Folks,
I'm not sure whether the following is useful for the forensis, but when
I read this passage in Applebaum's piece:
"From the first days of the war, it was evident that the Russian
military had planned in advance for many civilians, perhaps millions, to
be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes in Ukraine. Other
assaults on cities throughout history—Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki—took place only after years of terrible conflict. By contrast,
systematic bombardment of civilians in Ukraine began only days into an
unprovoked invasion."
... I thought that there is something irritating in the fact that of the
four cities she mentions where such assaults "took place only after
years of terrible conflict", three - namely Dresden, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki - were cities in the aggressing countries (Germany, Japan)
whose leadership were, at that moment, in fact senselessly prolonging
the war. And for the fourth example, Coventry, the claim is untrue,
because German bombers destroyed the city at an early stage of the
Second World War, on 14 November 1940; and even earlier they destroyed
the cities of Rotterdam (14 May 1940), and Warsaw (25/26 September 1939).
My feeling is that Applebaum makes these claims in order to affirm how
bad the Russian attacks on Ukraine are. I agree they are, but as in most
other cases, such historical comparisons get one into a quagmire of
'measuring' death and destruction, which, when these comparisons are
demonstrably wrong, play into the hands of the adversary.
-a
Am 01.05.22 um 21:00 schrieb allan siegel A Train:
Hello Nettimers
I find it odd that Anne Applebaum's questionable commentary on the
events - and historical references - in Ukraine are uncritically posted
here. Anne Applebaum is a notorious right-wing ideologue of the
unquestionable neoliberal persuasion who has been lauded for her attacks
on left-leaning politics (to say the least). As the conflict in Ukraine
becomes increasingly enmeshed in the myopic politics of the cold-war and
as America descends into pre-civil rights post war policies it becomes
increasingly important to consider who is describing reality and from
what vantage point. Most people in the U.S. still believe that the
atomic bomb was used to save the lives of U.S. soldiers and to end WW
II. A very questionable assumption. Saber rattling by Biden and others
indebted to military contractors won't bring democracy to Ukraine or
necessarily even peace.
Best
Allan
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2022 11:34:10 +0200 (CEST)
From: patrice riemens <patr...@xs4all.nl <mailto:patr...@xs4all.nl>>
To: nettime-l <nettim...@kein.org <mailto:nettim...@kein.org>>
Subject: <nettime> Anne Applebaum:
Message-ID: <365086298.990694.1651311250...@ox-webmail.xs4all.nl
<mailto:365086298.990694.1651311250...@ox-webmail.xs4all.nl>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
NB, just a reminder: I do not necessarily share all the viewpoints
expressed in texts I 'filter' for nettime. I just find them
interesting &/or worthwhile to take cognizance of.
Aloha,
I was induced to search for this article by an excerpt in Domani's
excellent international affairs supplement 'Scenari'. It is useful to
remeber that the complicated (euphemism) relationship between Russia
and Ukraine have a long, and sad, history. Meanwhile Russion foreign
affairs minister Lavrov has sortof reactivated the themes developed
below. In short 'we' -and not only Ukrainians - are all nazis.
Nobody's gonna believe that, least of 'm himself, but as talking point
('element de language' as the French have it) it's quite frightening ..
Have a sunny day all the same!
p+7D!
Original to:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/ukraine-mass-murder-hate-speech-soviet/629629/
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/ukraine-mass-murder-hate-speech-soviet/629629/>
First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing. By Anne
Applebaum, <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/anne-applebaum/
<https://www.theatlantic.com/author/anne-applebaum/>>
The Atlantic, April 25, 2022
In the terrible winter of 1932?33, brigades of Communist Party
activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking
for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as
villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and
used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They
watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a
family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They led away farm
animals and confiscated tomato seedlings. After they left, Ukrainian
peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They
gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay
alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.
At the time, the activists felt no guilt. Soviet propaganda had
repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they
called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies?rich, stubborn landowners
who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia
that its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away,
crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the
workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did. Years
later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote
about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. ?To spare
yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by
half-closing your eyes?and your mind,? he explained. ?You make panicky
excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and
hysteria.?
He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped
camouflage the reality of what they were doing. His team spoke of the
?peasant front? and the ?kulak menace,? ?village socialism? and ?class
resistance,? to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they
were stealing. Lev Kopelev
<https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/20/world/lev-kopelev-soviet-writer-in-prison-10-years-dies-at-85.html
<https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/20/world/lev-kopelev-soviet-writer-in-prison-10-years-dies-at-85.html>>,
another Soviet writer who as a young man had served in an activist
brigade in the countryside (later he spent years in the Gulag), had
very similar reflections. He too had found that clich?s and
ideological language helped him hide what he was doing, even from himself:
> I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn?t give in to
debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were
performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the
socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan. There was no need to
feel sympathy for the peasants. They did not deserve to exist. Their
rural riches would soon be the property of all.
> But the kulaks were not rich; they were starving. The countryside
was not wealthy; it was a wasteland. This is how Kravchenko described
it in his memoirs, written many years later:
> > Large quantities of implements and machinery, which had once been
cared for like so many jewels by their private owners, now lay
scattered under the open skies, dirty, rusting and out of repair.
Emaciated cows and horses, crusted with manure, wandered through the
yard. Chickens, geese and ducks were digging in flocks in the
unthreshed grain. That reality, a reality he had seen with his own
eyes, was strong enough to remain in his memory. But at the time he
experienced it, he was able to convince himself of the opposite.
Vasily Grossman, another Soviet writer, gives these words to a
character in his novel Everything Flows
<https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9781590173282
<https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9781590173282>>:
> > > I?m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were
human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such
terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all
around me? And the truth is that I truly didn?t think of them as human
beings. ?They?re not human beings, they?re kulak trash??that?s what I
heard again and again, that?s what everyone kept repeating. Nine
decades have passed since those events took place. The Soviet Union no
longer exists. The works of Kopelev, Kravchenko, and Grossman have
long been available to Russian readers who want them.
> > > In the late 1980s, during the period of glasnost, their books
and other accounts of the Stalinist regime and the Gulag camps were
best sellers in Russia. Once, we assumed that the mere telling of
these stories would make it impossible for anyone to repeat them. But
although the same books are theoretically still available, few people
buy them. Memorial, the most important historical society in Russia,
has been forced to close
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/28/russia-rights-memorial-liquidated/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/28/russia-rights-memorial-liquidated/>>.
Official museums and monuments to the victims remain small and
obscure. Instead of declining, the Russian state?s ability to disguise
reality from its citizens and to dehumanize its enemies has grown
stronger and more powerful than ever.
> > > All of this?the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance
about mass murder?is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history.
Nowadays, less violence is required to misinform the public: There
have been no mass arrests in Putin?s Russia on the scale used in
Stalin?s Russia. Perhaps there don?t need to be, because Russian
state-run television, the primary source of information for most
Russians, is more entertaining, more sophisticated, more stylish than
programs on the crackly radios of Stalin?s era. Social media is far
more addictive and absorbing than the badly printed newspapers of that
era, too. Professional trolls and influencers can shape online
conversation in ways that are helpful to the Kremlin, and with far
less effort than in the past
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/>>.
> > > The modern Russian state has also set the bar lower. Instead of
offering its citizens a vision of utopia, it wants them to be cynical
and passive; whether they actually believe what the state tells them
is irrelevant. Although Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their
falsehoods seem real. They got angry when anyone accused them of
lying, and they produced fake ?evidence? or counterarguments. In
Putin?s Russia, politicians and television personalities play a
different game, one that we in America know from the political
campaigns of Donald Trump. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously.
But if you accuse them of lying, they don?t bother to offer
counterarguments. When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down
over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a
denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: The
Ukrainian army was responsible, or the CIA was, or it was a nefarious
plot in which 298 dead people were placed on a plane in orde
r to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This constant stream of
falsehoods produces not outrage, but apathy. Given so many
explanations, how can you know whether anything is ever true? What if
nothing is ever true? (sorry, c+p snafu here ...)
> > >
> > > Instead of promoting a Communist paradise, modern Russian
propaganda has for the past decade focused on enemies. Russians are
told very little about what happens in their own towns or cities. As a
result, they aren?t forced, as Soviet citizens once were, to confront
the gap between reality and fiction. Instead, they are told constantly
about places they don?t know and have mostly never seen: America,
France and Britain, Sweden and Poland?places filled with degeneracy,
hypocrisy, and ?Russophobia.? A study of Russian television from 2014
to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three
main Russian channels, all state-controlled, an average of 18 times a
day <https://uacrisis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/TV-3.pdf
<https://uacrisis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/TV-3.pdf>>. Some of
the stories were invented (the German government is forcibly taking
children away from straight families and giving them to gay couples),
but even true stories were picked to support the idea that daily life
in Europe is frightening and ch
aotic, Europeans are weak and immoral, the European Union is
aggressive and interventionist.
> > >
> > > If anything, the portrayal of America has been worse. U.S.
citizens who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how
much time Russian state television devotes to the American people,
American politics, even American culture wars. In March, the Russian
president, Vladimir Putin, displayed an alarmingly intimate
acquaintance with Twitter arguments about J. K. Rowling and her views
on transgender rights at a press conference. It?s hard to imagine any
American politician, or indeed almost any American, talking about a
popular Russian political controversy with the same fluency. But
that?s because no American politician lives and breathes the ups and
downs of Russian partisan arguments in the same way that the Russian
president lives and breathes the battles that take place on American
cable networks and on social media?battles in which his professional
trolls and proxies compete and take sides, promoting whatever they
think will be divisive and polarizing.
> > > Within the ever-changing drama of anger and fear that unfolds
every night on the Russian evening news, Ukraine has long played a
special role. In Russian propaganda, Ukraine is a fake country, one
without history or legitimacy, a place that is, in the words of Putin
himself, nothing more than the ?southwest? of Russia, an inalienable
part of Russia?s ?history, culture and spiritual space.? Worse, Putin
says, this fake state has been weaponized by the degenerate, dying
Western powers into a hostile ?anti-Russia.? The Russian president has
described Ukraine as ?fully controlled from the outside? and as ?a
colony with a puppet regime.? He invaded Ukraine, he has said, in
order to defend Russia ?from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and
are trying to use it against our country and our people.
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-televised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-televised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24>>?
> > > In truth, Putin invaded Ukraine in order to turn it into a
colony with a puppet regime himself, because he cannot conceive of it
ever being anything else. His KGB-influenced imagination does not
allow for the possibility of authentic politics, grassroots movements,
even public opinion. In Putin?s language, and in the language of most
Russian television commentators, the Ukrainians have no agency. They
can?t make choices for themselves. They can?t elect a government for
themselves. They aren?t even human?they are ?Nazis
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/world/europe/ukraine-putin-nazis.html
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/world/europe/ukraine-putin-nazis.html>>.?
And so, like the kulaks before them, they can be eliminated with no
remorse.
> > > The relationship between genocidal language and genocidal
behavior is not automatic or even predictable. Human beings can insult
one another, demean one another, and verbally abuse one another
without trying to kill one another. But while not every use of
genocidal hate speech leads to genocide, all genocides have been
preceded by genocidal hate speech. The modern Russian propaganda state
turned out to be the ideal vehicle both for carrying out mass murder
and for hiding it from the public. The gray apparatchiks, FSB
operatives, and well-coiffed anchorwomen who organize and conduct the
national conversation had for years been preparing their compatriots
to feel no pity for Ukraine.
> > > They succeeded. From the first days of the war, it was evident
that the Russian military had planned in advance for many civilians,
perhaps millions, to be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes
in Ukraine. Other assaults on cities throughout history?Dresden,
Coventry, Hiroshima, Nagasaki?took place only after years of terrible
conflict. By contrast, systematic bombardment of civilians in Ukraine
began only days into an unprovoked invasion. In the first week of the
war, Russian missiles and artillery targeted apartment blocks,
hospitals, and schools. As Russians occupied Ukrainian cities and
towns, they kidnapped or murdered mayors, local councilors, even a
museum director from Melitopol, spraying bullets and terror randomly
on everyone else. When the Ukrainian army recaptured Bucha, to the
north of Kyiv, it found corpses with their arms tied behind their
backs
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/04/02/ukraine-russia-bucha/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/04/02/ukraine-russia-bucha/>>,
lying in the road. When I
was there in mid-April, I saw others that had been dumped into a
mass grave. In the first three weeks of the war alone, Human Rights
Watch documented cases of summary execution, rape, and the mass
looting of civilian property
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/03/ukraine-apparent-war-crimes-russia-controlled-areas
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/03/ukraine-apparent-war-crimes-russia-controlled-areas>>.
> > > Mariupol, a mostly Russian-speaking city the size of Miami, was
subjected to almost total devastation. In a powerful interview in late
March, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, noted that in
previous European conflicts, occupiers hadn?t destroyed everything,
because they themselves needed somewhere to cook, eat, wash; during
the Nazi occupation, he said, ?movie theaters were operating in
France.? But Mariupol was different: ?Everything is burned out.?
Ninety percent of the buildings were destroyed within just a few weeks
<https://www.reuters.com/world/mariupol-mayor-fears-humanitarian-catastrophe-says-city-must-be-completely-2022-03-28/
<https://www.reuters.com/world/mariupol-mayor-fears-humanitarian-catastrophe-says-city-must-be-completely-2022-03-28/>>.
A massive steelworks that many assumed the conquering army wanted to
control was totally flattened. At the height of the fighting,
civilians were still trapped inside the city, with no access to food,
water, power, heat, or medicine. Men, women, and children died of
starvation and dehydration. Those who tried to escape were fired upo
n. Outsiders who tried to bring in supplies were fired upon as well.
The bodies of the dead, both Ukrainian civilians and Russian soldiers,
lay in the street, unburied, for many days.
> > > Yet even as these crimes were carried out, in full view of the
world, the Russian state successfully hid this tragedy from its own
people. As in the past, the use of jargon helped. This was not an
invasion; it was a ?special military operation.? This was not a mass
murder of Ukrainians; it was ?protection? for the inhabitants of the
eastern-Ukrainian territories. This was not genocide; it was defense
against ?genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.? The dehumanization
of the Ukrainians was completed in early April, when RIA Novosti, a
state-run website, published an article arguing that the
?de-Nazification? of Ukraine would require the ?liquidation? of the
Ukrainian leadership, and even the erasure of the very name of
Ukraine, because to be Ukrainian was to be a Nazi: ?Ukrainianism is an
artificial anti-Russian construct, which does not have any
civilizational content of its own, and is a subordinate element of a
foreign and alien civilization.? The existential threat was mad
e clear on the eve of the war, when Putin reprised a decade?s worth of
propaganda about the perfidious West, using language familiar to
Russians: ?They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on
us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the
attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries,
attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration,
because they are contrary to human nature.?
> > > For anyone who might have accidentally seen photographs of
Mariupol, explanations were provided. On March 23, Russian television
did broadcast film of the city?s ruins?drone footage, possibly stolen
from CNN. But rather than take responsibility, they blamed the
Ukrainians. One television anchorwoman, sounding sad, described the
scene as ?a horrifying picture. [Ukrainian] nationalists, as they
retreat, are trying to leave no stone unturned
<https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/03/24/russia-state-tv-mariupol-drone-zw-orig.cnn-business
<https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/03/24/russia-state-tv-mariupol-drone-zw-orig.cnn-business>>.?
The Russian Defense Ministry actually accused the Azov battalion, a
famously radical Ukrainian fighting force, of blowing up the Mariupol
theater, where hundreds of families with children had been sheltering.
Why would ?ber-patriotic Ukrainian forces deliberately kill Ukrainian
children? That wasn?t explained?but then, nothing is ever explained.
And if nothing can be known for certain, then no one can be blamed.
Maybe Ukrainian ?nationalists?
destroyed Mariupol. Maybe not. No clear conclusions can be drawn,
and no one can be held accountable.
> > > Few feel remorse. Published recordings of telephone calls
between Russian soldiers and their families?they are using ordinary
SIM cards, so it?s easy to listen to them?are full of contempt for
Ukrainians. ?I shot the car,? one soldier tells a woman, perhaps his
wife or sister, in one of the calls. ?Shoot the motherfuckers,? she
responds, ?as long as it?s not you. Fuck them. Fucking drug addicts
and Nazis.? They talk about stealing television sets, drinking cognac,
and shooting people in forests. They show no concern about casualties,
not even their own. Radio communications between the Russian soldiers
attacking civilians in Bucha were just as cold-blooded. Zelensky
himself was horrified by the nonchalance with which the Russians
proposed to send some trash bags for the Ukrainians to wrap the
corpses of their soldiers: ?Even when a dog or a cat dies, people
don?t do this,? he told journalists.
> > >
> > > All of this?the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance
about mass murder, even the disdain for the lives of Russian
soldiers?is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history (or German
history, for that matter). But Russian citizens and Russian soldiers
either don?t know that history or don?t care about it. President
Zelensky told me in April that, like ?alcoholics [who] don?t admit
that they are alcoholic,? these Russians ?are afraid to admit guilt.?
There was no reckoning after the Ukrainian famine, or the Gulag, or
the Great Terror of 1937?38, no moment when the perpetrators expressed
formal, institutional regret. Now we have the result. Aside from the
Kravchenkos and Kopelevs, the liberal minority, most Russians have
accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and
moved on. They?re not human beings; they?re kulak trash, they told
themselves then. They?re not human beings; they?re Ukrainian Nazis,
they tell themselves today.
> > >
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