re: #17 ckkatz

re: #21 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

My belief from day one is that Putin is planning on this lasting for many years.

The failures of the Russian military are not that important.

The goal is a defining idea, an essence of Russianness as envisioned by Putin and his allies.

It’s a religious war.

These things can go on for a century.

I think many Americans overlook the ideological nature of this war.

I disagree. My observation would be that Americans frequently view ideology as paramount and do not understand that in situ, most unfree undemocratic governments and cultural hegemonies have no consistent system of ideas that effect governance, and most “belief” in ideologies in colored by contextual factors and material conditions that filter the high abstractions. Pretty much the whole War on Terror was built on a fundamental misunderstanding of how Islamic fundamentalism works, how different fundamentalists relate to one another, and even just the bare-bones history of how fundamentalism gained it’s influence.

The idea that the high abstractions were the issue, rather than a succession of identifiable material conditions, permitted the construction of a paranoid armature in which all Muslims were potentially suspect as terrorist-supporters, but specific Muslims with wealth and power that had allocated money to the expansion of fundamentalism were our best allies. That your average Taliban fighter was just a guy who preferred a local, comprehensible hegemony that hadn’t bombed his cousin’s wedding to a distant, seemedly more hostile hegemony that did bomb his cousin’s wedding was a big part of why none of our planned shit worked.

Similarly, discussion of Russia has long centered on the idea of sinister ideologues like Dugin guiding…but Dugin’s Eurasianism, has never really been adopted by the state beyond nominal acknowledgements, and most of what Russia does is simply consistent with the strategies and priorities of kleptocracies. And in particular, far too much is made of Putin himself: a specific competence at retaining power has been parleyed into a general competence such that all Russia plans are seen as chess when in fact a bunch of shit they’ve done has been ineffectual, counterproductive, or just plain bad, if you look past the mystique.

Indeed, a big part of the mystique of Russia is not about anything Russia has done competently, but about creating an external, conspiracist explanation for the rise of fascism in metropoles that considered themselves immune to fascism. France cannot be a flailing neoliberal state clinging to a series of colonial African holdings and thus retained the racist and imperialist seeds from which fascism grows; Britain cannot have shot itself in the neck implementing Thatcherian privatization of it’s industry, denied the obvious outcomes of this choice, and thus invited fascism to solve a “mystery” of national collapse; American fascism cannot have been the natural outcome of a century of borrowing fascist…explicitly Nazi…concepts and grafting them to a preexisting nationalism (and protofascist narrative of Confederate victimization); all of these things are the result of Russia meddling. This extends to Putin himself. Putin was a mediocre KGB agent notable mostly for fantastical corruption, a guy who was in the right place behind an utterly incompetent drunk and ended up with power by being The Guy Next To The Important Guy.

None of this is based on some grand plan, except that the notion that the opponent is hypercompetent is preferable to the possibility that our systems are generally kind of rickety, and our paramount values have been ignored and neglected for so long that people are looking for explanations for why shit don’t work. Russia is doing just the exact same shit every dictator does because they only have a light attack (constant nationalist and personal promotion), a heavy attack (state terror), and one special move (start a war and get young men killed to further stoke nationalism).

So is that sincere ideology or cynicism?

Trick question….ideology is meaningless in a autocratic system where a small cadre of individuals can whimsically decide how to define core values and terminology of the state. Ideas have no fixity because the leadership cadre cannot to called to account when they contradict themselves. Putin no more has a coherent value system than a banana republic generalissimo: the un-acted-upon actor, the dictator, cannot be constrained even by their own declared values. Dictatorship is synonymous with poorly-constructed, hothouse-orchid ideologies and texts—Juche, the Green Book, whatever mad spam various Central Asian potentates invent blending steppe culture and Communism—precisely because a way to shore up your absolute power is to construct a system in which you are the interpreter of truth and morality (by virtue of being the prophet or “philosopher”) and there is no other authoritative source of interpretation.

Putin has frequently cozied up to various quack thinkers like Dugin, but has committed to no particular vision beyond basic nationalism, with the standard condiments and side-dishes of nationalism that have been served for centuries. He’s been getting more socially conservative as he’s needed to ratchet down pertinent observations about his failures; he’s gotten more fascist sounding as he’s needed to explain failures of his state without accepting accountability. Social conservatism and fascism, with their central premise that all bodies belong to hegemons (as interpreters of the normal and the volkisch) is incredibly useful for compelling compliance when you have nothing beneficial to offer.

(…which is why so many leaders are leaning into nationalism and/or going fash, and those that aren’t going full fash are still leaning into panopticism and erosion of press power. Everyone’s experiencing the same end-of-empire systemic failure where all the capital has been raked up into a few private piles, and all the promised dividends never arrived because capitalism always bends towards monopolistic control.

They don’t need to be coaxed or bribed by foreigners, they have a completely coherent vested interest in not admitting they facilitated an enormous wealth transfer to a few crony institutions and that they plan to keep doing this evens as people burn to death)

But is any of that ideological? Still a trick question, because powerful people all play with notions of morality and good conduct, then use the words and rituals but alter the meaning to suit preservation of their power. Putin’s ideology is that anything that supports his unchecked power is True and Good, full stop. Orthodoxism, Russian ethnic pride, Tsarism, Communism, anti-Western-European sentiment, anti-Central Asian sentiment, anti-Islamic sentiment, homophobia—Putin has taken all of these things and turned them into the same thing. It’s the miracle of cis-substantiation: all things are actually just signposts that Putin cannot be replaced as leader.

Putin’s actual power that keeps him in place has been distribution of spoils: in past enough value went into the international capital flow that the world powers were content, and enough money went to his crook underlings and oligarchs that they’re appeased and don’t try and replace him with a different guy. But he’s fucked the money flow in the way dictators often fuck up, by forgetting that there’s a point where the international order will get tired of your edgelord bullshit and the piles of dead photogenic children become socially awkward.

Leveling a bunch of Chechen villages and calling everyone dead a franc-tireur in the middle of the War on Terror was…distasteful but barely registered in the larger morass of the era. But the fuckery in Ukraine was just too obvious, the clever-clogs annexation moves too clumsy, the Ukrainians too white, the attempts to do a blitzkrieg “clean” victory immediately turned to dogshit by a mix of rank incompetence and just the absolute inability for the gangster-adjacent pyramid scheme masquerading as a military to act like professionals. Putin has done the two worst things: all his troll psyops shit hasn’t made his clumsy warmongering less embarrassing internationally, and he’s demonstrated to his goons that he can fucked up distributing the spoils.

At this point, the war has to proceed because if it ends, then the embarrassment and the fuck up are permanent. As long as the violence escalates, Putin can argue that a point will come where Russia can re-balance their international relationships from a position of strength: if the throne of skulls is high enough, and the thirst for venture capital and cheap LNG is high enough, then the international order can just be made to look the other way.

(you know, that thing they regularly do because some nutjob with too much flair is sitting on a uranium mine or an oil field)

Like, let me hammer this home: most genocides are driven by material incentives, with a thin patina of emotive identity politics atop it. The mass murder is just the final form of theft: you take their stuff, you steal their labor through enslavement, you take their lives. The “hate” of the genocidaire is a sentiment downstream of a base assumption about property and ownership: the Wrong Kinds of People should not have nice things, and the at Right Kinds of People are entitled to what their inferiors have.

The Nazis hated the Jews, but most of that hate was centered on the premise that Jews possessed capital that should be held by Germans: they escalated to camps and mass murder because these were more efficient means of extracting values from Jews and other targeted groups, but their initial plans were, quite literally, just to steal all the valuables. Genocides are an act of robbery as much as they are an act of murder…actually all of racism is heavily tinged with anxiety about ownership and various formulation of “I am permitted your stuff, and sometimes even your body” and that has to be factored in when some fucking asshole atop a nation declares that Group X are all trash people that deserve nothing.

Like, to be an actual Putinist Russian vatnik you have to reject consistency of ideas in favor of emotional texture: the base assumption is not a solid idea that demands analysis but a strong feeling that denies analysis. There’s no ideology, just vibes; deeply self-involved, consciously small-minded, deliberately cruel vibes that are intertwined with a conceit that they are literally owed something.

Actually, the whole thing is like ISIS: if someone can just keep making up new “rules” to justify the shit you’re already doing, they’re existing in the realm of bullshit and time spent trying to determine good or bad faith is poorly spent. Russia just keeps making up new stories about why Ukrainians don’t get to keep their country, and it’s a perfectly valid to observe that maybe no particular argument is in good faith, and the only thing that’s really retained is the base assumptions that Russians get to take Ukrainians’ stuff. It’s a giant fucking robbery, accompanied by myriad smaller robberies conducted by individual pillagers, and the killing and destruction is effectively just a way to make theft easier.

Ukraine is also about material incentives: the seized eastern portions have a lot of natural gas reserves, the Black Sea ports are valuable as infrastructure, and Russia is basically an LNG petrostate with monopolistic control over the resource in continental Europe. Having failed to control Ukraine through political influence, just fucking the country up is good for Russia’s financial future.