Sounds good to me.
It’s a very common term in geopolitical discussion, both for and against US intervention abroad. I think it is Noam Chomsky’s most empathetic pejorative, and forms the essential premise of a popular (on the neocon right) book by Dick and Liz Cheney.
It doesn’t matter whether you think there isn’t any threat of Russia being invaded; the reality is that there is a long cultural memory from essentially the beginning of the Grand Duchy of Moscow (and even proceeding that) of wave after wave of foreign invaders on all fronts, and it doesn’t take a lot of genius propagandizing for Putin (or any other prospective Russian leader) to fan up fears that NATO or “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” or whomever is planning to invade Mother Russia. Which, again, is why Russians prefer a ‘strong’ leader (even on that is corrupt and sociopathic) over a fair or reasoned one. You can argue that it should be otherwise but if you talk to anyone who has actual experience with Russian culture you’ll find that attitude is broadly held across Russians, and especially those who aren’t actively trying to flee to other nations.
Stranger
I suspect that’s a bit of a “fish don’t notice water” kind of thing. You don’t notice it in the US because you’re so steeped in it, you don’t even notice it.
You’ll see it if you look for it. Hell, even here, any time there’s a discussion of how the US might adopt something from another country, someone always comes out to explain why That Just Won’t Work, Because The US Is Different. “Exceptionalism” isn’t just a belief that the US is better than the rest of the world, but that it’s unique in the world, and is the exception to every rule, no matter what.
We really don’t like to talk about it in the US, but you’re hearing American exceptionalism anytime you hear things like:
- even though gun control works in the rest of the world, it won’t work here because America is special.
- even though most developed countries make universal healthcare work, it won’t work here because America is special.
- even though we generally agree that countries shouldn’t invade each other, America can do it because America is special.
- even though America has more violent right-wing extremists than it’s ever had, fascism won’t happen in America, because America is special.
and so forth. To be sure, America really is special and different in some ways, and not all of them are bad. But when you’re unable to critically analyze America on any issue because America happens to be special in every situation, then that’s a big cognitive bias, and many Americans suffer from it.
Because the medical and pharmaceutical people make more money this way.
It would also mean wealthy people would have to wait while some ignorant bum had his arm sewn back on his cancer cured.
The reason I usually hear is because it smacks of Pinko Commies.
I’ve not heard “special” given as a reason for these, although I guess would could consider a Constitutional right to bear arms as special.
By this “logic”, the French should still be manning the Maginot line.
A major power with tactical nukes has zero realistic fears of invasion, especially by small weak neighbors.
The excuse doesn’t fly.
It’s not an “excuse”, it is an observation about Russian cultural fears and beliefs based upon observation by people intimately familiar with Russian history and culture. Every time this issue comes up there are a bunch of people trying to make the, “Logically, this shouldn’t be a problem because…” ignoring the fact that Russian perception and policy on this matter is not founded on logic. And they’re hardly alone in this; the United States decided to essentially go to war with the entire Muslim world over a terrorist attack that its intelligence and law enforcement services should have been easily able to detect and stop, and compounded it by invading the one country everybody who has ever studied history knows is a “destroyer of empires.”. The British collectively decided that cutting off trade with the EU, and it’s own nose to spite its face while it was at it, was a really good idea, and look how swimmingly that is going. We’ve all pretty much bought in on the notion that the way to keep the world safe from nuclear holocaust is to build large arsenals of nuclear weapons on ready standby to be launched on warning of an attack. Human beings are not rational creatures, and Russians in particular have a deep cultural paranoia toward pretty much everyone else even when they are the nation provoking aggression.
Stranger
Speaking of the Brits, they have a vast history and cultural experience of imperialist domination of the world, so everyone else should be deeply suspicious of them and arming themselves against incursions by the Royal Navy.
Tradition, you know. Can’t let go.
Exactly correct. Failing to understand the motivations and goals of your enemies, or assuming they think like you do, is a sure-fire way to make category errors that lead to war or create battlefield failures.
Too many people refuse to consider the strongly held beliefs of others if they conflict with their own. “They can’t really believe that! Everyone I know thinks that is stupid. They’re bluffing.” This is especially true when their beliefs run counter to those of yours that you see as obvious and natural.
There were still western ‘analysts’ before the war claiming that the Russians were bluffing or just carrying out war games even after they were seen setting up field hospitals and building logistics hubs along the Ukrainian border. They just couldn’t wrap their heads around Russian thinking. To them, a war made no sense so the Russians must have been up to something else. They were wrong.
The Russian culture is cynical and fatalistic. This is what happens when you grow up in a low-trust society. They don’t trust government to look after their interests, but have no choice than to deal with it. They grew up with black markets, people always skimming and scamming to get their own in the face of universal corruption, etc. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” was a common joke in the Soviet era. Alcoholism is rampant, life expectancy is low, and everyone just does what they need to survive. In that environment, war casualties are just part of the unique pain of Russian life, to be tolerated along with the rest of the shit sandwich they keep being served by their leaders and fellow citizens.
This doesn’t have to last forever, but it can’t be changed overnight either. Entrenched culture is a persistent thing. It will take decades of better experiences before the fundamental nature of Russia changes. Or, like Japan or Germany they would have to suffer such a devastating defeat that it destroys their previous national culture. It’s hard to deliver that kind of defeat to a country with 6,000 nukes.
To be quite honest, I didn’t think Putin would actually follow through with an invasion because of how devastating it would be to the Russian economy to occupy Ukraine even if it was completely successful. I was completely correct in my logic and totally off on my estimation of Putin’s concern for or perhaps basic understanding of the consequences.
I doubt Russian culture is going to change on the perspective of how they view the rest of the world in the foreseeable future, not only because being serially invaded is part and parcel of Russian history but because they interpret current events in a way that reinforces that belief. If you ask the typical Muscovite about why the Russian military is conducting and invasion—excuse me, ‘special operation’—of Ukraine, the majority will say that it is to prevent Ukraine from attacking Russia, or to protect ethnic Russians from being persecuted, or just because Zelenskyy is a NATO stooge doing everything that the the US, Germany, Britain, Poland, and the other NATO powers want him to do. Russians believe this propaganda in the same way that a whole slew of Americans still believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election, and for basically similar reasons.
Stranger
The invasion wasn’t “Russian thinking” – it was Putin thinking. It was entirely irrational, even within some supposed Russian frame of thought. Delusional, even – delusionally thinking most Ukrainians wanted to be ruled by Russia; delusionally thinking that decades of corruption and graft in government and broader Russian society hadn’t deeply ingrained itself in the Russian military; delusionally surrounding himself with yes-men and getting rid of truth-tellers; etc.
Western “culture” did invade Russia post Soviet Union. Starbucks, McDonalds, European autos, and hundred of other western stores and influences came to the modern cities (not the hinterlands). The sanctions/expulsions/withdrawals along with forced conscription was an eye-opener to the urban youths. They voted/left by leaving measured in the 100s of thousands. The upcoming advertised conscription of university/college youths will have a similar effect (if the borders have not been slammed shut). These youths were the future of Russia who will now either leave or die. (In Ukraine or at the hands of plentiful internal security troops - a “good” job; beat up on unarmed civilians, don’t have to go to Ukraine - yet).
And that only adds to the demographic collapse being experienced by Russia. The country already could not afford losing young people by the hundreds of thousands (I have the feeling that most of those who went away aren’t coming back, if ever).
Mid-term, Russia is looking at a population collapse in the face. Something which, incidentally, will cripple even more its ability to wage war.
I think we can pretty much guarantee that most of these people won’t be returning, not only because of the reinforcement of politically and socially repressive conditions but because there just aren’t going to be jobs to come back to.
An modern industrial nation would shift toward automation, and in fact, that is what many countries are doing to cope with reduced military enlistment, plus drones and automated systems are both more deniable and don’t have the public blowback the way returning soldiers in bodybags does. But Russia doesn’t have the industrial capacity to do that; even if they could build the hardware, they can’t fab highly capable microprocessors. Russia will be doing well to retain the borders of Russia proper in the next few decades…which of course reinforces the belief that Russia is under siege. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, unfortunately by a country with a large and presumably still somewhat functional nuclear arsenal.
Stranger
Self-accountability is good. But neither you nor I should beat ourselves up about reaching the same conclusion that the CIA did. We’re the product of more than a half-century of institutionalized thought that wanted to avoid what was plain to see all along, that Russia’s dispute with the west wasn’t simply about whether Communism is a good economic system, nor was it a dispute between two principled and competent systems of government.
We needed to think this because the alternative is too awful to contemplate; that Russia is & always has been a rickety, poorly run gangster state, obsessed with expansion and terrified of everything, and possessing the means to destroy civilization several times over. It’s a fucking awful truth to contemplate, but it’s now unavoidable and undeniable, and there’s no way out that doesn’t involve confronting it head-on.
I would tend to agree with both of you, but I’m not Russian.
The nature of category errors is that they are not even on the same axis as your own thinking. We are thinking, 'Why would Russia invade? It makes no sense economically or militarily." A normal error would be if the war DID make sense, but we did not have the information the other side had, or the other side was lacking information we had, even though we were both employing the same calculus of decision-making.
The category error might be that Putin isn’t thinking about the war in those terms at all. We could spend a year showing him the numbers and the analysis that the war would be futile, and it wouldn’t matter if Putin’s real goal was to avoid being murdered by a faction in his government that is more hawkish than he is, or something unique to his worldview says that a glorious battle lost is better than capitulation, or that God will intervene if things get too bad, or some other way of seeing the situation we simply don’t grok.
Or, he knows something that we don’t, such as a hidden deal with China where they will invade Taiwan and distract us once the war gets to a certain phase. Or maybe he believes that Russia needs a great challenge to survive, and even a devastating war that cements the people together is better than letting them all drift off to the west.
None of those have to be his actual reasons, and none of them have to make sense to us. The point is, we sometimes wind up in wars because our lack of understanding of the other side leads us to make very bad judgments.
Actually, there were things we didn’t know about at the time that affected his decision-making. For one, he thought he had bribed enough people in the Ukrainian government that they would fold. It turns out the bribes never happened because of Russian corruption, if I recall correctly. He also had his ‘lightning strike’ on Kiev and a backup Chechen assassination squad, and the big military buildup was essentially the backup plan. Put all that together, and to a guy like Putin it might have looked like a careful, well thought-out plan with appropriate backup plans.
One of the reasons the U.S. was caught off-guard by the attack on Pearl Harbor was that the very notion of Japan attacking the U.S. like that was stupid and no rational actor would do it. What we didn’t understand very well was Japanese culture and the internal pressures in the Japanese government that led them to make such a stupid decision. Hell, even Admiral Yamamoto knew it was a bad idea, and he came up with the attack plan. We made a category error, analyzing their possible actions along an axis that was just completely wrong.
I don’t know how many ways there are to explain this to you, but this is 100% Russian thinking. It’s not unique to Putin. If Putin died of a heart attack tomorrow, he’d be replaced by someone who might, might correctly see it as an opportunity to take a pause on the Ukraine obsession. And then 5-10 years later, if political circumstances allowed, Putin’s replacement will try it again. Why? Because Ukrainian conquest plays well in Russia. Because of the power of “Make Russia Great Again”. They have nothing else, no other hopes and dreams.
Putin didn’t do this for his own amusement. It’s because expansion is Russia’s “bread and circuses”. Russians don’t dream of peace and plenty by way of democracy and progress. They think it only comes via imperial expansion. Putin’s replacement will try this again and fail, and the guy who replaces him will try it and fail. This is a well-established historical pattern. There is no reason to believe it’s going to change except through some dramatic and unforeseen development that probably none of us really wants to live through.
Then why didn’t he invade in 2017, or 2020, or other years? It was irrational at that particular time. I just don’t buy that some stranger on the internet has special insight into the thinking of hundreds of millions in the other side of the world because they’re Russian.
Russia invaded in 2022 because of Putin’s delusions. Maybe Russian systems, institutions and culture make bad leaders more likely, but that doesn’t mean that Russia is forever fated to invade Ukraine again and again because of some unique Russian mindset.
Sounds like a bad imitation of Tolstoy. This was a dumb war executed by dumb leaders with an incompetent military. I think we’re on the same page on what to do about it, I just don’t buy this special Russian insight stuff. Sounds too much like magic. People are people, in Russia or Ukraine or anywhere else.
Indeed - the very type of people that make a nation strong - at least Argentina will benefit:
Well, he did invade Georgia in 2008, and Crimea in 2014. Are you asking for an explanation of why he didn’t also invade in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021? OK, the answer is he didn’t believe he had the military readiness. Russia conducted massive military drills in those years. They were preparing the entire time. See Zapad.
I don’t have special insight. I’m digesting Russian history, Russian media, and Russian social media, and Russian literature. I am not special. I’m communicating you what I’ve gleaned from people smarter than me and closer to the reality than me, starting with Aleksandr Pushkin who is considered to be the founder of modern Russian thought.
But this is not because of who Putin is. It’s because Russian culture produces Putins by the hundreds. Do you think he’s some sort of genetic supergenius, some sort of historical aberration, some sort of black swan? By all accounts he’s a very mundane and average intellect, just a guy who came up through the Soviet system and cultivated a skill for self-preservation and accumulating power. He’s the tip of a pyramid of guys exactly like him, and if you kill the top 100, Russia will produce 100 more, and 99 of them wiil march in line behind the top guy because that’s how it works.
Don’t ask me, ask a Russian. They’ll tell you the same.