Yes, this is precious time to act and to reflect. Taking your advice from yesterday's talks, and mobilizing Russian-speaking activists to get truthful content to their friends and family in Russia using the internet.
Additional points from the talk with Anne Applebaum and Yuval Noah Harari were:
- Donate -- you've given links and there are many links "out there"
- Convey to politicians that this is a voting issue -- and that we care about the future of "the free world," not just about our pocketbooks, making it clear that we won't tolerate politicians who make excuses for Putin
- Participate in demonstrations (practice corporeal politics and show solidarity)
- Do what we can to make sure Ukrainians know they have (and actually have) a future in Europe.
I strongly urge Tim Snyder's audience to watch - available on Utube - "The War in Ukraine and the Future of the World'. This conversation is the most incisive condemnation of Putin and provides a wide perspective on the significance of the war on all of us far into the future.
I should like to add that my father was born in Odessa in 1897, fought the Germans in WW I and the bolsheviks afterwards. He and his family fled Odessa in 1919 aboard a French warship. My mother and her family were aboard the same vessel. They owned a property near Poltava in Ukraine. Until now, since my parents did not have deep roots in Ukraine, I had no strong feelings for the country and its people. That has changed. My Ukrainian blood is running hot and I have made modest donations to charities which are assisting the Ukrainian Army, refugees and medical causes. As Timothy and Anne Applebaum and Professor Harari have said, we are witnessing a defining moment in our history.
Good clear analysis. One aspect of the "nuclear" that you don't address in this post, Tim, is the matter of nuclear energy which must play into all this somehow, both at the level of the Ukraine & at the wider level os Russia &/vs. the West. Could you enlighten us further about this aspect of things?
You are right about how even the most grotesquely false content tends to distract us and put us on our back foot. In the past five years I've noticed that people on both the right and the left suffer from the "fair and balanced" (not fair and balanced) disease, perceiving an obligation to give a fair hearing to the obscenity du jour. There must, after all, be some truth in there (there isn't).
Unfortunately, I think he's going to try and launch his nukes. Obviously in Ukraine, possibly elsewhere. Russia wrote letters to Sweden and Finland today "demanding security guarantees" - an implicit nuclear threat. The question is - will his army comply?
Seems to me that Putin's nuclear sabre-rattling isn't just information warfare, but also a reflection of standing Russian military doctrine known as "escalate to de-escalate," where use of tactical low-yield nukes is justified as a way of protecting the state from an "existential" threat. If we had the kind of robust transnational nuclear disarmament movement that we had in the 1980s, he might feel that this is more taboo but I fear we will only see the revival of such a movement after he crosses the line, not before. https://micahsifry.medium.com/time-to-start-worrying-about-the-bomb-again-8239828bd82b?sk=4ddd82b1d733b8f531dee657d1a55861
American nuclear deterrence was based on mutual assured destruction. In the 1960s, when people spoke of WW III, that was going to be a very short war, nuclear Armageddon. Putin is using nuclear threats to gain ground in a conventional war. That was not the MAD deal at all. Putin should be warned quietly that the announcement of the planned use of nukes by Russia means to the rest of us that Putin is taking about a first strike and we will take him at his word when he makes such threats. At the moment the most effective weapon Putin has is his mouth.
Yes, this is precious time to act and to reflect. Taking your advice from yesterday's talks, and mobilizing Russian-speaking activists to get truthful content to their friends and family in Russia using the internet.
Additional points from the talk with Anne Applebaum and Yuval Noah Harari were:
- Donate -- you've given links and there are many links "out there"
- Convey to politicians that this is a voting issue -- and that we care about the future of "the free world," not just about our pocketbooks, making it clear that we won't tolerate politicians who make excuses for Putin
- Participate in demonstrations (practice corporeal politics and show solidarity)
- Do what we can to make sure Ukrainians know they have (and actually have) a future in Europe.
I strongly urge Tim Snyder's audience to watch - available on Utube - "The War in Ukraine and the Future of the World'. This conversation is the most incisive condemnation of Putin and provides a wide perspective on the significance of the war on all of us far into the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCjBki16zl0
Thanks, Dmitri. I wasn't able to watch it live, and was wondering where to go to watch a video of it. I'm going to watch it right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCjBki16zl0
I should like to add that my father was born in Odessa in 1897, fought the Germans in WW I and the bolsheviks afterwards. He and his family fled Odessa in 1919 aboard a French warship. My mother and her family were aboard the same vessel. They owned a property near Poltava in Ukraine. Until now, since my parents did not have deep roots in Ukraine, I had no strong feelings for the country and its people. That has changed. My Ukrainian blood is running hot and I have made modest donations to charities which are assisting the Ukrainian Army, refugees and medical causes. As Timothy and Anne Applebaum and Professor Harari have said, we are witnessing a defining moment in our history.
Good clear analysis. One aspect of the "nuclear" that you don't address in this post, Tim, is the matter of nuclear energy which must play into all this somehow, both at the level of the Ukraine & at the wider level os Russia &/vs. the West. Could you enlighten us further about this aspect of things?
You are right about how even the most grotesquely false content tends to distract us and put us on our back foot. In the past five years I've noticed that people on both the right and the left suffer from the "fair and balanced" (not fair and balanced) disease, perceiving an obligation to give a fair hearing to the obscenity du jour. There must, after all, be some truth in there (there isn't).
Unfortunately, I think he's going to try and launch his nukes. Obviously in Ukraine, possibly elsewhere. Russia wrote letters to Sweden and Finland today "demanding security guarantees" - an implicit nuclear threat. The question is - will his army comply?
Seems to me that Putin's nuclear sabre-rattling isn't just information warfare, but also a reflection of standing Russian military doctrine known as "escalate to de-escalate," where use of tactical low-yield nukes is justified as a way of protecting the state from an "existential" threat. If we had the kind of robust transnational nuclear disarmament movement that we had in the 1980s, he might feel that this is more taboo but I fear we will only see the revival of such a movement after he crosses the line, not before. https://micahsifry.medium.com/time-to-start-worrying-about-the-bomb-again-8239828bd82b?sk=4ddd82b1d733b8f531dee657d1a55861
American nuclear deterrence was based on mutual assured destruction. In the 1960s, when people spoke of WW III, that was going to be a very short war, nuclear Armageddon. Putin is using nuclear threats to gain ground in a conventional war. That was not the MAD deal at all. Putin should be warned quietly that the announcement of the planned use of nukes by Russia means to the rest of us that Putin is taking about a first strike and we will take him at his word when he makes such threats. At the moment the most effective weapon Putin has is his mouth.
Lets all be nice to each other, hug and smoke sativa with high dose of myrcene! #problemsolved
As for the Budapest Memorandum (from someone who was born there), here's an interesting article from the Wash Post explaining the difference between "guarantee" and "assurance". We never read our car insurance policies under a magnifying glass, do we? Perhaps, we should... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/01/what-budapest-memorandum-means-us-ukraine/
Enter the title into your browser and a uTube version ought to come up on your screen. If not, send me your email and I shall forward it. Dimitri