Over the past two weeks, Ukrainian society has been transformed.
People have mobilized, transitioning from living normal, modern lives to making impossible decisions: do I leave my life behind and seek safety as a refugee? Or do I stay and apply whatever skills, supplies, or know-how that I have to supporting the war effort, risking death in the process?
Putin thinks he can break the Ukrainians’ resolve by being incredibly cruel to them. That never works. The more cruel the Russians become, the more determined Ukrainians will be to fight them. This is why Putin can’t possibly win. He trying to put out a fire with a blow torch.
Putin is fighting a trucker convoy war. Pointless, based on fake news, steeling the resolve of those impacted, and bound to fail.
Wonder how soon a Berlin Airlift type operation will be needed to feed the trapped Ukrainians? Has Russia achieved air superiority over the entire country?
Khalimonchuk has family in Crimea and in Russia; they refuse to believe the pictures of destroyed buildings, dead children that he and other relatives send them.
Do they really refuse to believe their own eyes, or is it just the doublethink necessary to stay out of the gulag?
Anyway, Josh K. is the best. Thanks as always for your insight and local color on this stuff.
“Bound to fail”
…already failed.
This guy is humble. I can’t even imagine what it takes to just survive there. He saw a need and took action. That’s powerful transformative magic that won’t give up.
Came here to say this.
Ever met a Trump voter?
I don’t think winning in any kind of tactical sense was ever the issue. That was all taken as a given. The real point was scratching a grievance itch, based on the same kind of nonsense we deal with from Trumpsters on this side of the planet (except with nukes).
Khalimonchuk has family in Crimea and in Russia; they refuse to believe the pictures of destroyed buildings, dead children that he and other relatives send them.
If democracy is to survive anywhere, we have to find an effective way of dealing with people who have voluntarily sealed themselves into Orwellian thought control bubbles. The party or state demands that people deny the evidence of their eyes and ears and many, many people wired for authoritarianism do. And, in the process, by design, they poison the entire marketplace of ideas with disinformation. That disinformation is intended and designed to spread outside the constructed alternate reality bubble of the true believers to those who believe themselves immune.
It is more understandable in a country exercising total, or near total, information control, but it is equally corrosive to democracy everywhere.
We have talked about this problem for years and years now, but the nature of democracy is such that those who see the problem are inclined to shrug their shoulders and treat it as just an untouchable consequence of democratic freedom of thought and speech. And at another level, the problem of the doublethinking true-believers is treated as a psychologically intractable problem that can’t be addressed without fundamental violations of democratic norms.
And that is the real problem. The propaganda being fed to them is an authoritarian hack of democracy and of the free press. It is epistemological warfare, not simply about making people believe absurdities but about destroying the very idea of objective reality. The point is to normalize epistemic crisis and make people internalize the belief that there are no facts, only opinions and that everyone operates in a world of pure opinion where each opinion is equally valid. It’s why flood the zone with falsified images and altered videos and shamelessly lie in the face of hard evidence they’re lying. It’s why they have waged relentless war on the very idea of expertise and of public education.
If anyone thinks they see a bitter irony in the fact that this is all just an application–I can’t even call it a perversion–of the kind of thought that came out of leftist academic circles in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s not irony because it’s not accidental. The right initially railed against ideas like deconstructionism, moral relativism, and the general revolt against the “manufactured consent” of public education and mass media operating under FCC rules that constricted free speech and required that opposing viewpoints be “responsible.” By the 80’s, however, they had begun to embrace it, exploit it, promote it. And then so did our adversaries abroad, and now here we are.
The seeming unity of mindset of the horseshoe left and right, of China’s regime of thought control, Russia’s information warfare and promotion of authoritarian control clothed in the skin of murdered democratic institutions, of corporate propaganda from Fox, and of the kind of wildfire metastatic spread of invented realities we see with Q-Anon and in Facebook groups mutating out from a few well-considered intentional falsehoods inserted by malignant actors all aligns around this war on reality, on reason.
Democracy, and everything we mean by “democracy”-rule of law, majority rule, freedom of speech, thought, expression, conscience, limited government-cannot survive this, anymore than people can survive and thrive when their water supply is contaminated with toxic substances and pathogens.
But no one has a solution that doesn’t entail destroying the village to save it. I certainly don’t. But I have to think the reason no one has a solution is that we have internalized the notion that it is not a problem we can solve because it isn’t a problem that needs to be solved, that democracy itself will some how magically correct itself with free market fairies or some sudden wave of self-enlightment where people realize they’ve been lied to and are mad about it.
I don’t know how to fix this, but it starts with acknowledging it’s happening, to stop denying the evidence of our own eyes and ears and understanding that it is an existential threat to democracy. We have to face up to the reality of a new war of ideas being waged by democracy’s enemies as surely as Communism, Nazism, the divine right of kings, or, yes, the legal and intellectual underpinnings of chattel slavery.
I’m afraid something like that wouldn’t happen. That would explode what’s left of Putty’s psychotic mind. The only way is by land unless the Ukrainian Airforce has transport planes and do airdrops. That part is only a guess.
Trump voters are highly proficient in doublethink.
Brilliant piece. May I use with credit elsewhere?
Please. I don’t throw this stuff out onto the Internet for money or credit.
Doctorate level.
Time to transform Russian society as well, by getting them access to news about what’s really going on at home and abroad, in terms of the Ukraine invasion and military fiasco, the sanctions, Putin’s massive corruption and incompetence, and connecting it in their minds with the coming economic and quality of life disaster awaiting them at home. I doubt that Putin’s able to build an impermeable digital wall around Russia where no unwanted information gets in.
There must be backdoors to exploit and barriers to do end runs around. E.g. the chat feature of video games and more obscure social media sites, information exchange systems used in various fields like medicine, law, finance and construction, shortwave radio, YouTube, and so on. He can’t shut it all down without shutting Russia down. And if he does that, Russians will riot.
And he’ll destroy everything before he ever admits to not winning. I’m very afraid for Ukrainians right now.
“Horseshoe left and right”
Fast becoming an oroborous.
This is, at least in part, why they refuse to believe. After shutting down all independent media, and passing laws with 15 year sentences for “fake news” (aka the truth), this is what the Russians see in their media.