the war in Yemen as we can without causing permanent damage to our ties to Saudi Arabia, on whom we'll be moderately dependent for another decade or so. After that, I'd be happy to let that particular alliance wither on the vine.
I'd be more sympathetic to the "Liberal democratic order" if it wasn't directly funding and propping up genocide and apartheid in Yemen and Palestine.
Or if the US and UK had vastly more egregiously invaded a country 8000km away who had offered no aggression to them over lies not 20 years ago, causing close to a million deaths and geostrategic instability that probably killed a million more... And then done it all again in Libya in 2012.
I've been keeping score. The modern Russian state is vastly less threatening to the human race in terms of body count than this "Liberal international order"... Which is neither liberal, nor providing order to anyone outside a very select club.
Explain the "apartheid" in Palestine. This is a classic example of a controversial claim made without evidence.
The Palestinians have one government that controls them... Israel yet they are denied citizenship, a vote, and are forced into ghettos where the "pallestinian leadership" which Israel can and does murder at any moment, predates upon them.
Israel is one state, it has been for decades now since Israel has defeated all Palestinian resistance... yet Israel maintains the fiction that there is or ever can be two states because then it doesn't have to grant the pallestinians, who have been born and lived entirely under israelli control, a vote of their own.
There should be a one state solution. One person. one vote. Full Stop.
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As is its as if America denied the native American's any rights as citizens, claiming the reservations were seperate countries, but "invaded" them near weekly to enforce its authority.
Its textbook apartheid. Denying full citizenship to those born within a country on the basis of their heritage.
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Do you think anyone sincerely cares about "the human race in terms of body count"? Do you genuinely personally feel, or think the average other person does, that people you care about and agree with are equal in value to people you don't know or can't stand?
Look, I'm more sympathetic to Russia than the Ukraine. As far as I'm concerned, Russia's obviously more right than Ukraine, and Russia's actions now seem like a justified and inevitable backlash against the West's steadfast refusal to leave them alone. But you know what?
It doesn't actually matter to my life who wins. Every Ukrainian can die and so long as I avoid the news channels I don't watch anyway and the celebrities I don't respect anyway my life changes none. Same if all the Russians go. This is a pissing match across the ocean that doesn't warrant anywhere near the level of emotion the average American displays. I'd like to see Russia win, but if Russia loses, my disappointment will be about a .5 on a scale of 1 to 10. It's just.. not a big deal.
Everyone's outrage over Russia is performative.
Its a big deal if Ukraine wins its shores up the "Liberal international order" another 30 years, and then we live to see the slow role of totalitarianism every western country is headed towards come to fruition. You can see it in Ukraine: Our elites wish they ban opposition parties, opposition press, and then round up their ethnic and political enemies to use as canon fooder just like Zelensky is doing...
If Russia had won quickly and decisively it would have probably broken the western elite, and forced Germany and Co. to pivot towards Russia to secure their energy and econonmic interests... And then the possibility of the global total state would have been impossible.
As it is, if Ukraine wins this war or Russia collapses I shudder at what globohomo might become...
I'm not outraged at Ukraine or the middle-east because of any especial emotional attachment to the people there... I'm outraged because of what it lets us know about what the western and more specifically north American elite will do to us here.
Same way they've been trying to deploy all the tools of the war on terror against dissidents at home, you can bet they'll use all the Zelensky techniques and cite "what those brave Ukrainians did" as a precedent when they wage war on their own population.
Ukraine losing won't stop the west's slide into degeneracy, and Russia winning won't save the west from globohomo, either. Salvation will not come through proxy battles misunderstood as magical omens indicating domestic currents. Even if Russia wins, the fact it's struggling so much makes it clear it's not a real threat, outside a nuclear salvo.
If you want to stop progressives, you gotta stop them at home, not across the sea. If anything, I'm glad even a little bit of their activist attention is harmlessly redirected to the ass end of nowhere.
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I also hate Saudi Arabia, but reserve a special place for Russia because they have no god damned excuse.
They were the second hegemon of the world ready to burst through the Fulda gap, they put a dude into orbit before us. Their spies read our mail at will and their diplomats painted a decent chunk of the world red. They made some fukin WILD speeches in the UN about us and we had to take them seriously, and now what?
Their flaccid dick of an army is getting flattened in Ukraine, their science is just qualcomm with the numbers painted over, their spies are less effective than their facebook trolls, and their diplomacy can't spare a moment from getting clowned on to stop their own putative allies from killing eachother.
I never expected suadia ariabia to be anything but a shitty monarachy with lots of money, but Russia was better and could have been even more better, and instead is what it is.
TL;DR: the Soviet Union falling apart is the worst thing that ever happened to the USA, and I resent it. RIP Gorby, wish you coulda made it work.
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Azerbaijan and Turkey consider one another as 'two states, one nation', so naturally Turkey was backing Azerbaijan which is arguably the reason Armenia is losing. Turkey is a decently young country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with a GDP per capita of $37k compared to Russia's stagnant economy with GDP per capita of $30k. In short, Russia can not compete with Turkey in West Asia. Also you seem to missing a lot of nuance about the origin of this conflict, basically it started around the time of the dissolution of the USSR, where Armenians living in western azerbaijan wanted their land to become part of the state of armenia while azerbaijan wanted to keep the borders of their national subdivision during USSR. There was a lot of ethnic cleansing on both sides and a lot of people got kicked out of their land. What should have happened was the territory should have been divided along property lines to bring ethnic group holdings into their respective ethnostate as much as possible barring 'islands' within the other's land.
This is all fair, and I'm aware of the complex situation underlying the conflict including the first war in the 90s, and was gliding over complex nuances. Interestingly, back in the early 1920s, Artsakh was going to be been awarded to the Armenia SSR based on predominant ethnic makeup, but Stalin personally intervened to prevent it.
And you're right about Turkey. Armenia has been very unlucky with its neighbours.
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°
All in all, we trekked to the place for a long time and had fun, and Granny held her own.
And, at last, we reached it. The pine forest parted a little, a clearing peered through, and on it – a stone. A humongous boulder, twice as tall as a man. You can only find such boulders in the forest in the northern countries. It got tossed in here to all hells in the Ice Age. And my grandmother immediately flung up her hands: «My sweeties, there it is!» We came closer, went around the boulder, and in it – a niche, sort of like a cave. And in the niche – three busts, carved into this granite boulder. Sonya and I just opened our mouths. Three busts! Carved right out of the stone, as if protruding from the wall of this cave. And the work is quite detailed, filigree. For some reason, I immediately recalled the statue of Pharaoh Khafre, which struck me with the craftsmanship, pharaoh was also carved from granite, and on his shoulders sits some falcon, its wings shielding the back of his head from enemies. Wish I had such a falcon these days!
We and Sonya are standing there, as if in a slight astonishment, while our grandmother immediately walked over to the busts, bowed and said loudly: «thank you, Three Greats!» We came to our senses, went over to the busts, started to touch and examine them. And Grandma said:
«Wait a minute, kids, I'll tell you everything in order. My dear grandchildren, these are three statues of three fateful rulers of Russia, the Three Great Baldies in front of you, three great knights who have crushed the dragon-state. The first of them, that sly one with the small beard, crushed the Russian Empire; the second, with the glasses and the spot on his bald head, destroyed the USSR; and this one, with the little chin, ruined the terrible country called the Russian Federation. And all three busts were carved out sixty years ago by my late husband, a democrat, a pacifist, a vegetarian and a professional sculptor, in the summer when the dragon Russia finally died and stopped devouring its citizens forever.
And the grandmother started to come up close to each bust and put candies and gingerbread on its shoulders. And she was saying: This is for you, Volodyushka, this is for you, Misha, and this is for you, Vovochka. Sonya and I are standing watching, and she lays it all out, muttering something affectionate. Unusual! And our grandmother was an atheist at all times, she didn't worship anything or anyone. And this was straight up a temple with three deities. Sonya was smart, so she kept quiet.
And I, of course, burst with questions: Grandma, how and what is that? So she told me everything in detail, and then sort of summed it up. She said that Russia was a terrible anti-human State at all times, but in the twentieth century, this monster was especially ruthless, then there were rivers of blood and human bones crunching on the fangs of that dragon. And to crush the monster, God sent three knights all marked with baldness. And they, each in his own respective time, performed feats. The bearded one crushed the dragon's first head, the bespectacled one the second, and the one with the small chin cut off the third. The bearded one, he says, succeeded through bravery, the bespectacled one through weakness; and the third, through cunning.
And this last of the three bald men, by all appearances, was the one Granny liked best. She mumbled something tender, caressed him, put a lot of candy on his shoulders. And she kept shaking her head: how hard it was for that third, the last one, the hardest of it all. For, she said, he did his work secretly, wisely, sacrificing his honor, reputation, bringing wrath on himself. She says: how many insults have you suffered, what hatred of fools, the stupid anger of the masses, all the backbiting! And she pets him and kisses him and embraces him, calling him a little crane, and she bursts into tears. Sonya and I were taken aback a little. And she said to us: kids, he endured a lot and did a great job. My grandmother categorically forbade us to take pictures of the cave with the smarty, she said - it's not good for sacred things to photo and reproduce them. A pity! We agreed to come here next year.
And on the way back, we stopped at our beloved family Snowman, and I must say, we had a wonderful lunch.
– Telluria. Vladimir Sorokin, 2013.
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I think there’s more activism against unorthodox opinions, and more fear about unorthodox opinions. And what intelligence agencies in America want have become what the Left wants, or vice versa, while old Leftist topics (mass NSA spying and secret courts) have fallen by the wayside. Being against Ukraine is now lodged in the same part of the brain as being against LGBTs and equality, or so it seems on social media. So heterodoxy has become riskier.
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First time?
Two scattered thoughts I've been recently having somewhat related to your post.
Standards (and being correct) are for undergraduate students.
Once you you have that magical paper that says 'PhD' on it, you can pretty much shit and piss all over the textbooks and still be lauded for being an "expert". "The War on drugs", "The War on terror", Covid, many such cases.
I still remember carefully making sure that no variables were linearly dependent, the models were crossvalidated and the performance metrics were passed through a hypothesis test before passing in statistical modelling project during my undergrad; and then seeing the same professor just YOLO numbers in SPSS without a concern in the world if it made sense or not for her research work. But she has a PhD, everything her hands touch is magic, or so I've been told.
I'm sure the further from academia and the further from the hard science you go, the more this is the case. Both the lack of expectation to be correct, and the amount of status you receive for having that paper.
This commentator you talked about is probably from the West.
Ukraine is close to home. And the closer to home it, the more bad the bad guy is. Syria, Palestine, Mexico, Armenia, North Korea are all too abstract, too far away, they are not even real people. The most evil of all evils is he who threatens your income/status.
It's always been politics. I'm surprised you are not jaded to this possibility.
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As someone who generally enjoys your writing - please don’t fall into the trap of granting assent to Putin just because doing so runs contrary to the disingenuous mainstream narrative. He really is an enemy of freedom; almost a quintessential looter type out of Rand novels
Too late. Retrospectively, this development makes sense - Kulak always stood out from rat-influenced writers with his passionate diotribes relying less on well-thought, charitable arguments than evocative and sharp language mercilessly cutting through all the things, ideas and people many of us resent so much. Not exactly academically strict discourse, but fun to read, so whetever shortcomings he had were easy to ignore.
Alas, I strongly suspect that from now on, when stumbling on his posts I will remember that one time he managed to get his opinion entirely coincide with most hilarious excerpts from Russian state TV, chuckle a bit, and close the tab.
Farewell Icarus, it was fun to watch you fly before you burned your wings.
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I broadly agree with Kulak's take here. Putin isn't great yeah, but the leadership of Ukraine isn't exactly Jeffersonian classical liberals either. It's a standard regional power struggle that America has no real interests in.
If the Ukrainian people desire independence enough to really fight for it, they're welcome to it. If not, whatever, not my problem. I'm fine with selling them a bunch of weapons, but giving them huge amounts of money or direct intervention ought to be off the table IMO.
Bleeding Russia dry is in America's interest surely.
I kind of agree with this, though I'd phrase it more as being moderately irritating to them rather than bleeding them dry. I did say I'd like to sell Ukraine lots of weapons - both because it makes them a bigger thorn in Russia's side and because it gives us information about how well our weapons actually perform against Russian weapon systems in the hands of the proper Russian army.
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Not really... Russia was positioned to become a US ally as late as 2008-2012, partner in the global war on terror stuff... another nuclear armed, economically dependent, ethically suspect appendage of American empire like Israel or Pakistan... Not really democratic, but good at keeping the locals in line...
Then the woke stuff hit, Putin was a white man who was anti-gay and the democrats went from mocking republicans for treating them as a geopolitical rival ("The 1980s called they want their foreign policy back" said Obama to Romney) to hating any republicans agreed with the take Obama had in 2012...
Its all Trump and Gay Marriage.
That's why Ukraine was treated as a major geopolitical happening in 2014 when Russia-Georgia was completely ignored, or how we're going defcon 1 with sanctions now... but didn't when Putin was propping up Assad in Syria back in 2015.
There can't be a white country that isn't woke. and Russia's the only Asia regional power Americans consider white... So when Turkey wages war on the Democratic and freedom loving Kurds, who have been America's allies for 30 years... no one gives a shit. But when Russia wages war against an ultranationalist not really democratic country that's been commiting warcrimes for 8 years... defcon 1.
Trump, Gay Marriage, white skin. Those are the driving forces of US foreign policy on this. Those are the only things that separate Russia from Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt... or any other Faux democratic, kinda belligerent regional power with dozens of different border disputes.
Not in my news it wasn't. I remember smugly listing it as a counter example to the notion that no two democracies have ever attacked each other. Of course, back then I was under the misapprehension that Russia was a democracy because I was a child.
Actually I think this has a lot more to do with that time Putin's boys shot down a commercial airliner. That was big news and generated a lot of animosity towards Putin.
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What's a huge amount, as a percentage of US GDP?
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Do you not suspect that this lip service to the idea of freedom is only paid as long as there's a credible risk of you and others like you effectively or literally defecting to the far group, should the trust be thoroughly betrayed? And that, as soon as there is nowhere to defect to, the hegemony secured forever – the show's over, your carrot is taken away and into the meat grinder you go?
Yep. The western elite has seen Ukraine bar the leaving of the country, ban critical newspapers, murder dissidents, ban opposition parties, imprison opposition leaders... and they have called it the height of democracy and encouraged us to be more like them.
There is no doubt in my mind the American, Canadian, and European elite would gladdly do the exact same things, selectively conscript their ethnic rivals and send them to the suicide units the second they got an excuse.
This is why I'd prefer Putin win... it might result in regime change in the west. I understand you feel the exact same, if not worse, hatred for Putin than I do for my government...
But Putin doesn't want my family dead, and the western elite does... Toronto Star (state funded newspaper) litterally ran front page stories about how th Unvaxxed should be denied medical treatment, and senior regime figures encouraged doctors and nurses to covertly not treat the unvaxxed... this while I was split open and going through multiple surgeries.
Russia is a very long ways away, and I knew people disfigured and unbanked here.
Regime change.. towards what? Alright, suppose Putin wins and suppose it triggers some regime changes in the West — a few European Putin LARPers might come to power — then what? Is your vision of the future a world littered with dysfunctional authoritarian states on the range from Putinist Russia to North Korea?
Then about the vaccinations… I made a Pfizer shot last year. It’s actual effect on my life is zero. Yes, I get it, it’s a bad precedent. Yes, I get it, the governments should stay the fuck out of regulating what you do to your body. Yes, I get it, it can and will get worse i the future. That said: trading a Western government for a Russian one is trading away a whole lot of your actual, important, substantial freedoms for something that is not (at least yet) a big deal.
John Galt had a hidden valley in the mountains, we the Russians have the western countries; where would you go if you achieved your stated ideal of dismantling the western regime? Don’t delude yourself thinking you’d fare well in Russia. That requires either doing nothing of importance (what kind of life is that), swearing fealty to degenerates, or indeed going against the govt and winning.
No putin larpers wouldn't win. The enemies of the regime would win.
You're acting as if a socialist would want the Tzarist forces to lose the Russo-Japanese war because they want Shintoism to take over russia... No they want the Tsarist regime humiliated so the revolution of 1905 could happen (though they wouldn't like that that revolution failed).
Likewise Putinism to the extent its an ideology is already prettymuch failed and dying... I want the Liberal Globalist order to lose to that failing and dying ideology not to prop up putinism but to humiliate and ruin the Liberal international order so that the homegrown ideologies already taking off in the west can have their revolutions as detached from putinism as Liberal Constitutionalism and Socialist revolutionaries were from Shinto-Imperialism.
distant enemies of my enemy can be quite useful.
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If i were to describe the Ukraine war I describe it like the Iran-Iraq War... Two awful regimes you'd never want to live in grinding conscripts and people with no better prospects against each other. And also maybe Iran was a better place to live than Iraq during the time... low bar. (or maybe Iran just happens to be the only middle-eastern country with a movie industry so it seems better)
Ultimately I'd like them both to lose, and the cynical western backers drawing out the war to lose even harder....
Picture the map of the region rendered in stained glass... and then picture all the lines if you hit that stained glass repeatedly with a hammer... Those are what the borders should be. I wouldn't trust any of these people to govern a man 10 miles away let alone 400, and even then I'd want that local subject to be heavily armed.
Putin is awful... don't get me wrong. But Ukraine is literally executing civilians for continuing to live in occupied areas, has shelled civillians since 2014, has banned every rival political party, banned a free press, banned its population from leaving... Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point... and this is what our leaders hold up as their ideal and model of democracy for the rest of us.
Fuck that.
To quote Marylin Manson: "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers, I don't need to choose a side."
This doesn't harmonise with your complaints about the intellectual laziness of others. "Putin is literally Hitler" and "Zelensky is literally Kim Jong-un" are both intellectually lazy takes.
Not letting your citizens leave the country is a very VERY unique horror with very few precedents. And one I am very fucking sensitive to having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns.
It's not unique at all, it was standard fare for half of my parent's lifetime doe to them being born in People's Republic of Poland, a vassal state of the dearest USSR. The standard fare for getting a passport was to become an informer for the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service), spying on your family and friends. And that was during cold "wartime", not war-wartime. While I'm not much a fan of Zeleński, calling wartime conscription of males a very rate precedent show only one's narrow historical and geographical perspective.
And "Ukraine's government is corrupt, therefore their cities getting shelled and their people getting warcrimed in a manner typical to Red-- I mean Russian army is just business as usual in the region" is an embarassing non sequitur.
No for most of human history there was no effective means to enforce border controls and people could just leave if they wanted, except for totalitarian states for which literally any violence is justified to end their existence. It remains a horror to the average American that any soviet countries could have existed without the populace flaying the flesh from their tyrants in the night.
that a "democracy" equipped with the technology and surveillance tech to actually prevent its citizens from leaving, has chosen to restrict mass cross-sections of the country from exercising basic freedom of travel, and has done so that they might be imprisoned and fed into the war machine is a very unique fucking horror and one no westerner has EVER tolerated in a democracy.
At the height of the Vietnam War the US did not control americans leaving. That's how draft dodgers got to Canada, they just fucking drove. If the US had set up checkpoints on the other side of the road and started interrogating anyone trying to leave the country, there would have been armed insurrection and those guards would have been firebombed in their homes with their children inside.
The fact you treat a totalitarian country like Soviet Poland as an at all acceptable comparison as if its very existence wasn't an insult to the human race, says a whole lot about those willing to support the Zelensky regime.
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Live free or die. Any regime that gets remotely close to these restrictions demands endless armed insurrection until the populace is free of it or until no one is left alive within it.
In the post above, you write
which implies that you're a Leaf, so I don't see how stealing USA's hypothetical 60s valor, or speaking about "average American's" horror is of any use here. But more to the point: how come you're still alive, then? Why didn't you live up to your proclaimed ideals, why didn't you take up arms against Trudeau regime, or died trying?
The difference between Vietnam and Russia's 'special military operation' is that the latter is fought on Ukraine's home soil. I thought that this was obvious, but apparently it needs pointing out. No western country had a war on their turf since 1945. If they did, the just-so-stories about how their superior civil liberties flow flow their citizens' moral superiority would melt rather quickly.
Also, there's no such thing as "Soviet Poland", Poland (along with Czechoslovakia, etc.) was not a soviet republic, but a separate state. Authoritarian, not totalitarian, and you having two factual errors in one sentence makes me think that you're getting it wrong on purpose, although I fail to imagine what it might be.
But it the American soul is truly as pained by my country's predecessor's existence as you claim, I'm afraid they have mostly their former president to blame. FD Roosevelt mad a deal with Stalin, and so the iron curtain landed to the west of Poland, instead of to the east. I guess "live free" only goes so far, and sacrificing entire countries' freedom as a bargaining chip was acceptable to 40s Americans.
Also, while great men theory of history is probably wrong. Thousands of above-average men can make a dent, at least in the short term. As it happens, some 22000 of Poland's cream of the crop were murdered in the early stage of WWII, which made mounting a successful resistance to the Soviets rather difficult. And the culprit was... would you look at that, Russians! I mean, Soviets! But surely, my antipathy towards Russia must only be because of the Western propaganda.
First, LOL if you believe this as if the poles weren't 100% a conquered people and your administrative status mattered. Sure. And the East German stasi was ethically better than the pre-45 Stasi... absolutely a free republic.
Second FDR 100% deserved the gallows for destroying American freedom and bringing about the administrative state. Fascism in all but name. I reccommend reading Herbert Hoover's Hsitory of the second world war Freedom Betrayed
*
Third, something big happened in Canada in response to the lockdowns, rebellions, blockades of the worlds busiest bridge, violent confrontations with the police, and occupation and encampment in -20 to -40... I neither confirm nor deny my involvement in any illegal activity. And BTW the truckers won. The government blinked, almost all restrictions were dropped across the board, and half the political spectrum of Canada is being purged of those who supported lockdowns.
Forth, English Canadians are a made up people. There is no cultural difference between us and the US. Its like Germany and Austria, but without even a significant history of cultural difference or conflict. Hell I've lived in apartments that looked into the US.
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Finally, I'm not some pro-Russia shill. You hate Russia? Good you probably should, as far as I can tell almost everyone in europe is 100% right to want almost everyone else in Europe dead. What I loath is the North American elite sending our money to support centuries old ethnic conflicts, treating violent authoritarian states as if they're some moral exemplars everyone over hear should admire, and risking an escalation to world war over a third world country and its conflict with its second world neighbor.
I want the US and Canada disentangled from Europe.
How would you feel if your government was sending billions of your dollars to prop up regimes in the South Pacific? How would you feel if you were edging closer to nuclear war over some bullshit conflict in West Africa? It does not concern us, we have no meaningful economic or geopolitical interest tied up in it, and there's no way the Ukrainian moral claims hold up to the slightest scrutiny compared to any other global conflict, especially on costs.
I don't really care whether Russia or Ukraine wins in the abstract, I care that my government is trying to get us further entangled in geopolitical conflicts that don't concern us and could end with nukes landing in our cities.
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Understandable, but it would also be understandable if this intensifies your passion on this issue beyond what is reasonable.
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Universal conscription is pretty common in small countries with bigger and more powerful neighbors. Finland, Israel, South Korea for examples that would generally be considered free countries. Russia too as it happens, though they have apparently loosened up on their terms of conscription.
Of those three Finland is the only one I'd possibly consider free or non-horrifying... and I suspect that's probably just my ignorance and it actually is horrifying in some way I haven't yet heard of, given it feels entitled to enslave its male population... and largely not even give them a vote on the matter since conscription begins at 18 and voting only occurs 1/4 years.
Most conscripts who've die in wars of "Democracy" die for a country they were never eligible to vote in.
This probably deserves its own thread to explore properly, since it's a tricky question. Technically it's true that it could be seen as a form of slavery. But on the other hand, if you aspire to live in a country with any political freedoms, don't you basically have to take some level of responsibility for physically defending it from hostile aggressors who would crush that freedom? Feels pretty abstract in a country like America, but not so much in places like the above where powerful and far more numerous adversaries are only a short distance away, could invade at any moment and crush any illusion of liberty you might have had.
Political freedom is not a function of the state but the individuals ability to commit violence against the state. Knights were free and serfs were slaves not because of some deriliction or philosopgical disposition of the king, but because the knights could rebel and offer violence to the king but the serfs could not even offer violence to the knights.
Likewise the North American colonists were able to gain so much more freedom than their European counterparts because they were armed and could murder government officials... Even Canada has had more rebellions in the past 200 years than Brittain.
Making oneself subservient, even in an armed role, to the state does nothing to gain one liberty Ask all those russian concripts who died with no political freedom under communism.
One does not gain freedom by fighting the state's enemies. One gains freedom by making the state your enemy
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If the government can unilaterally send you to die in the trenches then your freedom is already crushed
Likewise if a country cannot raise enough people who care about it enough to fight for it on their own volition, then perhaps it ceasing to exist as an independent entity is not such a bad thing
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Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
A principled stand for freedom here is worthwhile, but probably only if your particular set of borders has a bunch of nukes/is part of a nuclear alliance.
Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
I have written about concription several times on the motte... In every instance I've argued it demanded lethal violence against thos administering it. Up to ands including killing the volunteer members of the draft boards
If we are indulging in fantastical arrangements for society, I think we should all just get along, man.
The french revolution pulled the cork this particular bottle, and Napoleon smashed it and fired the remains into the sun. Until technology removes the need for mass participation of humans on the home front and the war front, any state that elects to leave this particular option on the table is tying it's hands for principles sake.
we can abandon chemical weapons because they don't really work on organized first tier militaries; we cam restrain ourselves from Nukes and Bio 'cause of MAD and escalation. You can't have a war without people, though.
I don't care if the hands are tied. I want free people to exist not states.
I'd rather A country be reduced to Afghanistan and lose a chunk of its territory and free people exist somewhere in the uncontrolled territory than no free people exist anywhere because the state propped up its own existence by enslaving them.
Yes this goes for WW2. Yes this goes for the civil war. I have not seen a single faction in a single war in any moment of human history where i thought their propping up their war efforts by resorting to litteral slavery was at all an improvement.
the 20 million who died fighting for the soviet union might have lived had they murdered their commissars and officers instead of being fed into the Soviet Unions horrific efforts at self preservation.
The worst enemy you have no matter what is the man who has you at gunpoint and is issuing orders... he is always the first person you need to kill. And if a nation and a people... even call themselves your people are standing behind him demanding your death, then they are your enemies too.
There is no one more sympathetic in WW2 than the soviet citizens who volunteered for the Nazis, or the German citizens who volunteered for the soviets or allies... They accurately assessed who their greater enemy was: Their own governments.
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Also there's both overt Western involvement that mainstream media portrays as good and proper, along with covert Western involvement, without which the conflict probably wouldn't have happened, that won't be talked about in mainstream sources for decades, if at all.
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That is also my perspective.
Except why condemn the cynical western backers in this particular case? For all we know they might have the same assessment; surely it’s unreasonable to expect them to broadcast it in their media right as they supply Ukraine with armaments and promises
The amount of otherwise reasonable people who seem to have drunk the coolaid in earnest gives me a pause too, though
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There were very big or even huge (500k+) anti-war rallies, especially outside of the US before the war started, notably in Uk and Italy.
But inside US, very few pundits were openly against the war. Largest demo was cca 100k.
Exiled Online did an accounting of pundits, it turned out practically everyone who was wrong either nothing happened or got promoted, pundits who called it correctly were mostly fired.
Not sure about public intellectuals at the time. I'd be that it was similar though to a lesser degree. After all, that was a war against brown people, a totem. Now we're talking war against Russia, which symbolises hateful white man's past in many ways. I believe it's worse now - everything is aligned in favor cheerleading.
Well that's terrifying if that's the trendline and the anti-war movement was that strong recently... certainly ups the odds of a world war if that's the case.
Why would westerners protest this war? It's painless, morally and geopolitically easily justifiable. You casually cheer on nukes and civil war, why would you be squeamish over a little proxy special operation, especially if, as you say, both sides are terrible.
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