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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 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?
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.
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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