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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26385 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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There is no such thing as popular will. Nor is there any such thing as the people, of Ukraine or anywhere else.

Zelensky is a fairly standard if aesthetically eccentric eastern european politician who will do whatever it takes to stay alive and in power, in that order.

To that end, and like every politician, he has to reach an equilibrium between the interests of national and international powers and factions, which leads him, like every politician, to seemingly contradictory policy and criticism for said policy. You should expect contradiction, since it's inherent to the exercise of power.

If you want to get an analytical answer as to why Zelensky makes a decision and if that was effective for his goals, you need to look at those actions in the context of interacting with those surrounding established factions and powers. Not ask theological questions such as "what do the people of Ukraine want".

There is no such thing as popular will. Nor is there any such thing as the people, of Ukraine or anywhere else.

What do you call the 1991 independence vote in which 84% of people voted and 92% of those voters voted for independence?

A justification ritual.

Only someone who believes in the metaphysical claim that votes can reveal the will of the people feels bound by them. Since I understand the mechanics of democracy, I believe no such thing. People can be made to vote for anything.

Voting is a justification ritual. The question is if that's only what it is.

What, in your world, does it mean Ukrainians to overwhelmingly vote in favor independence? Is the concept incoherent because Ukrainians, like all others, are not collectively anything?

What, in your world, does it mean Ukrainians to overwhelmingly vote in favor independence?

What it means is that Ukrainian nationalists, a small organized minority with preexisting goals that had existed in various forms and been trying to get independence by any means since the later 1910s finally managed, without the imminent threat of Soviet retaliation looming anymore, to hold enough of the levers of power to enact it and arranged for a ritual to announce that they could do it. Since they were ideologically democrats, this took the form of a vote.

I do not see the vote as instrumental to their ability to enact their agenda, only as a form of triumph.

In this sense it it wrong to see the voters (be they or be they not the "people") as significant actors. Had the nationalists obtained their nation through other means, such as through previously favored fascist vanguardism, they would have simply organized a different form of triumph than a vote.

But Ukraine didn't become independent because people voted on it. People voted on it because independence had been secured.

a small organized minority with preexisting goals

How do you square "small organized minority" with the overwhelming numbers on the independence side of the vote?

Because I don't believe casting a vote once the deed is done is the same as doing the difficult political maneuvers to make it happen in the first place. Not every Ukrainian was Leonid Kravchuk, who specifically convinced the communist parliament and refused to go the way of Soviet reforms.

There is no such thing as popular will. Nor is there any such thing as the people, of Ukraine or anywhere else.

What utter Thatcherite nonsense.

Remember September 11? Did Americans go "Huh, something happened over there in New York? How about that, good thing it's got nothing to do with me"? Or did they go "OH YOU WANT A FIGHT BOY, LET'S GO"?

Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?

The media demanded a war neocons had wanted for a while and they got it. Had the elite of the time been radically against the intelligence community instead of for it they probably would have asked for the dismantling of the CIA and got it on also perfectly justifiable grounds.

"Americans" are perfectly unable to "want" anything because they are a category made up by a civil religion whose "will" is tied to the interests of institutions. They "want" what the NYT says they want and if they do not are ignored and marginalized.

Individual Americans may have wanted a whole lot, including a full investigation of those events, but they only got what they were told they wanted and what few they could organize to make happen. Because that is how power works.

Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?

I don't know if you're old enough to remember that day, but...before. Absolutely 100% before.

Just because you have a nice, coherent model of how society works that fits neatly in your head, that doesn't mean your model is correct.

To be sure. But I was alive then and it coheres with my own experiences.

From what I could gather then people were in a haze of confusion and horror for a long time and what crystallized it into what it became was Dubya's legitimately great speech. I'd be willing to stake a lot on the idea that had he spun it a different way than it being an attack on freedom itself the war in Irak may never have happened.

Unfortunately we can't test that. But the reason I believe in my model is that things as shocking as 9/11 I've seen happen elsewhere in countries where a war on terror wasn't in the interests of the ruling class, and those somehow failed to materialize the will for such a thing despite clearly fertile ground.

People wanted to know who was responsible the day of.

Unfortunately we can't test that. But the reason I believe in my model is that things as shocking as 9/11 I've seen happen elsewhere in countries where a war on terror wasn't in the interests of the ruling class, and those somehow failed to materialize the will for such a thing despite clearly fertile ground.

Most other countries cannot do what the US did.

Many felt great emotion, who ended up to blame was, is, and will always be up to who holds real power. I bet you could even convince Americans to turn on themselves if CNN kept saying 9/11 was their own fault insistently enough and you had hard power. Mao did that shit many times.

I'll reiterate that Saddam would probably have lived were it not for specific neocon interests. And I don't see how you can reconcile that with the theory of popular sovereignty unless you take the people for a naive mob led around by the nose, which circles you indubitably to my position.

If this was just a huge tantrum of the people, how come it always lands on elite designated targets, and how can you claim the people are a meaningful political entity and not just a mob?

I continue to be unsure of how much you remember, but the invasion of Iraq took place almost two years after 9/11, with a lot of focus on things other than that event to justify the invasion to the people, like WMDs.

The invasion of Afghanistan took place a month after 9/11 and that absolutely was an expression of outrage by the country.

It was an expression of pictures of Osama on TV is what it was. And the fact replacing those pictures with those of some other dude who was very questionably related didn't dull the effect any is what I'm pointing at.

But you're not addressing the core of my argument any here because I don't think you can. Other pictures could have been put there by people who actually hold power, and that's what matters.

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