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Again, you’re asking everyone to just play along with these retarded polite fictions, in the belief that if everyone just converged on the right metapolitical narrative, there would no longer be any compelling material/geopolitical reason for conflict. Any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region would be well-aware of the extremely complicated cultural, linguistic, and political realignments within the patch of territory currently known as “Ukraine”. Putin’s casus belli isn’t made any more or less valid by Zelenskyy refusing to conduct an interview in a language which everybody already knows that he speaks. Nor is Ukraine’s desire to resist forceful reabsorption into the Russian Federation made any more or less justified by crafting an easily-falsifiable narrative about the proud and independent history of the Ukrainian/Ruthenian-speaking nation. None of these things are actually materially important.
If propaganda isn't materially important why are both sides doing it?
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The language of a single podcast of course isn't the sole hinge on which Putin's justifications turn. But it is a small piece. I think Putin's casus belli is made very slightly more valid if Zelensky speaks Russian. And very slightly less valid if he doesn't. Putin talked about the medieval history of Ukraine and Russia being one country to Tucker for so long because that type of thing does matter to Putin, and to many other Russians.
Hard disagree. Annexations to culturally unite a people are /so/ 1930s. We don't do that any more. If Olaf Scholz was to invade Austria, which shares a lot of cultural history with Germany, that fact would not make it better or worse than an invasion of the culturally more distinct Poland.
Want to unite your people in the 2020s? Let them vote to join you, don't invade.
Tell that to Putin then, cause that's exactly what he did
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For what it's worth, I recall literally zero episodes of anyone in my life going on about "actually Ukraine is just Russia" before the war. On my screen, people were perfectly fine having it as just a quaint almost-Russia, similar but separate, until the TV turned on the propaganda tap.
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Sure, but the masses buy the first narrative someone with a modicum of credibility sells them. Find a friendly historian, find a friendly journalist, have the latter cite the former and voila: Russian was never spoken by more than 5% of the population of Ukraine, citable on wikipedia. Find a friendly linguist and friendly journalist, and you can create the West-East Slavic Languages or add Ukranian to the Western Slavic ones. Again, a single article in an Reliable Source is all that is needed for wikipedia to consider it a fact on par with the Earth being round. And since most people will not delve to discover and possible dissent, a consensus among the masses can be manufactured by a wikipedia editor, skilled in the art of wiki bureaucracy and lacking in appreciation for the truth.
Records can be destroyed, and lied about. Have a reliable source claim Zelenskyy speaks Russian at such a low-level he is unable to discuss politics live, and it will believed by the masses whos willingness to research the truth ends at wikipedia, if that.
See above.
But lets ignore the deceivers, and focus on the language nationalism. In many Slavic countries the idea of a Nation (not as a synonym for a country) includes at its heart a language which is a distinct property of the members of a nation and which is meaningfully distinct from other languages. From the Spring of Nations a crucial demand was to be allowed to speak ones native tongue, usually associated with the peasentry, in official everyday business with the state and in parliaments also. This is probably the history, particularly within the context of Austria-Hungary, Zelenskyy is much more familiar with than Americans who never had to think about their native tongue and the wider society and any possible conflicts between them. And it is not like such conflicts do not exist today: A lawmaker just a few months ago protested to make Greenlandic an official language in the Danish parliament by making a speech only in Greenlandic, and ommiting the legally demanded Danish.
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We aren't discussing any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region. We're talking a podcaster and a podcast audience, who are in turn being used to shape the perceptions of an even less informed broader audience whose opinions have collective weight and impact on American policy makers decisions.
These framings are actually materially important, because the go on to shape the material inputs for the capacity to wage war.
Part of the insight 'war is politics by other means' is that the extension of policy into war also entails the inverse- politics is war by other means, because politics is what establishes policy that governs the conduct of war.
Policy may be boring, it may involve a lot of non-material elements, but it absolutely is materially important, hence why every serious power-building or power-seeking institution in the world invests non-trivial amounts of effort and thinking on information advantages. Part of information conflict is the language you choose to pursue it in- and that is a choice, because the choice itself has impacts.
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