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~ Yehuda Amikhai
Oriana:
One of the best anti-war poems I've encountered. The last three lines are magnificent.
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If this continues, we will soon become
strangers in our native land,
exiles from the heavenly state,
because it has no place in our world,
and we can not get there,
where we must first die to come to life
and lose all human likeness,
to become not people and not gods,
but something like a shadow, like smoke, like steam.
~ Lesia Ukrainka, 1908
~ This month marks the 151st birthday of Ukrainian poet, Larysa Kosach-Kvitka. She used a pseudonym, Lesia Ukrainka, because in the Russian empire, publications in the Ukrainian language were forbidden.
Known for her plays, poems and for her political activism, Lesia Ukrainka is regarded as one of the most notable Ukrainian writers of Ukrainian literature. She traveled extensively throughout Europe and Egypt in search of treatment for tuberculosis, and she learned much about the world beyond her native land.
Writing from Vienna in 1891 she said, “I look at the Europe and the Europeans before me, and I want to say something true even though I’m on the sidelines… My first impression was that I had entered another world – a better world, a freer world. It will be much harder for me now when I return to my country. I’m ashamed that we are so enslaved, that we carry such heavy shackles and sleep so peacefully under them. I have awakened, and I am sad and I grieve; I am in pain…”
Kosach-Kvitka had a gift for languages, speaking English, German, French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, and her native Ukrainian. She wrote prolifically in spite of a debilitating illness that often kept her bedridden for months.
~ Doyle Glass, posted on Facebook, 3-2-22
Oriana:
”Ukrainka" means "a Ukrainian woman." The choice of this pen name was already an act of courage in the Russian Empire, which tried to Russify its conquered territories (including a large part of Poland). I am not sure what Lesia evokes in Ukrainian, but in Polish, a closely related language, Lesia suggests the forest.
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ROZANOV’S APOCALYPSE
~ In my childhood, it was still held by a surviving literary group, the “Nothings,” that a writer is an idiot in the original Greek sense of the word, the sense which lingered in English up to the 18th century: a private person, a layman. Political, social, legal, religious, or professional life is not for such idiots—of whom Vasily Rozanov was one. He once engaged in a magazine polemic concerned with a social subject, and when it was his turn for the final rebuttal (crucial forensically, as every polemicist knows), he wrote: “Ah, go to the devil, I am sleepy.” On another occasion it was found that he had been writing articles for both warring political sides. He could not understand the resulting uproar.
Russia has never produced a single thinker like Plato, Kant, or William James. But Russia produced Rozanov, some Russians of my milieu would say. Western culture, they would press on, has been fascinated by the machine ever since Plato. Form, system, concept, structure, sonata—are these not sublimations of the machine? Everything is organized, a Westerner might say, music, mathematics, novels, and the movement of stars. To this, Rozanov says no; there is only a “salty cucumber at the end of June, with a tiny thread of fennel on it (it should not be removed).” Or: “My soul is woven of filth, tenderness, and sadness.” ~
https://www.commentary.org/articles/lev-navrozov/the-apocalypse-of-our-time-and-other-writings-by-vasily-rozanov/
Oriana:
How strange, after this, to learn that in 1919 Rozanov died of starvation during the famine that followed the the Bolshevik revolution. After all his eccentric writings on Creation and Apocalypse, the real apocalypse did not fail to find him.
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Mikhail Iossel: THE END OF RUSSIAN MODERNITY
~ In the early 70s, one of the most popular films in the Soviet Union was "Flight" — an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's 1920's play about Russian emigres in Istanbul. And now, once again, Istanbul and scores of other foreign cities are filled with escapees from Russia.
What happened on February 24, 2022, was the end of Russian modernity — Russia as we've known it for most of our lives. By trying to destroy Ukraine, which stood at the source of Russian history and for a long time has wanted to be what Russia itself has not been able to bring itself to try being — Russia's future-bound doppelgänger — Russia is destroying itself, its own reason for being and its own future; and in this process of willful self-destruction, it is threatening to destroy the entire world. Such is the degree of its resentment-fueled self-loathing.
Russian history, in all its misery and brutality, is going around in century-wide concentric circles. ~
Oriana:
“The end of Russian modernity” — an attempt to restore the Soviet Union . . . with a lot more territory to be reconquered, all because of one man's crazy view that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But today's Russia doesn't have millions and millions of young men, the way it had them during WW2 (and Stalin was certainly willing to sacrifice millions). It's an aging and depopulating country (in parallel with many other European countries, but some of those countries can rely on being attractive to immigrants; no one would care to immigrate to Russia.)
A 2019 government report said Russia’s population could drop by more than 12 million by 2035. ~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/13/russias-population-undergoes-largest-ever-peacetime-decline; Russia's population peaked at close to 149 million in 1991, just before the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The current figure is 141 million. It could be argued that Russia doesn't have enough young men to fight expansionist wars.
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THUCYDIDES CAN EXPLAIN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR
~ Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War described a war fought between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta and their allies between 431 and 404 BCE. Although Sparta ultimately won the war, it was a pyrrhic victory. The long war destroyed the Greek city-states’ power and sapped their resources. Thucydides stated that the war started because of three factors: fear, interest, and honor. More than 2,000 years later, his ideas remain relevant for understanding the current conflict.
FEAR
The American strategy of containment helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the years since, several former Soviet states have joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO expansion has now reached Russia’s western borders in several places. Russia feared for its security.
The turning point was NATO’s April 2008 summit in Bucharest, when it was announced that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually join NATO. This heightened Russian fears on the expansion of NATO and its motives. In August 2008, Russia launched a “peace enforcement” military operation into Georgia. Sparta feared the rise of Athens, sparking the Peloponnesian War. Russia’s war in Georgia served as a stark warning that Russia will take military action if it feared its national security is threatened.
Ukraine initiated steps to join both NATO and the European Union (EU). Those actions led to Russian intervention in 2014. Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and supported pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. That conflict simmered for eight years until Russia invaded Ukraine in February to disrupt its plans to join NATO and the EU.
INTEREST
The occupation of Ukrainian territories is related to Russia’s strategic interests. Russia seeks to have a strategic “buffer” that can serve as geographical bulwarks against potential Western expansion.
Ukraine could hypothetically be used as territory from which to launch an attack into Russia. Memories of Germany’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia in World War II still linger. Ukraine was one of the prime axes for the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South advance which captured Kiev, Crimea, Kharkiv, and the Donbas region in 1941. History informs us that Russia needs geographical buffer zones in its western boundaries to ensure it can have strategic depth for defense.
Many former Soviet states in Eastern Europe have now joined NATO. Ukraine was one of the last strategic buffers positioned between Russia and the West. Ukrainian membership in NATO would mean that Russia has lost influence over its land connections to Eastern and Central Europe, relegating it to be an Asian power in the Eurasian landmass.
Russia also needs to strengthen Crimea with land connections to the Donbas region via control of Mariupol and its adjacent areas. Linking Crimea to Odessa further west would provide Russia with a strategic corridor with access to a warm water port. It would also secure lines of communications and support for these occupied areas. These geographical zones are Russia’s core strategic interests in Ukraine.
HONOR
Russian president Vladimir Putin must also demonstrate resolve and strength. Russia’s culture and history shows that this is important. Russians have favored strong leaders throughout their history with legendary figures such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Putin won re-election in 2018 with a convincing 76.7 percent of the vote, but circumstances have changed in recent years.
THUCYDIDES’ LESSONS
Thucydides’ trio of fear, interest, and honor each played a role in Russia’s strategic reasoning for invading Ukraine. However, it must be noted that strategy is a two-way street. On the other side, Ukraine and NATO also have their respective elements of fear, interest, and honor in this geopolitical conflict. The clashing of these irreconcilable ends may lead to a larger and more tragic conflict.
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War also has a cautionary lesson for us today. The Peloponnesian War started with Corinth and Corcyra fighting each other, later dragging the larger Greek powers with their allies into an epic war that almost destroyed their world. If the world powers do not tread carefully in managing the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War, it may escalate and spiral into a more massive and destructive war with global consequences. ~
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/thucydides-can-explain-russias-invasion-ukraine-201237
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PUTIN’S THOUSAND-YEAR WAR
~ The Russian president’s enduring antagonism toward the West is a complex tale, one compounded of Putin’s 69-year-old personal history as a child of World War II and career Soviet spy as well as the tangled, thousand-year history of Russia itself—or at least Putin’s reading of it. At the bottom, Putin and the many right-leaning Russian officials, elites, and scholars who support him not only don’t want to be part of the West and its postwar liberal value system but believe their country’s destiny is to be a great-power bulwark against it.
Even if Putin is somehow ousted from power, the generals and security mandarins who surround him are just as vested in his aggression as he is. And already, Russia is almost as isolated economically as it was during the Soviet era.
Indeed, Putin may have been preparing for this moment longer than people realize: After the Russian leader annexed Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin’s longtime ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, wrote that it would mark “the end of Russia’s epic journey to the West, the cessation of repeated and fruitless attempts to become a part of Western civilization.” Surkov predicted that Russia would exist in geopolitical solitude for at least the next hundred years.
Ukraine became the touchstone of Putin’s anti-Western attitudes in large part because the Russian leader and his supporters saw their historical brother nation as the last red line in a long series of Western humiliations. Putin, in his speeches, has repeatedly called this the West’s “anti-Russia project.” These perceived humiliations go back a long, long way—not just in the 30 years since the Cold War ended, nor even in the 100 years since the Soviet Union was formed in 1922. They reach all the way back to the European Enlightenment of more than three centuries ago, which gave rise to liberty, democracy, and human rights. To Russian nationalists like Putin, these developments have gradually come to eclipse Russia’s distinct character as a civilization.
By his own account, Putin sees himself not as the heir to the Soviets but as a champion of Russian civilization and Moscow’s Eurasian empire, whose roots extend back to a much earlier Vladimir—St. Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kyiv from about 980 to 1015. St. Vladimir was ruler of what the Russians consider their first empire, the Slavic state known as Kievan Rus—based, of course, in Kyiv, the capital of what is now Ukraine. St. Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity in 988 later gave rise to the idea that Russia would be the “third Rome”—the heir to the fallen Roman and Byzantine Empires following the surrender of Constantinople to the Ottomans. It is why, like Putin, many Russians refer to Kievan Rus as “the cradle of Russian civilization” and Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities.”
All this history is key to understanding Putin’s delusional view that Ukraine is not, and can never be, a separate country and “never had a tradition of genuine statehood.” Putin made this plain in a Feb. 21 speech, three days before the invasion, and in a 6,800-word essay from July 2021 titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In that essay, he reached back more than 10 centuries to explain why he was convinced that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people—a single whole.” He claimed it was important to understand that Russians and Ukrainians, along with Belarusians, “are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.” Putin wrote: “The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir … still largely determines our affinity today.”
Some scholars believe this obsession with long-ago history is why Putin, who during his two decades in power was often thought to be a wily and restrained tactician, made the biggest miscalculation of his career in invading Ukraine. In doing so, he united, in one reckless move, the Ukrainians and the Europeans as well as the rest of the world against him. “He didn’t realize that even most of the Russian-language speakers in eastern Ukraine see themselves now as Ukrainian—that over the past 30 years, the Ukrainians had formed their own country. He didn’t realize that their sense of identity had changed,” said Peter Eltsov, a professor at National Defense University and author of the new book The Long Telegram 2.0: A Neo-Kennanite Approach to Russia. “He also killed all the progress he was making in dividing Europe. Even Finland and Sweden, which had been neutral, are now talking about joining NATO. He achieved the 100 percent opposite result of what he wanted.”
Putin’s historical focus is also meant to convey his deeply entrenched belief that Russia is a distinct civilization that has little in common with the West. This is a key element of “Eurasianism,” a Russian imperial ideology that is more than 100 years old but today has been directed at what Putin and his supporters see as the “philistinism” of the West and the corruption of its democracies, said Kelly O’Neill, a historian of Russia at Harvard University. She suggested that Putin’s reluctance to fully integrate modern Russia into the global economy—beyond selling it a lot of oil and gas—is based on the Eurasianist belief that Russia and its dominions are “distinct economies that belong to this beautiful imperial whole. It’s a defensive mechanism. If you integrate, then you become more vulnerable. Their view is, ‘We’re fortress Russia. We don’t need anyone else.’”
This attitude also has profound roots in Russian history, especially the Russian belief that Orthodox Christianity is superior to the West’s liberalized Christianity, which Putin and other conservative Russians view as corrupted by Enlightenment ideas. In the early 19th century, the Russian answer to the French Revolution’s Enlightenment creed, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity), was “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”—which Sergey Uvarov, minister of public education to Tsar Nicholas I, formulated as the conceptual foundation of the Russian Empire. This tripartite credo isn’t mentioned in Putin’s speeches and writings—he still likes to pretend Russia is a democracy—but it has been invoked by the far-right thinkers said to influence Putin, including Aleksandr Dugin, Lev Gumilev, Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy, and others dating back 200 years.
“Uvarov’s formula explains why Russia always seems to resuscitate an autocratic empire in periods of crisis—as it did after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and is now doing following the fall of the Soviet Union,” Eltsov said. Putin’s Eurasianist goals can also only live or die through autocracy and imperial power, Eltsov and other scholars said. “Eurasianism is an imperial idea because it offers a way to reconcile the unity of the people as a whole and their diversity,” O’Neill said. “It’s difficult to do that if you don’t have an empire.”
For Putin, the idea of rebuilding a Eurasian empire under his rule—of which Ukraine must be a part—seems central to his sense of destiny as a leader. Russia, a vast land straddling Europe and Asia, is a civilization that has never been able to decide whether it is more European or Asian—a dilemma made more confusing by the fact that Mongols ruled it for 240 years, leaving behind millions of Tatar descendants. Russia also can’t agree on what its borders ought to be, not even after a thousand years.
“In Europe, borders have been set by rivers and mountain ranges, but that is not the way Russia looks at how boundaries are set. They have fluctuated over time,” based in large part on Moscow’s fears of invasion, said Thomas Graham, a former senior U.S. diplomat and Russia expert now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “People have long said that there’s never been a Russian nation state in history—that it’s always been an empire of one sort or another. The borders of Russia today are pretty much the borders of Russia in 1721, the year the empire was founded. The way they see it now, [the Soviet collapse of] 1991 undid some 200 to 300 years of geopolitical advances.”
Putin’s main goal in office has been to reverse that trend as much as possible. Or as Surkov, the Kremlin ideologist, wrote in 2019: “Having collapsed from the level of the USSR to the level of the [Russian Federation], Russia stopped crumbling, began to recover and to return to its natural and only possible condition as a great land, combining and augmenting the commonality of its peoples.” As a result, Surkov concluded, Russia will soon return to its past glory and the top rank of geopolitical struggle.
Graham and other Russia experts said it is a mistake to view Putin merely as an angry former KGB apparatchik upset at the fall of the Soviet Union and NATO’s encroachment after the Cold War, as he is often portrayed by Western commentators. Putin, himself, made this clear in his Feb. 21 speech, when he disavowed the Soviet legacy, inveighing against the mistakes made by former leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to grant Ukraine even partial autonomy. On the contrary, Putin and other Russian nationalists today see Marxism-Leninism as just another regrettable Western import.
Putin is rather a messianic Russian nationalist and Eurasianist whose constant invocation of history going back to Kievan Rus, however specious, is the best explanation for his view that Ukraine must be part of Russia’s sphere of influence, experts say. In his essay last July, Putin even suggested that the formation of a separate, democratic Ukrainian nation “is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.”
As Putin has shown by transforming post-Soviet Russia’s brief experiment with democracy under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin into his personal power structure, he also has never demonstrated any sympathy for the Western postwar order of liberal democratic capitalism. Instead, for him, the post-Cold War period has been mostly about redesigning borders and power. Putin has been driven mainly by an old strategic concept, embraced by dictators Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and other traditional strategists from recent centuries, of the need for “strategic depth” or buffer zones to defend one’s borders. For Putin, whose father fought in World War II (Putin carries his picture every year in the national parade commemorating what Russians call the Great Patriotic War), and for many other Russians, the defining event of their lives was the trauma of Hitler’s invasion and the deaths of tens of millions of their countrymen. That was likened at the time, and still is, to Napoleon’s calamitous war on Russia the century before.
“Russia has been repeatedly invaded. That’s something that’s very difficult for us in the United States to understand because we never faced a catastrophe of those dimensions,” Graham said. “It is a sense that goes back centuries: In order to survive, you need strategic depth, so you need to push borders out as far away from the heartland as possible—not so much physical as geopolitical barriers. You just push until you meet something that can resist you.”
Putin’s strange promise to “de-Nazify” Ukraine to justify his invasion—especially odd because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish—is better understood if one considers that he may actually believe he’s still fighting World War II, when substantial numbers of Ukrainians joined the Nazis. Ukrainian national hero Stepan Bandera—whose name adorns many streets in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and other cities and whose statues can be found across the country—was himself a far-right nationalist who allied with the Nazis and oversaw Jewish pogroms. In his speeches, Putin has often recast the allied fight against the Nazis as a largely Russian triumph. “He probably genuinely believes he’s reproducing the war, fighting against Nazism again,” said Marlene Laruelle, a Russia scholar at George Washington University.
Putin’s consolidation of power and attempts to take back bits of the former Soviet bloc, starting with his incursion into Georgia in 2008, are also a result of what Eltsov calls “Weimar syndrome”—a burning sense of defeat and humiliation after Soviet Russia’s defeat in the Cold War. One reason Putin has been so popular until now is many ordinary Russians share his sense of national injustice, Eltsov said. It is analogous to what happened in Germany after World War I, when popular outrage over the Treaty of Versailles and weakness and chaos in the Weimar Republic precipitated a right-wing reaction and, ultimately, the rise of Hitler.
Not every Russian, of course, shares these anti-Western views—even going back hundreds of years. Great figures in Russian history, especially two of its most lionized tsars, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, often sought to embrace the West and Russia’s European identity. Peter, who ruled from 1682 to 1725, was so enamored with the West that he ordered his boyars, or lords, to educate their children in Europe and even imposed a “beard tax” to force them to look like clean-shaven Europeans. Catherine corresponded with Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, called French writer Voltaire her hero, and initially sought to set up a parliament and free the serfs. Many royal and aristocratic Russian families eagerly interbred with their European counterparts; Catherine herself was Prussian-born.
But both Peter and Catherine were conquerors as well. And these reformist efforts at integration, while they helped modernize Russia and gave rise to all those French-speaking Russian aristocrats who populated the works of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, were almost always eclipsed by deeper conservative Russian fears. Today, Russian nationalists deride the Western reform efforts of Peter the Great as a seditious “fifth column.” Even Boris Nemtsov—a liberal opponent to Putin’s regime who was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015— suggested that Russia could benefit from a constitutional monarchy back in 1993.
To a degree little understood by many Westerners, Russian literary figures they revere, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were also devotees of this idea of a “greater Russia” under an absolute autocrat. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for writings that exposed the horrors of the Soviet gulag, later became one of Putin’s favorite intellectuals. Before his 2008 death, Solzhenitsyn wrote in an essay: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood.” Shortly before his death in 1881, Dostoevsky wrote: “To the people the Czar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes and beliefs.”
Putin, many Russia experts say, is only Russia’s latest tsar, and that’s the way he should be viewed by the Western strategists now searching for ways to stop him. The answer, in the end, may be to understand that Putin is acting more out of weakness than strength. In other words, Putin is riding the tiger of democratic self-determination in Ukraine and other former states of the Russian sphere—all of which now want to join the West—and he may not know how to get off. Eltsov argues that as a result of its centuries-long effort to control so many ethnic nationalities within its ever-shifting borders, Russia cannot survive for long as a true liberal democracy.
If it embraced the West and its democratic values, he said, “Russia would probably disintegrate.” ~
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/12/putins-thousand-year-war/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE WEAKNESS OF A DESPOT (interview with Steven Kotkin, Princeton Professor of History, author of two volumes of biography of Stalin)
~ What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.
I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in NATO? They would be in the same limbo, in the same world that Ukraine is in. In fact, Poland’s membership in NATO stiffened NATO’s spine. Unlike some of the other NATO countries, Poland has contested Russia many times over. In fact, you can argue that Russia broke its teeth twice on Poland: first in the nineteenth century, leading up to the twentieth century, and again at the end of the Soviet Union, with Solidarity.
When you talk about the internal dynamics of Russia, it brings to mind a piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs, six years ago, which began, “For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.” You go on to describe three “fleeting moments” of Russian ascendancy: first during the reign of Peter the Great, then Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon, and then, of course, Stalin’s victory over Hitler. And then you say that, “these high-water marks aside, however, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power.” I wonder if you could expand on that and talk about how the internal dynamics of Russia have led to the present moment under Putin.
We had this debate about Iraq. Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In other words, there’s the personality, which can’t be denied, but there are also structural factors that shape the personality. One of the arguments I made in my Stalin book was that being the dictator, being in charge of Russian power in the world in those circumstances and in that time period, made Stalin who he was and not the other way around.
Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place—a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.
Russia is a great power, but not the great power, except for those few moments in history that you just enumerated. In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion. They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards in order, militarily and economically, to either match or compete with the West. And that works for a time, but very superficially. Russia has a spurt of economic growth, and it builds up its military, and then, of course, it hits a wall. It then has a long period of stagnation where the problem gets worse. The very attempt to solve the problem worsens the problem, and the gulf with the West widens. The West has the technology, the economic growth, and the stronger military.
The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. They’ve been in this bind for a while because they cannot relinquish that sense of exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match that in reality. Eurasia is just much weaker than the Anglo-American model of power. Iran, Russia, and China, with very similar models, are all trying to catch the West, trying to manage the West and this differential in power.
What is Putinism? It’s not the same as Stalinism. It’s certainly not the same as Xi Jinping’s China or the regime in Iran. What are its special characteristics, and why would those special characteristics lead it to want to invade Ukraine, which seems a singularly stupid, let alone brutal, act?
Yes, well, war usually is a miscalculation. It’s based upon assumptions that don’t pan out, things that you believe to be true or want to be true. Of course, this isn’t the same regime as Stalin’s or the tsar’s, either. There’s been tremendous change: urbanization, higher levels of education. The world outside has been transformed. And that’s the shock. The shock is that so much has changed, and yet we’re still seeing this pattern that they can’t escape from.
You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners.
And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.
Putin believed, it seems, that Ukraine is not a real country, and that the Ukrainian people are not a real people, that they are one people with the Russians. He believed that the Ukrainian government was a pushover. He believed what he was told or wanted to believe about his own military, that it had been modernized to the point where it could organize not a military invasion but a lightning coup, to take Kyiv in a few days and either install a puppet government or force the current government and President to sign some paperwork.
But think about the Prague Spring, in August, 1968. Leonid Brezhnev sent in the tanks of the Warsaw Pact to halt “socialism with a human face,” the communist reform movement of Alexander Dubček. Brezhnev kept telling Dubček, Stop it. Don’t do that. You’re ruining communism. And, if you don’t stop, we will come in. Brezhnev comes in, and they take Dubček and the other leaders of Czechoslovakia back to Moscow. They don’t have a puppet regime to install. In the Kremlin, Brezhnev is asking Dubček, after having sent the tanks in and capturing him, what should they do now? It looks ridiculous, and it was ridiculous. But, of course, it was based upon miscalculations and misunderstandings. And so they sent Dubček back to Czechoslovakia, and he stayed in power [until April, 1969], after the tanks had come in to crush the Prague Spring.
One other example is what happened in Afghanistan, in 1979. The Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan. It did a coup in Afghanistan, sending special forces into the capital of Kabul. It murdered the Afghan leadership and installed a puppet, Babrak Karmal, who had been hiding in exile in Czechoslovakia. It was a total success because Soviet special forces were really good. But, of course, they decided they might need some security in Afghanistan for the new regime. So they sent in all sorts of Army regiments to provide security and ended up with an insurgency and with a ten-year war that they lost.
With Ukraine, we have the assumption that it could be a successful version of Afghanistan, and it wasn’t. It turned out that the Ukrainian people are brave; they are willing to resist and die for their country. Evidently, Putin didn’t believe that. But it turned out that “the television President,” Zelensky, who had a twenty-five-per-cent approval rating before the war—which was fully deserved, because he couldn’t govern—now it turns out that he has a ninety-one-per-cent approval rating. It turned out that he’s got cojones. He’s unbelievably brave. Moreover, having a TV-production company run a country is not a good idea in peacetime, but in wartime, when information war is one of your goals, it’s a fabulous thing to have in place.
The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.
How do you define “the West”?
The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.
If you assumed that the West was just going to fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; if you assumed that the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; if you assumed that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine—if you assumed all of that, then maybe you thought you could take Kyiv in two days or four days. But those assumptions were wrong.
Let’s discuss the nature of the Russian regime. Putin came in twenty-three years ago, and there were figures called the oligarchs from the Yeltsin years, eight or nine of them. Putin read them the riot act, saying, You can keep your riches, but stay out of politics. Those who kept their nose in politics, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were punished, sent to prison. Others left the country with as much of their fortune as possible. But we still talk about oligarchs. What is the nature of the regime and the people who are loyal to it? Who is important?
It’s a military-police dictatorship. Those are the people who are in power. In addition, it has a brilliant coterie of people who run macroeconomics. The central bank, the finance ministry, are all run on the highest professional level. That’s why Russia has this macroeconomic fortress, these foreign-currency reserves, the “rainy day” fund. It has reasonable inflation, a very balanced budget, very low state debt—twenty per cent of G.D.P., the lowest of any major economy. It had the best macroeconomic management.
So you have a military-police dictatorship in charge, with a macroeconomic team running your fiscal, military state. Those people are jockeying over who gets the upper hand. For macroeconomic stability, for economic growth, you need decent relations with the West. But, for the military security part of the regime, which is the dominant part, the West is your enemy, the West is trying to undermine you, it’s trying to overthrow your regime in some type of so-called color revolution. What happened is that the balance between those groups shifted more in favor of the military security people—let’s call it the thuggish part of the regime. And, of course, that’s where Putin himself comes from.
The oligarchs were never in power under Putin. He clipped their wings. They worked for him. If they didn’t work for him, they could lose their money. He rearranged the deck chairs. He gave out the money. He allowed expropriation by his own oligarchs, people who grew up with him, who did judo with him, who summered with him. The people who were in the K.G.B. with him in Leningrad back in the day, or in post-Soviet St. Petersburg—those people became oligarchs and expropriated the property to live the high life. Some of the early Yeltsin-era people were either expropriated, fled, or were forced out. Putin built a regime in which private property, once again, was dependent on the ruler. Everybody knew this. If they didn’t know, they learned the lesson the hard way.
Sadly, this encouraged people all up and down the regime to start stealing other people’s businesses and property. It became a kind of free-for-all. If it was good enough for Putin and his cronies, it’s good enough for me as the governor of Podunk province. The regime became more and more corrupt, less and less sophisticated, less and less trustworthy, less and less popular. It hollowed out. That’s what happens with dictatorships.
But such people and such a regime, it seems to me, would care above all about wealth, about the high life, about power. Why would they care about Ukraine?
It’s not clear that they do. We’re talking, at most, about six people, and certainly one person as the decision-maker. This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison, they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are.
And yet, as corrupt as China is, they’ve lifted tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty. Education levels are rising. The Chinese leaders credit themselves with enormous achievements.
Who did that? Did the Chinese regime do that? Or Chinese society? Let’s be careful not to allow the Chinese Communists to expropriate, as it were, the hard labor, the entrepreneurialism, the dynamism of millions and millions of people in that society. You know, in the Russian case, Navalny was arrested—
This is Alexey Navalny, Putin’s most vivid political rival, who was poisoned by the F.S.B. and is now in prison.
Yes. He was imprisoned in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. In retrospect, it could well be that this was a preparation for the invasion, the way that Ahmad Shah Massoud, for example, was blown up in Northern Afghanistan [by Al Qaeda] right before the Twin Towers came down.
You have the denial of alternatives, the suppression of any opposition, arrest, exile, and then you can prosper as an élite, not with economic growth but just with theft. And, in Russia, wealth comes right up out of the ground! The problem for authoritarian regimes is not economic growth. The problem is how to pay the patronage for their élites, how to keep the élites loyal, especially the security services and the upper levels of the officer corps.
If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate themselves from the oppressed. The oppressors can say, we don’t need you. We don’t need your taxes. We don’t need you to vote. We don’t rely on you for anything, because we have oil and gas, palladium and titanium. They can have zero economic growth and still live very high on the hog.
There’s never a social contract in an authoritarian regime, whereby the people say, O.K., we’ll take economic growth and a higher standard of living, and we’ll give up our freedom to you. There is no contract. The regime doesn’t provide the economic growth, and it doesn’t say, Oh, you know, we’re in violation of our promise. We promised economic growth in exchange for freedom, so we’re going to resign now because we didn’t fulfill the contract.
What accounts for the “popularity” of an authoritarian regime like Putin’s?
They have stories to tell. And, as you know, stories are always more powerful than secret police. Yes, they have secret police and regular police, too, and, yes, they’re serious people and they’re terrible in what they’re doing to those who are protesting the war, putting them in solitary confinement. This is a serious regime, not to be taken lightly. But they have stories. Stories about Russian greatness, about the revival of Russian greatness, about enemies at home and enemies abroad who are trying to hold Russia down. And they might be Jews or George Soros or the I.M.F. and NATO. They might be all sorts of enemies that you just pull right off the shelf, like a book.
We think of censorship as suppression of information, but censorship is also the active promotion of certain kinds of stories that will resonate with the people. The aspiration to be a great power, the aspiration to carry out a special mission in the world, the fear and suspicion that outsiders are trying to get them or bring them down: those are stories that work in Russia. They’re not for everybody. You know many Russians who don’t buy into that and know better. But the Putin version is powerful, and they promote it every chance they get.
The West has decided, for obvious reasons, not to go to war with Russia, not to have a no-fly zone. Economic sanctions have proved more comprehensive and more powerful than maybe people had anticipated some weeks ago. But it seems that the people who these are aimed at most directly will be able to absorb them.
Sanctions are a weapon that you use when you don’t want to fight a hot war because you’re facing a nuclear power. It’s one thing to bomb countries in the Middle East that don’t have nuclear weapons; it’s another thing to contemplate bombing Russia or China in the nuclear age. It’s understandable that economic sanctions, including really powerful ones, are the tools that we reach for.
We are also, however, arming the Ukrainians to the teeth. And there’s a great deal of stuff happening in the cyber realm that we don’t know anything about because the people who are talking don’t know, and the people who know are not talking. And there is quite a lot of armed conflict, thanks to the courage of the Ukrainians and the response and logistics of NATO, with Washington, of course, leading them.
We don’t know yet how the sanctions are going to work. The sanctions often inflict the greatest pain on the civilian population. Regimes can sometimes survive sanctions because they can just steal more internally. If you expropriate somebody’s bank account in London or Frankfurt or New York, well, there’s a source where that came from originally, and they can go back inside Russia and tap that source again, unfortunately. Putin doesn’t have money abroad that we can just sanction or expropriate. Putin’s money is the entire Russian economy. He doesn’t need to have a separate bank account, and he certainly wouldn’t keep it vulnerable in some Western country.
The biggest and most important sanctions are always about technology transfer. It’s a matter of starving them of high tech. If, over time, through the Commerce Department, you deny them American-made software, equipment, and products, which affects just about every important technology in the world, and you have a target and an enforceable mechanism for doing that, you can hurt this regime and create a technology desert.
In the meantime, though, we saw what Russian forces did to Grozny in 1999-2000; we saw what they did to Aleppo. For Russia, if precision doesn’t work, they will decimate cities. That is what we’re seeing now in Kharkiv and in other parts of Ukraine. And it’s only just begun, potentially.
The largest and most important consideration is that Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine. They do not have the scale of forces. They do not have the number of administrators they’d need or the coöperation of the population. They don’t even have a Quisling yet.
Think about all those Ukrainians who would continue to resist. The Nazis came into Kyiv, in 1940. They grabbed all the luxury hotels, but days later those hotels started to blow up. They were booby-trapped. If you’re an administrator or a military officer in occupied Ukraine and you order a cup of tea, are you going to drink that cup of tea? Do you want to turn the ignition on in your car? Are you going to turn the light switch on in your office? All it takes is a handful of assassinations to unsettle the whole occupation.
Let’s take the story back to Moscow. We know the story of how Tsar Paul I was assassinated by people around him. Khrushchev was overthrown and replaced, eventually, by Brezhnev. Under Putin, is there any possibility of a palace coup?
There is always a possibility of a palace coup. There are a couple of issues here. One is that [the West is] working overtime to entice a defection. We want a high-level security official or a military officer to get on a plane and fly to Helsinki or Brussels or Warsaw and hold a press conference and say, “I’m General So-and-So and I worked in the Putin regime and I oppose this war and I oppose this regime. And here’s what the inside of that regime looks like.”
At the same time, Putin is working overtime to prevent any such defection while our intelligence services are working overtime to entice just such a defection—not of cultural figures, not former politicians but current security and military officials inside the regime. This happened under Stalin, when General Genrikh Lyushkov of the secret police defected to the Japanese, in 1938, with Stalin’s military and security plans and a sense of the regime. He denounced him at a press conference in Tokyo.
So now we’re watching Moscow. What are the dynamics there with the regime? You have to remember that these regimes practice something called “negative selection.” You’re going to promote people to be editors, and you’re going to hire writers, because they’re talented; you’re not afraid if they’re geniuses. But, in an authoritarian regime, that’s not what they do. They hire people who are a little bit, as they say in Russian, tupoi, not very bright. They hire them precisely because they won’t be too competent, too clever, to organize a coup against them. Putin surrounds himself with people who are maybe not the sharpest tools in the drawer on purpose.
That does two things. It enables him to feel more secure, through all his paranoia, that they’re not clever enough to take him down. But it also diminishes the power of the Russian state because you have a construction foreman who’s the defense minister [Sergei Shoigu], and he was feeding Putin all sorts of nonsense about what they were going to do in Ukraine. Negative selection does protect the leader, but it also undermines his regime.
But, again, we have no idea what’s going on inside. We hear chatter. There’s a lot of amazing intelligence that we’re collecting, which is scaring the Chinese, making them worry: Do we have that level of penetration of their élites as well? But the chatter is by people who don’t have a lot of face time with Putin, talking about how he might be crazy. Always, when you miscalculate, when your assumptions are bad, people think you’re crazy. Putin pretends to be crazy in order to scare us and to gain leverage.
Do you think that’s the case with this nuclear threat?
I think there’s no doubt that this is what he’s trying to do. The problem is, we can’t assume it’s a bluff. We can’t assume it’s a pose of being crazy, because he has the capability; he can push the button.
Steve, Sun Tzu, the Chinese theorist of war, wrote that you must always build your opponent a “golden bridge” so that he can find a way to retreat. Can the United States and NATO help build a way for Russia to end this horrific and murderous invasion before it grows even worse?
You hit the nail on the head. That’s a brilliant quote. We have some options here. One option is he shatters Ukraine: if I can’t have it, nobody can have it, and he does to Ukraine what he did to Grozny or Syria. That would be an unbelievable, tragic outcome. That’s the pathway we’re on now.
Even if the Ukrainians succeed in their insurgency, in their resistance, there will be countless deaths and destruction. We need a way to avoid that kind of outcome. That would mean catalyzing a process to engage Putin in discussion with, say, the President of Finland, whom he respects and knows well, or the Israeli Prime Minister, who has been in contact with him; less probably, with the Chinese leadership, with Xi Jinping. Someone to engage him in some type of process where he doesn’t have maximalist demands and it stalls for time, for things to happen on the ground, that rearrange the picture of what he can do.
It’s not as if we’re not trying. The Finns know Russia better than any country in the world. Israel is another good option, potentially, depending on how skillful Naftali Bennett proves to be. And then China, the long shot, where they’re paying a heavy price and their élites below Xi Jinping understand that. There’s now quite a lot of worry inside the Chinese élites, but Xi Jinping is in charge and has a personal relationship with Putin. Xi has thrown in his lot with Putin. But how long that goes on depends upon whether the Europeans begin to punish the Chinese. The Europeans are their biggest trading partner.
The Chinese are watching this very closely. They’re watching (a) our intelligence penetration, (b) the mistakes of a despotism, and (c) the costs that you have to pay as the U.S. and European private companies cancel Russia up and down. Xi Jinping, who is heading for an unprecedented third term in the fall, needed this like a hole in the head. But now he owns it.
Finally, there’s another card that we’ve been trying to play: the Ukrainian resistance on the ground and our resupply of the Ukrainians in terms of arms and the sanctions. All of that could help change the calculus. Somehow, we have to keep at it with all the tools that we have—pressure but also diplomacy.
Finally, you’ve given credit to the Biden Administration for reading out its intelligence about the coming invasion, for sanctions, and for a kind of mature response to what’s happening. What have they gotten wrong?
They’ve done much better than we anticipated based upon what we saw in Afghanistan and the botched run-up on the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians. They’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about the United States. We have corrective mechanisms. We can learn from our mistakes. We have a political system that punishes mistakes. We have strong institutions. We have a powerful society, a powerful and free media. Administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia or in China. It’s an advantage that we can’t forget.
The problem now is not that the Biden Administration made mistakes; it’s that it’s hard to figure out how to de-escalate, how to get out of the spiral of mutual maximalism. We keep raising the stakes with more and more sanctions and cancellations. There is pressure on our side to “do something” because the Ukrainians are dying every day while we are sitting on the sidelines, militarily, in some ways. (Although, as I said, we’re supplying them with arms, and we’re doing a lot in cyber.)
The pressure is on to be maximalist on our side, but, the more you corner them, the more there’s nothing to lose for Putin, the more he can raise the stakes, unfortunately. He has many tools that he hasn’t used that can hurt us. We need a de-escalation from the maximalist spiral, and we need a little bit of luck and good fortune, perhaps in Moscow, perhaps in Helsinki or Jerusalem, perhaps in Beijing, but certainly in Kyiv. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Putin in his $14,000 Loro Piana jacket
Sandy:
I'm reading a book about the lead-up to and invasion of Ukraine & Russia by Nazi Germany in 1940. The Nazis, like the USA invading Vietnam in the 1960s and Iraq and Afghanistan 20 years ago, and like Russia invading Ukraine now, all chant the same "We'll be treated like liberators!" And then are surprised that the local folks they are "liberating" seem to think of them as "invaders".
Mary:
After all the discussion of the Russian state, its history and culture, shaped by expansionism and invasion, its multi-ethnic population, and its system of corruption as a central and pervasive economic structure, what I understand is how very different it is from how the West operates, a result of different cultural and historical forces. I think that's why some react by saying Putin must be crazy...an error because we are evaluating his actions and thinking from a perspective so unlike his it cannot see or react to the world as he does..our worlds are contingent but essentially different. Our social, political and philosophic systems grew out of the Enlightenment, a heritage Russia may have flirted with, but rejected. Orthodoxy, the rule by autocrat, tsar, strongman, operating more like a Mafia boss than a democratic statesman, all come out of a culture and history unlike our own, with different values, different assumptions, different habits of thought than those of the West.
In particular, the idea that Putin sees the present as part of WWII- that he is still waging that war, remembered in Russia as The Great Patriotic War, cannot simply be dismissed. Another crucial fact to consider, another basic difference between Russia and the US, is that Russia has suffered great invasions, repelled only with terrible sacrifice, and we have never been invaded. That fact alone shapes attitudes about boundaries, threats, and the need to act against such threats. Putin can see his invasions of border territories not as invasions at all, but as reclaiming areas properly part of his own state, refusing all claims that they are sovereign states in their own right. Going back a thousand years to justify that vision is not a problem.
Oriana:
Any speaking out for Ukraine’s right to exist as a country is classified as treason and punishable by four years of prison.
Putin’s ideology is fairly simple: the most important thing in the world is Russia’s power and glory, even if that glory means erasing a lot of history or annexing this or that territory. Russia is sacred, Russia is God. And Putin stands for Russia the way Queen Victoria stood for the power of the British Empire . . . except wait, Great Britain was a constitutional monarchy, with checks and balances, with at least some human rights. It was a Western civilization, be it with much on its conscience. Putin sees himself as a “Eurasian” — a special kind of god-chosen leader, the guardian of true religion and traditional values.
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REGARDING "PUBLIC OPINION" UNDER TOTALITARIAN REGIME
Maxim Mironov, professor of economics at the International Business School in Madrid:
~ When the war began, everyone was terrified for two reasons. First of all, Putin started this crazy war. Secondly, the majority of the population supported him in this aggression.
When I studied public opinion polls, I didn't believe them and became interested in the opinions of my older friends, whom I hadn't spoken to for twenty years. And much to my surprise, 80-90 percent of my 60-year-old friends strongly support Putin's and government policies. And these are the people who know me from birth, treated me very well, made friends with my parents, and then with me, saw my whole life journey.
Nevertheless, I must state that the TV beat my arguments and arguments.
And that's no coincidence. Powerful anti-Ukrainian propaganda did not begin yesterday. For the past 8 years, federal channels have been talking round the clock about the evil Ukrofascists, about the oppressed Donbass, about NATO, which is at our gates and is going to tear down those gates. What were we doing ? We were laughing at stupid propaganda. Hahaha who believes this crap! Ha-ha-ha, this Skabeeva and the beaver are so stupid. Hahaha Putin is trying to switch attention from internal problems to Ukraine, but still the people will soon bite him.
We became victims of our little info bubbles, when our friends (both offline and on social networks) share our point of view, and it seemed that all the viewers of federal channels will soon [see the truth].
. . . I think that Putin will soon leave Ukraine and everything will be fine there. The de facto war has already been lost and it's a matter of time before Putin recognizes it. After that, I am sure Ukraine will be quickly rebuilt all over the world, and will also be accepted into the EU in the coming years. And Russia will have a much more invisible fate. Putin has already declared war on the "fifth column", which means repression will only intensify. It is quite possible that Putin will soon close the country completely and turn it into a huge North Korea.
Therefore, the fight against Putin is yet to come. And the main thing we must learn to do is understand how to talk to the majority that Putin has fooled. It is necessary to create media products targeted at this particular audience. Media managers and journalists need to carefully study the Russian mass newspapers, review the programs of federal channels in order to understand how information communication technologies work to appeal to a mass audience. It is necessary to take off the masks of snobs and recognize that it is our snobbishness that allowed Putin to turn into the monster he has turned into. ~
(source: M. Iossel’s Facebook page)
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WHY THE AMERICAN RIGHT SUPPORTS PUTIN
~ Say what you like about Vladimir Putin; he may be slaughtering innocent Ukrainians, but, on the plus side, he has never once called the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson a racist. Last Tuesday, Carlson, who is reportedly paid $10m (£7.5m) a year for his piercing insights and analysis, told Americans that they had been brainwashed into thinking Putin was a baddie.
Think critically, Carlson instructed his depressingly large audience. Ask yourself this, he posited: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? … Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions – and the answer to all of them is no.” To be clear: these are inane questions and the answer to all of them is: “Turn off Fox News before the rest of your brain turns to mush.”
Carlson, it should be said, has significantly toned down the pro-Putin rhetoric in the past few days. What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that Carlson is far from the only person on the US right to have a soft spot for old Vlad. While Donald Trump has called the Russian attack on Ukraine “appalling”, he has also called Putin’s actions “genius”, “savvy” and “smart”.
While I haven’t called up every white nationalist group in the US and Europe for comment, it is fair to say the Russian premier has a fervent fanbase among the far right in the west. Why is this? They love what he has done with Russia. They love the way he has dismantled women’s rights. They love his attacks on gay and transgender people. They love his dismissal of western liberalism. Their values align perfectly.
There is also a whiff of antisemitism in the right’s support for Putin. On Sunday, for example, Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator in Arizona, tweeted about the Ukrainian president: “[Volodymyr] Zelensky is a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.” “Globalist” and “Soros” are well-established dog whistles, of course. (Zelenskiy is Jewish.)
Rogers’ comments on Zelenskiy came shortly after she attended a white nationalist convention in Florida, where she praised Nick Fuentes, its Holocaust-revisionist organizer, and proposed hanging “traitors” from “a newly built set of gallows”. A very normal thing for a politician to say! Fuentes, meanwhile, urged the crowd to applaud Russia and had them chanting: “Putin! Putin!”
It is not just the racism, homophobia and misogyny that the right love about Putin: it is also his muscle. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from January found that 62% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents reckon Putin is a “stronger leader” than Joe Biden; that number rises to 71% among those who name Fox News as their primary source of cable news. Putin’s bare-chested photoshoots have done their job, eh?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/01/why-does-putin-have-superfans-among-the-us-right-wing?fbclid=IwAR1UsnxQpDBBn7KfPIkYf4eVey5ju2s6CMM33PXjvuI67og-G6PfRMEQvdQ
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THE PROBLEM WITH THE FIGHT AGAINST TOXIC MASCULINITY
~ The popular term points toward very real problems of male violence and sexism. But it risks misrepresenting what actually causes them.
Over the past several years, toxic masculinity has become a catchall explanation for male violence and sexism. The appeal of the term, which distinguishes “toxic” traits such as aggression and self-entitlement from “healthy” masculinity, has grown to the point where Gillette invoked it last month in a viral advertisement against bullying and sexual harassment. Around the same time, the American Psychological Association introduced new guidelines for therapists working with boys and men, warning that extreme forms of certain “traditional” masculine traits are linked to aggression, misogyny, and negative health outcomes.
A predictable conflict has accompanied the term’s rise. Many conservatives allege that charges of toxic masculinity are an attack on manhood itself, at a time when men already face challenges such as higher rates of drug overdose and suicide. Many progressives, meanwhile, contend that the detoxification of masculinity is an essential pathway to gender equality. Amid this heated discourse, newspaper and magazine articles have blamed toxic masculinity for rape, murder, mass shootings, gang violence, online trolling, climate change, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump.
Masculinity can indeed be destructive. But both conservative and liberal stances on this issue commonly misunderstand how the term toxic masculinity functions. When people use it, they tend to diagnose the problem of masculine aggression and entitlement as a cultural or spiritual illness—something that has infected today’s men and leads them to reproachable acts. But toxic masculinity itself is not a cause. Over the past 30 years, as the concept has morphed and changed, it has served more as a barometer for the gender politics of its day—and as an arrow toward the subtler, shifting causes of violence and sexism.
Despite the term’s recent popularity among feminists, toxic masculinity did not originate with the women’s movement. It was coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and ’90s, motivated in part as a reaction to second-wave feminism. Through male-only workshops, wilderness retreats, and drumming circles, this movement promoted a masculine spirituality to rescue what it referred to as the “deep masculine”— a protective, “warrior” masculinity—from toxic masculinity. Men’s aggression and frustration was, according to the movement, the result of a society that feminized boys by denying them the necessary rites and rituals to realize their true selves as men.
This claim of a singular, real masculinity has been roundly rejected since the late 1980s by a new sociology of masculinity. Led by the sociologist Raewyn Connell, this school of thought presents gender as the product of relations and behaviors, rather than as a fixed set of identities and attributes. Connell’s work describes multiple masculinities shaped by class, race, culture, sexuality, and other factors, often in competition with one another as to which can claim to be more authentic. In this view, which is now the prevailing social-scientific understanding of masculinity, the standards by which a “real man” is defined can vary dramatically across time and place.
Connell and others theorized that common masculine ideals such as social respect, physical strength, and sexual potency become problematic when they set unattainable standards. Falling short can make boys and men insecure and anxious, which might prompt them to use force in order to feel, and be seen as, dominant and in control. Male violence in this scenario doesn’t emanate from something bad or toxic that has crept into the nature of masculinity itself. Rather, it comes from these men’s social and political settings, the particularities of which set them up for inner conflicts over social expectations and male entitlement.
“The popular discussion of masculinity has often presumed there are fixed character types among men,” Connell told me. “I’m skeptical of the idea of character types. I think it’s more important to understand the situations in which groups of men act, the patterns in their actions, and the consequences of what they do.”
As this research was popularized, however, it was increasingly mischaracterized. By the mid-2000s, despite Connell’s objections, her complex theories were being portrayed in ways that echoed mythopoetic archetypes of healthy and destructive masculinity. In a 2005 study of men in prison, the psychiatrist Terry Kupers defined toxic masculinity as “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” Referencing Connell’s work, Kupers argued that prison brings out the “toxic” aspects of masculinity in prisoners, but that this toxicity is already present in the wider cultural context. (Kupers told me that he believes critics of his study incorrectly assumed that he claimed masculinity itself is toxic, though he acknowledged that the article could have explained his position in greater detail.)
Since then, the return to toxic masculinity has leaked from academic literature to wide cultural circulation. Today the concept offers an appealingly simple diagnosis for gendered violence and masculine failure: Those are the “toxic” parts of masculinity, distinct from the “good” parts. New proponents of the concept, sometimes unaware of its origins, tend to agree that men and boys are affected by a social “sickness” and that the cure is cultural renewal—that is, men and boys need to change their values and attitudes. Former President Barack Obama is championing mentoring programs as the solution to a “self-defeating model for being a man” in which respect is gained through violence. A range of classes and programs encourage boys and men to get in touch with their feelings and to develop a healthy, “progressive” masculinity. In some educational settings, these programs are becoming mandatory.
Certainly, these programs can have a positive impact. Research consistently shows that boys and men who hold sexist attitudes are more likely to perpetrate gendered violence. Connell herself notes that “when the term toxic masculinity refers to the assertion of masculine privilege or men’s power, it is making a worthwhile point. There are well-known gender patterns in violent and abusive behavior.”
The question is: Where do these sexist attitudes come from? Are men and boys just the victims of cultural brainwashing into misogyny and aggression, requiring reeducation into the “right” beliefs? Or are these problems more deep-seated, and created by the myriad insecurities and contradictions of men’s lives under gender inequality? The problem with a crusade against toxic masculinity is that in targeting culture as the enemy, it risks overlooking the real-life conditions and forces that sustain culture.
There’s genuine danger in this misperception. By focusing on culture, people who oppose toxic masculinity can inadvertently collude with institutions that perpetuate it. For example, the alcohol industry has funded research to deny the relationship between alcohol and violence, instead blaming “masculinity” and “cultures of drinking.” In this regard, the industry is repeating liberal feminist arguments about toxic masculinity. However, there is strong evidence that the density of liquor shops in a given geographic area increases the local rate of domestic violence. Any serious framework for preventing violence against women will address alcohol availability as well as masculine norms and sexism.
The concept of toxic masculinity encourages an assumption that the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well. But as Connell and her cohort have spent years demonstrating, material realities matter. While themes of violence, entitlement, and sexism recur across communities, they show up differently in different places. In one Australian Aboriginal violence-prevention program that I evaluated with colleagues, Aboriginal educators worked in partnership with men and boys to identify the key drivers of gendered violence and inequality. Solutions were rooted in cultural pride, tailored to local contexts, and underpinned by recognition of the intergenerational impacts of racism and trauma. The program understood that masculinity itself isn’t toxic, and instead sought to understand and change the roots of toxic gendered behavior.
Those roots are quite different than, for example, the roots evident in majority white, wealthy communities, where male violence and sexism are commonplace. Responses to gender inequality in professional workplaces, such as programs to stamp out sexism in employment culture and practices, have particular purchase in middle-class communities. They’re not universal solutions—and they don’t have to be. Recognizing differences in the lives of men and boys is crucial to the effectiveness of efforts to resolve gender violence and inequality. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/toxic-masculinity-history/583411/
Oriana:
As I understand, this article’s main point is that “toxic masculinity” shouldn’t be identified with “normal masculinity.” When boys and men misbehave, the causes are multiple and depend on a particular subculture, including factors such as the density of liquor stores in a particular neighborhood.
Boys and men can channel their greater physical strength and energy into positive venues (which society should make available), and should be rewarded for that. They should also be rewarded for protectiveness toward women and young children. The rise of feminism should not mean the denigration of the masculine.
Mary:
In thinking about toxic masculinity I think history and culture is just as important. What is masculine and what is feminine are both culturally defined in all the details, beyond the influence of the physical...bones, muscles, hormones. In the current cultural struggles around gender and gender identity there is unfortunately a tendency to ignore these basics, or dismiss them, to think you can be whatever you say you are. At the risk of sounding reactionary, I don’t think you can. You also can't deny concern with gender and gender roles is shaped by history and culture, very much an issue of our times, not unconnected to the continuing struggle for women's rights.
And I can’t believe much of what our culture sees as masculine, problematic for seeing strength as synonymous with bullying and even abusive, violent behavior, is unconnected to our Wild West mythos and gun culture.
Oriana:
Completely agree. We can’t deny biology — nor can we deny the role of culture, either. We live in an era when women, after a tremendous struggle, gained a lot of freedom — and yet the struggle for women’s basic rights, especially the control of her own body, continues. And we are lucky — think of women living under Sharia law, or in countries like India, where rape is commonplace.
As for domestic violence, the glorification of violence and gun culture in the movies and other mass media certainly has something to do with the sense of sexual entitlement that some men feel, and their resentment of the fact that a woman can say No, well, we have no end of studies and essays about that. Many years ago I read a really eye-opening article on how men are more dependent on women than women on men — in that deeper, emotional sense. True liberation would mean that both men and women have no trouble discussing their feelings and bringing up their emotional and other needs. And women should have no fear of being strong, and men of being seen as “weak.”
But true change takes generations. Let’s celebrate how far we’ve managed to come.
*
ANCIENT EARTH WAS A WATER WORLD
~ Across the ages, sea levels have risen and fallen with temperatures—but Earth's total surface water was always assumed to be constant. Now, evidence is mounting that some 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, the planet's oceans held nearly twice as much water—enough to submerge today's continents above the peak of Mount Everest. The flood could have primed the engine of plate tectonics and made it more difficult for life to start on land.
Rocks in today's mantle, the thick layer of rock beneath the crust, are thought to sequester an ocean's worth of water or more in their mineral structures. But early in Earth's history, the mantle, warmed by radioactivity, was four times hotter. Recent work using hydraulic presses has shown that many minerals would be unable to hold as much hydrogen and oxygen at mantle temperatures and pressures. "That suggests the water must have been somewhere else," says Junjie Dong, a graduate student in mineral physics at Harvard University who led a model, based on those lab experiments, that was published in AGU Advances. "And the most likely reservoir is the surface.”
The paper makes intuitive sense, says Michael Walter, an experimental petrologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. "It's a simple idea that could have important implications."
Two minerals found deep in the mantle store much of its water today: wadsleyite and ringwoodite, high-pressure variants of the volcanic mineral olivine. Rocks rich in those minerals make up 7% of the planet's mass, and although only 2% of their weight is water today, "a little bit adds up to a lot," says Steven Jacobsen, an experimental mineralogist at Northwestern University.
Jacobsen and others have created these mantle minerals by squeezing rock powders to tens of thousands of atmospheres and heating them to 1600°C or more. Dong's team stitched together the experiments to show wadsleyite and ringwoodite hold fractionally less water at higher temperatures. Moreover, the team predicts, as the mantle cooled, these minerals themselves would become more abundant, adding to their ability to soak up water as Earth aged.
The experiments aren't alone in suggesting a water-bound planet. "There's pretty clear geological evidence," too, says Benjamin Johnson, a geochemist at Iowa State University. Titanium concentrations in 4-billion-year-old zircon crystals from Western Australia suggest they formed underwater. And some of the oldest known rocks on Earth, 3-billion-year-old formations in Australia and Greenland, are pillow basalts, bulbous rocks that only form as magma cools underwater.
Work by Johnson and Boswell Wing, a geobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, offers more evidence. Samples from a 3.24-billion-year-old chunk of oceanic crust left on Australia's mainland were far richer in a heavy oxygen isotope than the present-day oceans. Because water loses this heavy oxygen when rain reacts with the continental crust to form clays, its abundance in the ancient ocean suggests the continents had barely emerged by that point, Johnson and Wing concluded in a 2020 Nature Geoscience study. The finding doesn't necessarily mean the oceans were larger, Johnson notes, but, "It is easier to have submerged continents if the oceans are bigger.”
Although the larger ocean would have made it harder for the continents to stick their necks out, it could explain why they appear to have been on the move early in Earth's history, says Rebecca Fischer, an experimental petrologist at Harvard and co-author on the AGU Advances study. Larger oceans could have helped kick off plate tectonics as water penetrated fractures and weakened the crust, creating subduction zones where one slab of crust slipped below another. And once a subducting slab began its dive, the dryer, inherently stronger mantle would have helped bend the slab, ensuring its plunge would continue, says Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University. "If you cannot bend plates, you cannot have plate tectonics.”
The evidence for larger oceans challenges scenarios for how life began on Earth, says Thomas Carell, a biochemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Some researchers believe it began at nutrient-rich hydrothermal vents in the ocean, whereas others favor shallow ponds on dry land, which would have frequently evaporated, creating a concentrated bath of chemicals.
A larger ocean exacerbates the biggest strike against the underwater scenario: that the ocean itself would have diluted any nascent biomolecules to insignificance. But by drowning most land, it also complicates the thin pond scenario. Carell, a pond advocate, says in light of the new paper, he is now considering a different birthplace for life: sheltered, watery pockets within oceanic rocks that broke the surface in volcanic seamounts. "Maybe we had little caves in which it all happened," he says.
The ancient water world is also a reminder of how conditional Earth's evolution is. The planet was likely parched until water-rich asteroids bombarded it shortly after its birth. If the asteroids had deposited twice as much water or the present day mantle had less appetite for water, then the continents, so essential for the planet's life and climate, would never have emerged. "It's a very delicate system, the Earth," Dong says. "Too much water, or too little, and it wouldn't work.” ~
https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-earth-was-water-world?
* * *
THE AFTERLIFE: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
~ "Shahid" is translated as "martyr" but it does not signify the Christian concept of "martyr," that is one who peacefully accepts death rather than abandon his faith. In Islam, shahids are more typically those who "slay and are slain" to advance Islam, and who die as warriors. Shahids are the only people guaranteed Jannah, that is Paradise, in Islam (Qur'an 3:169-170, 22:58-59, 9:111, 47:4-6). In Jannah, Muslim men will be serviced by supernatural sex workers with large, round, "not sagging" breasts and renewable virginity. Women do not receive any comparable promise, and Muslim women have noticed that.
Allah created some people specifically to send them to Hell (Qur'an 7:179). "Indeed, the unbelievers among the people of the book and the idolaters will remain in the fire of Gehenna. They are the most vile of created beings," says Qur'an 98:6. The Qur'an borrowed much material from pre-existing Jewish and Christian texts, but, significantly, the Qur'an did not borrow Genesis 1:26, in which God creates humanity in his own image.
In Islam, 999 people out of 1,000 will go to Hell. Muslims, too, will be sent to Hell, and only rescued from it if it is Allah's will (Qur'an 19:71-72). Short of dying in jihad, Muslims can never be sure that they have performed enough prayers and fasting to earn a slot in Jannah. Given Muslim insecurity about salvation short of jihad, the Qur'an's graphic descriptions of Hell's sadistic tortures and Jannah's sensuous delights, and the Qur'an's assurance that infidels are vile and destined for Hell anyway, one can see how Muslims have been inspired to take up jihad. In his recent book "The Critical Qur'an," Robert Spencer highlights those quotes that promise Jannah to jihadis. Spencer comments, "Muslim warriors have fought with courage throughout history, knowing that … if they are killed, they will enjoy paradise.”
Most Muslims are not jihadis. But ideas influence enough members of a society for societies to exhibit the distinctive imprint of those ideas. ~
Danusha Goska, Facebook, March 4, 2022 (an excerpt of a much longer post on the afterlife in general)
Oriana:
According to what I read, the Islamic hell is not eternal. In the end everyone will be saved, even Satan.
Sandy:
Perhaps we are constructing our afterlife by what we do here. OTOH, from a quantum theory reincarnation perspective, our consciousness might "relive" all the different possible life paths before it decides that it is bored and wants something entirely different. Not that I believe it, but it's fun to speculate. Maybe everything possible is true?
Oriana:
I think the concept of heaven or paradise has done as much harm as the concept of hell. The carrot is as important as the stick. Crusaders too were promised instant heaven if they are killed fighting. Eternity is obviously infinitely much longer and consequently vastly more significant than our brief sojourn on earth. From that point of view, it would make sense to put our time and energy into praying, engaging in a jihad, and/or otherwise worshiping the deity who’ll decide our location (so to speak) in the afterlife.
By the way, I do enjoy Sandy’s “quantum theory” speculation that the afterlife will consists of exploring all the possible life paths. I used to spend quite a bit of time trying to imagine my potential life had I stayed in Poland. I imagined my very different Polish marriage, myself as a loving, bedtime-tales reading mother (I had zero doubt that if I’d stayed in Poland, I’d have had at least one child), my possible job as a translator, the white lace curtain over my balcony, and my adored beautiful German shepherd looking up at me with those soulful eyes. Let me stop at these details before I yield to the temptation to imagine even more, and/or substitute other details.
(Did I ever doubt I would have been happier if I stayed in Poland. No. I imagined a life rich with emotional fulfillment. But my rational side reminded me that my scenarios should definitely admit at least the average share of difficulties and struggles.)
**
One kind of afterlife I could imagine: revisiting the happy moments, fully experiencing their delight. Even a mostly unhappy life has some lovely moments. I can imagine a sci-fi novel based on the premise of powerful aliens who can somehow replicate those moments for everyone -- and they love doing it because they feel that we humans have had enough suffering and punishment, and it may be difficult for some to feel grateful to be alive. Those moments could be revisited over and over, until a person is sated, and totally happy and grateful . . . and then perhaps feels tired, and falls asleep and dissolves, but into a kind of sweetness.
Well, the closest we can come to this kind of “afterlife” is by consciously reviewing our best moments and feeling thankful for them. I’ve come to realize that we can enjoy the memory of those moments even if the overall experience ended badly, say a marriage that ended in divorce. The end doesn’t necessarily annihilate the beginning, or the special moments along the way. Even the kind of deep and honest communication that can happen as part of the divorce process can provide one of those moments when you remember why you fell in love. But it can take many years of healing before the happy moments come to mind again.
*
Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, 1445
*
WHY IT’S HARDER TO REMEMBER THINGS AS WE GET OLDER — THE “CLUTTER” THEORY
~ An obvious explanation might be that remembering things becomes difficult because something changes in the brain that makes it more difficult to store information.
But a paper published recently in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences has presented an alternative explanation for this phenomenon: that our memories remain good, but they get cluttered as we age.
The authors of this new study reviewed a range of evidence on this topic. They suggest that instead of a difficulty in storing memories, poorer memory as we get older is a result of being less able to focus our attention on relevant target information, meaning we put too much information into our memory. This is not something we have any control over – it just seems to be a natural consequence of aging.
A previous study, which was included in the review, shows this theory in action. An older and a younger group were shown two types of objects (faces and scenes) and told which type of object they would be tested on. The older adults exhibited higher levels of brain activity when they were shown the irrelevant objects later on. Further, the more brain activity they demonstrated in response to these irrelevant objects, the poorer their memory for the objects they were trying to remember.
The review found that not only do older adults add clutter to their memory by taking in too much information from the environment, but they also accumulate information from knowledge gained over many years. This means older people have more material to navigate when trying to access a memory, which can compound the errors we make in memory as we age. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-memory-clutter-makes-it-harder-to-remember-things-as-we-get-older?utm_source=pocket-newtab
from another source:
Compared to young adults, healthy older adults (defined in the paper as 60 to 85 years old) process and store too much information, most likely because of greater difficulty suppressing irrelevant information, the analysis found. This difficulty is described as “reduced cognitive control” and can explain the cluttered nature of older adults’ memory representations.
“It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” Amer said. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.”
This explanation stems from and is supported by the team’s review of several behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Their paper “makes a compelling case that, as we get older, part of the problem is that we get less selective,” said Charan Ranganath, a professor at the University of California, Davis Center for Neuroscience. Ranganath was not part of the new paper. ~
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/memory-issues-older-people-result-clutter-rcna15133
Oriana:
This is interesting in the context of the general pattern of the selective brain function decline due to aging. Young children are impulsive and easily distracted — but the elderly also tend to move in that direction, showing less emotional and cognitive control. The last function to be developed and the first one to go is INHIBITION. Being able to focus depends on filtering out the clutter, to stay on track despite a gazillion distractions that need to be ignored.
Inhibition depends on the availability of inhibitory neurotransmitters such as GABA. With age, the levels of those neurotransmitters keep going down.
*
MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT
~ About 1 in 7 people age 60 or older have a brain condition that may be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease.
The condition, called mild cognitive impairment, occupies a gray zone between normal aging of the brain and dementia. And most people know almost nothing about it.
A national survey found that 82% of Americans are unfamiliar with the condition or know very little about it. More than half thought the symptoms sounded like "normal aging," according to the survey, which was part of a special report released this week by the Alzheimer's Association.
"Mild cognitive impairment is often confused with normal aging because it is very subtle," says Maria Carrillo, chief science officer of the Alzheimer's Association. Symptoms include "forgetting people's names, forgetting perhaps that you've said something already, forgetting a story, forgetting words," she says.
The condition, which affects about 10 million people in the U.S., is defined as changes in memory and thinking that are noticeable to the affected person and those around them but not serious enough to interfere with the individual's everyday activities.
That makes it tricky to diagnose, says Dr. Pierre Tariot, director of the Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix.
So after talking to a patient, Tariot often asks if he can speak with the person's spouse or a close family member.
A patient's wife, for example, might notice that her husband is still managing to keep his appointments, Tariot says, but then she adds: "But a year ago, he had it all locked and loaded in his brain. And now, unless he writes it down 12 times and then asks me to double-check, he's not going to get there."
Is that mild cognitive impairment or dementia? Tariot says it would be a tough call.
A diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment requires at least one visit to a doctor, Carrillo says. But that won't happen if an affected person doesn't recognize the symptoms or doesn't want to get a life-changing diagnosis.
In the survey, just 40% of respondents said they would see a doctor right away if they experienced symptoms associated with mild cognitive impairment. The rest said they would wait or not see a doctor at all.
Reasons for avoiding the doctor included fear of receiving an incorrect diagnosis (28%), learning they have a serious problem (27%), fear of receiving an unnecessary treatment (26%) and believing symptoms will resolve in time (23%).
But if people avoid seeing a doctor for their symptoms, "they're not going to open the door to finding out what the underlying cause is," Carrillo says.
That's important, because the symptoms of mild cognitive impairment can be caused by lots of factors other than Alzheimer's disease.
"Maybe somebody is tired. Maybe somebody is not sleeping well. Maybe somebody is taking some medications that make them a little groggy," Carrillo says.
Also, many of the underlying causes of memory and thinking problems can be remedied.
Sleep apnea can be treated. So can depression. "If there's a vitamin B12 deficiency, it does actually mimic mild cognitive impairment or even early Alzheimer's dementia," Carrillo says. "And that can be solved with vitamin B12 injections.”
About a third of patients with the condition will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's within five years, she says.
But long before then, tests can reveal whether mild cognitive impairment is the result of disease processes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's.
"We're rapidly zooming into an era where we can use imaging or blood or spinal fluid tests to establish likely causes" of memory and thinking problems, Tariot says.
Those tests can reveal the presence of sticky plaques and tangled fibers in the brain, which are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's.
EARLY DIAGNOSIS OFFERS OPTIONS
When Alzheimer's is the cause of mild cognitive impairment, patients have a growing number of treatment options, Tariot says.
One is Aduhelm, a controversial Alzheimer's drug approved last year by the Food and Drug Administration. The drug has a proven ability to remove sticky plaques from the brain. But it's still unclear whether it can slow memory loss.
Another good option for many patients with mild cognitive impairment is enrolling in a clinical trial of an experimental Alzheimer's drug, Tariot says.
"They're all scientifically sound, ethically sound, approved by the FDA, done under FDA oversight," he says.
Moreover, many drug trials are trying hard to recruit patients in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, including those with mild cognitive impairment. That's because many scientists believe the best chance to intervene is before the disease has caused significant damage to the brain.
"The earlier you get on treatment, the better," Carrillo says.
And in part because of Aduhelm's approval, drugmakers are now pushing ahead with many other experimental treatments.
"There's a whole wave of other therapies coming forward," Tariot says, "so we'll have many more choices than we have now, and that's great news."
Those choices are badly needed. Projections show that the number of Americans with Alzheimer's disease will rise from about 6.5 million today to more than 12 million by 2050. ~
Oriana:
I am afraid that until we have more solid treatment options, there is little point in seeking an official diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment. Let's see if this "new wave of treatments" becomes reality.
Vegetarians and the elderly should consider taking a daily supplement of sublingual Vitamin B12, regardless of whether they show signs of mild cognitive impairment. The absorption of Vitamin B12 declines with age, so corrective supplementation becomes a necessity. And in spite of impaired absorption, there is still much to be said in favor of B-12 rich food. One unexpected source is clams.
Another promising dietary therapy for reversing mild cognitive decline is keto. If that seems too complicated, just start using coconut oil, gradually increasing the quantity.
"Normal aging" is like saying "normal cancer." Aging is the underlying disease that results in the downward spiral of countless ailments. The whole approach to aging needs to be revised in view of strategies to slow it down, and potentially even reverse it. Less aging = less expensive age-related diseases.
*
REDUCED DEMENTIA INCIDENCE FOLLOWING SHINGLES VACCINATION IN WALES 2013-2020
INTRODUCTION Chronic infection with herpes viruses is a potential contributing factor to the development of dementia. The introduction of nationwide shingles (varicella zoster) vaccination in Wales might therefore be associated with reduced incident dementia.
METHODS We analyzed the association of shingles vaccination with incident dementia in Wales between 2013 and 2020 using retrospectively collected national health data.
RESULTS Vaccinated individuals were at reduced risk of dementia (adjusted hazard ratio: 0.72; 95% CI: 0.69 to 0.75). The association was not modified by a reduction in shingles diagnosis and was stronger for vascular dementia than for Alzheimer’s disease. Vaccination was also associated with a reduction in several other diseases and all-cause mortality.
DISCUSSION Our study shows a clear association of shingles vaccination with reduced dementia, consistent with other observational cohort studies. The association may reflect selection bias with people choosing to be vaccinated having a higher healthy life expectancy.
Several observational cohort and case–control studies have shown a reduction in dementia rates post-vaccination. Twenty years ago Verreault et al. reported that reported that vaccine exposure (diphtheria/tetanus, polio, influenza) was associated with a 25–60% reduction in later Alzheimer’s disease (AD) development. Klinger et al. demonstrated a significantly reduced risk of developing AD in bladder cancer patients exposed to repeated intravesicular applications of Bacillus Calmette– Guérin (BCG) vaccine, especially in the population aged 75 years and older. Scherrer et al. showed a significantly reduced rate of dementia in people vaccinated with Tdap and shingles vaccination compared to those not vaccinated using data from two American disease registers (Veterans Health Affairs and MarketScan). Liu et al. found a reduced dementia rate in chronic kidney disease patients vaccinated with influenza vaccine using data from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan. However, observational studies to ascertain vaccine efficacy are not easy to interpret, and, to our knowledge, no vaccine, whether specific for dementia or with a primary target other than dementia, has been proven in a clinical trial to be efficient in preventing dementia.
People exposed to the shingles vaccine were at lower risk of all-cause mortality (aHR: 0.58), MI, (aHR: 0.86), stroke (aHR: 0.86), and hip fracture (aHR: 0.55) – but not cancer (aHR: 0.98) – and the aHRs were similar in size to the aHR for the association of vaccination with dementia. This result could indicate a non-specific effect of the shingles vaccination. We have carefully considered the possibility of a potential mechanism that explains our findings, particularly in AD. There has been escalating interest in the possibility that AD is triggered by infection and that the signature protein of AD brain, Aβ peptide, has antimicrobial activity, and thus may be a consequence rather than a cause of AD. One potential interpretation of our results is therefore that the live attenuated VZV vaccine acts as an adjuvant that plays a role in the immune responses against microbes.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.22.21260981v1.full
Oriana:
This is one of those frustrating studies that leave us with nothing more than speculation — it’s possible that those who choose to be vaccinated are healthier and already have a lower risk of dementia and — note this — the shingles vaccines is associated with a considerably lower risk of hip fracture. Speculation is intellectual fun, but as one grows older medical questions become personal. People fear dementia more than death itself. Research seems haphazard, while the sheer number of people affected with neurological diseases keeps on increasing.
And yet there is hope, because there is also decreased dementia in recipients of yearly flu shots:
~ Repeated receipt of influenza vaccinations, compared to remaining unvaccinated, is associated with lower risk for dementia. This is consistent with the hypotheses that vaccinations may reduce risk of dementia by training the immune system and not by preventing specific infectious disease. If vaccines are identified as causative factors in reducing incident dementia, they offer an inexpensive, low-risk intervention with effects greater than any existing preventive measure. ~
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X21010793
And it’s not just the flu vaccine — it seems that practically any anti-viral vaccine, including polio, is associated with lower risk of dementia.
We should also remember that any viral infection (but especially one involving a Herpes virus) is a strong suspect as one of the major causes of dementia.
*
ending on beauty:
“We are the children of the Unknown.
We are the ministers of silence
that is needed to cure all victims of absurdity
who lie dying of a contrived joy.
Let us then recognize ourselves
for who we are:
dervishes mad with secret therapeutic love
which cannot be bought or sold,
and which
the politician fears
more than violent revolution,
for violence changes nothing.
But love changes everything.”
~ Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
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