“I think there’s a generational habit, especially among an older generation, to think of Russia as the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union as some kind of unstoppable superpower.
You have the academic “realists”, like Mearsheimer or Stephen Walt, who operate in a world without reality.
Like their realism is all about abstractions about states.
They don’t know anything about Russia or Ukraine. They don’t speak the languages, they don’t think they have to even read the news.
They just know that there’s a category of great power and a category of buffer state, and so it’s like a math problem.
That position is fundamentally unreal because wars are decided on the battlefield.
And actually since the second world war, the smaller country has won most of the wars, which is worth remembering if you’re a big country starting a war. Usually, the small country wins.
And who wins a war is often an open question. It depends upon other things about the ideas that you express.
So if you express the idea that the big country has to win, you may be contributing to what actually happens on the battlefield.
Morally, it’s totally atrocious. To say that the world is just such that the big country always wins, therefore the little country should give in.
I mean the consequences of that are that genocide is permissible, anything’s okay.
It’s just a very simple point that the Ukrainians don’t care whether American realists tell them that they’re a small state and they have to give up.
Because they know what happened in Trostianets, Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, and countless other places. No one would want that.
It’s not just an abstraction of one state to beat another state. It’s human life, the loss of life, rape, injury, trauma. And also just subordination.
If you’re Ukrainian and you know that the aspiration of the Russian government is to make it impossible to be who you are, even if you physically survive, that’s a very serious thing.
I don’t think Mr. Kissinger, or Mr. Walt, or Mr. Mearsheimer, or Mr. Chomsky, I don’t think they can really contemplate the idea of a country coming and saying that you can no longer be American. You can no longer be who you are.
We’re going to deport your school teachers, we’re going to re-educate your children, we’re going to teach you that you’re something else.
I don’t think they even understand what that means.
That’s what the Ukrainians are also fighting against. They know who they are, so it’s not just about physical survival, it’s also about survival subjectively, who you are, what kind of subject you are.
The realism which wants to reduce everything to these airless abstractions, it’s very poor at describing what’s happening.
But it’s also morally atrocious, because it sets aside all these conditions which help explain why people fight or why they don’t fight.”
Source: Timothy Snyder: Putin’s and Trump’s lies, “rashism”, Dostoyevsky is an imperial writer
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
origamiaround
