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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34936 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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The NATO fear is always stated as NATO invading Russia

This is both an uncharitable and untrue strawman of the Russian position.

is always stated as

why would you include this?

A year into this war your the first person I’ve come across to say that Russians nato fear was about stopping their ability to invade other countries.

your the first person I’ve come across to say that Russians nato fear was about stopping their ability to invade other countries.

are you confusing me with someone else or are you strawmaning me aswell?

If you would like to hear different analysis after a year of hearing the apparently same, this is a quote from a British political scientist working at the Institute for International Relations Prague.

As one analyst (Galeotti 2016) wrote, “In Russia, NATO is periodically portrayed as a military threat. … Realistically, this is not a military one. … To many in and close to the Kremlin, Russia faces a real threat, not borne by tanks and missiles but cultural influences, economic pressure, and political penetration. This is, in their eyes, a civilizational threat aimed at making Russia a homogenised, neutered, subaltern state.”

As for their fear of NATO in their sphere of influence, and Russian politics, here are some choosen quotes from the same paper. It would be better to read the paper itself

In the context of the conventional insecurity perception, political changes in Georgia and Ukraine were viewed by the Kremlin as a Trojan horse for getting these countries into the Atlantic alliance and push Russia in the direction of regime change.

This securitized perception of political change was at the heart of Russia-Georgia conflict. In addition to grown instability in the region, the colored revolutions added to the perception within the Kremlin that Washington’s chief objective was in fact to change regime in Russia. Although the public support for a revolution was weak, the Kremlin’s political technologists took the threat seriously knowing that influential elites in the United States maintained contacts with some radical organizations in Russia. For instance, in April 2007 the U.S. State Department issued a report highly critical of Russia’s political system pledging various assistance to “democratic organizations” inside the country.

Russia can go all North Korea and close their borders if their fear is cultural hegemony.

Your the one who accused my take of NATO invading Russia as uncharitable. And elsewhere I’ve said cultural conquest is a more legitimate fear. Nato though is explicitly a military alliance so you should have specified their fear was the EU not Nato.

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