Mopologist William Schryver Continues His Descent Into Madness

[Physics Guy]

Russia invading Ukraine didn't suddenly turn Ukraine into a perfect state peopled by saints, except in media presentations in faraway countries. People shouldn't have to be saints, though, to deserve not to be murdered.

When there are enough bombardments and sinkings to fill the news hour, nobody talks about language rights or corruption. Nuance dies early in war. I don't think that's really a failing, though. When missiles are flying, I think that the appropriate level of media attention on corruption at that point probably is close to zero.

Right or wrong, if you invade a neighbouring country, world media is likely to demonise you completely, and canonise your opponents. If we're going to see everyone's shades of gray, accept Realpolitik and work within how the world works, then the way news clips are going to represent conflict should be just another fact of life to accept. Perhaps we can try to oppose it, in some well-chosen battles, but outrage is naïve.

Demonisation in the media is one of the costs of invasion. It's too far down the list, though, to deserve much attention at this point.

[Analytics]

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....

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on all of this, Symmachus. You provide more questions than answers, and I'm trying to figure out what to make of it all. If I had to distill your point, I'd say you are pointing out in a Socratic way that we don't know as much about this as we think we do. The first step to wisdom is to realize we don't know, and we really don't know all of the pertinent details of what's going on in Ukraine. Am I on the right track?

For my part, I don't see the Ukrainians as being the good guys and the Russians as being the bad guys. Nor vice versa. I don't even know what the right questions are, much less the answers.

But it does bring to mind the sign a Quaker I knew hung in his window when the U.S. was gearing up to invade Iraq. The sign said:



Like I said, I don't even know what the right questions are, but I do tentatively agree that these folks were on to something--their views seem to have stood up better than our friends at the so-called Institute for the Study of War.

On the other hand, I suppose that in the course of human events, there are times when you have to fight back against a bully. Sometimes, you really do have to defend yourself, your home, and your loved ones from tyrants. If I'm right and those are among the few justifications for engaging in war, it becomes really hard not to see the invaders as being less justified in this particular conflict than the ones who seem to be defending their homes.

[Physics Guy]

I'm afraid I disagree with the Quakers. I think that sometimes war is the answer. In particular, war is usually the only answer to war. Once someone starts one, you can't just talk to their bullets.

The idea of preemptive war is a lot more dubious. If you're going to shoot first you'd better have an awfully good reason. I'd accept an ongoing genocide by a regime within its own borders as a good reason to invade to enforce regime change, if it seemed feasible. Short of that, it's a hard case to make.

What is war, anyway? Many places in the world are plagued by violence on scales well above street crime: what's so important about the difference between that and war? Shouldn't we humans collectively do something about that? Shouldn't there be something like a global police force, which could be called in anywhere, like a sort of mother of all SWAT teams, to deploy armour and airstrikes against things like terrorist insurgencies?

Even if there should be that, perhaps there would be important differences between that kind of larger-scale SWAT action and war, after all. Modern militaries all claim to have precision weapons that can minimise civilian casualties, but the military standards of "minimise" are still a lot more careless of collateral damage than would be acceptable in any civil police force. Civilian casualties in war aren't usually people we know, after all.

That may not be because airstrikes just aren't quite precise enough yet. It may be because humanitarian precision just cannot be achieved reliably with high explosive delivered at Mach 3. Inasmuch as there seem to be plenty of vicious groups around the world that are not yet planning on abandoning violent strategies, though, I don't see that we can just abandon the pursuit of superior firepower as one tool for response. If it worked, it would help.

I'm only a very amateur historian, and can't claim to be an especially good one at that, but my broad-sweep impression of the last couple centuries is that western imperial powers used to intervene with violence all over the world, every few years on a fairly large scale. There were generally humanitarian justifications; none stand historical scrutiny. For a good hundred years or so, though, brushfire wars and gunboat diplomacy were accepted as part of the White Man's Burden—accepted by most white men.

World War I wore out all the imperial powers, finally fighting each other. Even the United States, barely touched in comparison to the Europeans, disarmed dramatically afterwards. The lesson everyone drew from World War II was that violent intervention sooner would surely have been easier. That lesson seemed to apply to openly imperial Japan and Fascist Italy as much as to Nazi Germany.

Brushfire wars persisted throughout the Cold War, but it seems to me that something had changed. The superpowers were leery of direct confrontation; they had the nuclear stockpiles, but everyone else now had Maxim guns. The postwar brushfires burned hotter.

The problem still isn't solved. We should all be fighting on YouTube only by now, but there are still plenty of barbaric morons eager to seize the power that comes from a gun barrel, and even rogue states that seem to think that collectively, with guns upscaled to divisions.

Peace will never be stable as long as those guys can win, and that's why I'm not a pacifist.

[Chap]

Russia invading Ukraine didn't suddenly turn Ukraine into a perfect state peopled by saints, except in media presentations in faraway countries. People shouldn't have to be saints, though, to deserve not to be murdered.

That's the nub of it for me.

[Moksha]

So how can Russia take back territory lost through no-goodnik "self-determination" without tank invasion? This worked in the past when growing room was needed.

[Kishkumen]

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.

To be sure, if Will ever bothered to discuss things as you do, there would be much less disdain of his views. Unfortunately for him, he is probably incapable, and that is easy enough to pick up on. Thank you for sharing so much enlightening information. As so often, the mess behind the propaganda is a Gordian knot. The history of de-Russification is especially interesting and makes sense. I have to chuckle about it in the context of our current cultural mea culpas in the US. Probably not the same thing at all, but it did make me think of it. In any case, not my monkeys, not my circus.

I just have so little sympathy for Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, just as I had no patience for the US invasion of Iraq, which is even more unfounded and much worse in its initial conception. By quadrupling down on brutal, incessant shelling of civilian homes, Putin has signed his own death warrant, and how we got where we are suddenly matters much less in the calculus. That is the spirit of what Physics Guy seems to be saying.

In all of this, I have learned something more, I believe, about the historical relationship between fascism and nationalism. Talk about blunt, bloody hammers of human misery! One wonders what people can hang their hats on when borders are drawn, an official language and flag are chosen, and very little that is real lays at the foundation. One thing is true: there is little you can trust that is built in these myths. All just levers in the machines wielding power.

I mean, there is Alexander Dugin, claiming the existence of Eurasianism as a justification for . . . . fill in the blank. Someone blows up his daughter, and the creep is happy to use that to forward the purposes of Russian imperialism. Cold.

But that’s mostly just my individualistic American sentimentalism speaking, and so who cares?

[malkie]

Russia invading Ukraine didn't suddenly turn Ukraine into a perfect state peopled by saints, except in media presentations in faraway countries. People shouldn't have to be saints, though, to deserve not to be murdered.

That's the nub of it for me.

and at every level, from the individual to the national.

[PseudoPaul]

Just a quick update on Mopologist, William Schryver. William is still posting his incredibly dangerous and bizarre rants on Twitter. William continues to slather praise and lotion on Putin's backside.

It's the strangest rabbit hole you will ever go down:
https://Twitter.com/imetatronink

Here are just a few of the thousands of insane Tweets from William:

July 26

Fascinating.

A poll of Europeans shows the vaxxed blame Russia for the war in Ukraine to a FAR HIGHER degree than do the unvaxxed.

(For the record, I am unvaxxed and have NEVER masked my face).

July 24

The Russians have, in 5 months, with one hand tied behind their back, eviscerated what was -- BY FAR -- the most powerful army in Europe; built and trained by NATO at great expense over 8 years.

The rest of Europe is STUNNED by what has happened.

July 22

The US will never win another war in our lifetimes ... because they are just plain stoopid.

July 17

One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored is to provoke the #NAFO [Ukrainian Fund Raising Group] idiots to reply to a tweet of mine so I can block them en masse.

They are easily the stupidest troll cult in the world right now.

This is the worst case of terminal brain worms I've ever seen.

[Bond]

It's wild to me that we have a segment of 55+ year old conservatives who grew up stewing in Reaganism and the Cold War who by reflex backed the US against any adversary for 50+ years who have become Russian sympathizers.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

This is the worst case of terminal brain worms I've ever seen.

Is William Schryver the Nikocado Avocado of the Alt-Mormon blogosphere? One of the interesting things about Internet-behavior is how the blogger becomes shaped by the views rather than the viewers becoming shaped by the blogger. People who seek attention and validation quite often act performatively, to capture eyeballs, hoping to make an impact on the eyeball holders. However, they find in short order the more outrageous, clownish, sexual, or rabid one is the eyeballs they capture tend to uptick in views. It isn’t long before they, the blogger or performer, become subsumed into the character created by mass attention rather than some sort of harbinger of knowledge. They become enslaved to an act, addicted to affirmation, and galvanized in their ‘rightness’ as confirmed by likes and hearts. Once a populist gets a taste of ‘power’, even the innocuous power of Twittersphere comments and claps, there’s no going back. William Schryver will go full on Qtard if he hasn’t already.

- Doc