As I am already receiving pro-Russian propaganda, I reproduce here a recent post by Timothy D. Snyder, an American author and historian (at Yale) specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust.
“Do Russians want war?"
Putin's war propaganda answered with dignity by the Ukrainian president
Vladimir Putin absurdly claims he has invaded Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers. Yet Russian speakers in Ukraine are far more free than Russian speakers in Russia.
A Russian speaker in Russia who thought of running for president would be imprisoned, as Alexei Navalny has been. A Russian-speaker, meanwhile, can run for president of Ukraine, and win. That has happened more than once.
Just before Russia began its full invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, gave a moving and dignified speech in Russian to the Russian people. I tweeted it out as I listened to it.
This is not a translation of his dignified, thoughtful, and balanced speech; just a hasty set of notes made late on a terrible night. But as the Russian assault begins, on grotesque and Orwellian premises, Zelenskyi’s address was an important attempt at communication and reconciliation that deserves to be remembered; these notes are a gestures towards that.
Putin absurdly claims that he must invade Ukraine to denazify it. Zelens’kyi unlike Putin is a democratically-elected president. Zelenskyi unlike Putin does not support racists and white supremacists around the world. He interprets the Second World War from a Ukrainian perspective.
“How can you call us Nazis when we gave millions of lives in the Second World War?” It is a fair point. Ukrainian soldiers died in terrible numbers in the Red Army: more than Americans, British, and Frenchmen combined during the Second World War. He adds: “Tell it to my grandfather, who fought in the Soviet infantry and died as a colonel in independent Ukraine.” President Zelensky does not mention that his grandfather’s father and much of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.
President Zelensky says that Russian culture and culture in general should unite people, not divide them. Culture is about communication, not conflict.
He says that the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government want peace, but will defend themselves.
President Zelens’kyi says that he trusts that there are Russians who will understand him and who also want to avoid the horror and sorrow of war. ask Russians to disregard war propaganda and to take responsibility.
“Do Russians want war? I would very much like an answer to that question. It depends upon you, citizens of the Russian Federation.”
"It is not [the present human civilisation] which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved, and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine or in the way that they imagine. The present civilisation must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater truth, is the issue." — Sri Aurobindo, 2 September 1945
I’ve been thinking too much lately, which is not good. One thinks in the past, and acts in the present, not the other way around, unfortunately. (Thinking in the future is obviously an impossibility).
There are three recurrent themes, the last one brings me some words from Toynbee in relation to Sri Aurobindo’s open question from 1945. But starting with the first point, I have the image of Nishida Kitarō writing his philosophical testament, a few days before his death in that same year, while the bombs were falling nearby and he was chopping his beloved cherry trees to make firewood. There he returned to the all important religious subject after a 35 years sojourn trying to explain it philosophically, since the publication of his original Inquiry in 1911. “Humanity is bottomlessly self-contradictory”, he said, and he also said something which might resonate: “The world creates its own space-time character by taking each monadic act of consciousness as a unique position in the calculus of its own existential transformation. Conversely, the historical act is, in its space-time character, a self-forming vector of the world. [..] In this way each act of consciousness is a self-perspective of the dynamic, spatial-temporal world.” (p.52)
The second point is why complex systems struggle to self-organize once they become closed systems. The Easter Island effect. There are many ways you can look at the same problem, and they all lead to the same answer, which in part can be extrapolated from Bertalanffy’s words about biological organisms: “Differentiation or self-organization is impossible within closed systems or ordinary automata because increasing order presupposes import of energy or ‘negative entropy’ and is possible only in open systems.” But the most obvious answer is that these milieus are deeply asymmetrical, inactivity predominantly favours the status quo. The system “works”. That would be just bad enough, if it were not that activity also favours the status quo, at least in a universally technological society. So there really is no escape on either front, as Ellul and other sociologists correctly predicted in the 1950s.
That brings me to the last point, the impossibility of thinking in the future, and Toynbee’s past prediction. In his last book he said that we face three alternatives. One is annihilation following business as usual (the global Tragedy of the Commons we are witnessing today). The second one is coming together under a global democratic organisation capable of protecting life on Earth and the common good (what Steven Rockefeller has been promoting most of his life under the Earth Charter, for example). And the final alternative is to abandon humanity, what it means to be human, at the hands of a universally despotic regime, in the hope that by being global in scale, it would at least try to avoid its own collapse. In essence, a life of servitude.
He, and I’m sure most people, would favour the second option. In practical terms though, we are already living the third alternative, whether most people realise it or not. He erred in thinking that the regime is personalised, and in thinking that is capable of avoiding its own collapse, as already explained. Whether the preferred option would one day become actual, that’s a future question already asked.
On March 3, 2022, the independent Russian news organization Novaya Gazeta published a piece on how Russian schools were reacting to the war. It is a chronicle recording questions from parents, responses from school officials, and government guidance. Addressing a chiefly American audience, Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote about it:
“In the school your children attend there is probably a lesson about ‘critical thinking’ in the use of the internet. It turns out that this lesson is also taught in Russia, with the twist that ‘critical thinking’ means treating the pronouncements of Russia's president as the most reliable source. This puts everyone in a surreal position when that president begins a murderous war on the basis of foul lies.
"One approach is to treat them as official truth. A regional school authority, faced with questions from parents about what to do in time of war, issued the guidance that ‘Vladimir Putin's speech on February 21, 2022 [is] the main historical revelation of recent years and a major guide to our own times.’
“Those familiar with Soviet history will be struck by that Stalinist tone. The latest speech of the leader is truth. The leader is the authority in all fields, botany, physics, in this case history. Whatever he says determines not only what is knowledge but how we are to see the world around us. We genuflect before his genius.
“Lesson plans have been updated to account for some of what the Russian president has said about the war. History is to be taught on the basis of the ‘unity of the nations of Russia and Ukraine.’ This echoes the title of a long essay Putin published last July (to which I am not linking because the Kremlin website is still down). Putin has the idea, expressed over the last decade, that God wants Russia and Ukraine to be together eternally because of something that a Viking warlord might have done a thousand years ago, when neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor for that matter the notion of modern nations existed.
“The imagined past enforces a deadened future. A historiosophy that weird can only be made true by a war, which it is used to justify. If Ukrainians don't recognize the truth as revealed to Putin, that means they must be hit harder, killed in greater numbers. Only force can bend a resistant real world towards a lonely dictator's dream of eternity.”
It is the date of Putin’s speech on February 21, 2022, in which he gave the green light to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, which I considered the beginning of that invasion, at a time when an official date had yet to be agreed upon.
As I am already receiving pro-Russian propaganda, I reproduce here a recent post by Timothy D. Snyder, an American author and historian (at Yale) specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust.
“Do Russians want war?"
Putin's war propaganda answered with dignity by the Ukrainian president
Vladimir Putin absurdly claims he has invaded Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers. Yet Russian speakers in Ukraine are far more free than Russian speakers in Russia.
A Russian speaker in Russia who thought of running for president would be imprisoned, as Alexei Navalny has been. A Russian-speaker, meanwhile, can run for president of Ukraine, and win. That has happened more than once.
Just before Russia began its full invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, gave a moving and dignified speech in Russian to the Russian people. I tweeted it out as I listened to it.
This is not a translation of his dignified, thoughtful, and balanced speech; just a hasty set of notes made late on a terrible night. But as the Russian assault begins, on grotesque and Orwellian premises, Zelenskyi’s address was an important attempt at communication and reconciliation that deserves to be remembered; these notes are a gestures towards that.
Putin absurdly claims that he must invade Ukraine to denazify it. Zelens’kyi unlike Putin is a democratically-elected president. Zelenskyi unlike Putin does not support racists and white supremacists around the world. He interprets the Second World War from a Ukrainian perspective.
“How can you call us Nazis when we gave millions of lives in the Second World War?” It is a fair point. Ukrainian soldiers died in terrible numbers in the Red Army: more than Americans, British, and Frenchmen combined during the Second World War. He adds: “Tell it to my grandfather, who fought in the Soviet infantry and died as a colonel in independent Ukraine.” President Zelensky does not mention that his grandfather’s father and much of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.
President Zelensky says that Russian culture and culture in general should unite people, not divide them. Culture is about communication, not conflict.
He says that the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government want peace, but will defend themselves.
President Zelens’kyi says that he trusts that there are Russians who will understand him and who also want to avoid the horror and sorrow of war. ask Russians to disregard war propaganda and to take responsibility.
“Do Russians want war? I would very much like an answer to that question. It depends upon you, citizens of the Russian Federation.”
[link to this post: https://snyder.substack.com/p/do-russians-want-war]
In his latest post [https://snyder.substack.com/p/genocide-and-genocide], Timothy Snyder traces Putin's path into the heart of darkness
"It is not [the present human civilisation] which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved, and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine or in the way that they imagine. The present civilisation must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater truth, is the issue." — Sri Aurobindo, 2 September 1945
Timothy Snyder, the three stages of isolation: USSR > art center > FSB [https://snyder.substack.com/p/isolation]
I’ve been thinking too much lately, which is not good. One thinks in the past, and acts in the present, not the other way around, unfortunately. (Thinking in the future is obviously an impossibility).
There are three recurrent themes, the last one brings me some words from Toynbee in relation to Sri Aurobindo’s open question from 1945. But starting with the first point, I have the image of Nishida Kitarō writing his philosophical testament, a few days before his death in that same year, while the bombs were falling nearby and he was chopping his beloved cherry trees to make firewood. There he returned to the all important religious subject after a 35 years sojourn trying to explain it philosophically, since the publication of his original Inquiry in 1911. “Humanity is bottomlessly self-contradictory”, he said, and he also said something which might resonate: “The world creates its own space-time character by taking each monadic act of consciousness as a unique position in the calculus of its own existential transformation. Conversely, the historical act is, in its space-time character, a self-forming vector of the world. [..] In this way each act of consciousness is a self-perspective of the dynamic, spatial-temporal world.” (p.52)
The second point is why complex systems struggle to self-organize once they become closed systems. The Easter Island effect. There are many ways you can look at the same problem, and they all lead to the same answer, which in part can be extrapolated from Bertalanffy’s words about biological organisms: “Differentiation or self-organization is impossible within closed systems or ordinary automata because increasing order presupposes import of energy or ‘negative entropy’ and is possible only in open systems.” But the most obvious answer is that these milieus are deeply asymmetrical, inactivity predominantly favours the status quo. The system “works”. That would be just bad enough, if it were not that activity also favours the status quo, at least in a universally technological society. So there really is no escape on either front, as Ellul and other sociologists correctly predicted in the 1950s.
That brings me to the last point, the impossibility of thinking in the future, and Toynbee’s past prediction. In his last book he said that we face three alternatives. One is annihilation following business as usual (the global Tragedy of the Commons we are witnessing today). The second one is coming together under a global democratic organisation capable of protecting life on Earth and the common good (what Steven Rockefeller has been promoting most of his life under the Earth Charter, for example). And the final alternative is to abandon humanity, what it means to be human, at the hands of a universally despotic regime, in the hope that by being global in scale, it would at least try to avoid its own collapse. In essence, a life of servitude.
He, and I’m sure most people, would favour the second option. In practical terms though, we are already living the third alternative, whether most people realise it or not. He erred in thinking that the regime is personalised, and in thinking that is capable of avoiding its own collapse, as already explained. Whether the preferred option would one day become actual, that’s a future question already asked.
On March 3, 2022, the independent Russian news organization Novaya Gazeta published a piece on how Russian schools were reacting to the war. It is a chronicle recording questions from parents, responses from school officials, and government guidance. Addressing a chiefly American audience, Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote about it:
“In the school your children attend there is probably a lesson about ‘critical thinking’ in the use of the internet. It turns out that this lesson is also taught in Russia, with the twist that ‘critical thinking’ means treating the pronouncements of Russia's president as the most reliable source. This puts everyone in a surreal position when that president begins a murderous war on the basis of foul lies.
"One approach is to treat them as official truth. A regional school authority, faced with questions from parents about what to do in time of war, issued the guidance that ‘Vladimir Putin's speech on February 21, 2022 [is] the main historical revelation of recent years and a major guide to our own times.’
“Those familiar with Soviet history will be struck by that Stalinist tone. The latest speech of the leader is truth. The leader is the authority in all fields, botany, physics, in this case history. Whatever he says determines not only what is knowledge but how we are to see the world around us. We genuflect before his genius.
“Lesson plans have been updated to account for some of what the Russian president has said about the war. History is to be taught on the basis of the ‘unity of the nations of Russia and Ukraine.’ This echoes the title of a long essay Putin published last July (to which I am not linking because the Kremlin website is still down). Putin has the idea, expressed over the last decade, that God wants Russia and Ukraine to be together eternally because of something that a Viking warlord might have done a thousand years ago, when neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor for that matter the notion of modern nations existed.
“The imagined past enforces a deadened future. A historiosophy that weird can only be made true by a war, which it is used to justify. If Ukrainians don't recognize the truth as revealed to Putin, that means they must be hit harder, killed in greater numbers. Only force can bend a resistant real world towards a lonely dictator's dream of eternity.”
It is the date of Putin’s speech on February 21, 2022, in which he gave the green light to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, which I considered the beginning of that invasion, at a time when an official date had yet to be agreed upon.
Sources:
https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/03/03/khotite-li-vy-stat-obektom-v-voine-za-istoriiu
https://snyder.substack.com/p/how-to-talk-about-the-war