Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 10:39 pm
Well, who would you rely on so I can get factual current information?
To reveal this to you would put me in the sights of Putler's FSB, who will ruin me either with
dezinformatsiya or a car bomb.
Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 11:18 pm
Some events aren't just moves in a language game. Some events change the game and the new game is simpler. Once you drive tanks across a border and shell civilians, a lot of nuances are zero. At this point, I'm afraid, the only things I really want to know about the war in Ukraine don't require any language at all. They're just numbers: killed, captured, missing, disabled, destroyed.
Well, to be sure, I was addressing a quibble of Chap's with my larger claim that the people running ISW have a very poor track record in terms of geopolitcal strategy and general honesty with the public going back a couple of decades now. I wouldn't trust them to give an independent description of a birthday party, let alone plan it. I was merely pointing out that the people on their staff doing the actual descriptions don't seem all that experienced or qualified. This was part of a wider response to a post that described it as sober and rational (maybe it is, maybe it isn't—who knows? There are reasons to be skeptical), not an argument about why language competency is the only thing that matters (I think it is part of the bare minimum).
Someone has to collect those numbers and interpret them, though. But how can you say language doesn't matter here? That language games are a part of it. Language is in fact a central part of the conflict and has been for years (see
here and
here, for starters). Ignoring all of this isn't going to help. We have all in the US already been conditioned to view this from the perspective of the Ukrainian nationalists, a process that has been going on for years. The rechristening of "the Ukraine" as "Ukraine" was part of this in the 90s (
ukraina means, basically, "in the borderland" in Russian and Ukrainian, because it was the borderland of the the Russian lands through various political iterations; English always had the definitive article "the" because it reflected the meaning of the word without directly translating it; so Ukraine = "the border area," and removing the "the" elided that fact to please Ukrainian nationalists who didn't want Western people, curious about why it was "the Ukraine," to get the answer and then ask: "borderlands of what?"). The way the US media marched eagerly into spelling conformity from the the traditional English spelling "Kiev" to the Ukrainian "Kyiv" was expected but still breathtaking in its rapidity and totality. All maps must be written now because we support these nationalists in this corrupt country.
On just the surface level language has been part of the propaganda efforts of both sides, but it is symptomatic of the deeper conflict and reveals some of the complexities that make it hard to brush away nuance—unless the goal is to drag the publics in the US and NATO countries in all the way. The Russian government has been factually arguing that Ukrainian has been artificially imposed on the much of the population of eastern Ukraine to de-Russify it, which is in fact a continuation of Soviet policy (very interesting material on this in the Robert Service book I mentioned: contrary to popular American belief, for most of the USSR's history the Communist Party was very deliberate and aggressive in co-opting nationalism by implementing de-Russification policies in language and a whole host other areas of administrative and political life; that is in the context in which Crimea suddenly became part of Ukraine in the 1950s administrative reforms, despite there being no Ukraine-speakers or people thinking of themselves as Ukrainians living there. Incidentally, notice how most of the leaders of the USSR were Ukrainians or from other peripheral areas of the old Russian empire, and how of all the many republics that made up the USSR, there Russia alone had not constitutive republic; Russian nationalism was the only nationalism that was always forbidden in the USSR until its final days, and there is still a lot resentment among ethnic Russians). While there is a core East Slavic language that we can call "Ukrainian," a great deal of it was invented whole-cloth by Romantic nationalists in the 19th century and Soviet educationalists in the 20th. Of course Russian propagandists are wrong in saying there is no such thing as the Ukrainian language, but this claim has staying power because it is not always clear what Ukrainian is. The numbers I have seen all rely on old census data, but even there it is very confusing: 2/3 of Ukrainians claim Ukrainian as their mother tongue and 1/3 claim Russian, but around 80% used Russian in daily life, more than 50% exclusively, with less than 10% relying exclusively on Ukrainian. Language has been part of this conflict because of the de-Russification policies of successive NATO-backed governments since the 2000s. People in the US light their hair on fire with rage whenever some county in Wyoming or Mississippi violates fundamental human rights and commits genocide by declaring its meeting minutes will only be published in English, but for some reason it's ok when dipsh!t Ukrainian actors do it.
Does the anti-Russian language policy justify invasion? Of course not, but it should make one skeptical of the simplistic Russian vs. Ukrainian framing on which Western propaganda relies. The falsity of that distinction is part of the problem, but worse is the way it is instrumentalized to win over public opinion. In the west there is this portrayal of a distinct national identity with its own language and culture, but that is largely a fiction. It's even been used in war time, reported on with ghoulish glee in the west. Early on those who followed Russian Twitter or Russian media would run across videos of people executed or beaten after being weeded out as a Russian saboteur based on their pronunciation of the word
palianytsia, a kind of bread. Supposedly only real Ukrainians can pronounce this word, so it became a shibboleth, and one did not want to be on the wrong end of it on a patrol. Ok. Call it all Russian propaganda. But the sober and rational
Economist celebrated this as the liberal European freedom-fighter's ingenuity in the face of Asiatic Russians, which means the fact of it happening is agreed upon. However, if you know that most Ukrainians would pronounce it as a Russian because they are actually Russian speakers (even Zelensky is a native Russian-speaker, not a Ukrainian speaker), then you start to wonder which account is the more propagandistic. Added to that, the pronunciation is really just characteristic of southern Russian dialects, which means that a southern Russian could pass the test but potentially not a "real" Ukrainian. The people doing the beating and killing of course knew that and knew what the were doing. It wasn't about smoking out saboteurs. If it had been Russians doing it, it would have been called a genocide or a war crime atrocity, but reported on in the West it becomes an inspiring story when the regime in this dipsh!t third-world country does it—because we're bankrolling them. What is a citizen in the US supposed to make of that? That Ukraine is worth all the billions we are giving them? That we should continue be cavalier in our approach, our language, our attitude to this because of perceived atrocities? Which
atrocities count and which don't? One wonders whether this is truly about democratic self-determination and not a
project for maintaining American dominance, as conceived by some American elites in the foreign policy and military establishments, not necessarily American voters or their representatives (that op-ed is written by a board member of the ISW, by the way).
More to the topic, are the analysts at ISW with their deep knowledge of the linguistic landscape of the region and their top notch Russian and Ukrainian (they got an A in intermediate Russian at Smart People University!) able to see through
The Economist and other publications that celebrated this or—more likely—are they relying them for their analysis? If they do see through it, does that go into their analysis, or is it suppressed in service of the larger "strategic objective" (and just what is that objective anyway)? I don't know, but I'm not sure assume they are capable of this relevant nuance or would care in the case of an organization that includes Bill Kristol and the Kagans on its board, because I know about their previous adventures in wartime propaganda and their larger belief that American military power should be used now, while it's strong, to impose a particular vision on the world, despite the costs and risks and the lack of clear benefit. As Doc says, it's a no-brainer; just listen to what they say. The ISW is not just some blog. Kimberly Kagan is the head of ISW and is the sister-in-law of
Victoria Nuland, who was caught red-handed trying to handpick the leader of Ukraine in 2014 (so much democratic self-determination there! So telling then was that the scandal was about her disrespect of EU, not the fact that she was trying to pick the leader of a country on Russia's border and subvert its much lauded democratic processes). Her policy in Ukraine of regime change through successive "color revolutions" is part of what got us here—but not only is she back in government, she's got an even higher position!
Perhaps other people are fine with all of this, and WIll Shryver might be a loon, but
people should at least be clear on all of this. That remains the core of my response and the only thing I have to add to the discussion on Will Shryver's lunacy.
