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How Putin managed to de-Russify East Ukraine in just 8 years This is probably the best explanation of why Ukrainian political dynamics developed the way they did.
This conflict manufacturing strategy backfired on Putin. Russians are shocked by resistance they are now facing in the Russophone East Ukraine. Russians believed it would just switch to them immediately. After all, it voted for pro-Russian candidates on every election till 2014.
What happened? How Kharkiv which used to be culturally and politically pro-Russian so quickly turned super anti-Russian? It’s a huge cultural change and a very recent one. And the answer would be: Putin’s conflict manufacturing strategy killed pro-Russian sentiments in Ukraine.
Read the whole thing, highly recommended.
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The assumption by some people is that Ukrainians who speak Russian want to be ruled by Mr Putin – they do not.
For over TWENTY YEARS Mr Putin has been doing terrible things – yet some people still make excuses and try and point at other bad behaviour, by other people, to try and justify Mr Putin (“but what about…..”).
If people wish to utterly discredit themselves by still making excuses for Mr Putin – then nothing more can be done for these people. They have destroyed themselves.
Mr Putin is NOT a Western conservative (not someone like Edmund Burke or Margaret Thatcher) – Alexander Dugin is NOT a Western conservative.
In so far as Mr Putin, a violent criminal, has any political philosophy – it is Tribal Collectivism.
“But he is not Woke”.
Yes Mr Putin is not “Woke” – neither was Stalin (a hero of Mr Putin), or Mao, or Castro.
“Wokeism”, Frankfurt School Marxism, is indeed evil – but it is only one face of evil.
For those who say “but there are Russian speakers in parts of the Ukraine” – please read the first sentence of my first comment again.
Yes there are Russian speaking Ukrainians – but, no, they do not want to be ruled by Mr Putin.
Mr Putin is a violent criminal, who has been committing terrible crimes for over twenty years.
Mr Putin must go – trying to make deals with him (the stock in trade of the Biden/Harris Administration – – as it was with the Obama/Biden Administration), has broken on the rock of who-and-what Mr Putin is.
One can not make deals with a rabid dog.
The Ukrainians did not like my ancestors any more than the Russians liked them – perhaps we are just not very likeable. And I am not “anti Russian”.
Far from being a “follower of Disraeli” I oppose his foreign policy just as I oppose his domestic policy (such as the Acts of 1875).
I believe that a “pro Russian”, rather than a “pro Ottoman”, policy would have served British interests (indeed the interests of humanity) better in the 19th century and the early 1900s.
But this war is nothing to do with “Russia”, “the Russian people”, or “Russian culture” – this war is about one person – Mr Putin.
Some on the ‘populist right’ have “shit the bed” as Tim Newman phrased it.
Not entirely, Paul. Putin did not emerge from a political, social or historical vacuum. Russian imperialism is not a creation of Vladimir Putin, he is merely its latest manifestation.
Perry – we will have to agree to disagree about Russian culture.
Candace Owens has done a brilliant fisking of the disinformation put out by the western media and the biden admin over Ukraine
A rather mixed bag of a fisking really. Yes, some articles appearing are utterly absurd (such as the bizarre ‘roid rage one), and so Candice Owens rightly points out quite that Putin has a long history of stating Ukraine is not a separate identity, so this is not something he decided to do on an drug induced impulse. But then she goes on to repeat what I call the ‘Americocentric delusion’ that the invasion of happening because of the risk of NATO expansion, rather than seeking to restore the Russian Empire (in effect).
Did Putin slice off a piece of Georgia or Moldova because of fears of NATO expansion?
The collapse of the pro-Russian vote in Ukraine, the fact solidly Russian-speaking Kharkiv is bitterly resisting him, flies in the face of the bullshit being pushed by so many people who a month ago probably could not find Ukraine on a map.
Yes, there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine. So what? What share of the vote do they get?
NATO has nothing to do with it. Russia’s demographic collapse has everything to do with it.
This description of what has been going on in the Donbass amazed me:
Patrick, I know a rather fetching lady originally from Donbas who moved to Kyiv to escape the endemic thuggery, which was pretty much as described in the article. She remarked a few months ago “In Kyiv you see corruption, but life for regular people is safe. In Donbas, the sense today could be the day a bunch of toothless vatniki rape you is constant.”
And now she fled again, this time to Germany. It has damn near crushed her.
This was all widely understood in Ukraine, and as the article explains, is reflected in the steady collapse of the “pro-Russian” vote.
That was a good article.
(I’m handicapped by my grad school having been law school. I expect every statement of fact to have a footnote or citation that I can backcheck, else don’t bother saying it. I’m destined to be forever frustrated on this. No one writes this way anymore.)
Was Putin supporting this Hobbesian thugocracy in the Donbass simply because the thugs were his friends, or specifically as a destabilizer for Ukraine? (“The Ukraine . . . “?)
Good question, bobby, for which I do not have a good answer. But I am strongly of the opinion Putin’s deviousness & smarts has been vastly overrated, so for all I know, the sole criterion for someone in Donbas getting Russian backing might have been a willingness to take Russian orders. But I have no real insight on that score & when I just asked a (different) Ukrainian chum, he just shrugged.
Kamil Galeev is giving us some very important insights. I don’t know that he is correct, but i take Perry’s word for it, and at least Galeev is internally consistent.
WRT Russian culture, i have had a look at the previews of Richard Pipes’ books on Amazon. Basically they confirm what i read elsewhere, that there has long been a dichotomy between a Western-oriented strand of Russian culture, and a more inward-looking strand which i would think is in line with Robert Filmer in England, Maistre and Bonald in France … and Mencius Moldbug and Shlomo Maistre in the US.
All what i can say, from my superficial acquaintance with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is that Russian literature seems to be rich in negative role models and poor in positive role models. I think it valuable, but i can take it only in small doses.
Nationality and elections. In 1935, the people of the Sudetenland were given the choice whether to become part of Germany or not. Despite the fact that Hitler had already abolished democracy, introduced the Enabling Act and overseen the Night of the Long Knives, they overwhelmingly (something like 90%) voted to rejoin Germany. In other words nationality trumped democracy and the rule of law. So, I am surprised – happily so – that the opposite has happened in this case.
The opposite has happened. While the Irish Boundary Commission was doing its work in the 1920s a Westminster election was held in Fermanagh and Tyrone. For the one and only time the unionists won – the implication being that the Irish did not actually want to join an independent Ireland.
bobby b (March 17, 2022 at 10:23 pm), I do my best in my posts to provide some kind of link to evidence for anything I think needs it, but I’m not perfect even then and sometimes just have to (ask the reader to) trust my memory.
As regards my comments, I very occasionally provide references, but if I tried to do it in general, my comments would be far shorter and very much fewer. (I leave it to readers to decide whether that’s an argument against my doing it or in favour. 🙂 )
You may well be aware of left-wing footnotery and what Thomas Sowell calls the pseudo-footnote. He offers the following joke example of the first, assuring the reader it is not an exaggeration of the style:
I encountered the most perfect example of a pseudo-footnote I’ve yet seen in a large book titled, “The Imperial Presidency” written by an academic, when I was working on a charity bookstall; BTW it did not sell. 🙂 (From memory) A bald statement that Reagan had done a disreputable thing (that I’d never heard of) was footnoted. The entire footnote was as follows:
Many people in the West have dug their own political graves by siding with Mr Putin – by making excuses for him “but what about what the CIA has done….” and so on. It is really unfortunate. I do not know what to do about it.
They are NOT bad people – they are just so horrified by what has been happening in the West for many years now (and I am horrified by it as well) that, in utter desperation, they turn to Mr Putin. As I have said before – it is like watching a drowning person clutching at a poisonous snake.
I wish I could continue to try and explain this on such Social Media as “Facebook” – but they have locked me out. Not censorship (oh dear me no) – just their enhanced security measures – which just-so-happen to get rid of people they do not like.
Ukraine means border / borderland and so it is natural in English grammar to speak of “The Ukraine”. Compare how one says ‘Holland’ but ‘The Netherlands’ – though one could in demotic speech say just ‘Netherlands’ and not stand out much, and just “Ukraine” is similarly very minor.
Towards the end of the Soviet Union, some Ukrainian exiles, living in the west and so influenced by western idiocies, started suggesting that “The Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine” was somehow a way of denying that the Ukraine was a country instead of just a region of Russia. Robert Conquest (a good friend to the Ukraine and an intelligent defender of its historical claims to be a country) discusses it briefly in the preface to his book ‘The Harvest of Sorrow’ (on the Ukraine famine), where he offers a modest defence of the usage “The Ukraine”.
(I can’t be bothered to check whether Conquest provides footnotes in his preface. 🙂 He is probably speaking out of his direct personal experience of many discussions with Ukraine exiles.)
By contrast, Kviv is indeed (AFAIK) the longstanding Ukrainian way of saying Kiev, not a modern western-influenced idea. I feel there are more important ways to defend the Ukraine than being punctilious in avoiding the way we’d all have named that city last year. On the other hand, I feel that there are far less forgivable forms of PC virtue-signalling than that.
Niall.
What you have encountered is one part of a broader problem – the Progressives either do not know, or they reject, the basic system of logical argument.
Most of us, without reading Aristotle, try and follow an Aristotelian system of logical argument and evidence.
The left just do not follow the system of logical argument and evidence – they have, for centuries, described themselves as “rebels” even if they are in power and have been in power for a long time. Because, in a key sense, they are in revolt – they are in revolt against REASON.
To deal with the specific examples you give – the Marxist theory of exploitation was based on the Labour Theory of Value (a theory he got from others, but adapted), which is just wrong (flat wrong). The society of “1867” was not worse for “the workers” than past societies, profits were NOT made by the “surplus value from the workers” – this is just not true.
Though even Pope Leo XIII in 1891 wrote (in the various first paragraph of his once famous Encyclical) of how the people had been impoverished – which was JUST NOT TRUE (it is just not true that most people were worse off in 1891 than in 1791 or 1691 or 1591 – in fact most people were BETTER off in 1891). The propaganda (the lying) was saturating society even as early 1891 – the Pope (a generally conservative Pope) took it for granted that the people were poorer than they had been in the past, because of wicked “capitalism” making most people poorer (even though this was the opposite of the truth) – because this lie was repeated so often (by so many people) that it was already dominating the culture, at least in some places.
The solution for this false problem (the false claim that people were getting poorer)? State intervention – spending and regulations. Arguments that these polices would work – none, there were no arguments presented (it was just ASSUMED that the policies would work – Disraeli, Bismarck, T. Roosevelt look at any of them, they do not present logical ARGUMENTS for the policies of increased government spending and regulations that they suggest, they ASSUME the policies will do good). Evidence for the policies? As Ludwig Von Mises put it “they [the German “Historicists”] measured rooms and declared them too small” – again no evidence that a bigger government would make people better off than THEY OTHERWISE WOULD HAVE BEEN, just the ASSUMPTION that statism MUST work (by definition), that “Social Reform” (more government spending and more regulations) is automatically a good thing.
As for the “rise of sexism” since the election of President Reagan in 1980 – what is this even supposed to mean?
Classical Marxism is wrong (it is false) – but at least one can not understand it.
Frankfurt School Marxism (the screeching about “sexism”, “racism”, and so on) is just insane noise.
How is society in 2022 (or 1989 – when Ronald Reagan left office) more “sexist” than it was in 1980?
Again – what does this even mean?
In the early 1890s John Dewey, one of the most important American “Pragmatist” philosophers (people whose philosophy rejected the concept of universal truths – and whose politics was statism), arrived in Chicago.
He hated the place – and, YES, there was a lot of poverty. The technological level of the early 1890s was much lower than today. But John Dewey just ASSUMED that government backed union “collective bargaining” and more statism (more government spending and more regulations) would improve life. He failed to understand that people were migrating to Chicago from all over the world, partly to GET AWAY from such policies.
The lives of people in Chicago were hard (although the stuff in “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair is partly LIES – sorry “creativity”) – a lot harder than John Dewey childhood in little Burlington Vermont, but they were LESS hard than in the Big Government places that a lot of these people had come from.
If John Dewey has understood the basic laws of economics (from Bastiat and others) he would have understood WHY – but like “economists” such as Richard Ely, John Dewey rejected the idea of universal logical laws of economics.
And Chicago today?
Well it, and most other big American cities, have done everything that John Dewey, Richard Ely and the rest of these thinkers urged.
Have a look at them. And remember, as you do so, that technology is vastly better today than it was a century or so ago.
Things have not turned out well under Social Reform.
The economist W.H. Hutt (who actually was from an ordinary background in the East End of London) would have been able to explain WHY collective bargaining and social reform (statism) did not turn out well – but the Progressives would never listen.
Paul Marks (March 18, 2022 at 12:09 pm), maybe you misread my comment? The spoof ‘paragraph with citations’ I quoted was written by Thomas Sowell to illustrate the PC-academic’s writing style, and while Sowell would certainly agree with your deep criticism of them, he was actually using it to illustrate a much more specific point; how the activist posing as a researcher uses wildly trivial and/or irrelevant citations to give the air of a research paper to a piece of agitprop.
The paragraph is not an actual paragraph in a leftie academic’s paper. It is a representative example of the stuff you will find there, differing only by all its examples being ones any reader will recognise. The stuff Sowell is spoofing will often be helped to hide its true nature by containing less well-known names from journals non-academics rarely read.
The pseudo-footnote I quoted, by contrast, is absolutely real. Sowell discusses the phenomenon in depth – go to tsowell.com and read his thoughts-on-writing essay if you wish. It has useful thoughts and some amusing quips.
My apologies Niall – I did indeed misread your comment.
As for Thomas Sowell.
“Austrian School” people (such as the fat man typing these words) tend to stress logical argument more than evidence – and he tends to stress evidence rather than logical argument.
But we both use BOTH – both sorts of people (“Austrian School” or “Chicago School”) use logical argument and evidence (the difference is where we put the emphasis). We are all in the Aristotelian tradition when it comes to reasoning – it is a “broad church” as it were.
The left are not in it, not in the tradition of classical reasoning – their works more closely resemble mystical inscriptions.
Please take my word that I was not referring to anyone here when I complained about a lack of support or citation in writing! What I meant was: I have been pointed toward many different writings by many different people in my quest to understand some things. All of them – good or bad, readable or not – contain some sweeping conclusory statements the truth of which I am expected to accept, often drawing the very point of the article or essay as one such conclusion.
In the article at issue when I said that – what I considered to be a good article – there was a derisory sentence concerning the supposed bombing of the Donbass region. Nothing more. Simply, basically, “some dumb people think it was bombed”. And then it moved on to the next topic.
I would prefer a style such as “the tree was green” (citation to some proof that I can follow to convince me the tree was green) “and the sun was shining” (citation to meteorological chart) “and the birds were singing” (citation to sworn deposition testimony by page and line that the birds were, indeed, singing.)
As I said, I’m destined to be forever frustrated in this. But I didn’t mean y’all!
bobby b (March 18, 2022 at 5:22 pm), I apologise that my tone evidently conveyed some implication of my feeling hurt or defensive at your remark. I was merely providing context. Like you, I prefer statements (including my own) be provided with support where they could need it (and Perry, when he recruited me as a writer, stressed the value of links in posts). I was merely mentioning that the question whether to delay saying something (perhaps forever) rather than omit referencing it has a different standard in my posts and in my comments. The demands of my day job at the time also play a role. 🙂
Niall: many thanks for pointing me to Sowell’s essay about writing; which is itself very well written indeed.
For those who have not read it, here is the link.
I myself am very much a follower of the trial+error school of learning to write well.
(When i put together my refereed papers into a PhD thesis, i discovered that there was a sentence in my first paper which did not make sense to me anymore.)
This is what Trump realised that led to the Abraham accords. The idiots in the state department clung rigidly to the belief that solving the Arab-Isreali problem meant negotiating with the Palestinian leaders. Trump realised that the Palestinian leaders were (literally) the last people to negotiate with, after cutting deals with the other players.
I do not know if Kamil Galeev has read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions”. If he did he would find much to agree with in Sowell’s application of the two visions to the issue of war and peace.
The Donbass experience sounds worse than the post floyd riot experience in the worst-affected US cities.
I wonder if it wasn’t just as much as that the idiots in State were looking to push Israel into the sea and leave Palestinians rampant – while Trump was looking for an end to the violence with Israel extant.
It takes a differing mix of power inputs for each. I liked that Trump recognized that. Yell at the dog’s owner, not at the dog.
I wonder who Putin’s owners are.
If the actions of the Putin regime in eastern Ukraine have indeed “killed pro-Russian sentiments in Ukraine” despite Putin listing recognition of the breakaway puppet-statelets there as one of his (current) pre-conditions for peace, might Ukraine not call his bluff…
“Well, Ukraine is a democracy and, unlike Russia, we have no wish to force our rule over areas that genuinely do not want to be part of our country, so we are prepared to offer recognition of the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and the ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ as independent states … subject, however, to a referendum being held in those areas under the auspices of the United Nations and with large teams of international observers present in order to oversee the proceedings and certify the results as being free and fair.”
I seriously doubt Russia would allow a genuine unintimidated vote, and they sure as hell would not allow people driven from the region to return for the vote.
Frankly, barring a complete unexpected Russian military collapse, Ukraine should probably just write off the pre-invasion chunks of Donbas & Luhansk already lost to them. Sadly, again baring a stunning reversal on the battlefield, Russia is likely to demand Mariupol and all of Donbas/Luhansk, not just the bits they previously held. We are talking some serious real estate. It seems clear Russia intended to end Ukraine as an independent nation, so remains to be seen how far they will roll back their expectations in the face of vastly more resistance than they seem to have expected.
In this whole mess, real military reporting and conclusions have taken a back seat, regarding the ultimate outcome, to public perception. The winner isn’t going to be the one holding the most land. It’s going to be the one that the masses have been convinced “won”.
It’s no longer the Fog of War. It’s the War of Fog.
bobby b (March 18, 2022 at 9:11 pm), I agree anti-semitism is a key factor in the state department (and not only there) but I also think false models and sheer incomprehension of how things work are a real factor in and of themselves. I think they are simply stupider than Trump, over and above their prejudices and agendas. The two things reinforce each other.
Perry de Havilland (London) March 18, 2022 at 9:50 pm: “I seriously doubt Russia would allow a genuine unintimidated vote, and they sure as hell would not allow people driven from the region to return for the vote.”
Exposing Russia’s position was rather the aim of the suggestion I was making: if Ukraine made such an offer, the Putin regime would then be backed into the corner of having to explain their reasons for rejecting out-of-hand what would strike most fair-minded observers as a perfectly reasonable, even generous, offer of allowing those regions to determine their own future.
Dang. I might pick a body other than the UN, but I’d accept those conditions for the next US election.
Hang on, you actually believe NATO’s actions had nothing to do with why Putin “sliced off a piece of Georgia or Moldova”? …..seriously??
And yes, Putin is a mean, horrible, no good, very bad guy. I’m aware.
You believe NATO’s actions had nothing to do with why Putin “sliced off a piece of Georgia or Moldova”?????
Why unexpected? They’re in big, big trouble at the moment.
It’s very hard to tell what is happening, because the reportage of the war is so poor. But the following observations make me feel that things are bad for them: 1) they are having to try and cadge weapons off China and men out of Syria, not what you would expect three weeks into a victorious war, 2) because they can’t find the Ukrainian army to shell, they have taken to shelling towns, which is militarily stupid because those munitions should be aimed at soldiers, 3) they don’t seem to have captured many Ukrainian soldiers. As the war drags on, the Russians will lose tanks and planes, which will leave them increasingly unable to make headway.
This has all the hallmarks of Russia in WWI. They were actually doing quite well on the battlefield when the Tsar fell. But the social costs of the war, and the attractions of other political systems, led to a collapse in confidence in the ruling class.
And you do? Oh boy, where to start?
According to Bruce Menning – who appears to be the expert on all things First World War Russian military – by 1917 the Russian army had been reduced to an armed rabble. It had lost too many officers and senior NCOs.
The Ukrainians have every right to make whatever deal with Putin that they find in their interest, but “the West” should ideally ramp up economic pressure on Russia, until whoever ends up in charge over there agrees to:
* Ukraine being free to join NATO or any other defense pact that arises in its place;
* compensation to Ukraine for war damages;
* compensation to Ukraine for lost territories.
(No point in returning to Ukraine the devastated bits in the East, and no chance that Russia will return the Crimea.)
That is a matter of principle; or rather, of enlightened self-interest: to prevent future aggression, “we” should not reward any past aggression.
There are people here who supported the American Invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which millions of people were killed, maimed, displaced, their lives destroyed, while also opposing the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
They justify this difference by basically explaining that Saddam Hussein was a bad, mean, horrible, evil dictator who did massive harm to his own people. In contrast, Ukraine is a democracy with respect for human rights.
They are right that Saddam Hussein was a bad, mean, horrible evil dictator who did massive harm to his own people.
They are wrong that this justifies killing, maiming, displacing, and destroying the lives of millions of people.
They are wrong that America’s Invasion was a net-benefit for the people of Iraq.
America’s invasion of Iraq net-benefited no one except shareholders of Halliburton and military/defense manufacturers.
Kiev and Moscow have been part of the same country for hundreds and hundreds of years. Washington DC never had any business invading Iraq.
And yes, I personally know people who are from Iraq. They agree with me that if Putin is a war criminal then George W. Bush and Tony Blair are war criminals also and on a much larger scale.
Personally, I am against both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the American Invasion of Iraq. Both are horrible wars that are/were not justified and I oppose both. Neither invasion should have happened. Both are worth condemning in strong terms.
But the idea that the American Invasion of Iraq is more justifiable than the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fucking hilarious to me.
Both the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the American Invasion of Iraq in 2003 are horrible wars that should not have happened. Both are worth condemning in strong terms. Both invasions overall did enormous harm to the peoples of Ukraine and Iraq.
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy who did evil and horrible things to his own people. Totally true.
Another thing that is true is that the US Invasion of Iraq in 2003 was overall extraordinarily harmful and devastating to the people of Iraq. Not only were millions of people killed and maimed, but millions more were displaced. Even those who remained their lives were destroyed and many of their lives remain destroyed to this day.
I personally know people who are from Iraq and I know for a fact that the people of Iraq were devastated in every conceivable way by the American Invasion of Iraq. The people I know from Iraq universally view the American Invasion as a catastrophe that destroyed their lives and the lives of everyone they knew. They tell me that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing, but it was not worth it. Not even close to worth it. The downsides of the American invasion for the People of Iraq were simply not worth the benefits of the American invasion of Iraq for the people of iraq.
We may have moved on but their lives were shattered and remain shattered to this day. Saddam was a very bad guy, an evil dictator. But the American Invasion of Iraq WAS BAD FOR THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ. And the war should absolutely not have happened.
The idea that the American Invasion of Iraq in 2003 was any more justifiable than the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is preposterous to me. It’s just absurd.
Your own comments refer to some differences, Tim B.
You noted – correctly – that Saddam Hussein was a sadistic dictator whereas the Ukraine is a functioning democracy. There were pacifists in WWII who refused to grant that getting rid of Hitler justified that war’s immense destructiveness, but only the dishonest ones (who, admittedly, were most of the loud public ones) talked as if it was a goal of no value in itself. It reads strangely to describe a war to overthrow a sadist and a war to overthrow a democracy as equally unjustified, even if neither meet your standards for waging war.
You described the destructiveness of the Iraq war in terms that the Ukraine war has not yet begun to approach – millions in the dead category, millions in the maimed category and millions neither dead nor maimed yet with their lives “destroyed” and “many of their lives remain destroyed to this day”, as you put it. In living memory, the Ukraine knew horrors on that scale from Stalin and from Hitler – not when fighting them but after the conquest, when being ruled by them. Putin might be a less horrible ruler than Stalin – there again, the Ukraine’s war against being ruled by him may be less horrible than you suggest.
I only know for four people from Iraq (three of which are still in Erbil), all Kurdish, so hardly a definitive sample, but they were very supportive of the invasion & the end of Saddam Hussain. So, really depends.