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CONNECTIONS
“I saw Babcia in a dream,” mother tells me.
“She stood in the kitchen and said,
Make a wish — because I have
connections everywhere.”
But my mother had forgotten
all her wishes, like a flustered little girl.
The temptation, to believe our dead
have connections everywhere
But those strings had already been pulled
when I had the mother I had.
she divided one turkey TV dinner,
choosing the smaller portion, as always,
for herself. She said, The only real
poverty is here — and touched her head.
~ Oriana
I still remember a visiting American scientist who exclaimed, “You are so poor, yet there are flowers on the table and paintings on the wall.” I didn't yet have a concept of a “ culture of poverty” — it was later on that I understood that I most certainly didn't grow up “in a culture of poverty.” Quite the opposite: in ways that counted most, I was a child of privilege.
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“Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.” ~ Frank McCourt
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A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities. ~ Herman Melville
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WHY RUSSIA IS STILL HOMESICK FOR THE SOVIET UNION
~ It’s a case of “lost empire” syndrome and nostalgia combined with pride/hubris of an honor culture.
Soviet Union was an empire and a global super power, shaping the fate of the world with its actions. The way it was shaping the world was evil — but none can deny its power.
The evil part can be disputed after enough time has passed and people forget history (that’s why it’s so bloody important not to forget).
The Soviet Union collapsed not because it was defeated on the battlefield, but through its economy being run down to the ground by its rulers. Basically Russians had an empire that slipped through their fingers because of their own actions. Russia has an honor culture and honor cultures are not that big on admitting fault.
In such a culture taking responsibility for your mistakes, like let’s say: “pissing away a global empire” for example, would be considered shameful. Same goes for admitting to genocides and other atrocities.
So instead Russians selectively forget about the genocides and their own incompetence when it comes to economy. Instead they are spinning tales, mostly for their own comfort, about how the Soviet Union was great and it’s a historical injustice and the fault of everyone around them that it collapsed.
By repeating that fairy tale for some time Russians (just as any other nation would) start believing it, especially since the media are tightly controlled — there is only one version of events that’s propagated. It’s hard and very inefficient to challenge it, not to mention simply being arrested or “disappeared” for doing it too successfully.
Harmless exaggerations and selective reminiscence lead to resentment: “Soviet Union was such a great country and was destroyed by its enemies (USA and NATO)”. This leads to bitterness and wishing to fix this historical injustice.
Bada-bing bada-bum and you get Georgian war in 2008 and a repeat in 2022 with Ukraine. You see Russians are restoring the glorious country that lives in their imagination! A country that they remember as having lifted people out of poverty and helped the oppressed.
Only an evil Nazi would oppose such a noble and worthy goal… ~
~ Mateusz Wesołowski, Quora
CULTURE OF HONOR
A culture of honor is a culture in which a person (usually a man) feels obliged to protect his or her reputation by answering insults, affronts, and threats, oftentimes through the use of violence. Cultures of honor have been independently invented many times across the world. Three well-known examples of cultures of honor include cultures of honor in parts of the Middle East, the southern United States, and inner-city neighborhoods (of the United States and elsewhere) that are controlled by gangs.
Cultures of honor can vary in many ways. Some stress female chastity to an extreme degree, whereas others do not. Some have strong norms for hospitality and politeness toward strangers, whereas others actively encourage aggression against outsiders. What all cultures of honor share, however, is the central importance placed on insult and threat and the necessity of responding to them with violence or the threat of violence.
http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/cultural-psychology/culture-of-honor/
Oriana:
That country was also called "the prison of nations."
To get back to Russia's nostalgia for the Soviet Union:
I think an additional attraction of the Soviet Union was idealism. The Soviet Union was, in principle, an idealistic project. I’m fully aware of how things went wrong and the idealism ended up as corruption and cynicism — or worse, mass murder under Stalin.
I know all this not just from books, but from personal experience. And still I insist that there is a yearning for idealism not only among the young but also among the not-so-young, especially when it comes to the well educated. They often have the feeling that their talents are going to waste instead of making the world a better place — even just a bit better. They crave meaning.
Building socialism automatically provided the goal of bettering the world. It transcended nationalism. Once the ideology was shattered, for most there was only the daily grind and nationalism, sometimes in combination with sports.
Simply the existence of the Soviet Union was an astonishing fact: a radical experiment was being conducted. It turned out badly, but at least such an experiment had been tried. It will continue to fascinate historians, scholars, and thinking people in general. Humanity has been taking a long time to learn that Utopias can't really be brought into existence. It's in the very definition of the word.
Mats Andersson:
People in the Soviet Union had lots of rights, many more than they had enjoyed under the Czars.
They had the right to education, healthcare, housing, pensions, and amazingly, a job. If they found themselves without a job, they could approach the authorities, and a job would be found for them.
They also has a number of rights that were usually ignored or twisted so far as to be meaningless, such as the right to a trial, the right to free expression, and the right to join any association of their choice. But they had had none of those rights under the Czars, so for most people, it was still an improvement overall.
Mike S:
“If they found themselves without a job, they could approach the authorities, and a job would be found for them.”
That was not how that worked.
It was literally illegal to be unemployed. Anyone found without a job would find themselves approached by authorities and given a warning that they had four months to fix that under Article 209 of the Criminal Code. If they didn’t get a job, they were looking at up to two years in prison.
Cecilia Andersson:
Memory can do strange things with how we remember history. In a documentary some years ago, a couple of retirees complained about Russia today and said that “in the USSR everyone had a job”. The interviewer asked about KGB and long lines for food, but they still remembered the old days as better than today.
**
Misha:
The atmosphere in Russia right now is worse than it was in the old USSR: more creepy, vile, toxic, more madly militaristic and openly and hysterically death-loving, more seething with unfocussed resentment against the rest of the human race, more proudly inhumane in the most tawdry way conceivable. It is the atmosphere characteristic of a fully fascist state.
Russia today is in many ways a worse — more openly fascist, more hateful, more insanely toxic and shameless — place than the old Soviet Union used to be.
Back then, there might have been hope that the majority of Soviet people, silenced unto muteness by the repressive apparatus of a giant totalitarian state, inwardly yearned for freedom and the dignity of being the fully self-reliant members of a democratic society.
Now that hope is gone. Now we know that the majority of people in Russia, sadly, feel infinitely more comfortable in the familiar condition of non-freedom and seething resentment against the West.
Also Misha:
One hundred days since the beginning of the crazy, unimaginable war between Putin and his Russia with Ukraine that dared to wish a normal, decent, free life. A hundred days of Russia's war with itself, with its own, not completely still suffocated aspirations for freedom, calls for good and self-respect.
A hundred days of mass murders of Ukrainian civilians, demolition of Ukrainian cities, rapes and looting, and medieval atrocities, inhuman savagery, among which many Russian contractors grew up.
I feel sorry for the people who suddenly (although, of course, only the blind and the deaf could have been unclear years ago, so to speak, the leading "trend," a vector of Putin's mafia statehood) residents of a fascist state ... which until a few months ago was simply authoritarian. I understand their normal human desire to live as if a normal, former life is still possible. I understand, but I do not sympathize with their ambition. There are such times, periods in life, when in order to continue living, a person needs to move away from the surface of life.
It won't be "as before" anymore and it can't be. The country is enraging, being beastly, locking in itself — and if they remain in it, or if this war does not end quickly, or if the cancer-eaten supreme body does not go urgently to another world, they will be at risk of being dogs.
All this has already happened, both in Russia and elsewhere on Earth. (Facebook)
Misha Firer:
As a primary school student, I was indoctrinated in the communist message, taught about goodness of Lenin and communist party. My teachers were staunch believers and they transmitted their faith onto us, children. In the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, communism was no more.
When I returned to school, suddenly there were no scarlet pioneer neckties. No library book readings about Lenin as a child. No celebrations of Red October Day. In just one summer, they obliterated every vestige of faith like it had never existed before. More than that, teachers didn’t even bother to explain anything to us. They just pretended like it had always been that way.
The same fate will befall Putin and his regime of kleptocrats, one of these summers. When students return to their classrooms, there won’t be any portraits of Putin and patriarch Kiril hanging on the walls, aggressive patriotism and celebration of Great Patriotic War will vanish, and Russians will breathe a huge sigh of relief.
However, very soon new specters and demons will take place of the old ones, and Russia will plunge into a new mad social experiment, without rhyme or reason.
One way or another, there’ll be a tyrant with absolute power.
Russia cannot be redeemed. She slumbers in thick darkness. ~ (Quora)
Misha Firer:
It’s actually not very hard to overthrow the existing regime in Russia because if it had stayed in power long enough it had almost guaranteed to abuse populace to a degree where they feel relieved to be rid of them. 1917, 1991, every time an almost bloodless revolution.
Marie Struck:
Almost bloodless revolution, followed by numerous casualties due to at least a decade of economic collapse, civil wars and banditry. If there’s anything Twentieth century history has taught Russians, it’s that when a revolution comes, there’s always a decade of massacre and starvation, followed by the rise of a new, even worse, tyranny than the one overthrown.
*
IF RUSSIA LOSES THE WAR IN UKRAINE: WHAT HAPPENS LATER
~ Since Russian history has a tendency to go in circles, there are two basic scenarios for defeat in Ukraine:
1) Similarly to 1917: a period of civil unrest, loss of the Kremlin's control over its military and bureaucratic apparatus. An economic crisis will make the 90ies look like a time of prosperity, and humanitarian catastrophe. Very likely a civil war and atomization of the Russian Federation. That is a particularly dangerous scenario, given that there're 6,000 nuclear warheads spread throughout Russian territory.
The longer the war goes on, the more likely this will be the outcome. Like in 1917, it has to do with the sheer number of soldiers. Putin's government is over once those soldiers are sufficiently demoralized and refuse to fight against Ukrainians. They have been trained in using weapons (and have access to them) and have seen (and taken part) in horrific events. They won't be afraid of Putin nor of using violence. FSB is too small and inefficient to deal with so many aggressive discontents.
Again, that's pretty much how czar Nicholas ended his reign.
2) Similarly to 1956 (after the death of Stalin, the communist party, headed by Krushchev, condemned Stalin's excesses and set the USSR on a sort of correction course). In this scenario, possibly after Putin's death (most likely by natural causes), the Russian government is overtaken by a "dove" faction (quotation marks because they're doves by Russian standards, don't expect any western-type liberals here). That faction would denounce Putin's decision to invade Ukraine as an unfortunate mistake and arrest a few scapegoats (such as the leader of the "hawks," Patrushev).
Of course, this scenario hinges very much on Putin's health since he was meticulous in surrounding himself with the most incapable and subservient of people. Otherwise, they would have ousted him already.
Whatever the case, two things are not going to happen.
Firstly, there is no going back to whatever Russia was before the invasion — not internationally nor internally. There will be either a correction or a civil war.
Secondly, for anyone hoping for democracy to replace authoritarianism, I wish there was a chance of this happening. It's the only way to break the chaos-imperialism cycles that have hunted Russia throughout its history. But for it to happen, Russians needs to break up with a lot of their traditions, cultural innuendos, and beliefs. They need to embrace at least some of the western values. At the very least, they need to treat themselves and
— especially — others less like cattle for slaughter and more like human beings. ~
~ Vladimir Kokorev, Quora
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Misha Iossel: PUTIN IS A CANCER
~ Putin “believes the West will become exhausted,” said one well-connected Russian billionaire. “Now he is trying to reshape the situation and he believes that in the longer term he will win. Western leaders are vulnerable to election cycles.”
But your cancer will not get exhausted, Vova. And neither, incidentally, will the collective West, which by now realizes that you are in fact a cancer yourself in the world's geopolitical body.
*
ARE THE SANCTIONS HAVING AN IMPACT?
The embargo on Russia’s seaborne oil exports announced by the European Union this week — hailed by Charles Michel, president of the European Council, as putting maximum “pressure on Russia to end the war” — would “have little influence over the short term,” said one Russian official close to Moscow diplomatic circles, also speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The Kremlin mood is that we can’t lose — no matter what the price.”
The Kremlin believes it can outlast the West in weathering the impact of economic sanctions. Putin has little choice but to continue the war in hopes the Ukraine grain blockade will “lead to instability in the Middle East and provoke a new flood of refugees,” said Sergei Guriev, former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
“The world is gradually falling into an unprecedented food crisis. Tens of millions of people in Africa or in the Middle East will turn out to be on the brink of starvation — because of the West. In order to survive, they will flee to Europe. I’m not sure Europe will survive the crisis,” Nikolai Patrushev told Russian state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta in one of the interviews.
The Kremlin has insisted that the blockade on Ukrainian grain exports is due to Ukrainian mining of the Black Sea — a claim denied by Kyiv — while Peskov said Western sanctions were also preventing grain shipments from being dispatched.
Several current and former senior Western officials have been discussing proposals for the United States and E.U. to form a cartel and impose a price cap on Russian oil, possibly at $30 or $40 per barrel. This step could be more effective than the E.U. ban and help drive down global prices, Guriev and Fishman said. Under the proposal, the United States could impose secondary sanctions on anyone buying Russian oil at a price over the cap, they said.
Putin has declared that “the economic blitzkrieg” against Russia has failed, and on the surface, the economy has been cushioned against the initial shock of Western sanctions by the inflow of nearly $1 billion in revenue per day from oil and gas exports to Europe before the E.U. embargo on seaborne oil. Thanks to capital controls and orders that Russian exporters sell half their hard currency earnings to the state, the ruble has strengthened to prewar highs.
But Russia’s Central Bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, has warned that the full impact of Western sanctions is yet to be felt. A ban on high-tech imports is just beginning to bite, while shortages of some goods are only now starting to be seen. Inflation is set to exceed 20 percent, and Russia is facing its deepest recession in 30 years. Putin’s attempt to protect the population against inflation, estimated at 18 percent, by ordering a 10 percent increase in pensions and the minimum wage falls far short.
With risks growing for all sides, “it is going to be a war of attrition from the economic, political and moral point of view,” the Russian official said. “Everyone is waiting for autumn,” when the impact of sanctions will hit the hardest, he said.
So far, however, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky estimating Kyiv needs $7 billion in aid a month just to keep the country running, Putin appears to be betting on the West blinking first, the former U.S. government official said. Putin’s “goal of subjugating Ukraine and eventually placing a Russian flag in Kyiv has not changed.” ~
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/03/russia-putin-economy-attrition-war/?
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“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.” ~ D.H. Lawrence
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Dying should be prohibited in a lot of places.
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A KILLER’S REBUKE
Even a killer claims to be more moral than Putin: "In a rare rebuke by an ally, outgoing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has slammed Russian leader Vladimir Putin for the killings of innocent civilians in Ukraine by his forces.
Known as the “Punisher” in part due to his bloody anti-drugs crackdown, Duterte – who openly calls Putin an idol and a friend – said that while the two of them have been dubbed killers, “I kill criminals, I don’t kill children and the elderly.”
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WHY DO SOME PREDICT THAT THE WAR WILL END IN LATE SUMMER OR FALL?
~ Because this is how long it will take for Russia’s Army to be depleted of matériel to the point of no longer being able to fight. They are sitting on huge stockpiles of Soviet weaponry and ammunition, which they will use against Ukraine. They will salvage whatever is left of their old tanks in storage, maybe rendering another 300–500 “operational”. These need to be blown up as well before the Russians call it quits.
Allegedly Putin’s health is visibly deteriorating as I write this, so with luck his “stepping down” and the depletion of the Russian Army will coincide in autumn.
Some experts expect the end in June. Others say this will last until autumn. The Ukrainians get a say in this as well. They won’t stop until they have retrieved all of the Donbas and the South of Ukraine. I doubt whether Ukraine will be able to retake Crimea, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried. ~ Sven Dirks, Quora
William Bates:
Russia can't conquer Ukraine, but Putin's ego won't let him admit it. So he'll keep throwing men and materials at a lost cause. Ukraine can't”win" because they do not have the resources to invade Russia. Both sides hope the other will tire and make a big concession. Until then it will grind on.
Sven Dirks:
Russia cannot produce more arms due to the special economic operation of the West.
Russia sits on huge stockpiles of unmaintained Soviet war material, with tires rotting away and vehicles cannibalized for spare parts.
Russia requisitions civilian trucks to supply the Orc horde in Ukraine because her military trucks have been blown up or are unavailable due to non-existing maintenance.
The only thing Russia has in abundance are shells and artillery guns. Which means Ukraine will have to use more guided ammunition to blow them up.
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EVEN IF PUTIN WINS, WOULD HE BE ABLE TO HOLD ON TO UKRAINE?
~ Simple facts: in order to subdue a hostile population, you need roughly one soldier per 50 civilians.
That’s 800,000 soldiers for Ukraine.
There
is simply no way Russia can ever afford this. It doesn’t matter whether
they are armed with sticks and kitchen knives. Russia does not have
this sort of resources. ~
Mats Andersson, Quora
WHY SO MANY RUSSIANS SUPPORT THE “SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION” IN UKRAINE
~ “I don’t understand why people in Russia are silent!” This cry was heard across hundreds of Ukrainian posts during the first weeks of the war. “Do they really support this? Do they not care? We’re getting bombed and they are too scared to get fined for protesting? Maybe they don’t know what is happening? Somebody, tell them!”
After Bucha and Kramatorsk, Ukrainians seem to have stopped caring what Russians think. But I too couldn’t understand how the majority of Russians could possibly support all of this. It seemed nightmarish, you just wanted to run from it.
For many decades, everyone had been asking if Germans in 1939 really didn’t understand what was going on. We’ve wondered how an entire nation, all of those regular people, decided to go along with total insanity. It occurred to me that today, we’re in a position to answer this question.
My friend Alisa, a sociologist whose name has been changed, and I started walking around Moscow and asking random people how they felt about the war in Ukraine. We thought that what was going on was so insane, everyone must have questions about it. Half of the people we asked refused to talk to us. The other half were usually open to fairly in-depth conversations. Later, I talked to people in the Kaluga and Kostroma regions. We conducted over 50 interviews in total. They are not intended to be representative. We just wanted to get some sense of what was going through people’s heads. To enter into the darkness and feel around for something human.
Two men in their fifties hanging out next to a sports field in a Moscow park explained that they’d had a soccer club since they were kids that met here on the weekends. One of them really was wearing a soccer uniform, although neither of them had a ball. The men were drinking cranberry liquor and snacking on roast pork. They both fully supported the “special operation.”
“My buddy’s wife is from Kharkiv. They were just bombing him the other day, but it seems to be quiet now,” one of them said. “Sounds like [the Russian troops] took the city. Irka, my wife, talked to them – they were hiding out in their basement. They said they were shooting at them. But it’s not our guys doing the shooting — why would they do something like that? I’m sick and tired of talking about this, if I am going to be honest. They’ve even forgotten all about covid here now. You walk through the kitchen, the wife’s there, and the TV is just blaring the same things, over and over, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.”
“Do you know anyone who’s against the war?”
“Everyone is against war! What are you talking about? What, do you think I support war? I’m against it, too! It’s the politicians, that Zelensky… He handed out weapons [to everyone], it’s really awful. Of course I’m against it! We only have one life to live — how can we spend it fighting?”
“Do you think that the people in Ukraine support their government?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And how do you think they feel about our invasion?”
“Judging by what I’ve seen on TV, they’re extremely happy about it,” the second man said.
“Everything had been planned and seen to ahead of time. The invasion of such a big country that’s spitting in the face of the whole entire world. I’m no politician, this is just my extremely subjective opinion.”
We ended up hearing that phrase many times. People recited the propaganda spiels from state television verbatim, and then explained that they were only expressing their purely subjective opinions. Like the majority of the people we talked to, the men at the soccer field were against war in general, but very much in favor of this particular war, and didn’t see any contradiction in this.
*
“I fully support our President’s decisions!”
This is a completely uniform and somewhat strange answer we heard again and again when asking people “What did you feel [when the "special operation" was announced]?” It came up eight times out of ten. Usually, this was stated in a provocative tone, with a bit of a furrowed brow, as if we’d already started an argument. We’d ask people to tell us more, and then they would launch into the story about the threat of NATO and “Nazis” in Ukraine.
Some people believe that support for the war comes out of the propaganda itself. In a way, this is true, of course. But why do people believe it? The formulas work because people can use them for their own ends. The public are the victims of propaganda but, at the same time, it’s made-to-order just for them.
CONTRADICTIONS
Almost every conversation we had was filled with contradictory convictions that routinely astounded us.
“Everyone’s so excited, they’re rubbing their hands together, they’re so happy they’ve pitted one nation against another,” A Moscow taxi driver told me. “Go ahead, fight, destroy one another! They’ve always wanted to take down Russia and drain its blood. Yes, it’s a bad situation, it’s really hard, but I don’t think it could have happened any other way.”
“They keep pushing all that on the youth — the fascism and the anti-war stuff.”
“Did Russia attack Ukraine?”
“No. I mean yes, but we didn’t do it first.”
“There wasn’t any other way.”
“We’re liberating them.”
“But what if the people there are against it?”
“Well, that may be the case. But we’re not fighting civilians. It just happened to be that they live where all that is happening.”
“Do you think that Ukraine would have attacked us?”
“Of course, during sporting competitions they would always [shout]: ‘string them up’ and ‘go fuck yourself.’ Next thing you know, they might have devised atom bombs.”
“We treat Ukrainians perfectly fine here, don’t we?”
“A lot of people have told us they thought the ‘khokhols [a derogatory term for Ukrainians] need to be punished’.”
“Exactly! They need to be punished!”
“Just like they have different states in America, everyone should be united here: Ukraine, the Chuvash Republic, all of us should be together as brotherly nations, basically like the USSR with the republics. They broke all that up, divvied it up. Like a huge corporation — you break it up into parts and then buy them up cheap.”
“You don’t consider Ukraine a sovereign nation?”
“I consider Donetsk and Luhansk sovereign nations. They declared their independence, so let them have it! Why don’t you let them have it?!”
*
In the early days of the war, I was on a Moscow tram from Novokuznetskaya to Chistye Prudy. An older woman of about 70 sat down across from me and suddenly, out of nowhere, started cursing out “traitors”— there’d been an anti-war rally somewhere downtown that day. I told her that I am a “traitor,” too, and that set her off instantly. She turned to face me and started screaming completely insane and horrifically angry things at me.
“I would just shoot every last one of you if I could! You’re selfish! They don’t like the war! Then why don’t you go fight in it, huh? Why don’t you go to war! Those khokhols have always been that way! I worked in Ternopil, and there was a woman there, she told me back then, ‘If I could, I would shoot every last one of you moskals!’ You think that’s normal? Tell me!”
She was acting like a real ghoul, her yelling was completely absurd and totally contradictory. But there was no point in calling out her contradictions. In fact, what she really wanted to say was concealed within them.
We noticed that people’s true feelings weren’t expressed in parroted narratives, but in their offhand remarks, misstatements, threats, evasions, contradictions, intonations, glances, and gestures.
One elderly bureaucrat that we stopped in a shopping mall with his wife would turn away from me every time I asked him something uncomfortable, just like a child, and stand with his back to me. They were a really touching couple, incredibly kind, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. They passionately and sincerely supported the war. The husband listened to my questions about the bombing of Kharkiv with his eyes full of terror. And then he got out his pen and carefully took down the information from my press badge.
CYNICISM
We entered a small cafe in a small town in the Kaluga region. Two neatly-dressed young women who worked at the district administration sat at the far table. They didn’t mind talking to a journalist even one bit, in fact, it made their lunch that much more exciting.
“Doesn’t the war scare you?”
“Nope. I’m a patriot,” said one of the well-kempt women cheerfully. “The only thing I’m against is the global policy toward Russian athletes. I don’t feel bad for the conscripts, or the Ukrainians, or the Russians, soldiers, or civilians — the only people that I feel bad for are athletes! They won’t let them go anywhere! H [an athlete] built his whole life around defending his country’s honor, training 14 hours a day…”
“And you find that more upsetting than young civilians dying for no reason?”
“Yep!”
The woman spoke loudly, surveying the room, like she was giving a speech. She showed off her cynicism while her friend snuck sidelong glances at me curiously.
I’d heard this ranting about the Olympics a million times already. It’s a great reason to be upset. Then you don’t need to think about how you feel about all the cities being bombed. All you need is to remember how much they hurt our athletes or Valery Gergiev (a brilliant conductor!) and then the war just retreats into the background.
“We’re not at war! There’s just some combat as part of the special liberation operation. If our troops hadn’t gone there, theirs would have come to us!”
The woman rattled off all of these tropes with obvious pleasure at their rhetorical power. It seemed she believed that this power was capable of defining what is considered the truth. I listened for her intonations: she sounded brazen and heartless.
“Why do you think that Ukraine would have attacked us?”
“[Baba] Vanga predicted Russia would become a global empire by 2026. And there’s no other way to become a great superpower. Throughout all of history, this only became possible through the annexation of various territories.”
Four of the people we talked to referred to the mystic Baba Vanga, likely out of a need to depict what’s happening as predetermined. (Baba Vanga was a blind Bulgarian mystic. She predicted a glorious future for Vladimir Putin as the Lord of the World.)
“So are we taking over Ukraine?”
“No, we are liberating it. We’re not trying to take anything over. They can go ahead and fiddle around over there as much as they like.”
This phrase, “fiddle around,” exemplifies the disdainful attitude toward Ukraine, which I found to be extremely popular.
The woman was not upset about contradicting herself. For her, it was all just a game of ping-pong — light-hearted trolling. All of these questions about the war were nothing but enemy discourse, she only wanted to keep hitting the ball back at her opponent. But to me, it seems that making contradictory claims also makes a certain kind of psychological sense.
“The Americans want to take over Ukraine. What a country they have!” “No one needs that stupid Ukraine for anything! They’re nothing but bums…”
“The simple folk are waiting for us to get rid of the Nazis!” “The khokhols have always hated us!”
“But we’re one people!” “They’ve never been human over there!”
“Putin did the right thing by starting the war. We’ve needed to put things straight for a long time now!” “America is just rubbing its hands together, pitting the Slavs against one another.”
“It’s a difficult situation but I don’t think that we had a choice!” “The Europeans provoked it themselves, ‘C’mon Putin, when are you going to attack Ukraine?’.”
“If we hadn’t done it, they would have attacked us first!’ “They don’t know how to fight, they use human shields…”
“So you really don’t care that people are dying?” I asked the young woman.
“Look: no matter what I tell you right now, nothing is going to change. Even if we transform how we feel about it — what good will that do, anyway? It won’t do anything. So what’s the point? Why even think about it? Think about your friends and family, instead. Show them more love.”
That evening, at the same cafe, we ran into a fashionable young man with a goatee.
“What, you don’t like Uncle Vova? You’re into that dummy Zelensky? Uncle Vova will show him, don’t worry. And I support him whole-heartedly.”
After that guy left, my friend said she knew him. He’s a big wholesale drug dealer who runs his business far away from Moscow so he can lay low. A guy who “Uncle Vova” would only be too happy to put behind bars for 15 years still supported him.
“It’s just because he’s doing so well, he likes things the way they are,” my friend explained.
Later on, I had a many hours-long conversation with a young deacon-slash-businessman. He was trying to prove to me that Russia was the freest country in the world because no one got in the way of him making money. He also completely supported the “special operation,” comparing Ukraine to a “teenage drug addict” that needed to be “forced into rehab.”
*
On the third day of the war, I went over to my mother’s house and she suddenly started talking about targeted strikes and “where were we looking for the past eight years.” I started telling her about the bombings, about a girl I knew in Kharkiv who’d called me, terrified, during a break in the shelling. I explained that there was a real war going on and that I didn’t understand how people refused to see this monstrous thing. My mother sat there stupefied, staring down at the floor.
“People are tired of negativity,” she sighed.
That phrase explained something. In the past 20 years, every time I’ve happened to overhear what’s being said on television, they were frightening people with something: migrants, “Gayropa,” Banderites — the main thing is that these people are just “others.” I suppose that the audience itself had wanted this. Having something specific to fear was more manageable than the free-floating terror of the unknown that people were forced to live with during the 1990s.
“She doesn’t tell me what she actually thinks,” a woman in a Moscow mall said of her friend in Ukraine. “It’s all negativity. She talks about the negative, trying to prove to me…” the woman made some fleeting, ephemeral gestures and faces meant to convey the fact that her friend was intentionally lying to her because she was scared that her phone calls were being intercepted.
“Do you have relatives in Ukraine?” we asked another woman.
“I do. And they brainwash them good over there. They didn’t know anything about Donetsk or Luhansk, they were completely fine. But now that a missile has hit an airbase five kilometers [three miles] away from their house, they’re all ‘Oh my! Lordy-lordy!’”
“Did you call them? How did it go?”
“Badly. I was really hoping my sister would come here [from Ukraine] so I could sit her down and turn on Rossiya-24 and make her watch that for a week — maybe it’d set her straight.”
“And what do you think would happen to you if they sat you down in Ukraine?”
“I’d never go there! They’re too good at brainwashing!”
Ukrainians are constantly asking, “Do Russians really not know what is going on?” The answer is no, most of them don’t. But they understand anyway. Fifteen minutes into every conversation, supporters would casually mention that yes, we were probably bombing the cities, people were dying, and everyone in Ukraine hates us. On some level, they understood everything — only they didn’t know it. And they refused to know, even when being confronted with direct evidence from their loved ones. ~
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/05/03/feeling-around-for-something-human
Oriana:
This is a very depressing article. I had little idea of the prejudice against the Ukrainians and the idea that they “must be punished” — presumably just for daring to be Ukrainian.
The word “khokhly” (a plural of “sheaf of wheat or rye”; in Polish it means straw men, scare-crows) is an insulting terms for Ukrainians. “Russian troops trampled the word "Khokhly" on the grass in front of their positions. Thanks to this, they were noticed by Ukrainian intelligence and struck.”
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Almost 17% of Russian men are classified as alcoholics. They top the world in almost every category related to alcoholism and deaths from alcohol. In Canada we drink a lot, but I have never encountered the levels of drinking, drunkenness and general public intoxication that I saw in Russia anywhere else in the world. It’s really sad and is an issue they need to deal with.
~ Nicholas Sawarna, Quora
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WILL RUSSIA COME UNDER CHINESE RULE?
~ I’d give it a pretty high likelihood that Russia will, in its entirety, be a Chinese province in all but name ten years from now.
The outside chance is that there will be a civil war in Russia. Even now, there are unconfirmed reports that some captured Russian soldiers have re-joined the fight—against Putin; they apparently sport the anti-war Free Russia white-blue-white flag.
If an actual civil war breaks out, all bets are off. There would be some likelihood that China would intervene just to make sure the Russian nuclear arsenal in the Far East and Siberia was kept under some sort of organized control, rather than being in the hands of some trigger-happy warlord, but that would depend a lot on development that is inherently unpredictable. ~ Mats Andersson, Quora
David Parry:
Agreed. A China-dominated Russia would create all sorts of problems, and my guess is that if things start to look hairy, then the West would intervene indirectly by helping Russia to be independent. This presupposes that Putin will be gone by then, which is almost certainly going to be the case if the medical reports are true.
It would of course be harder to help Russia if it no longer exists as such, but has broken up int little fiefdoms controlled by warlords. Of course, China went through such a phase a century ago.
Coury Koutz:
I don’t think that Russia will become part of China with nominal independence for the following reasons.
Russia is very big. This means that it has land that is very far away from Beijing. Only a quarter of the Russian population lives in Asia. That means that it would be hard for China to govern the vast majority of Russians due to how far they are from administration in China.
A lot of Russia’s land is land that was never part of any iteration of an independent China.
The majority of Russia’s population has no ethnic or cultural ties to the Chinese.
Peter Green:
One of the imponderables is how long China itself has until it collapses. Its instabilities are also being held together by a fascist dictator who, I'm sure, is watching both Ukraine and Taiwan carefully.
Dictators are prone to overreach, and China has both Muslim dissidents in the south west and unhappy educated younger urban adults in the south east and Hong Kong, many of whom are not necessarily pro Western but pro democracy and often Christian, both of which give them affinities with democratic groups and parties in the West and with fellow Christians in the West.
Suppression of movements like this not only causes resentment, but also teaches participants to survive and grow and innovate. Persecution is almost like adopting a policy of training opponents.
The West has helped China develop in the hope of shoring up democracy and has protected sea trade routes to China's benefit, but a belligerent China could find itself almost as isolated as Russia, in which case Russia might be a corpse around its neck.
Oriana:
China’s economy could collapse due to its real estate bubble. A lot of expensive office and residential buildings are apparently staying empty. And that’s only one of the problems. In future decades, China’s low fertility rate and coming demographic collapse could be more apocalyptic. Of course Russia too is facing demographic collapse, as is the West. Presumably the West has more resources, but importing Moslem immigrant workers could backfire . . .
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THE ACTIVISTS WHO CHOOSE TO STAY
~ Despite reaching one of the darkest moments in more than 40 years as a dissident and human rights activist, Oleg Orlov says that he has no plans to flee Russia. “I made a decision a long time ago that I want to live and die in Russia, it’s my country,” Orlov told the Observer. “Even though it’s never been so bad.”
That’s saying something for Orlov, who can recall printing homemade anti-war posters in the late 1970s to protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or in support of Poland’s Solidarność movement, and was an observer and negotiator during the bloody war in Chechnya in the 1990s.
He has been arrested three times for holding pickets since late February, when Russian troops launched an assault on Ukraine. And he doesn’t rule out a prison term in his future.
“I understand the high likelihood of a criminal case against me and my colleagues,” he said. “But we have to do something … even if it is just to go out with a picket and speak honestly about what is happening.”
Tens of thousands of Russians have fled the country since it invaded Ukraine, fearing a wave of government repression and a possible closure of Russia’s borders similar to what happened in the Soviet Union.
However, a devoted, diverse cadre of anti-war activists have stayed behind, continuing to protest, post online , fundraise and organize opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war against their neighbor.
“I made a decision that I’m not going. That was my decision,” said Ilya Yashin, 38, a veteran street and political activist who also serves as a municipal deputy in Moscow. “I understand all the risks. I understand what it could mean for me.
“But it seems to me that anti-war voices sound louder and more convincing if the person remains in Russia,” he said.
Yashin has continued to speak out against the war publicly, filming streams on his YouTube channel that reach 1.5 million viewers or more.
He estimated that 80% of his friends and colleagues, many in opposition politics or journalism, had left the country. “I think I have more friends in Georgia and in Vilnius now than in Moscow,” he said.
There was no judgment of those who had left, he said, while he looked on those who stayed with “great sympathy, great respect”. Through his activism, he also hoped to show that many Russians do not support this war.
“What’s the point of doing politics in Russia if you’re not willing to protest against war at such a historic moment?” he said.
The danger to activists like Orlov and Yashin is real. The government has already opened nearly a dozen cases into alleged “fakes” about the military, which can carry a sentence of up to 15 years, and has made more than 15,000 arrests of protesters.
“There are a lot of people asking for advice about whether to leave,” said Pavel Chikov, the head of Agora, a Russian human rights group based in Kazan, Tatarstan. “I tell all of them that if you’re thinking about leaving, you have to leave and watch the Titanic from the [rescue] boat, not on board.”
“If people are hesitating, they will blame themselves if they stay and can’t leave later,” he said.
Chikov compared the situation to that of the condition for activists inside Chile under Augusto Pinochet, or in Turkey after the recent failed coup attempt. “There’s no understanding of how far or how deep this can go,” he said.
In Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman has been a fixture in local politics for two decades. The former mayor and anti-narcotics activist is a rare official in the regions to express openly his support of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. A month after calling the war an act of “betrayal” by Russia against Ukraine, he continues to hold open-door consultations with local residents, a hallmark of his social activism in Russia’s fourth-largest city.
“I am almost 60, I lived my whole life in Russia, where the hell am I going to go?” Roizman said at the weekend.
“Many people see me as an example – they are staying because they see that I haven’t left,” he said. “My presence gives them the assurance that everything will be normal one day. And I know I am not alone in the country – there are still many normal people left.”
Roizman said he doesn’t judge the many who have fled but that he needs to be able to “look myself in the mirror”. “I now understand how the anti-fascists felt during the Third Reich,” he said. “But I can’t flee, it is unacceptable for me to do that.”
Others reasons for staying are diverse. Some worried about family members, and others were concerned that once they left they would probably never be able to come back.
Lucy Shtein, a municipal deputy and member of Pussy Riot, said she felt she could be more effective as an activist outside Russia, but that she could not leave because she is awaiting sentencing for promoting a pro-Navalny protest.
“I always wanted to stay in Russia until the very end because I knew that once I leave I will not be able to return for a long time,” she said.
Dmitry Ivanov, a pro-democracy activist and computer science student who runs the “Protest at MGU” [Moscow State University] Telegram channel, also said he feared that if he leaves, “then there will be no way back”.
The IT student would probably be “welcomed abroad”, and said the police had “shown a lot of interest in me”. But he insisted that he had not done anything illegal, just “encourage others to go out and protest peacefully”.
“That is allowed by law,” he said. “I don’t think I should be afraid or run away. This is my country.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/27/our-voices-are-louder-if-we-stay-russian-anti-war-activists-refuse-to-flee?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2Wb0T19I1b458CmBpvz5S-dNXjwbL36Ig8ftqRnm5VU9bQBwFum4JWNL0
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THE CYBER WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE
~ On the sidelines of a conference in Estonia on Wednesday, a senior U.S. intelligence official told British outlet Sky News that the U.S. is running offensive cyber operations in support of Ukraine.
"My job is to provide a series of options to the secretary of defense and the president, and so that's what I do," said Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the National Security Agency, who also serves as the chief of the Pentagon's digital branch, the U.S Cyber Command.
While he did not give any further detail, it was the first time the spy chief alluded to the U.S. government's efforts to launch counterattacks against Russia in cyberspace, in addition to helping defend Ukrainian agencies.
The so-called "cyberwar" in Ukraine hasn't always been front and center of news coverage, but it's one of the things that might most directly impact the West. It's still a real possibility that U.S. companies or critical infrastructure could become collateral damage if Russian hackers decide to retaliate, according to cybersecurity officials.
Even as the U.S. government is a key ally to Ukrainian defenders, the private sector might have a more complete picture of what's going on at any given time, because of their access to the digital systems in Russian hackers' crosshairs. The relationship between the U.S. private sector and Ukraine has only deepened as the war drags on into its third month.
During an interview with NPR in Seattle last week, Microsoft head of customer security and trust Tom Burt detailed what his team has been seeing throughout the war, beginning a couple months prior to the official start of the physical invasion.
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In January, according to Burt, Microsoft witnessed several "destructive attacks against a number of Ukrainian government agencies." This was the first time Microsoft and others observed what's become a major feature of Russia's digital strategy during the war — using wiper malware designed to destroy data within Ukrainian agencies. Burt said his team was trying to determine if the attacks might be a part of a broader offensive, or if it was yet another example of Russia testing out digital attack techniques in Ukraine, something the Kremlin has been doing for years.
"That's the experimental zone for Russian cyberattacks," he said.
Before publicly revealing what Microsoft had seen and attributing those attacks to Russia, Burt said he reached out to U.S. and Ukrainian government partners, to make sure Microsoft didn't "disrupt what might be very delicate conversations that were happening at the time." However, Burt said, both governments gave the green light — just one example of how public officials have been more open about disclosing sensitive information during the war in an effort to expose Russian aggression.
It became obvious to Burt that an invasion was imminent on February 23, a day before Putin announced the "special military operation," he said.
"So it's commonly believed that the invasion of Ukraine started on February 24th. But from our viewpoint, it really started on February 23rd, about 10 hours before the missiles were launched and the tanks rolled across the border," said Burt. "There was a huge wiper attack across 300 different systems in government agencies and private sector companies in Ukraine.”
According to Burt, at the beginning of the invasion, Microsoft only really had a pinhole view into what was happening in Ukraine. While some Ukrainian companies and agencies were using Microsoft products, where the company is routinely looking for threats, very few were using the cloud, where Microsoft has the most insights. Before the war, there was actually a law that prevented Ukranian agencies from using the cloud. That position was reversed on March 16, when the Ministry of Digital Transformation announced that state authorities are now allowed to store data using cloud services. According to Burt, Microsoft has been helping these agencies make the transition, and has become more able to detect threats as a result.
There are still limitations, but the cloud had other benefits, says Burt.
"We've been working with Ukrainian government agencies to completely move them to the cloud ... at least as a backup means of operating in case they get compromised on premises," he explained.
Throughout the war, Burt says his team has noticed a pattern — Russian hackers will often have similar objectives to the Russian military on the ground. While he couldn't definitively say the two groups were actively coordinating, it was clear to Microsoft analysts that they were working from the same playbook.
In the first days of the invasion, both the Russian military and hackers were targeting Ukrainian media and communications.
"They bombed radio towers. They physically invaded and seized media companies. And at the same time, they were engaged in cyber attacks on media companies," he said.
Russian hackers also launched a series of denial-of-service attacks on official government websites and financial institutions, stirring panic about the public's ability to access official information as well as their own bank accounts. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Russians were targeting European satellite company Viasat as well as several other satellites across Europe, disrupting Ukrainian military communications temporarily.
Ultimately, those early, fairly unsophisticated public attacks were mostly unsuccessful in achieving long-term effects. Websites were quickly brought back online, and no one was prevented from withdrawing money for long. Ukrainian military officials were able to rely on alternative methods of communication. Even so, the attacks contributed to a sense of panic and unease in the early days of the invasion.
Ultimately, Burt said, he believes Microsoft was able to alert Ukrainian media companies, for example, in the early phases of those attacks and help them install countermeasures.
"Russia has not been successful in shutting down media communications to Ukrainian citizens," he concluded.
Burt said that Microsoft has detected several examples of Russian hackers stealing information about Ukrainian cities in espionage-style attacks before launching physical attacks, likely in an effort to find information valuable to troops on the ground.
There have also been combined cyber attacks and physical assaults on energy and IT infrastructure, from nuclear power plants to tech companies, Burt said.
More recently, Burt told NPR, Microsoft has seen Russia targeting Ukrainian railways with both cyber attacks and missiles. In this phase of the invasion, there's an effort to disrupt Ukraine's ability to resupply and move vital goods around the country.
Additionally, Microsoft noted that Russia is even weaponizing the trauma caused by their own military operations. Microsoft detected at least one operation in which a Russian actor pretended to be a victim from Mariupol, a sieged Ukrainian city, to try to spread disinformation about how Ukrainian officials had abandoned the city in an effort to pressure citizens to surrender.
"And so we see, again, of course, sponsoring both the cyberattack and the kinetic attack in in support of what is clearly a hybrid war where the Russians are using all those resources in combination," Burt said.
On the ground in Ukraine, Ukrainian cybersecurity officials face a constant barrage. On Tuesday, Ukrainian mobile communications operations in the south in Kherson reported communication outages, which they linked to Russia.
"It is not the first attempt to make it impossible for Ukrainian citizens in the temporarily occupied areas to get in touch with their loved ones, call an ambulance or rescuers, access the true information on the developments in the war and the situation in the country," representatives from the Ukrainian State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection said in a statement.
It's a constant struggle. While Ukrainian officials were able to get communications back online by routing internet traffic through a Russian internet provider, according to Net Blocks, an organization that tracks internet disruptions, that opens those communications up to even further surveillance and disruption by Russia.
Burt recalled one instance where his team was trying to alert one Ukrainian company to a possible cyberattack, when they received a message back that the company couldn't respond because the building was surrounded by Russian tanks.
"If you are Ukrainian, this has been a relentless, unending cyber war that has been launched in correspondence with the physical war in what is clearly the world's first major hybrid war," said Burt. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102484975/a-digital-conflict-between-russia-and-ukraine-rages-on-behind-the-scenes-of-war
General Paul Nakasone, Commander of the US Military Cyber Operations
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INSIDE PUTINS’ PROPAGANDA MACHINE
~ Six nights a week, Vladimir Solovyov, one of the dominant voices in Russian propaganda, gathers a half-dozen pundits for more than two hours of what appears to be unscripted political crosstalk. Most recent episodes have been devoted to mocking Ukraine and its allies—especially the United States and President Biden—and debating Russia’s options. “Should we just turn the world to dust?” Solovyov asked during his show on April 29th. His guests—seven middle-aged men—laughed heartily.
Later, Solovyov grew somber. “I’d like to remind the West of two statements of historic significance,” he said. “The President of the Russian Federation has asked, ‘What is the point of a world in which there is no Russia?’” This is a quote from an interview Solovyov himself conducted with Vladimir Putin, in 2018, in which Putin responded to a question about the possibility of a nuclear war. The second statement Solovyov quoted was also from Putin in 2018: “If they start a nuclear war, we will respond. But we, being righteous people, will go straight to Heaven, while they will just croak.” Solovyov quotes this one a lot, sometimes as a sort of call-and-response with his guests.
All broadcast television in Russia is either owned or controlled by the state. The main evening newscasts on the two main state channels, Channel One and Russia One, cover more or less the same stories, in more or less the same order. On April 30th, for example, Channel One led with a report from a village recently “liberated from the neo-Nazis”; Russia One began its newscast with a general update on the gains made by Russian troops—“Hundreds of neo-Nazis liquidated, tens of airborne targets hit, and several hits against command centers and equipment stockpiles.”
Both newscasts reported on atrocities ostensibly committed by Ukrainian troops. “The Ukrainian Army once more bombed civilian targets,” Russia One claimed. Channel One carried a detailed confession supposedly made by a Ukrainian prisoner of war, who said that he had raped a Russian woman and murdered her husband. Both channels carried reports from a military hospital where a group of young men in identical striped pajamas received medals for their heroic roles in “liberating” Ukrainian towns and villages.
Coverage is repetitive not just from day to day, television channel to television channel; nearly identical stories appear in print and online media, too. According to a number of current and former employees at Russian news outlets, there is a simple explanation for this: at weekly meetings with Kremlin officials, editors of state-controlled media, including broadcasters and publishers, coördinate topics and talking points. Five days a week, a state-controlled consultancy issues a more detailed list of topics. (The organization did not respond to a request for comment.)
I have not seen these lists myself—individuals with access to them said that they were too scared of being prosecuted under new espionage laws to share them—but they agreed to analyze the lists during the course of a couple of weeks. They said that the lists generally contained six to ten topics a day, which appear designed to supplement the Ministry of Defense’s war updates that constitute mandatory coverage. Those among my sources who have seen these lists work for non-broadcast media, but the talking points they described invariably appeared in the news lineups on Channel One and Russia One.
Topics fall into four broad categories: economic, revelatory, sentimental, and ironic. Economic stories should show that Western sanctions against Russia have made life harder in Europe than in Russia: people in Britain can’t afford heat, Germans could be forced to ride bikes because gas prices are rising, stock markets are falling, and Western Europe may be facing a food crisis. Revelatory topics focus on misinformation and disinformation in the West. These may include stories about Ukrainian refugees exposing their true criminal selves by shoplifting in a Western European country, or a segment about Austin Tice, an American journalist who was kidnapped in Syria, in 2012, narrated to suggest that he was punished for telling the truth about the United States.
Sentimental stories focus on connections between Russians in Russia and in eastern Ukraine: a couple getting married in newly “liberated” Berdyansk, humanitarian aid from Russia arriving in the Donetsk region, and Russian doctors providing medical treatment to children injured in Ukraine. Finally, ironic stories focus on mocking the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, frequently, Joe Biden’s supposed mental decline. For these, Russian television often uses segments from Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.
In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was in Moscow, watching television, and I was struck by the ways in which channels downplayed the war: the tone was matter-of-fact, the length of newscasts unchanged. I assumed that this was a strategy aimed at making Russians pay little attention to what the Kremlin was calling a “special military operation.”
But, according to my sources, what I was observing was not a deliberate strategy but a lack of strategy. At least some of the Kremlin’s media managers hadn’t known that the invasion was coming. Now television is all war all the time; in addition to talk shows and newscasts, there are special reports that claim to debunk Western and Ukrainian propaganda or to expose the roots of so-called Ukrainian fascism, and fictional dramas on the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s term for the Soviet part of the Second World War.
In the past, journalists in television and print media would be instructed to pursue specific angles on stories. But people who have seen the lists describe a less prescriptive process today. “It’s this, not that—for example, Mariupol, and not Bucha,” one of my sources said. “And within that space you can even have a discussion.”
Solovyov, whose show airs on Russia One, is a master of orchestrating what sounds like discussion, within the narrow space defined by authorities. On April 26th, he and Margarita Simonyan, who runs both Rossiya Segodnya, a domestic state-news holding, and RT, the international arm of the television-propaganda machine, discussed a purported plot to assassinate them and several other propagandists that had ostensibly been foiled by the secret police a day earlier.
Footage of the raid looked like a parody—among the evidence police claimed to have found was a pendant with a swastika on one side and a Ukrainian trident on the other, Molotov cocktails in plastic bottles (not a thing), and three video-game cartridges. Simonyan mused that the assassination was planned on orders from the opposition politician Alexey Navalny, in collaboration with Zelensky, because both are neo-Nazis.
In 2020, Navalny himself survived an assassination attempt that appears to have been carried out by Russia’s security service, the F.S.B.; he has been in prison for more than a year. “Can you even imagine the things he would have done here, if he hadn’t been jailed?” Simonyan said.
Before I dived into watching Russian propaganda, Lev Gudkov, an independent sociologist, told me that television rhetoric was based on “ascribing their own traits to the opponent.” It really is that simple. Solovyov and his guests, along with the other news anchors, reporters, and hosts on Channel One and Russia One, sound like aggrieved kids on a playground: “No, you are the Nazi!”; “You are shelling residential neighborhoods!”; “You kill journalists!”; “You rape and kill civilians!”; “You are genocidal!” (I asked Solovyov and Simonyan for interviews; Solovyov didn’t respond, and Simonyan used her Telegram channel, which has about three hundred thousand subscribers, to announce that she would not speak to me.)
The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizo-fascism” to describe actual fascists who call their enemies “fascists.” Snyder has said that the tactic follows Hitler’s recommendation to tell a lie so big and outrageous that the psychic cost of resisting it is too high for most people—in the case of Ukraine, an autocrat wages a genocidal war against a democratic nation with a Jewish President, and calls the victims Nazis.
The talking heads on Russian television regularly acknowledge the apparent absurdity of the situation they claim to describe. “The world has gone mad,” Dmitry Drobnitsky, a political scientist, said on Solovyov’s show, on April 29th. “Russians are Russophobic, and Jews are the worst anti-Semites.” A few days later, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, in an interview on Italian television, repeated the same canard about anti-Semitic Jews, adding that Hitler was part-Jewish. Solovyov, who is Jewish, has referred to Zelensky as “a supposed Jew.”
In 2004, during Putin’s second Presidential election, I sat down to talk with Evgeny Revenko, a deputy news editor for All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, a holding that includes what is now Russia One. “It’s a simple logical chain,” he told me. “We are state television. Our state is a Presidential republic. Hence, we don’t criticize the President.” Revenko, who had previously worked as a correspondent and news anchor on independent television, went on to head the holding’s news operation.
Farida Kurbangaleeva, a former daytime news anchor, started working at Russia One in the spring of 2007, when she was twenty-seven. “Those were very mild times,” she told me over Zoom from Prague, where she now lives. “We could start a newscast with a story on the Large Hadron Collider or the death of fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré, those kinds of general-interest stories. It was considered in poor taste to lead with a story on Putin.”
By 2013, Kurbangaleeva said, general-interest stories, particularly international ones, were out, and reports on Russian military exercises were in. Kurbangaleeva described the editing process to me. “You are writing your copy in a proprietary program, and my bosses—Revenko and the person who was between me and him—have it open on their screens. The phone is ringing constantly: ‘change this,’ ‘drop that.’ ”
In fall, 2013, she said, she was writing copy for a story on protests that had broken out in Ukraine—in a few months, these would grow into a revolution. “I typed the word ‘protesters,’ and Revenko called me to say, ‘Where do you get off calling them protesters?’ ” He directed Kurbangaleeva to call them Nazi collaborators instead.
After Russia occupied Crimea, anchors and reporters were directed to call the act “reunification,” never an “annexation.” Kurbangaleeva told me that she did what she could, for example, by using the term “Ukrainian authorities” even when copy she had received used the word “junta.” But when Russian-backed troops in Eastern Ukraine, using Russian missiles, allegedly shot down a Malaysian airliner in 2014, Kurbangaleeva said on air that the plane had been downed by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Soon after, she quit and left the country.
Zhanna Agalakova, a former prime-time news anchor for Channel One, traded her desk for a foreign correspondent’s job back in 2005. “I thought I’d be filing reports on real elections and protests and would save myself from having to lie about what was happening inside the country,” she said. But in 2016, when Agalakova was in the United States, reporting on the Presidential election, her task was to portray Hillary Clinton as ailing. She made repeated use of a single instance in which Clinton, who was ill on the campaign trail, stumbled during an appearance.
In 2019, when Agalakova was reporting on French protests, her editor told her to cut the reason for them: pension reform. Russia, too, was undertaking an unpopular reform of its pension system. “I was supposed to focus instead on the fact that every protest ended in clashes with police,” Agalakova said. “They didn’t spell it out, but the idea was to create the impression that protests always lead to destruction.”
That same year, Agalakova was reporting on the unveiling of a monument to Soviet citizens who took part in the Belgian resistance during the Second World War. She interviewed a Belgian woman who remembered the fighters, saying that a couple of them wrote her postcards as they made their way back to the U.S.S.R. But communication had ceased once they arrived in Leningrad. The woman speculated that her friends—Agalakova suspected there had been a love affair with one of them—might have ended up in the Gulag. Agalakova’s editor cut this part.
Agalakova told me, “Maybe the state is laying the groundwork for concentration camps.” She finally quit when the full-scale invasion began. She gave up her Paris apartment and car, Channel One perks, and traded the status of foreign correspondent for that of exile.
These days, while Solovyov and a couple of others are particularly visible, most of the content for television is produced not by zealots but by drones, people who have very small jobs. They
rewrite copy that comes from the Defense Ministry, and write voice-over for silent video handed down by various government agencies; these are known in the trade as “the mandatories,” stories that must be shown.
Many of these workers have easy schedules—six to eight hours a day, seven days a week, with every other week off—that might make them feel like barely a cog in the wheel, albeit a decently remunerated one. “I don’t think,” a news editor told me, when I asked if they thought that referring to Ukrainian forces as “Nazis” was accurate. “I’m not a politician or a historian. I follow the official sources. If officials use this terminology, then that’s how it is.” (This source was one of only two people currently employed by a Russian state channel who agreed to speak to me directly.)
I wanted to test my hypothesis—that Russian propaganda is designed not to convince its audience that Ukrainians are Nazis and that Russia is waging a defensive war but to muddy the waters, to create the impression that nothing is true. Does truth exist? I asked. “Truth exists, that’s absolutely certain,” my interlocutor said. It’s just that it is unknowable. Unless one could personally travel to Bucha or Mariupol, one could never learn what happened. “We live in an era of fakes,” the editor said.
“It’s hard to identify true information. It’s like believing in aliens, or in God. Everyone decides for themselves.” Unlike most Russians, this person has unfettered access to Western newswires alongside Russian sources, but “it’s impossible to tell which is more true,” the editor said. “Every country has its own interests. Russia is interested in protecting the civilian population of the Donbass. The West is interested in interfering with that, in attacking Russia with sanctions, and giving military aid to Ukraine. It’s very hard, under these circumstances, to think about whose story is more true.”
Other current and former employees described state television as an army, one with a few generals and many foot soldiers who never question their orders. “It runs on military discipline,” Nikolay Svanidze, a historian and journalist who spent years hosting a weekly news-analysis show on Russia One, said. (Svanidze, a sort of liberal, is still affiliated with the channel, though his weekly comment was suspended when the full-scale invasion began.)
Everyone knows that they are part of the force. Solovyov’s laptop visibly has a large letter “Z”— a symbol of Russia’s war in Ukraine— taped to the back. On Channel One, a correspondent reporting from “liberated” Ukraine sported an armband with the “Z”—and the word “PRESS” across the chest of his bulletproof vest.
The Russian state and its propaganda machine form a feedback loop. Putin watches his own television and quotes it back to itself, the television amplifies the message, and so on. Messages can originate anywhere along this closed loop. On February 12th, Maria Baronova, a former opposition activist who went to work for RT’s Russian-language service in 2019, wrote a long, unhinged post on her personal Telegram channel, arguing that NATO and its allies should be “de-Nazified.” She soon heard from a senior editor who praised her post and encouraged her to write more like it. Twelve days later, Putin announced the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and declared that its goal was the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine.”
Baronova couldn’t find an instance of the term “de-Nazification” being used by Russians (not in reference to Germany) that preceded her Telegram post. The propaganda machine had been calling Ukrainians Nazis for years, but this word was novel; it had come to her following a fight with a Russian-speaking friend in the United States. “I pulled it out of my ass for that post,” she told me. “And then, when they were scraping together verbiage for Putin’s speech, they picked it up.”
It’s not an unlikely theory: autocratic ideologies in general, and Putin’s in particular, are cobbled together on the fly. Usable words and quotable quotes are few and far between—that is, among other things, why the propaganda machine makes such extensive use of a couple of Putin’s sayings from 2018, the ones about Russians going straight to Heaven and about not needing a world in which there is no Russia.
Baronova’s job was to write and edit neediest-case-type stories to raise money and awareness. She didn’t do much, she told me, because she didn’t have to. Funding was lavish, expectations were low, and Baronova concluded that “the more people get good salaries for doing nothing, the better.”
The system worked because it had an audience of one—Putin—and whatever he saw apparently satisfied him. She quit her job on February 24th. “Too late, I know,” she told me. In early May, the independent Russian investigative publication Proyekt reported that the Kremlin was dropping the term “de-Nazification,” because it hadn’t gained traction with the public.
If Russian propagandists think of themselves as the foot soldiers and officers of an army, this is an army shaped by the mythology of the Great Patriotic War. Victory in this war is the centerpiece of contemporary Russian historiography, the single event that justifies Russia’s claim to do what it wants in the world, and especially in its fight against those it has labelled Nazis. But the story of the war that Russians learn in school—and from books, movies, and television series—stresses the sacrifice made by Soviet forces even more than these forces’ ultimate triumph.
Russian schoolchildren today, just as their parents and grandparents did, memorize the stories of martyrs: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a partisan who was captured by the Germans and refused to talk, effectively choosing death by hanging; Alexander Matrosov, who died after throwing himself in front of a German machine gun. One of the highest-grossing Russian movies of all time, the 2013 film “Stalingrad,” ends with its sole surviving protagonist radioing for an air strike against the building where he has taken shelter, so that both he and a large number of German troops will be killed. Being willing to die for your country is an element of the mythology of any military, but, for Russian soldiers, dying—and taking others with them—is the better part of valor.
Every night, the propagandists model heroism as though they were suicide bombers strapping on explosive vests, live on air. During the April 26th show, Solovyov and Simonyan discussed the most likely outcomes of the current conflict.
“Personally, I see the path of a third world war as the most realistic,” Simonyan said. “Knowing us, knowing our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, knowing how things work around here . . . I think that the most improbable outcome—that it will all end in a nuclear strike—is still more probable than defeat. This horrifies me, on the one hand, but on the other I understand that this is how it is.”
“But we are going straight to Heaven,” Solovyov reminded her.
“Yes,” Simonyan said.
“And they’ll just croak.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/inside-putins-propaganda-machine?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The Admiral Kuznetsov, doing what it does best: wait for maintenance.
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ANOTHER VICTORY FOR DISSENT?
~ Quite incredible. The system is cracking all over. Alexei Navalny says that the judge, who replaced his suspended sentence with a real one, handed him a letter "with regrets about her decision.
~ Judge Natalia Repnikova gave him the letter through her lawyers. She regretted her ruling and called him "a brave man. ~ Misha Iossel
Add to this the letter from a top Russian UN diplomat who wrote an open letter saying that he was “ashamed” of his country’s actions.
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An update on Natalia Repnikova, the judge who sentenced Navalny six months ago and then allegedly wrote that letter of apology: she died suddenly at the age of fifty.
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Mary: HONOR CULTURE A MORE PRIMITIVE STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT
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~ Attention shapes our entire experience of the world. As defined by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1940, attention is ‘the function charged with giving the mind its structure and cohesion’. Yet, our attention is not our own. A third of all Americans clock 45 hours or more of work per week, with 8 million reporting 60-plus hours. Our down time isn’t ours either. Compared with 1940, individuals now consume almost 90 times more screen-fed information. That’s 82 hours per week – or 69 per cent of our waking hours. That’s a lot.
Even though the brain is a marvel of neurobiological engineering, it cannot sustain this type of data onslaught. Our focus drops off after somewhere between 90-120 minutes, with multitasking creating a ‘bottleneck’ effect, clogging information from one part of the brain to another. No wonder we engage in daydreaming 47 per cent of the time: we simply can’t keep up with today’s attentional demands.
Paying attention and daydreaming arise from activity between two brain networks. In the same way that a seasoned conductor unifies the sound of performers and controls the pace of the music, the executive control network (ECN) masterfully integrates and directs the activity of different brain regions to complete a specific task. During intermission, the conductor leaves the stage, and the default mode network (DMN) raises the house lights for a mental break.
The DMN underlies delicious escapes into one’s own past or future, expansive imaginary flights into the plots of books or movies, and even manipulations of moral gambits. Ideally, the two networks oscillate in opposition: the intermission does not interrupt the performance, and the performance does not start unexpectedly during the intermission. This see-saw action creates harmonious mental states associated with increased creativity, mindfulness, and psychological wellbeing.
For some, however, there is no harmony. Unforgiving work schedules, demanding family lives, negative news cycles and a social media addiction fracture attention and disturb the delicate balance between the ECN and DMN. We remain in a perpetual state of distraction.
In a speech to an audience of college students in 2009, the US essayist William Deresiewicz warns that, by spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle:
You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice …
With no access to our own personal music that relies on sparking the brain’s DMN, melodies conducted by an erratic ECN become discordant, and mental health is severely compromised.
This permanent obsession with speed, as Milan Kundera noted in the novel Slowness (1995), ‘is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man’. Each piece of technology seductively blinks, beeps and chimes, begging for our attention. In her Master’s thesis while at Stanford University, Devangi Vivrekar catalogued several forms of persuasive design used by sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Here are some you may be familiar with, and why they are effective:
Intermittent notifications: varied delivery schedule is interesting.
Red color of notification badge: indicates urgency, arouses curiosity.
Number of notifications on badges: want to get number to 0, arouses base desire for order out of chaos.
In the same way that a dog is rewarded with a treat, when we succumb to a notification, waves of dopamine surge through our brains, giving us a sense of pleasure. Over time, this addictive pattern erodes the natural cognitive coastline, making us slaves to our devices.
A perpetual state of distraction is not just personally detrimental, but societally devastating. Through a phenomenon called attentional bias, perception can be affected by select environmental factors. For example, attentional bias can be used to elevate fear levels by bombarding someone with threatening stimuli, such as fearful propaganda. Fear, in turn, can influence our unconscious, implicit biases, and lead to aversion toward groups of people we once thought harmless. If paying attention truly creates our reality, then what we pay attention to determines our actions within that reality.
On 11 March 2020, the world’s frenetic rhythm stopped. Soon, the COVID-19 pandemic placed the world in lockdown and, for some, afforded a much-needed mental slowdown. In what has been termed the Great Resignation in the United States, millions quit their jobs. Many realized that ‘Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster,’ as Oliver Burkeman writes in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021). Slowing down during the pandemic allowed the DMN to illuminate the harsh reality of our unbalanced daily routines.
Inevitably, the world will return to its frenetic rhythm. But we don’t have to. In her book Laziness Does Not Exist (2021), the social psychologist Devon Price writes personally about burnout, and explains that laziness is not a deficit or something we need to fix or overcome with caffeine or longer work hours, but is actually a sign that you probably need to slow down. While countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Iceland are adopting shorter working weeks, some argue that expanding the weekend is as helpful as slowing down the pace of the working day, so that a proper balance between DMN and ECN can be found.
One way to achieve a new rhythm is by reconnecting with our senses. So deep is our disconnection that we seldom notice the natural world around us. In her book The Anthropology of Turquoise (2002), Ellen Meloy advises:
Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.
Simply walking in nature – or, as the Japanese call it, shinrin-yoku – has been shown to reduce blood pressure and increase relaxation. Attuning to nature’s rhythm has also been associated with reduced neural activity in brain areas linked to risk for mental illness and inspired the attention restoration theory, which holds that nature replenishes our ability to concentrate and pay attention. Paying attention to the moment during a walk shifts focus away from the internally generated, anxiety-provoking scenarios, creating much-needed space.
A present-oriented mindset is one of the hallmarks of resiliency, the ability to beneficially reshape our emotional landscape during and after a stressful event (such as a global pandemic). Neuroscience research has shown that mindfulness in highly resilient individuals operates much like a conductor leading a soothing melody while the DMN keeps the lights dimmed low. In a similar vein, deep listening – the practice of giving attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically – has been shown to not only foster personal resilience but to bridge divides between those of different backgrounds. In the same way that negative attentional bias can create fear-based perceptions, positive attentional bias can increase social engagement and decrease emotionally withdrawn behavior. If we can control what we pay attention to, why not refocus our lens towards the positive aspects of the present moment?
In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), the artist Jenny Odell describes how, through the simple act of learning to identify local plant and animal species, her preconceived reality was deconstructed:
[Attention] can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them … It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.
By paying attention to our local natural surroundings, we pay attention to our global surroundings and the part we play in shaping them. As Odell states, ‘simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.’ ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/slow-down-its-what-your-brain-has-been-begging-for?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&&utm_campaign=launchnlbanner
Mary:
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LISTENING COMPLETELY IS A GIFT TO YOURSELF, NOT JUST TO OTHERS
~ Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realization crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen.
Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.
Along the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have.
When I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had only rarely adopted.
Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)
Rogers’s early work was focused on what were then called ‘delinquent’ children; but, by the 1940s, he was developing a new approach to psychotherapy, which came to be termed ‘humanistic’ and ‘person-centered’. Unlike Freud, Rogers believed that all of us possess ‘strongly positive directional tendencies’. Unhappy people, he believed, were not broken; they were blocked. And as opposed to the then-dominant modes of psychotherapy – psychoanalysis and behaviorism – Rogers believed that a therapist should be less a problem-solver, and more a sort of skilled midwife, drawing out solutions that already existed in the client. All people possess a deep urge to ‘self-actualize’, he believed, and it is the therapist’s job to nurture this urge. They were there to ‘release and strengthen the individual, rather than to intervene in his life’. Key to achieving this goal was careful, focused, ‘active’ listening.
That this perspective doesn’t seem particularly radical today is a testament to Rogers’s legacy. As one of his biographers, David Cohen, writes, Rogers’s therapeutic philosophy ‘has become part of the fabric of therapy’. Today, in the West, many of us believe that going to therapy can be an empowering and positive move, rather than an indicator of crisis or sickness. This shift owes a great deal to Rogers. So too does the expectation that a therapist will allow themselves to enter into our thinking, and express a careful but tangible empathy. Where Freud focused on the mind in isolation, Rogers valued more of a merging of minds – boundaried, but intimate.
Active listening, for Rogers, was essential to creating the conditions for growth. It was one of the key ingredients in making another person feel less alone, less stuck, and more capable of self-insight.
Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyze it, categorize it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard. As a teenager, I was a passionate atheist and a passionate Leftist. I saw things as very simple: all believers are gullible, and all conservatives are psychopaths, or at minimum heartless. I could hold to my Manichean view precisely because I had made no effort to grasp anyone else’s viewpoint.
Another of my old mental blocks, also flagged by Rogers, is the instinct that anyone I’m talking to is likely dumber than me. This arrogance is terrible for any attempt at listening, as Rogers recognizes: ‘Until we can demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the potential worth of an individual,’ he writes, we won’t be good listeners. Previously, on bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle. I would look for clues that this person was wrong, and could be made to feel wrong. But as Rogers writes, to listen well, we ‘must create a climate which is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralizing’.
‘Our emotions are often our own worst enemies when we try to become listeners,’ he wrote. In short, a great deal of bad listening comes down to lack of self-control. Other people animate us, associations fly, we are pricked by ideas. (This is why we have built careful social systems around not discussing such things as religion or politics at dinner parties.) When I was 21, if someone suggested that some pop music was pretty good, or capitalism had some redeeming features, I was incapable of not reacting. This made it very hard for me to listen to anyone’s opinion but my own. Which is why, Rogers says, one of the first skills to learn is non-intervention. Patience. ‘To listen to oneself,’ he wrote, ‘is a prerequisite to listening to others.’ Here, the analogy with meditation is clear: don’t chase every thought, don’t react to every internal event, stay centered. Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.
And when we do intervene, following Rogers, we must resist the ever-present urge to drag the focus of the conversation back to ourselves. Sociologists call this urge ‘the shift response’. When a friend tells me they’d love to visit Thailand, I must resist the selfish pull to leap in with Oh yeah, Thailand is great, I spent Christmas in Koh Lanta once, did I ever tell you about the Muay Thai class I did? Instead, I must stay with them: where exactly do they want to go, and why? Sociologists call this ‘the support response’. To listen well is to step back, keep the focus with someone else.
A nice example of Rogers’s approach, taken from his career, is his experience during the Second World War. Rogers was asked by the US Air Force to assess the psychological health of gunners, among whom morale appeared low. By being patient, and nonjudgmental, and gentle with his attention, Rogers discovered that the gunners had been bottling up one of their chief complaints: they resented civilians. Returning to his hometown and attending a football game, reported one pilot, ‘all that life and gaiety and luxury – it makes you so mad’. Rogers didn’t suggest any drastic intervention, or push any change in view. He recommended that the men be allowed to be honest about their anger, and process it openly, without shame. Their interlocutors, Rogers said, should begin by simply listening to them – for as long as it took, until they were unburdened. Only then should they respond.
Much like meditating, listening in this way takes work. It may take even more work outside the therapy room, in the absence of professional expectation. At all times, for almost all of us, our internal monologue is running, and it is desperate to spill from our brain onto our tongue. Stemming the flow requires intention. This is necessary because, even when we think an intervention is positive, it may be self-centered. We might not feel it, Rogers says, but, typically, when we offer our interpretation or input, ‘we are usually responding to our own needs to see the world in certain ways’.
When I first began to observe myself as a listener, I saw how difficult I found it to simply let people finish their sentences. I noticed the infinite wave of impatience on which my attention rode. I noticed the slippery temptation of asking questions that were not really questions at all, but impositions of opinion disguised as questions. The better road, I began to see, was to stay silent. To wait.
The active listener’s job is to simply be there, to focus on ‘thinking with people instead of for or about them’. This thinking with requires listening for what Rogers calls ‘total meaning’. This means registering both the content of what they are saying, and (more subtly) the ‘feeling or attitude underlying this content’. Often, the feeling is the real thing being expressed, and the content a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Capturing this feeling involves real concentration, especially as nonverbal cues – hesitation, mumbling, changes in posture – are crucial. Zone out, half-listen, and the ‘total meaning’ will entirely elude us.
And though the bad listener loves to internally multitask while someone else is talking, faking it won’t work. As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere ‘pretense of interest’, resenting it as ‘empty and sterile’. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This ‘demands practice’, Rogers said, and ‘may require changes in our own basic attitudes’.
Rogers’s theories were developed in a context where one person is attempting, explicitly, to help another person heal and grow. But Rogers was always explicit about the fact that his work was ‘about life’. Of his theories, he said that ‘the same lawfulness governs all human relationships’.
I think I started off from a lower point; by nature, I think my brain tends toward distraction and self-regard. But one would not need to be a bad listener to benefit from Rogers’s ideas. Even someone whose autopilot is an empathetic, interested listener can find much in his work. Rogers did more than anyone else to explore listening, systematize its dynamics, and record his professional explorations.
Certainly, being a good listener had an impact on Rogers’s own life. As another of his biographers, Howard Kirschenbaum, told me, Rogers discovered that ‘listening empathically to others was enormously healing and freeing, in both therapy and other relationships’. At his 80th birthday party, a cabaret was staged in which two Carl Rogers impersonators listened to one another in poses of exaggerated empathy. The well-meaning gag was a compliment; in a somewhat rare case of intellectuals actually embodying the ideas they espouse, Rogers was remembered as an excellent listener by everyone who knew him. Despite the kind of foibles that can weigh down any life – a reliance on alcohol, a frustration with monogamy – Rogers appears to have been a decent man: warm, open, and never cruel.
That he was able to carry his theories into his life should give encouragement, even to those of us who aren’t world-famous psychologists. Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.
Perhaps above all, Rogers understood the stakes involved in listening well. All of us, when we are our best selves, want to bring growth to the people we choose to give our time to. We want to help them unlock themselves, stand taller, think better. The dynamic may not be as direct as with a therapist; there is more of an equal footing – but when our relationships are healthy, we want those around us to thrive. Listening well, Rogers showed, is the simplest route there. Be with people in the right way, and they become ‘enriched in courage and self-confidence’. They feel the releasing glow of attention, and develop an ‘underlying confidence in themselves’. If we don’t want this for our friends, then we are not their friends.
Indeed, such is the generosity of active listening that one can view the practice as one that borders on the spiritual. Though Rogers traded theology for psychology in his early 20s, he always maintained an interest in spirituality. He enjoyed the work of Søren Kierkegaard, an existentialist Christian; and, over the years, he had public discussions with the theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber. In successful therapy sessions, said Rogers, both therapist and client can find themselves in ‘a trance-like feeling’ where ‘there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real “I-Thou” relationship’. Of his relationship to his clients, Rogers said: ‘I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself.’
Perhaps this is a bit rich for you; perhaps you would rather frame active listening as simply good manners, or a neat interpersonal hack. The point is: really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing. Only rarely will people notice, let alone thank you, for your efforts. Yet this generosity of attention is what people deserve.
And lest this all sound a bit pious – active listening is not pure altruism. Listening well, as Rogers said, is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, as Rogers was always quick to make clear, it is also a gift to ourselves.
Rogers became a hero of the 1960s counterculture. He admired their utopian dreams of psychic liberation and uninhibited communication; late in life, he was drawn to the New Age writings of Carlos Castañeda. All of this speaks to one of the key critiques of Rogers’s philosophy, both during his lifetime and today: that he was too optimistic. Rogers recognized himself that he was, in Cohen’s words, ‘incorrigibly positive’. His critics called him a sort of Pollyanna of the mind, and thought him naive for believing that such simple interventions as empathy and listening could trigger transformation in people. (Perhaps certain readers will harbor similar critiques about my own beliefs as expressed here.)
Those inclined to agree with this assessment of Rogers will probably think that I have overstated the case. Listening as love? Listening as spiritual practice? But in my own life, a renewed approach to listening has improved how I relate to others, and I now believe listening is absurdly under-discussed. Good listening is complex, subtle, slippery – but it is also right here, it lives in us, and we can work on it every day. Unlike the abstractions of so much of ethics and so much of philosophy, our listening is there to be honed, every day. Like a muscle, it can be trained. Like an intellect, it can be tested. In the very same moment, it can spur both our own growth and the growth of others. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I couldn’t write nonfiction that anyone else actually wanted to read until I began trying to truly listen.
‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me,’ said Henry David Thoreau, ‘was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.’
With anyone I can impact – and especially those whose souls I can help to light up – I follow Rogers; I offer as much ‘of safety, of warmth, of empathic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give.’ And I open myself to whatever I can learn. I fail in my attentions, again and again. But I tune back in, again and again. I believe it is working. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/the-psychologist-carl-rogers-and-the-art-of-active-listening?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&&utm_campaign=launchnlbanner
Oriana:
Actually, if I happened to be going somewhere unfamiliar, especially abroad, I would be interested in someone else’s impression of that place. I certainly would prefer that to being interrogated of why I’m going there, for how long, etc.
I once had an annoying acquaintance who subjected me to endless interrogations every time we met. I told her that it felt like the Inquisition. She didn’t get it; she thought that by asking questions of the sort: “Do you write on the computer or by hand?” she was giving me pleasure by showing interest. It was her attempt to be friendly.
But the Rogerian idea of active listening is not grueling drawing out of details. You and the other must establish warmth, empathy, friendliness. Then the conversation becomes a gift to both of you.
I'm also interested in the concept that Rogers bequeathed to us: UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD. I think this attitude underlies active listening -- we find the person worth listening to, and we show it.
As for the private life of this brilliant psychologist, I'm not sure that it's just "foibles." He was an alcoholic, had a tortured marriage, and many affairs. He managed to bequeath us a valuable legacy in spite of all that.
THE END OF RETIREMENT?
~ The concept of retirement as we know it is changing, and has been for a long time. The number of people working past retirement age has grown consistently since the 1990s. In the US, 32% of people aged 65 to 69 were in work in 2017, far more than the 22% who were working in 1994. In the UK, employment rates for people older than 65 doubled between 1993 and 2018.
Then came Covid-19. “Society was already poised for a real shift in how it’s thinking about retirement,” says Michelle Silver, associate professor of gerontology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “But the pandemic has definitely exacerbated it.”
When the pandemic hit, labor trends went awry. First, there was an exodus of older professionals from the workforce; in the UK, at least an extra 250,000 50- to 64-year-olds left, while more than 3 million Americans retired early.
Now, however, as inflation spikes, the number of people coming out of retirement is growing. In the US, job site Indeed reports 'unretirement' levels are at 3.3%, much higher than the sub-3% average seen since 2017. In the UK, Indeed saw a spike in 55-to-64 year-olds ‘urgently seeking work’, while another survey found that two-thirds of people who retired during the pandemic expect to keep working in some form.
Gaëlle Blake, UK and Ireland director for permanent appointments at recruitment firm Hays, says she believes “this is the start of a phenomenon where people are feeling the pressure financially, so they will come back to work”. Whether that’s part-time, full-time or a side gig, people are increasingly expecting and needing to work past traditional retirement age – perhaps permanently reshaping our idea of what this life stage might look like.
While there are several factors behind retirees’ return to the workforce, it’s clear that concerns linked to the cost of living are currently a major motivator. In the UK, of the over-50s who have returned to work since leaving during the pandemic, 48% said they did so because they needed money, while 23% said they couldn’t afford to retire.
Blake says she’s seen retirees’ positions change dramatically during the pandemic. Early on, they were leaving the workforce in droves, partly due to fears linked to Covid-19, but also to do with their assets; house prices started soaring, and investments were up. “It would have meant their pension programs were very high, their houses were valued very high.” But now, she says, inflation means people don’t feel as comfortable as they did a year ago. “People are definitely wanting to come back to work.”
It’s a similar story in the US. Anthony retired from his job at a shipping multinational in January 2020. He took his package early, in his late 50s, because he was tired of working for corporate America and a boss he didn’t like. But his retirement plan didn’t account for historic inflation increases. “Everything that we had planned for the future was based on having X amount invested,” he says. “But this year has been such a correction, our savings have gone down 20%.”
Luckily for Anthony, he had already re-joined the workforce when his investments started to drop, and the cost of living began to rise. A year into the pandemic, his former company called him, told him his old boss was gone and asked if he wanted to come back to work on a project.
“The deal is they’re paying me basically the same salary as I was making. And that’s on top of my retirement [pension],” says Anthony. He believes they brought him back to plug a skills shortage. “Whenever you have mass exodus from a company, you lose knowledge,” he says. “Sometimes you need fresh blood to get new ideas. But sometimes, to get things done quickly, you need older blood that knows how to get it done. And I’m in that latter half.”
Many retirees are being courted by companies with skilled vacancies to fill. In the UK, the unemployment rate is 3.7%, the lowest it’s been in 50 years. “But there’s also a record number of jobs,” says Blake. “So, you’ve got no talent pool.” She says the people who’ve chosen to retire are exactly the people that are needed in the labour market – knowledge workers like teachers, nurses, doctors, surveyors, technology professionals. “Where there is demand, they have the matching skill set,” says Blake. “They are the missing people.”
In the US, where unemployment is the lowest it’s been since the 1960s, unretirement is being touted as a solution to a raft of labour shortages – and many retirees are on board. Richard Sartiano retired from a medical device company in April 2021, but only a few months later – motivated by both rising living costs and boredom – he was job hunting again.
“I wanted to do something productive,” says Sartiano. “One of my children suggested I take up painting.” Instead, he applied for a director position at Purdue University, Indiana. “I wanted something challenging,” he says. “I have a pretty good education and I still want to use it.” Just a year after retiring, Sartiano had a new, full-time job.
While returning to full-time employment may work for some older workers, other retirees are seeking more flexible employment. In the UK, of the 50-to-70-year-olds who left the workforce during the pandemic, 69% of those looking to come back want to work part-time – planning a semi-retirement, rather than a fully-fledged one.
New Jersey-based Richard Eisenberg, who started his semi-retirement from journalism in January 2022, divides his time among writing part-time and volunteering, mentoring and experimenting with new challenges he didn’t have time for when he was in full-time work. Eisenberg says he’s “glad to have the extra income”, because the possibility of running out of money is always a back-of-the-mind concern, even though he and his wife have built up solid pension pots. But he’s also keen to keep working for mental stimulation. “I’m not somebody who plays golf,” he says, “so I just felt like if I wasn’t going to be doing some kind of work, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And I would get pretty bored, possibly depressed, and I didn’t want that to happen.”
Unhappiness in retirement is a well-documented issue. Silver, of the University of Toronto Scarborough, says retirement can be “an incredibly dissatisfying experience” for those whose personal and work identities are intertwined. She suggests the pandemic offered many people a preview of retirement - being with your partner all day, or alone all day, without the traditional structures of work – and that some people who traditionally would have retired by now realized the lifestyle didn’t appeal to them.
Plus, as flexible work practices increasingly become the norm, it’s become much easier to continue to do some work from a retirement setting – as Annie Llewellyn discovered. She retired 10 years ago, after a career as a university lecturer. “The first year, I really enjoyed it,” she says. “But then I realized I didn’t have enough money to really support myself.” So, she took on freelance work, such as marking papers and giving lectures. “Now I really enjoy the flexibility of having a retirement income plus a job,” says Llewellyn, who lives between Italy and a shared house in Wales.
Since the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of more flexible working practices, Llewellyn has found it much easier to maintain her unretired lifestyle. “Coronavirus changed the world of homeworking,” she says. “I don't work full time by any means, I wouldn't want that, but I think it's a new stage of life.”
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If current cost-of-living concerns ease, it’s possible that some older workers will no longer feel the need to be employed past retirement. But general trends – we’re living and working longer, and many of us aren’t saving adequate pension pots – suggest that ‘retirement’, for many, will include working in some form.
The shift to flexible work, however, could benefit both today’s retirees and also the younger workers lamented as the generations who will never be able to afford to retire. Before, the wealth gap between boomers and later generations might have meant many people toiling away at their desks well into their 70s.
But flexible working offers a new option. Last week, Llewellyn took a weekend trip to Corfu with a friend. “I was working for a few hours, but I was swimming, too,” she says.
This flexible version of retirement won’t be available to everyone, but it is an indicator of how the concept itself can and should evolve. “I think it’s really important to recognize that retirement is just a phase that was invented, it’s not a natural progression or an essential stage of life,” says Silver. “I think that now, lots more people will questions what it means, and whether it is really a life goal for everyone.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220526-is-this-the-end-of-retirement-as-we-know-it
Oriana:
Some people can’t wait to retire, while others say, “Don’t ever say that word to me.” It’s their biggest nightmare — an empty, useless life while they are still healthy and feel they have a lot to offer.
Some never manage to get over being forced to retire. Their health may suffer, and their life expectancy plummets. One study found that people who live longest are those who work hardest and longest. It goes without saying that they love their work — that’s perhaps the great divide between people who dream of early retirement, and those who dream of never retiring.
Writers never retire, though they may switch genres. The great novelist Thomas Hardy famously retired from writing novels to return to his first love — poetry. When Matisse could no longer paint, he turned to paper cutouts. His seventies were remarkably fertile.
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WHY I NO LONGER BELIEVE IN SCRIPTURAL INERRANCY
~ When I saw that God is love, He couldn’t have destroyed humanity in a flood. He couldn’t have rained down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah. He couldn’t have killed the firstborn in Egypt. And He couldn’t have killed David and Bathsheba’s son.
This also caused me to rethink a lot of my theology that was wedded to my politics. For example, I couldn’t be pro-life and pro-Jesus if I was pro-war or pro-capital punishment. I couldn’t be pro-life if I was opposed to lifting oppressive conditions on the poor and disenfranchised.
Then, in my search for confirmation bias for my pro-life politics, I was shocked to learn about what God (or Jesus) actually had to say about prohibiting abortions.
Nothing.
In fact, what I learned is that there’s a passage in the book of Numbers that actually gives a prescription for causing an abortion in an unfaithful wife. I also found numerous scriptures where the “god” of the Old Testament actually told His “chosen people” to slay their enemies — even cutting babies out of their mothers’ bellies.
Then when I look at how scripture was canonized — and by whom, and for what purpose — I began to see a pattern of control and manipulation. The very scriptures that people say give life have been used to justify war, genocide, slavery, and paternalism.
Which brings me to my conclusion: The book is just that — a book. It is an allegorical, albeit poor, historical record. It is a collection of stories that attempted to describe an awesome Father; in some cases with reverence and awe and in other cases with a clear interest in controlling population segments.
The book is not inerrant. It is not infallible. It speaks OF God but IS NOT God. While I am grateful for it in that it introduced me to Papa through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, I no longer rely on it. I learned that the letter truly kills but the Spirit, indeed, gives life.
And I’ve decided to run with that. ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveminusreligion/2020/04/scripturalinerrancy/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR2LLcwyNw2OK9aJ_D-fZcGcFWcNTF49RD4N
Oriana:
Of course the simpler approach is that the Bible is a book of myths and legends, even if some of the characters in it might have actually existed. Most biblical scholars agree that Jesus probably really existed, but the discovery of "historical Jesus" is impossible. It's likely that Moses never existed. There may have been someone who gave origin to the legend, but once the legend started growing, it grew distant from that original spark (if any).
"God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.” ~ Mildred Diaz
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BENEFITS OF BLACK TEA AND GREEN TEA
~ Because green tea has become so trendy, it’s easy to forget that black tea provides very similar benefits.
Groups of polyphenols, including catechins, theaflavins and thearubigins, are the main sources of antioxidants in black tea and may promote overall health.
THEAFLAVINS REDUCE BLOOD SUGAR AND CHOLESTEROL LEVELS
One study in rats examined the role of theaflavins in black tea and the risk of diabetes, obesity and elevated cholesterol. Results showed that theaflavins reduced cholesterol and blood sugar levels.
HEART HEALTH
Black tea contains another group of antioxidants called flavonoids, which benefit heart health.
Along with tea, flavonoids can be found in vegetables, fruits, red wine and dark chocolate.
Consuming them on a regular basis may help reduce many risk factors for heart disease, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, elevated triglyceride levels and obesity.
One randomized controlled study found that drinking black tea for 12 weeks significantly decreased triglyceride values by 36%, reduced blood sugar levels by 18% and lowered the LDL/HDL plasma ratio by 17%.
Another study found that those who drank three cups of black tea per day had an 11% reduced risk of developing heart disease.
BENEFITS THE MICROBIOME
Studies have found that the type of bacteria in your gut may play a significant role in your health.
That’s because the gut contains trillions of bacteria, as well as 70–80% of your immune system.
While some of the bacteria in your gut is beneficial for your health, some are not.
In fact, some studies have suggested that the type of bacteria in your gut may play an important role in reducing the risk of certain health conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and even cancer.
The polyphenols found in black tea may help maintain a healthy gut by promoting the growth of good bacteria and inhibiting the growth of bad bacteria, such as Salmonella.
In addition, black tea contains antimicrobial properties that kill off harmful substances and improve gut bacteria and immunity by helping repair the lining of the digestive tract.
MAY HELP REDUCE HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
High blood pressure affects approximately 1 billion people worldwide.
It can increase your risk of heart and kidney failure, stroke, vision loss and heart attacks. Fortunately, changes in your diet and lifestyle can lower your blood pressure.
A randomized, controlled study looked at the role of black tea in decreasing blood pressure. Participants drank three cups of black tea daily over six months.
Results found that those who drank black tea had a significant decrease in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, compared to the placebo group.
However, research on the effects of black tea on blood pressure is mixed.
A meta-analysis of five different studies involving 343 participants looked at the impact of drinking black tea for four weeks on blood pressure.
Although results found some improvements in blood pressure, researchers concluded that the findings were not significant.
Drinking black tea on a daily basis, as well as incorporating other lifestyle modifications like stress management strategies, may benefit those with high blood pressure.
MOOD BENEFITS
Black tea contains caffeine, though not as much as coffee. Caffeine offers its own range of benefits, including greater release of the mood lifting neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin.
AS FOR GREEN TEA, I HAVE A MEME PRESENTING ITS BENEFITS
What interests me is the benefits for oral health. I've witnessed a case of "furry tongue" completely cleared up with green tea held in the mouth for about a minute per sip.
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ending on beauty:
VIEW
In our garden, in light rain,
wet and shiny and whiter than white
against the gray greens,
my wife’s stack of four plastic
five-gallon joint-compound buckets
is tilted a little but balanced,
three of them fitted into the one
just below, the bottom one lifting
the others. But it’s the top one
I’m thinking of, it having come up
for air, open to fortune, filling
with rainwater dancing with rain.
~ Ted Kooser
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