Mopologist William Schryver Continues His Descent Into Madness

[Symmachus]

...
eta: inb4 it’s the West’s faults because Ukraine wanted a political relationship with it, and we obliged

- Doc

You respond to points I did not raise or lines of argument I was not pursuing, so I have no response to the particulars. The minute you start talking about "eastern slavic ethnicity and language" you reveal yourself as someone Googling through this conversation and not speaking with knowledge about this.

I feel like the Cato Institute has a representative on the board.

Seriously.

An attempted ad hominem. Charming.

If the conclusion you draw from anything I have written is that I am a libertarian, then there are severe reading comprehension issues that no amount of response from me can address.

Slava Ukraini!

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Oh, I didn’t know I was talking to a geopolitical mastermind with innate knowledge of all things “Russospherian”. My bad, Symmachus-who-doesn’t-Google.

- Doc

[Dr Moore]

Well, Doc, count yourself lucky. Most days, when Kishkumen or Symmachus write a lengthy post, I have to google at least 2 words.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well, Doc, count yourself lucky. Most days, when Kishkumen or Symmachus write a lengthy post, I have to google at least 2 words.

Well, since I respect Symm's contributions to the board I'll humble myself and ask:

Symm, do you have any recommended resources I should read to broaden my perspective on the matter, or even change my outlook on the conflict?

- Doc

[honorentheos]

Hi Symmachus,

Thank for the detailed response to my request. Of the issues you identified, the one that jumped out at me as most concerning was this one: "Of course the most egregious example is the attempt to cut off water to the (again, very pro-Russian) population of Crimea." Then the story turned out to be the Ukraine dammed a man-made canal that fed the Crimean peninsula's agricultural lands as infrastructure. At which point it gets pretty murky as well. Is that anti-ethnic Russians? Or leverage against an occupying force? It's hard to see the directed malice at a population. Is Russia shutting off pipelines due to ethnic malice?

Anyway, it does seem relevant given the Russian army blew the dam up Day 2 of the war so it is entirely valid to say it was provocative. Like shutting off other infrastructure might be provocative.

To that point, you later suggest the US has a unique interest in national sovereignty which, given our use of drones to kill people on lists with acceptable levels of collateral damage, is hypocritical but valid.

But I would suggest that this idea that a war has to have a moral justification dependent on sovereignty alone is not only a rather recent but also a very western (especially American) obsession. Most wars involve the application of force for group interest, and most wars have not needed this kind of justification—the interest for prosecuting the war needed to be justified, not the reason for violating sovereignty. Nations will always act in their interest, and sometimes they will wage war to do so. But in the US and its sub-colonial partners we have this idea that somehow we have outgrown this, that we don't operate on interest but only on a highs principles like democracy, and that national conflicts elsewhere can be mediated—usually through submission to US will via one of its innumerable proxies. It has worked out poorly....The reason I see it as a problem is because it may force us to see as an enemy someone who really isn't (and I don't think Russia really is much of a threat to the US as a sovereign nation, though it is a threat to US pretension to being the global hegemon). It is the equivalent of being duped by your own propaganda.

The issue you have is with the post WWII order that is decidedly breaking down as western influence wanes. Is that good, bad, mir egal? It seems it takes more energy to maintain than humanity could sustain for long at any rate, even at our troubled levels of hypocritical belief in sovereign national borders and ideals. It's a post-modern world now,.I suppose. Or just another turn of the wheel. You mentioned Thucydides earlier and I have to imagine the ideas aren't so post-modern as they are the thoughts of systems below the level of nation-state and globalization. Nothing is more timeless as that.

[Physics Guy]

That 2014 attack in Donetsk was a terrorist crime, but it was hardly shelling a city. It was a single mortar bomb; according to Symmachus’s Amnesty link, the pro-Russian de facto authorities in Donetsk determined it to have come from an improvised launcher.

A modern mortar is just a tube with only one open end. You drop the projectile (the “mortar bomb”) in the open top end, and when it hits the bottom end, its propellant charge fires and the bomb flies out. The bomb is essentially a big grenade-dart, stabilized by fins. The propellant charges are small, so mortar bombs can’t fly more than eight hundred yards or something. The smallest mortar bomb I know is 60mm; their tubes are about two feet long and can easily be carried in one hand, so if anybody just got hold of a live mortar bomb, it wouldn’t be too hard to improvise a launching tube. I carried and fired these little guys on training exercises a few times, years ago, so this much I can really say.

A 60mm bomb could wreck a streetcar, all right; but it’s only the size of a grenade. Bigger mortar tubes may need two people to carry, and their bombs can make bigger blasts, but they are usually considered human-portable weapons.

Artillery shells are much bigger; they’re fired by big guns that have to be towed by vehicles or mounted on tracked tank-like hulls. The shells can easily go twenty miles or more, and when they land, each one can bring down a large building, leave a huge crater, and kill people within a radius of a hundred yards or more. Moreover artillery isn’t deployed a gun at a time, but in troops of at least four guns, if not much larger batteries. Fire missions are rarely one shot per gun. Russian artillery has often been firing tens of thousands of heavy shells in Ukraine every day.

Even a large single mortar bomb from an improvised tube is a terror attack, not a shelling. There do indeed seem to have been some nasty attacks in Crimea; conceivably they have been somehow backed by the Ukrainian state, but they have been at scales easily feasible by independent terrorists. People killed by improvised mortars are just as dead as people obliterated in a shower of howitzer shells. The difference in scale between an improvised mortar and the Russian invasion is still so vast, though, that it is hard to justify mentioning them in the same breath.

[Kishkumen]

It is not a question of sympathy for me, but with respect, the idea of just retribution lurking behind this response will lead to a situation of total war if we indulge them: it doesn't matter what the other side wants or what the causes of this conflict art—at this point, Putin is a criminal, so only his submission and punishment matters. That certainly can only be answered by total war because Russia is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria. We cannot punish Putin, and he is more popular in Russia than Joe Biden is anywhere except perhaps suburban DC and Berkeley. He has not signed his own death warrant. And it wouldn't matter if he did, because this war is not a personal pet project for Putin designed to make the comparison with Peter the Great more real in his deluded mind or whatever half-wit American commentators go on about—it has a lot of support in Russia, and it is better to understand why and grapple with that rather than boxing the shadows of an evil dictator caricature. If it's not him, it'll be another Russian leader in ten or twenty years.

So I think it really does matter how we got here. This has every mark of being about Russia's traditional concern over its ever precarious security. We have given them reason to feel it keenly, so any policy that includes the spread of US and European liberal democracy as its goal will get us more of the same. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has had a policy in Eastern Europe that is as imperial a project as any, and we should either assume the burden of empire properly or surrender our pretensions to the principled realism of the past, a realism that recognized real constraints but was motivated and conditioned by a set of ideals that Americans largely shared (one of the great ironies of this for me is that the people most passionately flying Ukrainian flags tend to be the people most open to the idea that America is evil racist country laced with white supremacy through and through—if that's so true, let's get the beam out of our own eye before attempting to extract the mote from our Russian brother's).

Russia at any rate is not going to be deterred in the slightest by the empire-LARPing that constitutes US foreign policy. It's concerns can be apprehended and addressed, and that makes them real and concrete, whereas Bush-style fantasies about the spread of liberal democracy as an inevitability and thus a duty are airy fantasies with a very bloody track record in their attempts to make them real. Russia is a country spanning several time zones, comprised of dozens of ethnic groups, where hundreds of languages are spoken, bounded by vast but fairly artificial land borders, with very few natural ports that are serviceable year-round and that are independent of foreign control or influence (look at what they are doing in Ukraine: taking control of all the coastal areas, which rings all kinds of bells for people familiar with Russian history). The NATO countries did no favors for anyone by expanding up to Russia's borders throughout the 90s and early 2000s, when Russia was too weak to object meaningfully, by attempting to put missiles in Poland, by instigating and supporting a number of revolutions in Belarus and Ukraine in the early 2000s, building on of the largest armies in Europe in unstable and corrupt country on Russia's border, most of which has historically been part of Russia, and even by interfering in Russian domestic politics in 2012, which was a lot more than memes on Facebook. There is nothing to do about past provocations like this in a particular way, but the issue that defines these actions as provocations—Russian security concerns—can be addressed and will have to be addressed at some point anyway. Stephen Kotkin—again, someone who is a proponent of response to this invasion and no fan of Putin—is not alone in pointing out how the west has been repeating this pattern for the past century and a half: Russian security concerns are ignored whenever Russia is riven by internal conflict or economic weakness, that weakness is exploited by opposing powers, and then those security concerns come roaring violently back when Russia recovers. This is just a fact of the Eastern European situation that needs to be dealt with, and I find dismissal of all of these causes to be dangerous because they are the heart of the issue. Call it Russian propaganda all you want; it is a fact one will have to reckon with.

Shryver's views seem to be—and they are not my views—that the NATO countries are irredeemably decadent, Russia has an unassailable moral right to its invasion, that there is no moral foundation to the NATO response, and that everything coming out of the west is propaganda. I don't share such a bleak view of the west nor harbor such a rosy fantasy about Russia. They certainly have a moral right to security, which we have failed to respect and which will have to respected if this is to end rather than escalate, but that is not the same as morally justifying their invasion. I don't think justification matters: it has happened, but it has happened for understandable reasons, and we do ourselves and Ukrainians no favors by ignoring them and retreating into the same species of pseudo-democracy promotion that has been so disastrous elsewhere for so long.

My complaint is that our conversation in the United States and our policy are currently dominated by demonstrably incompetent people who do hold views rejected not just by me or Shryver but probably most Americans when those views are presented on their own and not embedded in atrocity porn: namely, the view that the United States can and should be the world hegemon. Not only has it proven false that the United States can be such a hegemon, it has also proven impossible, reckless, and fatal for the countries that become the lab rats for this theory. Like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been and remains just such a lab rat, however just or unjust the situation, and the fact that people like Bill Kristol and his camp are talking quite openly now about wearing Russia down in a long drawn out conflict (again, like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria) by endlessly supplying Ukraine with weapons and other support means more and more civilian deaths. Now, that seems to be the main concern of people in this thread, so are those inevitable deaths justified just so that Putin can be put back in his place like a naughty child? Or do we need to escalate this to total war on account of the civilian deaths? Probably the goal is to wear Russian down in the one case or win a decisive military victory in the other, so that Russia's final negotiating position will be weaker. Good luck—not to them in their gamble, but to all the people who have to be the lab rats for their theory.

For it is rash to think that a country like a Russian can be worn down over an issue of border security through a conflict like this. I don't remember that working out so well in the past. Proponents of this fantasy derive their confidence from the self-congratulatory myths about the USSR's Afghan war, which they totally decontextualize or else know nothing about it. Even if those myths were rooted in reality—and they are not—it didn't turn out so great for Afghanistan, now, did it? And it was not without its side effects for the United States, as we well know.

Thanks for your thoughtful response, consul. I hope to get back to this discussion soon. I have been distracted from it by the beginning of the semester. Thanks again for bringing such intelligent and well-informed commentary to the board.

[Morley]

Thanks for your response, Consul. Allow me to take issue with a few points.

Was it the result of a robust national identity or the fact that Ukraine has a massive military (thanks to the US and allies)? I am skeptical of all this. Why are the Ukrainians enforcing conscription and controlling the flow of Ukrainian men from and inside the country? I don't know about you, but if Mexico invaded the US, there probably wouldn't be much worry from the government that Americans would flee to Mexico or even Canada.

I can’t argue with such a trustworthy news source as The Guardian, as in the two-month-old article you linked, the paper questions the validity of their own headline (Ukraine’s military plans to limit free movement to make conscription easier). In the body of the article: “It remains unclear if movement permits for men will be introduced…” and "President Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticised the announcement in his nightly TV address to the nation on Tuesday, saying that the general staff should not make decisions without him. Two parliamentarians immediately filed draft legislation that would scrap the army’s initiative, which they described as 'outdated'."

Even aside from that, I can’t treat this as a serious argument. If Mexico were three times the size of the US, with three times the population; had nuclear weapons while we had none; had a million active duty troops compared to our 250,000; had an annual military budget of 48 billion dollars compared to our 5 billion; had land borders on three sides of our country; and had the ability to block our only waterway—then yes, I think some folks in the US would be running to Canada and Poland and France as well as trying to repatriate to Mexico. The US had to draft men during WWII, when evil was seemingly clearly defined, and conscripts hotfooted it to Canada rather than be drafted to fill some clerk position during our experience in SE Asia. Ukraine's performance, as evidence of their feelings of a national identity, compares favorably.

What’s interesting to me, is how few Ukrainians, among those who flee the country, choose to go to benevolent Mother Russia.

But if they did, we have to wonder whether such people really had such a strong national identity after all. So, presumably, Ukraine wouldn't need to force a population to fight if that population had such a strong national identity. Added to this is the fact that Ukraine does not appear to have a manpower shortage as much as a shortage of materiel (which is why we keeping sending them money and weapons), which suggests something else is going on.

What does it suggest is going on?

And who knows what Putin thinks? I have heard so many different theories, all of which say more about the theorist than Putin.

Forgive me, but this is one of those meaningless clichés that could be ventured about any theory and its advocate.

We still don't really know what Russian war aims are—and perhaps the Russians do not either!

No, we don't, but it might be fair to speculate. On second thought, it might be not just be fair to speculate but also important to do so.

Which surely would be the most Russian thing of all time. It really amazes me the competence that we attribute to the Russian government. The Facebook memes many in the US believe were used to install Trump were hilariously bad and ineffective, but I wouldn't go on an Aeroflot plane if you paid me. My favorite exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum was some soviet space equipment on loan which included one of the suits used in some mission or other that went outside of the space craft (equivalent to the US Gemini program): it had a piece of wood to which different parts of the suit were connected with screws—fVcking wood in space! Just glorious.

(enter Physics Guy to explain why the wood was genius idea)


I remember that [ 'artificially created country' argument was one of the intellectual / technocratic justifications for the US going into Iraq] was part of the discussion, but I don't recall anyone using that, at least in the US, as justification for the invasion of Iraq; it was all about freedom, democracy, Al Qaeda, and weapons of mass destruction, never about Kurds getting a country or anything like that. In any case I am not justifying anything. My point was about western narratives that there is some inherent sanctity to having national borders that overrides any interest that Russia may have, and therefore that supporting Ukraine in an unthinking way is ipso facto justified because of that. Just about every response to my earlier post is a variation of that: "well, maybe that is so, but the minute they crossed the border they earned the death penalty and we must fight them."

Or perhaps it was, "Well, maybe that is so, but the minute they crossed the border and started killing people, shelling homes, and demanding we let them govern us, we must fight them."

It could be said [that Russia is a fragile state], but I just don't see it as anything but wishful thinking and—once again—another narrative tool that is only useful to the extent it reflects what is real. So how does it actually reflect something real? Why didn't Russia do this earlier? Is support of a war proof-positive that it was done for this reason another? It just seems like something a journalist or analyst would come up with because it is a cliché and they only think in cliches because—to get back to my very first post—they don't really understand these places or people—they don't even try to.

A moment ago, you were demonstrating proofs to Russia’s incompetence, now you call the notion of their fragility a cliché.

Again, Stephen Kotkin is great on this; he denounces the kind of regime Putin has but not without pointing out—much to the discomfort of commentators who rely on pre-made narratives—that it has been successful because it has co-opted so many people into it. A lot of people have an interest in keeping Putin's regime going. And even if it were someone else, it would be just someone else, not a different regime. Putin has not invented this pattern but is adapting the technologies of governance and administration that have long been a part of Russian life.

Unless I'm misreading him, Stephen Kotkin is also great on the idea that American intelligence did a bang up job in its assessment of Russia, that not taking the opportunity to expand both NATO and democratic ideals would have been a mistake, and that this conflict is an unmatched opportunity for the West to get things right.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Won’t someone, anyone, put Shill Schryver in contact with Scholz?

https://www.merkur.de/politik/putin-tel ... 62659.html

Since the beginning of the war, Olaf Scholz has spoken to Vladimir Putin on the phone "several times. The chancellor now reports that during the talks it became clear to him why Russia is attacking Ukraine.

Essen - Olaf Scholz is currently on a tour of Germany. In the "Chancellor Talk" he faced questions from citizens in Essen on Thursday. Scholz spoke about the Ukraine war and the consequences, including for the German population. The chancellor announced "decisions" on the third relief package - and gave insight into Vladimir Putin's mind games.

Scholz describes Putin's idea: "This must worry us all".

The chancellor explicitly defended Germany's sanctions. "Russia has declared: if I'm powerful enough, I'll get something from my neighbor," Scholz described. "And that must worry all of us, because this is not just limited to Ukraine."

Scholz added insight into his conversations with Putin since the Russian invasion began: He has had "several conversations with Putin on the phone" and will "continue to do so." His impression from the conversations? "Putin thinks, actually, Ukraine and Belarus belong to his country."

Both countries were once part of the Soviet Union. Putin himself called the fall of the USSR "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." Time and again, there are reports that the Kremlin leader dreams of a new, imperialist Soviet empire.

Ukraine war: Scholz on Putin talk - "Then we'll have 300 years of war in the world"

According to Scholz, Putin "reached into the history books and mixed them more or less wrong or right." As a result, he said, the Russian president started the war. "But this is terrible. Imagine if we all looked in the history books and saw where borders used to be. And then we say, let's get that back. Then we have 300 years of war in the world."

The chancellor's message: "We cannot accept attempts to move borders by force." This motto, he said, is the reason "that we are also helping Ukraine with weapons."

Scholz announces discharge decisions - and continues to reject gas embargo

In addition, Scholz again assured that the German government would do "everything possible" to "get us through this situation." Much has already been done, he said, but "we know that this is not enough." The chancellor sees the vast majority of society under pressure as a result of the sharp rise in energy prices. Prices are a problem "for almost everyone in Germany," he said. Even those who have a "quite normal income" are "already starting to worry."

In his opinion, this will "become even more so, I'm not kidding myself," Scholz added. "Because many have not even seen the higher heating bills, the higher electricity bills." Regarding the debates within the traffic light coalition about further relief measures, which have been going on for weeks, the chancellor said that "it must be discussed what is the right thing to do, and there you can also have different opinions."

But the important thing, he said, was "not to put it off, to make decisions. And I also feel responsible for that." Scholz again rejected a gas embargo against Russia. Russia, he said, had severely curtailed supplies on its own. However, the situation would become more difficult for Germany "if we were to do without the little bit that is coming in."

As a refresher for our Russo-apologists:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundat ... eopolitics

Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible.

The FoGP is institutionalized within Russian military and diplomatic, uh, institutions.

- Doc

[Res Ipsa]

Yikes, from the Wikipedia article linked by Doc.

In the United States:

Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]

Thank God that never happened.