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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Putin has repeatedly used ethnic russians as pretexts to intervene, or threaten intervention, around the region. Much of the pre-February rhetoric from Moscow on multiple fronts could be leveraged against Russia's more northern neighbors, which was one of the reasons Europe reacted as strongly as it did when Putin followed through with his threats with actual invasion. Just from this angle, significantly increasing the Russian national population in the border states- who are almost certainly going to locate themselves to the ethnic russian enclaves- strengthens an ethnic-based framing of a future pre-conflict narrative.

I think this is a non-issue that gets propped up as a convenient justification for visa bans, and has no real significance whatsoever.

Wars are fought with soldiers, planes, tanks and missiles, not with flimsy excuses. Providing or withholding such excuses does nothing to help or harm the enemy. Suppose there were zero Russians or Russian-speaking people in Ukraine this February. Would it stop Putin from declaring the war? No. Would it make things harder for Russia on the international diplomacy angle? No. Would it stop Russian tanks from rolling into Ukraine? No. Would it make harder for Putin’s propaganda to boost support for the war among the Russian citizens? No; in fact it would make things easier because an important anti-war thesis is that the Russian army is essentially bombing Russian-speaking cities.

The pro-war thesis is that Russia is bombing Russian-speaking cities because they're held by anti-Russian oppressors, oh and that it's the anti-Russian nazis who are doing the worst bombing anyway.

The counterpoint to 'propaganda doesn't matters' is that the Russians expend significant amounts of time, resources, and center much of their international diplomatic strategy around it. They seem to think it matters, and the Russians will base their decisions on what they think is important, not what you think is a non-issue.

Propaganda can manufacture any other cause and work with it, they’d just say the Ukrainians planned to retake Crimea and roll with that.

Or remember the time they invented an insane conspiracy theory about NATO plotting to attack Russia with biological weapons developed in secret bio labs in Ukraine? That would work too

Putin doesn’t need a proper casus belli to start a war. He doesn’t need democratic approval; international legitimacy is a lost cause for him, so not a factor too (contrary to Hitler w.r.t. Sudetenland, for instance)

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