Русский корабль - иди нахуй

[atomheartbevo 89771]

10 hours ago, statsman said:

Is the stealing of toilet bowls and washing machines a real thing? Because toilets are heavy and brittle, and really not that expensive. It’s the city water hookup that’s the issue, usually. 

It wouldn't let me edit the above, but Zelenskyy even addressed them stealing toilets:

The war will be over when Russian soldiers either leave or we drive them out - address by the President of Ukraine — Official website of the President of Ukraine

Quote

To end the war is to end your state's aggression. Even when your missiles and drones are not hitting our cities, the terror in the occupied territories continues. You don't give Ukrainians any respite. People are tortured, electrocuted, raped. This continues every day while your soldiers are on our soil.

And the war will be over when your soldiers either leave or we drive them out.  So, let them take the toilet bowls - they'll need them on the road - and go back home. Behind our border of 1991.

 

[Chad Fuck 17713]

12 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Oh it was definitely a thing, and it was truly pathetic how much they were looting and what they were looting.  Early on, they were constantly being seen openly stealing stuff.  We ended up with memes like this:

And photos like this:

And photos like this (a Ukrainian even recognized some of their possessions):

Or them mailing their stolen stuff back home to Russia:

I had a buddy who was involved with peacekeeping in the Balkans in the 90s.  He said they'd watch the Russians fly in an Il-76, and just drive on whatever western vehicles they could find.  He said they area for miles around must've been picked clean of Western European cars.  BMWs, Mercedes, Skoda, you name it, all heading to Russia.  

[Chad Fuck 17713]

And don't forget the stolen John Deeres.

Quote

Russian troops stole $5M worth of farm vehicles from a John Deere dealership, which remotely locked the thieves out of the equipment

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troops-locked-out-of-stolen-john-deere-farm-equipment-2022-5

They're modern mongol horde level rapers, pillagers, thieves.  

[KYHorn 17132]

 

 

 

[KYHorn 17132]

 

 

 

[BamaATL 16593]

11 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

I had a buddy who was involved with peacekeeping in the Balkans in the 90s.  He said they'd watch the Russians fly in an Il-76, and just drive on whatever western vehicles they could find.  He said they area for miles around must've been picked clean of Western European cars.  BMWs, Mercedes, Skoda, you name it, all heading to Russia.  

The washing machines I kind of get, those are expensive and luxurious to a group that desires to steal toilets.  However, stealing toilets is just unreal.   Most toilets we have here are ultimately produced in China for about $10.  Home Depot and Lowes sell a different versions but they are both retail for around $99.  What is truly pathetic is that the so called 2nd ranked "super power" has soldiers stealing these; because they must be genuinely valuable to them.  Now imagine if we sent our army anywhere and something worth as little as $100 was enticing enough to get them to forget their missions and tasks at hand to focus on stealing them.  It's completely worthy of ridicule.  

All that having been said, there are two golden marketing opportunities for washing machine companies and toilet makers once this over.  Be the official rebuilding source of either product to the people Ukraine and use new anti-theft features in a comic way.  

[InkaUtexas 26029]

18 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

I had a buddy who was involved with peacekeeping in the Balkans in the 90s.  He said they'd watch the Russians fly in an Il-76, and just drive on whatever western vehicles they could find.  He said they area for miles around must've been picked clean of Western European cars.  BMWs, Mercedes, Skoda, you name it, all heading to Russia.  

Yep, and their sectors tended to be poor with little patrolling. Go to Northeast Bosnia and it was destroyed with very little reconstruction going on. Russian APC's just parked on the roads. And this is post Minsk agreement so for Russia to say we have never worked with them since the collapse of the Warsaw Pack is BS. Here is a short article on their involvement in peacekeeping operations. 

https://www.nato.int/docu/presskit/010219/brocheng.pdf

[atomheartbevo 89771]

16 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

 

 

And to the surprise of many, 43% of former South Africans living in the US would totally buy twitter for $44 billion so they could read Grimes' DMs.

[956 Worldwide 34742]

2 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Yep, and their sectors tended to be poor with little patrolling. Go to Northeast Bosnia and it was destroyed with very little reconstruction going on. Russian APC's just parked on the roads. And this is post Minsk agreement so for Russia to say we have never worked with them since the collapse of the Warsaw Pack is BS. Here is a short article on their involvement in peacekeeping operations. 

https://www.nato.int/docu/presskit/010219/brocheng.pdf

If  Russia didn’t have nuclear weapons we’d have intervened and this war would have looked like NATO vs. Yugoslavia, 1995. That’s what’s so damn frustrating about the whole thing.

[SmokeyTheBear 5562]

16 minutes ago, BamaATL said:

The washing machines I kind of get, those are expensive and luxurious to a group that desires to steal toilets.  However, stealing toilets is just unreal.   Most toilets we have here are ultimately produced in China for about $10.  Home Depot and Lowes sell a different versions but they are both retail for around $99.  What is truly pathetic is that the so called 2nd ranked "super power" has soldiers stealing these; because they must be genuinely valuable to them.  Now imagine if we sent our army anywhere and something worth as little as $100 was enticing enough to get them to forget their missions and tasks at hand to focus on stealing them.  It's completely worthy of ridicule.  

All that having been said, there are two golden marketing opportunities for washing machine companies and toilet makers once this over.  Be the official rebuilding source of either product to the people Ukraine and use new anti-theft features in a comic way.  

Let alone the size/weight to value prop. You are in war and you have dedicated a lot of risk and resources to something trivial in the west. 

[Nivek 16953]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

Oh it was definitely a thing, and it was truly pathetic how much they were looting and what they were looting.  Early on, they were constantly being seen openly stealing stuff.  We ended up with memes like this:

 

 

Pictures like this where the metal is all buckled, dented, warped, and the crooked variable-sized "reactive" charges really should underscore how incredibly shitty their equipment is and how shitty it is cared for.  

[MissingInAction 25145]

11 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

As someone who remembers us running Hodges Mitchell up the gut for an average of .0001 yds per carry against Stanford….TOO SOON.

God damn it.

[The Dog 44073]

Interesting:

 

[ABSR 5321]

Interesting article Meduza put out in their weekend report.  From a Russian Sociologist about Putin and Russian mindset.  Interesting and depressing in his discussion of Putin and Russian mindset, which is very different from how we view the world/war/future. 

Net is Putin will never stop (in Ukraine and in wanting to invade other Eastern European countries), and that the Russian people's mindset is to eat a shit sandwich from whatever dictator/tyrant they have and to blame everyone else for their misery.

Putin will continue forward as he thinks the war has long been going on for Russia to gain its ascendancy and that means invading NATO countries he believes are rightfully Russian once he is done with Ukraine.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say?utm_source=email&utm_medium=briefly&utm_campaign=2023-02-25

 

 

Spoiler

Interview by Margarita Liutova. Abridged translation by Emily Laskin.

Sociologist Grigory Yudin was one of just a few Russian experts who believed in February 2022 that a military clash between Russia and Ukraine was inevitable. In an article published just two days before the invasion, Yudin predicted that a major war loomed in the near future, that Russians would follow the Kremlin in blaming the West, and that sanctions would do nothing to stop Putin — all of which came true. In February 2023, Meduza special correspondent Margarita Liutova spoke to Yudin about why Putin needs a “forever war,” and what might ensure the emergence of a broad anti-war movement in Russia.

 

There’s a widespread view about contemporary Russian politics that says war is an endless process for Putin, and Putin himself seemed to confirm the idea in his recent Federal Assembly address: He said nothing about how Russia will win and what will happen after that. Do you think that Putin’s plan is really eternal war?

Yes, of course, the war is now forever. It has no goals that can be achieved and lead to its end. It continues simply because [in Putin’s imagination], they are enemies and they want to kill us, and we want to kill them. For Putin, it’s an existential clash with an enemy set on destroying him. 

There should be no illusions: while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war will not end. It will only expand. The size of the Russian army is increasing rapidly, the economy is reorienting toward guns, and education is turning into a propaganda tool and war preparation. They’re preparing the country for a long and difficult war.

And then it’s obviously impossible for Putin to win?

It’s absolutely impossible. No one has set any goal [for the war] or offered any definition of victory.

So, can we consider the point to be the preservation of Vladimir Putin’s authority?

They’re almost the same thing. He thinks of his rule as constant war. Putin and the people who surround him told us long ago that there’s a war against us. Some preferred not to mark their words, but they seriously think that they’ve been at war for a long time. It’s just that now this war has entered such an aggressive phase, and there’s obviously no exit. War itself is normal, in their worldview. Stop thinking that peace is the natural state, and you’ll see the situation through their eyes. As the governor of Khanty-Mansi [Natalya Komarova] said, “War is a friend.”

On February 22, 2022, you published an article on openDemocracy, in which you described an upcoming major war and Putin’s dismissive attitude toward the sanctions that Western countries imposed in response. In the second half of the article, you argued that “the war with Ukraine will be the most senseless of all the wars in our history.” Do you think Russian society has started to realize this over the past year?

No, in my view, it hasn’t. It was clear to many, many people from the very beginning, but since then that category has barely grown. In Russia today, you find this powerful feeling, and it’s one of those rare occasions when Vladimir Putin connects with a significant part of society. It’s far from everyone who shares his wild theories, but he does connect with people. Even more importantly, he produces this emotion himself. And that emotion is resentment — monstrous, endless resentment. Nothing can mollify this resentment. It’s impossible to imagine what could compensate for it. It doesn’t allow people to think about establishing any kind of productive relationships with other countries.

You know, it’s like a young child who gets deeply offended and then hurts those around him. The harm grows greater and greater, and at some point, he seriously begins destroying others’ lives, as well as his own. But the child isn’t thinking about that; he isn’t thinking that he somehow needs to build relationships.

I think that the feeling of resentment, which has been overflowing lately in Russia, is supported at a very high level, and we haven’t yet reached the point where someone might realize that we [Russians] have normal, legitimate interests, and we need to reach them by building relationships with other countries in the right way.

There’s a good saying in Russia: “Water is borne on the shoulders of the offended,” [meaning, roughly, that a grudge is a heavy burden]. At some point, we’ll understand that this resentment works against us, that we’re harming ourselves because of it. But at the moment, too many of us want to be offended.

 

Whom do Vladimir Putin and Russian society resent? The whole world? The West? The U.S.?

[They resent] a world order that seems unfair, and, accordingly, whoever takes responsibility for being “superior” in this world order, meaning the United States of America. 

I always remember something Putin said in mid-2021. He said, completely unprovoked, that there’s no happiness in life. It’s a strong statement for a political leader, who of course doesn’t have to bring people into heaven but should in theory make their lives better. 

But it’s as if he says: “There’s no happiness in life. The world is a bad, unjust, difficult place, where the only way to exist is to struggle constantly, to fight, and, at the outer limit, kill.” 

Resentment of the outside world is deeply rooted in Russia, and it gets projected onto the U.S., which seems responsible for the world. At some point, the United States really did take responsibility for the world — not completely successfully. And we see that the resentment I’m talking about is definitely not only in Russia (where it of course exists in a catastrophic, horrible form).

A significant part of the world has well-founded complaints about the current world order, and against the U.S., which took responsibility, became a hegemon, and has benefited from the world order in many ways. We see that parts of the world that are engulfed by this resentment are more understanding toward Vladimir Putin. 

I wouldn’t say that this understanding becomes support, simply because Putin offers nothing [to the world]. Putin wants to do the same things for which he criticizes the United States. So, supporting him is difficult, but many want to join in the resentment.

Is resentment rooted in Russian society from before Putin, in the nineties? Or has it been cultivated under Putin?

There are some grounds for resentment [in Russian society]. It’s related to the instructive role that the U.S. and some parts of Western Europe took on. Ideologically, [that role] was framed in terms of modernization theory, which said that there are developed countries and developing countries, and the developed countries — kindly and supportively — will teach the developing ones: “Guys, you should be arranged like so.” Generally speaking, no one likes to be lectured. Especially a big country that has its own imperial past.

In fact, the situation that developed in the 1990s was much more complicated. [After the collapse of the USSR,] Russia was invited to join a whole host of key international clubs, and Russia influenced decisions on key global questions. But that instructive tone [in relation to Russia] was there. It was the result of a profound ideological mistake: In the conditions of the socialist project’s collapse, it seemed [to many] that there was only one correct path, the famous “end of history.” So, there were preconditions for resentment, but there were also preconditions for other emotions.

There were [also] many competing narratives [about the meaning of the USSR’s collapse for its citizens]. One held that it was a people’s revolution, a glorious moment in Russian history and the history of other nations, because they managed to take control of a hateful, tyrannical regime. That conception, of course, doesn’t lead to resentment.

But Putin chose resentment. In part, probably, because of his own personal qualities. And resentment is contagious. It’s a convenient emotion: you always feel, first of all, in the right, and second, you feel undeservedly trampled on.

Resentment and Russian culture

• ‘We can do it again’ The invention and reinvention of an ‘antifascist-fascist’ slogan

You’ve said more than once that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. What exactly do you anticipate? Moldova, the Baltic states, a self-destructive war with the U.S.?

His worldview sees no borders. This formula has become a practically official line: Russia ends nowhere. This is the standard definition of an empire because an empire recognizes no borders. 

I’ll remind everyone of [Putin’s] ultimatum [to the U.S. and NATO] in December of 2021 — it’s crystal clear, it says in plain text that all of Eastern Europe is Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. How that will be worked out, whether it means a formal loss of sovereignty or not, what difference does it make? And this zone without a doubt includes East Germany, just because Putin has personal memories of it. It’s really hard for me to imagine that he truly thinks of that territory as not his. Putin definitely intends to restore the Warsaw Pact zone [the former Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet influence].

 

I often hear, “It’s irrational. It’s senseless. There’s no possibility of this happening!” Not long ago, people said exactly the same thing about Ukraine. They said the same thing even more recently about Moldova, and now we’re hearing that the leadership of Moldova, Ukraine, and the U.S. believe that Moldova is in grave danger. We’ve already seen that Moldova was figured into the plans of the current military operation; it just hasn’t gotten there yet.

Russia’s general strategy is something like this: let’s bite off a piece, then that piece will be recognized as legitimate, and in the next phase, on the basis of that recognition, we can take something else.

[In this strategy’s logic,] we’ll bite off, roughly, eastern Ukraine, with the help of some kind of truce. Soon, we’ll start to hear voices from Europe, saying, “Well, it was their land, after all. Everyone agreed, it’s fine.” Well, wait a minute. If it’s “their” land — Russian land — because people there speak Russian, then what about eastern Estonia? You might say, “But Estonia is in NATO!” But will NATO fight for Estonia? Putin is absolutely sure that if the durability of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty [the article ensuring collective defense] is tested at the right moment, NATO will fall apart.

To be clear, I don’t see what I’m talking about as the likeliest possibility. I’m describing Putin’s strategy, but Putin doesn’t rule the world. He’ll get as much as he’s allowed to get. But a scenario like that isn’t impossible to imagine. 

It’s easy to imagine that Putin and his team held such views on, say, February 24, 2022. But a year has passed, and the West has not collapsed and in fact is providing Ukraine with appreciable support. Could this year’s events, including the results of the Russian military campaign, have influenced the perceptions you just described?

They could, and they definitely did. The whole year showed [Putin] that, since the West has seized onto Ukraine, it clearly indicates that it’s a key region and [the West] was planning an attack on him precisely from there. Apart from that, [in Putin’s view] it’s good that this year’s problems came to light before the real war, which Russian leadership considers inevitable. It would be much worse [according to their logic] to take such an army into a [future] big war. So, everything that happens strengthens Putin, in his own eyes.

They’ve been preparing this war for many years. It would be strange if they went into it with only one plan. [Putin’s logic is like this:] “Yeah, things didn’t all work out according to the best scenario — no problem, we’ll press on. We’re prepared to shed as much blood as necessary on this, and they’re not.”

I’m not saying that such tactics will be successful. In fact, I think that Putin’s logic dooms him to defeat, and that he subconsciously wants to lose. The question is how many people will die before that happens. But if we want to make predictions, we have to understand the logic that [people in power in Russia] are operating under.

Do you think anything could make Putin doubt his own perceptions about the world?

No. Nothing. 

When we discussed the topic of this conversation before the interview, you commented on the current state of Russian society, its atomization and blocked collective action, and you noted that a conversation like this can actually strengthen the feeling of learned helplessness, which you didn’t want to do. Are there ways to talk to society that don’t feed this sense of helplessness?

If the main emotion in Russia is resentment, then the main affect, on which everything is built now, is fear. It’s existential fear — fear of a specific person’s wrath, or fear of war, or an abstract fear of chaos. 

Fear is beaten out by hope. That’s the opposite affect. People need to be given hope. In this sense, the absolutely understandable, well-founded accusations [against the people of Russia] are politically shortsighted. Again: they’re understandable, well-founded, and legitimate, but they’re politically shortsighted. 

The question is how to give people hope in this situation. Hope is related to a demonstration that everything can be different, that Russia can be organized differently. The truth is that, until [Russians] realize they’re at a dead end, there’s not much motivation to listen to such things, because they’re scary. It’s connected to a challenge to the status quo. And that’s threatening enough to convince people not to get involved.

In Russia, any normative discourse has been snuffed out. It’s been difficult for a very long time to ask how society should be organized, how to do it fairly, honestly, and well. A few years ago, respondents [to a sociological survey I ran] responded, “In Russia? There’s no way.” This is the suppression of normative discourse, but there will be a demand for it, inevitably, when people realize they’re at a dead end. In this situation, it’s important that people have hope.

You’ve presented the discourse that is most often heard regarding Russian culture right now: that it’s imperial, that it birthed and nurtured a slave mentality…

I think that Russian culture has a large imperial element, and the time has come to deal with it. The collapse of an empire is a good moment to do that. Will it extinguish Russian culture? No. It might not even extinguish the works of any given author. Can you find imperial ideas in a given author’s work? You can, and you must. Why the need either to reject completely or accept completely? You’re not marrying anybody and pledging a vow of unconditional love.

Culture develops through reworking itself, including through criticizing itself. But the criticism can’t be a complete rejection. 

Culture itself provides the positions from which to criticize it. There’s nothing demeaning in this; there’s no problem in seeing [imperial ideas] in Russian culture, isolating it, and examining how it’s related to other elements. 

Can you give an example of a recipe for wisdom and hope from within Russian culture?

Well, the classic critic of imperialism in the history of political thought is Vladimir Lenin. It was Lenin who spoke about “Great Russian chauvinism” in relation to Ukraine, and he attacked imperialism in other countries. Today, in universities all over the world, the study of imperialism begins with Lenin.

Russia also gave global political thought the ability to think beyond the state: Mikhail Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and in some regards also Lenin. The list goes on. Russia has not given rise to one significant statist or centralist thinker. All ideas about centralization in Russia are imported. Ideas about freedom, mutual aid, and dignity run in the other direction. 

What do you think about the divide between those who have left Russia and those who have stayed?

It seems to me that all of us, and our country, are in trouble. It would be good if everyone who’s now outside of Russia thought about how to help those who are in Russia. And if everyone in Russia thought about how to help those who are suffering far away. We’ll get through it, but we can only get through it together. Only together.

 

[Trey3216 15350]

11 hours ago, BamaATL said:

On of the long term problems with propaganda is that at some point there has been so much of it done that no one knows what to believe, from any source.  We know that while watched by a good chuck of their population, state tv is not trusted by the Russian population.  Which is interesting considering that we know its widely consumed.  Typically, when something is on tv that I know is outright bullshit, I either mock it, or change the channel.  Russians apparently don't this, I suppose they consume media in the same way we watch good old fashioned rassling, we know its bullshit but we are entertained so whatever.  That might be enough to drive people away, but now we get to the insidious part, Putin has people infiltrate as much other parts of the media as possible, and it would seem, the crazier the stories the better.  It's sort of genius in and evil way, if you make everything look to be complete bullshit, who knows what to believe?  

You can line up bodies with brains blown out, guts hanging out, etc for miles and film it and send it to Russia and someone would spin the story to be that Aliens from our distant past were in league with the Ukrainians, digging for treasure off the coast of Canada, and building pyramids in Kyiv and it might well captivate the public there.  Call it History Channel Russia.  Well I forget hookers and trampolines, but you get the point.  

Our collective access to knowledge has never been greater.  However, our bombardment by way of bullshit has also never been higher, and the truth is, no human is completely immune to the bullshit.  How much varies human to human, but suffice to say our least educated are more prone to buying it, and Russia has a lot of that.  (Truth be told even educated people frequently go down these rabbit holes).  Maybe it speaks to the fact that humans just naturally love a good story, and those that are skilled in telling stories, true or not, hook people with oration, visual art, etc.  If those skilled story tellers ply their collective wears for insidious purposes, they are going to get a lot of people to believe.  

 

I wouldn't call it knowledge.  Our collective access to "information" has never been greater.  Sometimes too much information is less efficient, because the ability to separate good information from bad information becomes so blurred that it causes information paralysis.  "Paralysis of Analysis" is absolutely the case these days.  

[RDCanecutter 26461]

12 hours ago, statsman said:

Is the stealing of toilet bowls and washing machines a real thing? Because toilets are heavy and brittle, and really not that expensive. It’s the city water hookup that’s the issue, usually. 
 
Washing machines- those mfers are heavy as hell. How in the hell are these idiots getting them home?

 
Am I missing something? Do the RA grifters have trucks to get these articles back, and maybe they’re paying the RA troops $50 each for the toilets and washers, or something, and they’re selling them on the black market/Ivan’sList back home?

My guess is the front line troops were swapping the loot to the thieving support personnel in exchange for booze and warm clothes. Not as if they can drop them off with the thieving support personnel to "mail" them back home. The photos we saw early on of guys who'd retreated into Belarus FedExing loot home were probably an exception.

Hell, at this point the thieving support personnel are probably almost done mining abandoned rear-area buildings for loot, and anything closer to the front is shot to shit.

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

14 minutes ago, Trey3216 said:

I wouldn't call it knowledge.  Our collective access to "information" has never been greater.  Sometimes too much information is less efficient, because the ability to separate good information from bad information becomes so blurred that it causes information paralysis.  "Paralysis of Analysis" is absolutely the case these days.  

Nah man.

There is a large portion of our society that won’t even consider (and often times never even see) information that challenges their beliefs.

They aren’t consuming various pieces of information and trying and failing to process all of it due to too much info.

They're doing the opposite. Blindly accepting information (often times not even rooted in reality) while wholly rejecting anything that challenges their truth.

[Trey3216 15350]

2 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

Nah man.

There is a large portion of our society that won’t even consider (and often times never even see) information that challenges their beliefs.

They aren’t consuming various pieces of information and trying and failing to process all of it due to too much info.

They're doing the opposite. Blindly accepting information (often times not even rooted in reality) while wholly rejecting anything that challenges their truth.

Yeah man...

It's the ability to consume endless amounts of information that supports confirmation bias that allows people to do exactly what you are saying.  They are incapable or unwilling to see the other information and assess that it is superior to that which they have decided was correct.  

 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

5 minutes ago, Trey3216 said:

Yeah man...

It's the ability to consume endless amounts of information that supports confirmation bias that allows people to do exactly what you are saying.  They are incapable or unwilling to see the other information and assess that it is superior to that which they have decided was correct.  

 

But people aren’t having a problem separating “good information” versus “bad information”. In fact they’re incredibly efficient at it.

The problem is how those ideas are defined. Namely, good info is stuff that confirms their viewpoint while bad info is anything that challenges it.

We’re in a post-truth world, embrace your narrative!

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

But nevermind that tangent, let's get back to talking about CHINA!

[InkaUtexas 26029]

11 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

But nevermind that tangent, let's get back to talking about CHINA!

And UT Football. 

[InkaUtexas 26029]

35 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

My guess is the front line troops were swapping the loot to the thieving support personnel in exchange for booze and warm clothes. Not as if they can drop them off with the thieving support personnel to "mail" them back home. The photos we saw early on of guys who'd retreated into Belarus FedExing loot home were probably an exception.

Hell, at this point the thieving support personnel are probably almost done mining abandoned rear-area buildings for loot, and anything closer to the front is shot to shit.

Fucking REMF's. 

[956 Worldwide 34742]

1 hour ago, ABSR said:

Interesting article Meduza put out in their weekend report.  From a Russian Sociologist about Putin and Russian mindset.  Interesting and depressing in his discussion of Putin and Russian mindset, which is very different from how we view the world/war/future. 

Net is Putin will never stop (in Ukraine and in wanting to invade other Eastern European countries), and that the Russian people's mindset is to eat a shit sandwich from whatever dictator/tyrant they have and to blame everyone else for their misery.

Putin will continue forward as he thinks the war has long been going on for Russia to gain its ascendancy and that means invading NATO countries he believes are rightfully Russian once he is done with Ukraine.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say?utm_source=email&utm_medium=briefly&utm_campaign=2023-02-25

 

 

  Hide contents

Interview by Margarita Liutova. Abridged translation by Emily Laskin.

Sociologist Grigory Yudin was one of just a few Russian experts who believed in February 2022 that a military clash between Russia and Ukraine was inevitable. In an article published just two days before the invasion, Yudin predicted that a major war loomed in the near future, that Russians would follow the Kremlin in blaming the West, and that sanctions would do nothing to stop Putin — all of which came true. In February 2023, Meduza special correspondent Margarita Liutova spoke to Yudin about why Putin needs a “forever war,” and what might ensure the emergence of a broad anti-war movement in Russia.

 

There’s a widespread view about contemporary Russian politics that says war is an endless process for Putin, and Putin himself seemed to confirm the idea in his recent Federal Assembly address: He said nothing about how Russia will win and what will happen after that. Do you think that Putin’s plan is really eternal war?

Yes, of course, the war is now forever. It has no goals that can be achieved and lead to its end. It continues simply because [in Putin’s imagination], they are enemies and they want to kill us, and we want to kill them. For Putin, it’s an existential clash with an enemy set on destroying him. 

There should be no illusions: while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war will not end. It will only expand. The size of the Russian army is increasing rapidly, the economy is reorienting toward guns, and education is turning into a propaganda tool and war preparation. They’re preparing the country for a long and difficult war.

And then it’s obviously impossible for Putin to win?

It’s absolutely impossible. No one has set any goal [for the war] or offered any definition of victory.

So, can we consider the point to be the preservation of Vladimir Putin’s authority?

They’re almost the same thing. He thinks of his rule as constant war. Putin and the people who surround him told us long ago that there’s a war against us. Some preferred not to mark their words, but they seriously think that they’ve been at war for a long time. It’s just that now this war has entered such an aggressive phase, and there’s obviously no exit. War itself is normal, in their worldview. Stop thinking that peace is the natural state, and you’ll see the situation through their eyes. As the governor of Khanty-Mansi [Natalya Komarova] said, “War is a friend.”

On February 22, 2022, you published an article on openDemocracy, in which you described an upcoming major war and Putin’s dismissive attitude toward the sanctions that Western countries imposed in response. In the second half of the article, you argued that “the war with Ukraine will be the most senseless of all the wars in our history.” Do you think Russian society has started to realize this over the past year?

No, in my view, it hasn’t. It was clear to many, many people from the very beginning, but since then that category has barely grown. In Russia today, you find this powerful feeling, and it’s one of those rare occasions when Vladimir Putin connects with a significant part of society. It’s far from everyone who shares his wild theories, but he does connect with people. Even more importantly, he produces this emotion himself. And that emotion is resentment — monstrous, endless resentment. Nothing can mollify this resentment. It’s impossible to imagine what could compensate for it. It doesn’t allow people to think about establishing any kind of productive relationships with other countries.

You know, it’s like a young child who gets deeply offended and then hurts those around him. The harm grows greater and greater, and at some point, he seriously begins destroying others’ lives, as well as his own. But the child isn’t thinking about that; he isn’t thinking that he somehow needs to build relationships.

I think that the feeling of resentment, which has been overflowing lately in Russia, is supported at a very high level, and we haven’t yet reached the point where someone might realize that we [Russians] have normal, legitimate interests, and we need to reach them by building relationships with other countries in the right way.

There’s a good saying in Russia: “Water is borne on the shoulders of the offended,” [meaning, roughly, that a grudge is a heavy burden]. At some point, we’ll understand that this resentment works against us, that we’re harming ourselves because of it. But at the moment, too many of us want to be offended.

 

Whom do Vladimir Putin and Russian society resent? The whole world? The West? The U.S.?

[They resent] a world order that seems unfair, and, accordingly, whoever takes responsibility for being “superior” in this world order, meaning the United States of America. 

I always remember something Putin said in mid-2021. He said, completely unprovoked, that there’s no happiness in life. It’s a strong statement for a political leader, who of course doesn’t have to bring people into heaven but should in theory make their lives better. 

But it’s as if he says: “There’s no happiness in life. The world is a bad, unjust, difficult place, where the only way to exist is to struggle constantly, to fight, and, at the outer limit, kill.” 

Resentment of the outside world is deeply rooted in Russia, and it gets projected onto the U.S., which seems responsible for the world. At some point, the United States really did take responsibility for the world — not completely successfully. And we see that the resentment I’m talking about is definitely not only in Russia (where it of course exists in a catastrophic, horrible form).

A significant part of the world has well-founded complaints about the current world order, and against the U.S., which took responsibility, became a hegemon, and has benefited from the world order in many ways. We see that parts of the world that are engulfed by this resentment are more understanding toward Vladimir Putin. 

I wouldn’t say that this understanding becomes support, simply because Putin offers nothing [to the world]. Putin wants to do the same things for which he criticizes the United States. So, supporting him is difficult, but many want to join in the resentment.

Is resentment rooted in Russian society from before Putin, in the nineties? Or has it been cultivated under Putin?

There are some grounds for resentment [in Russian society]. It’s related to the instructive role that the U.S. and some parts of Western Europe took on. Ideologically, [that role] was framed in terms of modernization theory, which said that there are developed countries and developing countries, and the developed countries — kindly and supportively — will teach the developing ones: “Guys, you should be arranged like so.” Generally speaking, no one likes to be lectured. Especially a big country that has its own imperial past.

In fact, the situation that developed in the 1990s was much more complicated. [After the collapse of the USSR,] Russia was invited to join a whole host of key international clubs, and Russia influenced decisions on key global questions. But that instructive tone [in relation to Russia] was there. It was the result of a profound ideological mistake: In the conditions of the socialist project’s collapse, it seemed [to many] that there was only one correct path, the famous “end of history.” So, there were preconditions for resentment, but there were also preconditions for other emotions.

There were [also] many competing narratives [about the meaning of the USSR’s collapse for its citizens]. One held that it was a people’s revolution, a glorious moment in Russian history and the history of other nations, because they managed to take control of a hateful, tyrannical regime. That conception, of course, doesn’t lead to resentment.

But Putin chose resentment. In part, probably, because of his own personal qualities. And resentment is contagious. It’s a convenient emotion: you always feel, first of all, in the right, and second, you feel undeservedly trampled on.

Resentment and Russian culture

• ‘We can do it again’ The invention and reinvention of an ‘antifascist-fascist’ slogan

You’ve said more than once that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. What exactly do you anticipate? Moldova, the Baltic states, a self-destructive war with the U.S.?

His worldview sees no borders. This formula has become a practically official line: Russia ends nowhere. This is the standard definition of an empire because an empire recognizes no borders. 

I’ll remind everyone of [Putin’s] ultimatum [to the U.S. and NATO] in December of 2021 — it’s crystal clear, it says in plain text that all of Eastern Europe is Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. How that will be worked out, whether it means a formal loss of sovereignty or not, what difference does it make? And this zone without a doubt includes East Germany, just because Putin has personal memories of it. It’s really hard for me to imagine that he truly thinks of that territory as not his. Putin definitely intends to restore the Warsaw Pact zone [the former Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet influence].

 

I often hear, “It’s irrational. It’s senseless. There’s no possibility of this happening!” Not long ago, people said exactly the same thing about Ukraine. They said the same thing even more recently about Moldova, and now we’re hearing that the leadership of Moldova, Ukraine, and the U.S. believe that Moldova is in grave danger. We’ve already seen that Moldova was figured into the plans of the current military operation; it just hasn’t gotten there yet.

Russia’s general strategy is something like this: let’s bite off a piece, then that piece will be recognized as legitimate, and in the next phase, on the basis of that recognition, we can take something else.

[In this strategy’s logic,] we’ll bite off, roughly, eastern Ukraine, with the help of some kind of truce. Soon, we’ll start to hear voices from Europe, saying, “Well, it was their land, after all. Everyone agreed, it’s fine.” Well, wait a minute. If it’s “their” land — Russian land — because people there speak Russian, then what about eastern Estonia? You might say, “But Estonia is in NATO!” But will NATO fight for Estonia? Putin is absolutely sure that if the durability of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty [the article ensuring collective defense] is tested at the right moment, NATO will fall apart.

To be clear, I don’t see what I’m talking about as the likeliest possibility. I’m describing Putin’s strategy, but Putin doesn’t rule the world. He’ll get as much as he’s allowed to get. But a scenario like that isn’t impossible to imagine. 

It’s easy to imagine that Putin and his team held such views on, say, February 24, 2022. But a year has passed, and the West has not collapsed and in fact is providing Ukraine with appreciable support. Could this year’s events, including the results of the Russian military campaign, have influenced the perceptions you just described?

They could, and they definitely did. The whole year showed [Putin] that, since the West has seized onto Ukraine, it clearly indicates that it’s a key region and [the West] was planning an attack on him precisely from there. Apart from that, [in Putin’s view] it’s good that this year’s problems came to light before the real war, which Russian leadership considers inevitable. It would be much worse [according to their logic] to take such an army into a [future] big war. So, everything that happens strengthens Putin, in his own eyes.

They’ve been preparing this war for many years. It would be strange if they went into it with only one plan. [Putin’s logic is like this:] “Yeah, things didn’t all work out according to the best scenario — no problem, we’ll press on. We’re prepared to shed as much blood as necessary on this, and they’re not.”

I’m not saying that such tactics will be successful. In fact, I think that Putin’s logic dooms him to defeat, and that he subconsciously wants to lose. The question is how many people will die before that happens. But if we want to make predictions, we have to understand the logic that [people in power in Russia] are operating under.

Do you think anything could make Putin doubt his own perceptions about the world?

No. Nothing. 

When we discussed the topic of this conversation before the interview, you commented on the current state of Russian society, its atomization and blocked collective action, and you noted that a conversation like this can actually strengthen the feeling of learned helplessness, which you didn’t want to do. Are there ways to talk to society that don’t feed this sense of helplessness?

If the main emotion in Russia is resentment, then the main affect, on which everything is built now, is fear. It’s existential fear — fear of a specific person’s wrath, or fear of war, or an abstract fear of chaos. 

Fear is beaten out by hope. That’s the opposite affect. People need to be given hope. In this sense, the absolutely understandable, well-founded accusations [against the people of Russia] are politically shortsighted. Again: they’re understandable, well-founded, and legitimate, but they’re politically shortsighted. 

The question is how to give people hope in this situation. Hope is related to a demonstration that everything can be different, that Russia can be organized differently. The truth is that, until [Russians] realize they’re at a dead end, there’s not much motivation to listen to such things, because they’re scary. It’s connected to a challenge to the status quo. And that’s threatening enough to convince people not to get involved.

In Russia, any normative discourse has been snuffed out. It’s been difficult for a very long time to ask how society should be organized, how to do it fairly, honestly, and well. A few years ago, respondents [to a sociological survey I ran] responded, “In Russia? There’s no way.” This is the suppression of normative discourse, but there will be a demand for it, inevitably, when people realize they’re at a dead end. In this situation, it’s important that people have hope.

You’ve presented the discourse that is most often heard regarding Russian culture right now: that it’s imperial, that it birthed and nurtured a slave mentality…

I think that Russian culture has a large imperial element, and the time has come to deal with it. The collapse of an empire is a good moment to do that. Will it extinguish Russian culture? No. It might not even extinguish the works of any given author. Can you find imperial ideas in a given author’s work? You can, and you must. Why the need either to reject completely or accept completely? You’re not marrying anybody and pledging a vow of unconditional love.

Culture develops through reworking itself, including through criticizing itself. But the criticism can’t be a complete rejection. 

Culture itself provides the positions from which to criticize it. There’s nothing demeaning in this; there’s no problem in seeing [imperial ideas] in Russian culture, isolating it, and examining how it’s related to other elements. 

Can you give an example of a recipe for wisdom and hope from within Russian culture?

Well, the classic critic of imperialism in the history of political thought is Vladimir Lenin. It was Lenin who spoke about “Great Russian chauvinism” in relation to Ukraine, and he attacked imperialism in other countries. Today, in universities all over the world, the study of imperialism begins with Lenin.

Russia also gave global political thought the ability to think beyond the state: Mikhail Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and in some regards also Lenin. The list goes on. Russia has not given rise to one significant statist or centralist thinker. All ideas about centralization in Russia are imported. Ideas about freedom, mutual aid, and dignity run in the other direction. 

What do you think about the divide between those who have left Russia and those who have stayed?

It seems to me that all of us, and our country, are in trouble. It would be good if everyone who’s now outside of Russia thought about how to help those who are in Russia. And if everyone in Russia thought about how to help those who are suffering far away. We’ll get through it, but we can only get through it together. Only together.

 

This is a great article and reminds me of something I heard regularly back in the early 2000s— that Russia would eventually get off her knees and remember how she’d been treated. And also, that Russia was never either as strong or as weak as she may seem. 
 

I think both of those sentiments turned out to be true. And our mistakes, such as they were, was a desire to be either new great friends (impossible) or treating Russia with too much deference (just encourages baf behavior) for the past 20 years or so. Russia always does better when treated with a firm hand and clear eyes. 
 

The talk about the resentment over how Russia got treated in international structures is telling of the national pathology— the deal was that we allow this wreck of a country that drove into a ditch into the “Big 8” (Yeltsin’s term for the G7) where it had no right to be based on either it’s economy or soft power of attraction. And in exchange for that courtesy, Russia would take some advice on how to clean up and be a productive partner.  
 

It should be noted that a lot of Central European nations navigated this humbling process just fine. But Russia couldn’t because it believes it has a right to this status and doesn’t have to earn it.  And so “wallah”, resentment. 

[Gatorubet 30279]

1 hour ago, ABSR said:

Interesting article Meduza put out in their weekend report.  From a Russian Sociologist about Putin and Russian mindset.  Interesting and depressing in his discussion of Putin and Russian mindset, which is very different from how we view the world/war/future. 

Net is Putin will never stop (in Ukraine and in wanting to invade other Eastern European countries), and that the Russian people's mindset is to eat a shit sandwich from whatever dictator/tyrant they have and to blame everyone else for their misery.

Putin will continue forward as he thinks the war has long been going on for Russia to gain its ascendancy and that means invading NATO countries he believes are rightfully Russian once he is done with Ukraine.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say?utm_source=email&utm_medium=briefly&utm_campaign=2023-02-25

  Reveal hidden contents

Interview by Margarita Liutova. Abridged translation by Emily Laskin.

Sociologist Grigory Yudin was one of just a few Russian experts who believed in February 2022 that a military clash between Russia and Ukraine was inevitable. In an article published just two days before the invasion, Yudin predicted that a major war loomed in the near future, that Russians would follow the Kremlin in blaming the West, and that sanctions would do nothing to stop Putin — all of which came true. In February 2023, Meduza special correspondent Margarita Liutova spoke to Yudin about why Putin needs a “forever war,” and what might ensure the emergence of a broad anti-war movement in Russia.

 

There’s a widespread view about contemporary Russian politics that says war is an endless process for Putin, and Putin himself seemed to confirm the idea in his recent Federal Assembly address: He said nothing about how Russia will win and what will happen after that. Do you think that Putin’s plan is really eternal war?

Yes, of course, the war is now forever. It has no goals that can be achieved and lead to its end. It continues simply because [in Putin’s imagination], they are enemies and they want to kill us, and we want to kill them. For Putin, it’s an existential clash with an enemy set on destroying him. 

There should be no illusions: while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war will not end. It will only expand. The size of the Russian army is increasing rapidly, the economy is reorienting toward guns, and education is turning into a propaganda tool and war preparation. They’re preparing the country for a long and difficult war.

And then it’s obviously impossible for Putin to win?

It’s absolutely impossible. No one has set any goal [for the war] or offered any definition of victory.

So, can we consider the point to be the preservation of Vladimir Putin’s authority?

They’re almost the same thing. He thinks of his rule as constant war. Putin and the people who surround him told us long ago that there’s a war against us. Some preferred not to mark their words, but they seriously think that they’ve been at war for a long time. It’s just that now this war has entered such an aggressive phase, and there’s obviously no exit. War itself is normal, in their worldview. Stop thinking that peace is the natural state, and you’ll see the situation through their eyes. As the governor of Khanty-Mansi [Natalya Komarova] said, “War is a friend.”

On February 22, 2022, you published an article on openDemocracy, in which you described an upcoming major war and Putin’s dismissive attitude toward the sanctions that Western countries imposed in response. In the second half of the article, you argued that “the war with Ukraine will be the most senseless of all the wars in our history.” Do you think Russian society has started to realize this over the past year?

No, in my view, it hasn’t. It was clear to many, many people from the very beginning, but since then that category has barely grown. In Russia today, you find this powerful feeling, and it’s one of those rare occasions when Vladimir Putin connects with a significant part of society. It’s far from everyone who shares his wild theories, but he does connect with people. Even more importantly, he produces this emotion himself. And that emotion is resentment — monstrous, endless resentment. Nothing can mollify this resentment. It’s impossible to imagine what could compensate for it. It doesn’t allow people to think about establishing any kind of productive relationships with other countries.

You know, it’s like a young child who gets deeply offended and then hurts those around him. The harm grows greater and greater, and at some point, he seriously begins destroying others’ lives, as well as his own. But the child isn’t thinking about that; he isn’t thinking that he somehow needs to build relationships.

I think that the feeling of resentment, which has been overflowing lately in Russia, is supported at a very high level, and we haven’t yet reached the point where someone might realize that we [Russians] have normal, legitimate interests, and we need to reach them by building relationships with other countries in the right way.

There’s a good saying in Russia: “Water is borne on the shoulders of the offended,” [meaning, roughly, that a grudge is a heavy burden]. At some point, we’ll understand that this resentment works against us, that we’re harming ourselves because of it. But at the moment, too many of us want to be offended.

 

Whom do Vladimir Putin and Russian society resent? The whole world? The West? The U.S.?

[They resent] a world order that seems unfair, and, accordingly, whoever takes responsibility for being “superior” in this world order, meaning the United States of America. 

I always remember something Putin said in mid-2021. He said, completely unprovoked, that there’s no happiness in life. It’s a strong statement for a political leader, who of course doesn’t have to bring people into heaven but should in theory make their lives better. 

But it’s as if he says: “There’s no happiness in life. The world is a bad, unjust, difficult place, where the only way to exist is to struggle constantly, to fight, and, at the outer limit, kill.” 

Resentment of the outside world is deeply rooted in Russia, and it gets projected onto the U.S., which seems responsible for the world. At some point, the United States really did take responsibility for the world — not completely successfully. And we see that the resentment I’m talking about is definitely not only in Russia (where it of course exists in a catastrophic, horrible form).

A significant part of the world has well-founded complaints about the current world order, and against the U.S., which took responsibility, became a hegemon, and has benefited from the world order in many ways. We see that parts of the world that are engulfed by this resentment are more understanding toward Vladimir Putin. 

I wouldn’t say that this understanding becomes support, simply because Putin offers nothing [to the world]. Putin wants to do the same things for which he criticizes the United States. So, supporting him is difficult, but many want to join in the resentment.

Is resentment rooted in Russian society from before Putin, in the nineties? Or has it been cultivated under Putin?

There are some grounds for resentment [in Russian society]. It’s related to the instructive role that the U.S. and some parts of Western Europe took on. Ideologically, [that role] was framed in terms of modernization theory, which said that there are developed countries and developing countries, and the developed countries — kindly and supportively — will teach the developing ones: “Guys, you should be arranged like so.” Generally speaking, no one likes to be lectured. Especially a big country that has its own imperial past.

In fact, the situation that developed in the 1990s was much more complicated. [After the collapse of the USSR,] Russia was invited to join a whole host of key international clubs, and Russia influenced decisions on key global questions. But that instructive tone [in relation to Russia] was there. It was the result of a profound ideological mistake: In the conditions of the socialist project’s collapse, it seemed [to many] that there was only one correct path, the famous “end of history.” So, there were preconditions for resentment, but there were also preconditions for other emotions.

There were [also] many competing narratives [about the meaning of the USSR’s collapse for its citizens]. One held that it was a people’s revolution, a glorious moment in Russian history and the history of other nations, because they managed to take control of a hateful, tyrannical regime. That conception, of course, doesn’t lead to resentment.

But Putin chose resentment. In part, probably, because of his own personal qualities. And resentment is contagious. It’s a convenient emotion: you always feel, first of all, in the right, and second, you feel undeservedly trampled on.

Resentment and Russian culture

• ‘We can do it again’ The invention and reinvention of an ‘antifascist-fascist’ slogan

You’ve said more than once that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. What exactly do you anticipate? Moldova, the Baltic states, a self-destructive war with the U.S.?

His worldview sees no borders. This formula has become a practically official line: Russia ends nowhere. This is the standard definition of an empire because an empire recognizes no borders. 

I’ll remind everyone of [Putin’s] ultimatum [to the U.S. and NATO] in December of 2021 — it’s crystal clear, it says in plain text that all of Eastern Europe is Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. How that will be worked out, whether it means a formal loss of sovereignty or not, what difference does it make? And this zone without a doubt includes East Germany, just because Putin has personal memories of it. It’s really hard for me to imagine that he truly thinks of that territory as not his. Putin definitely intends to restore the Warsaw Pact zone [the former Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet influence].

 

I often hear, “It’s irrational. It’s senseless. There’s no possibility of this happening!” Not long ago, people said exactly the same thing about Ukraine. They said the same thing even more recently about Moldova, and now we’re hearing that the leadership of Moldova, Ukraine, and the U.S. believe that Moldova is in grave danger. We’ve already seen that Moldova was figured into the plans of the current military operation; it just hasn’t gotten there yet.

Russia’s general strategy is something like this: let’s bite off a piece, then that piece will be recognized as legitimate, and in the next phase, on the basis of that recognition, we can take something else.

[In this strategy’s logic,] we’ll bite off, roughly, eastern Ukraine, with the help of some kind of truce. Soon, we’ll start to hear voices from Europe, saying, “Well, it was their land, after all. Everyone agreed, it’s fine.” Well, wait a minute. If it’s “their” land — Russian land — because people there speak Russian, then what about eastern Estonia? You might say, “But Estonia is in NATO!” But will NATO fight for Estonia? Putin is absolutely sure that if the durability of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty [the article ensuring collective defense] is tested at the right moment, NATO will fall apart.

To be clear, I don’t see what I’m talking about as the likeliest possibility. I’m describing Putin’s strategy, but Putin doesn’t rule the world. He’ll get as much as he’s allowed to get. But a scenario like that isn’t impossible to imagine. 

It’s easy to imagine that Putin and his team held such views on, say, February 24, 2022. But a year has passed, and the West has not collapsed and in fact is providing Ukraine with appreciable support. Could this year’s events, including the results of the Russian military campaign, have influenced the perceptions you just described?

They could, and they definitely did. The whole year showed [Putin] that, since the West has seized onto Ukraine, it clearly indicates that it’s a key region and [the West] was planning an attack on him precisely from there. Apart from that, [in Putin’s view] it’s good that this year’s problems came to light before the real war, which Russian leadership considers inevitable. It would be much worse [according to their logic] to take such an army into a [future] big war. So, everything that happens strengthens Putin, in his own eyes.

They’ve been preparing this war for many years. It would be strange if they went into it with only one plan. [Putin’s logic is like this:] “Yeah, things didn’t all work out according to the best scenario — no problem, we’ll press on. We’re prepared to shed as much blood as necessary on this, and they’re not.”

I’m not saying that such tactics will be successful. In fact, I think that Putin’s logic dooms him to defeat, and that he subconsciously wants to lose. The question is how many people will die before that happens. But if we want to make predictions, we have to understand the logic that [people in power in Russia] are operating under.

Do you think anything could make Putin doubt his own perceptions about the world?

No. Nothing. 

When we discussed the topic of this conversation before the interview, you commented on the current state of Russian society, its atomization and blocked collective action, and you noted that a conversation like this can actually strengthen the feeling of learned helplessness, which you didn’t want to do. Are there ways to talk to society that don’t feed this sense of helplessness?

If the main emotion in Russia is resentment, then the main affect, on which everything is built now, is fear. It’s existential fear — fear of a specific person’s wrath, or fear of war, or an abstract fear of chaos. 

Fear is beaten out by hope. That’s the opposite affect. People need to be given hope. In this sense, the absolutely understandable, well-founded accusations [against the people of Russia] are politically shortsighted. Again: they’re understandable, well-founded, and legitimate, but they’re politically shortsighted. 

The question is how to give people hope in this situation. Hope is related to a demonstration that everything can be different, that Russia can be organized differently. The truth is that, until [Russians] realize they’re at a dead end, there’s not much motivation to listen to such things, because they’re scary. It’s connected to a challenge to the status quo. And that’s threatening enough to convince people not to get involved.

In Russia, any normative discourse has been snuffed out. It’s been difficult for a very long time to ask how society should be organized, how to do it fairly, honestly, and well. A few years ago, respondents [to a sociological survey I ran] responded, “In Russia? There’s no way.” This is the suppression of normative discourse, but there will be a demand for it, inevitably, when people realize they’re at a dead end. In this situation, it’s important that people have hope.

You’ve presented the discourse that is most often heard regarding Russian culture right now: that it’s imperial, that it birthed and nurtured a slave mentality…

I think that Russian culture has a large imperial element, and the time has come to deal with it. The collapse of an empire is a good moment to do that. Will it extinguish Russian culture? No. It might not even extinguish the works of any given author. Can you find imperial ideas in a given author’s work? You can, and you must. Why the need either to reject completely or accept completely? You’re not marrying anybody and pledging a vow of unconditional love.

Culture develops through reworking itself, including through criticizing itself. But the criticism can’t be a complete rejection. 

Culture itself provides the positions from which to criticize it. There’s nothing demeaning in this; there’s no problem in seeing [imperial ideas] in Russian culture, isolating it, and examining how it’s related to other elements. 

Can you give an example of a recipe for wisdom and hope from within Russian culture?

Well, the classic critic of imperialism in the history of political thought is Vladimir Lenin. It was Lenin who spoke about “Great Russian chauvinism” in relation to Ukraine, and he attacked imperialism in other countries. Today, in universities all over the world, the study of imperialism begins with Lenin.

Russia also gave global political thought the ability to think beyond the state: Mikhail Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and in some regards also Lenin. The list goes on. Russia has not given rise to one significant statist or centralist thinker. All ideas about centralization in Russia are imported. Ideas about freedom, mutual aid, and dignity run in the other direction. 

What do you think about the divide between those who have left Russia and those who have stayed?

It seems to me that all of us, and our country, are in trouble. It would be good if everyone who’s now outside of Russia thought about how to help those who are in Russia. And if everyone in Russia thought about how to help those who are suffering far away. We’ll get through it, but we can only get through it together. Only together.

 

So we kill them all then? 

[Trey3216 15350]

12 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

This is a great article and reminds me of something I heard regularly back in the early 2000s— that aggy would eventually get off her knees and remember how she’d been treated. And also, that aggy was never either as strong or as weak as she may seem. 
 

I think both of those sentiments turned out to be true. And our mistakes, such as they were, was a desire to be either new great friends (impossible) or treating aggy with too much deference (just encourages baf behavior) for the past 20 years or so. aggy always does better when treated with a firm hand and clear eyes. 
 

The talk about the resentment over how aggy got treated in international structures is telling of the regional pathology— the deal was that we allow this wreck of a school that drove into a ditch into the “BDF” (aggy's term for the B12) where it had no right to be based on either it’s economy or soft power of attraction. And in exchange for that courtesy, aggy would take some advice on how to clean up and be a productive partner in the SEC.  
 

It should be noted that a lot of schools navigated this humbling process just fine. But aggy couldn’t because it believes it has a right to this status and doesn’t have to earn it.  And so “wallah”, resentment. 

FIFY

[Orange&White 5528]

4 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

So we kill them all then? 

[The Dog 44073]

[WhatTheBuck 28795]

3 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

They're modern mongol horde level rapers, pillagers, thieves.

To the Vyktor go the spoils.

[BamaATL 16593]

1 minute ago, WhatTheBuck said:

To the Vyktor go the spoils.

I think the Mongols likely had more class

[Chad Fuck 17713]

2 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

To the Vyktor go the spoils.

[956 Worldwide 34742]

9 minutes ago, The Dog said:

NATO is the most successful defensive military alliance in history. A NATO member has never been attacked by a non-NATO state. And no NATO member has attacked another member. You’re basically invulnerable when you’re in the club and that’s why Russia objects to its neighbors joining. 

[Chad Fuck 17713]

I think the most telling part of that Meduza article is that it just never crosses Putin's mind that there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between nations. There is only the conqueror or the vanquished.  So there he sits, for decades watching countries all around him do it.  He's had plenty of opportunity to have people who've done it tell him how it's done.  But he's completely unable to do it.  He's like a eunuch ruler.   He sits there watching it happen all day long, but can't do it himself.  That's no way to go through life, son. 

 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Chad Fuck

[BamaATL 16593]

Why Moscow needs to feel pain in a map

[Parliament 14280]

The Russia = Aggy comparison is absolutely perfect.  

[Nivek 16953]

19 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Let alone the size/weight to value prop. You are in war and you have dedicated a lot of risk and resources to something trivial in the west. 

The US combat soldier is wearing more money than he is going to come across.   

[Gatorubet 30279]

14 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

I think the most telling part of that Meduza article is that it just never crosses Putin's mind that there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between nations. There is only the conqueror or the vanquished

I forget who posted this a while ago, but some Surly poster said either he or a friend bought out a Russian immigrant’s car repair shop. He noted that the Russian owner had terrible customer service as he was always trying to overcharge and cheat people. That poster made the observation that the Russian came from a society where if you weren’t fucking somebody, they were fucking you.

He simply had no understanding of how there could be a cooperative relationship between an owner not screwing you and customers not screwing the owner. The concept of mutually beneficial without theft or threats was alien to him.  

That sounds like the micro and macro cultural result. 

[956 Worldwide 34742]

23 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

I think the most telling part of that Meduza article is that it just never crosses Putin's mind that there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between nations. There is only the conqueror or the vanquished.  So there he sits, for decades watching countries all around him do it.  He's had plenty of opportunity to have people who've done it tell him how it's done.  But he's completely unable to do it.  He's like a eunuch ruler.   He sits there watching it happen all day long, but can't do it himself.  That's no way to go through life, son. 

 

I really do think that Putin had somewhat of a vision of how to build an architecture based on cooperation, of sorts. And he really thought he was going to reach an accommodation with the United States. The deep irony is that his vision involved misreading us and making a bet that we’d behave the way he now accuses us of acting. Of dividing the world into “real” big nations and secondary small nations. 
 

I really do think that he believed that since the USSR dropped its official revolutionary ideology that maintained it would prevail over the whole world, the U.S. would be OK with a blatantly imperial Russia with its own sphere of influence that can’t be questioned internally or from without. And that we’d be able to accept that and cooperate, so to speak, on the economy and counter-terror. 
 

He miscalculated by thinking this arrangement would be acceptable either to us or to the people living in his desired sphere of influence. And really, we have been mostly OK with his sphere of influence and alternate arrangements so long as it’s all based on consent. We never made a peep about the CTSO or the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we only got cranky when some country decided to LEAVE that sphere of its own accord and Putin acted like he had a right to tell them they couldn’t.  
 

So in a sense the Kremlin apologists are right, we could maybe have accommodated him if we’d betrayed ourselves and accepted his 19th century mentality. And of course, they forget that the 19th century influence wars were bloody and frequent. 
 

Also, never underestimate his deep personal horror of rulers getting what they deserve.  Libya made a huge impression on him. Ukraine grated on both of these exposed nerves. 

[ABSR 5321]

37 minutes ago, Parliament said:

The Russia = Aggy comparison is absolutely perfect.  

And Belarus is Blinn CC.

[bolverk 29705]

@956 Worldwide Not to get too ahead of ourselves, but I'd like to know if you think there are any lessons from how we handled the collapse of the USSR that could be applied to post-Putin Russia. Was it a failure by the West to sufficiently support/build democratic institutions in Russia? Or was Russia always going to just fall back into an imperium no matter the timeline? I'm simply asking whether there will ever be the widespread hope in Russia that the sociologist from the previous page mentioned as being necessary and what, specifically, NATO/EU can do to foster it once Putin eventually croaks.

9 minutes ago, ABSR said:

And Belarus is Blinn CC.

And Serbia is Baylor?

[InkaUtexas 26029]

2 minutes ago, bolverk said:

@956 Worldwide Not to get too ahead of ourselves, but I'd like to know if you think there are any lessons from how we handled the collapse of the USSR that could be applied to post-Putin Russia. Was it a failure by the West to sufficiently support/build democratic institutions in Russia? Or was Russia always going to just fall back into an imperium no matter the timeline? I'm simply asking whether there will ever be the widespread hope in Russia that the sociologist from the previous page mentioned as being necessary and what, specifically, NATO/EU can do to foster it once Putin eventually croaks.

And Serbia is Baylor?

Serbia is Texas Tech. 

 

 

[DDD Dad 14346]

3 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Serbia is Texas Tech. 

 

 

[MillerEP 30494]

 

[MillerEP 30494]

 

[MillerEP 30494]

 

[MillerEP 30494]

 

[MillerEP 30494]

Starting from tomorrow, 28 February, Kazakh authorities will begin to issue 10-year residence permits to Russian citizens in simplified manner. This applies to specialists, whose skill sets are in high demand in Kazakhstan.

[The Dog 44073]

1 minute ago, MillerEP said:

Starting from tomorrow, 28 February, Kazakh authorities will begin to issue 10-year residence permits to Russian citizens in simplified manner. This applies to specialists, whose skill sets are in high demand in Kazakhstan.

BRAIN DRAIN

[MillerEP 30494]

 

[Schulz2.0 29000]

 

[MillerEP 30494]