Слава Україно! Героям слава*
published in The Zero Point
See? I told you there was a bear.
World War III began quite a while ago, and not nearly enough attention was paid, because part of the point was subterfuge, to unravel our societies in a hidden, covert manner…World War III is what’s called a “hybrid war.” That means it’s not just about guns, but about information. Not even just cyberwar, but propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, about taking societies apart while they’re not even aware of it. ~Umair Hair https://eand.co/is-this-world-war-iii-eed6d0e2dec1
A confession: My primary goal for the first several articles of this series was to slowly and carefully build an argument for keeping our national eyes glued firmly on Vladimir Putin. I believed he was going to be disastrous for the soul, and perhaps the body, of this nation. My goal was to get ten articles in before I’d have to switch to my next thesis: How do we get out of this frying pan without jumping into the fire?
I thought I had more time; I thought I had almost a year. But this frying pan has some mad skills.
You take it slow when you’re going to try to convince a group of people, those who proudly tell you they hate politics, that half the country has been the laser focus of a Russian intelligence operation for years. It’s tricky. People get super nervous and think you’re being overdramatic — or a pedantic asshole — or a Democrat — or an overdramatic pedantic asshole Democrat.
They don’t want you to poke the bear.
And so now I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to unceremoniously jump to the middle of a story that’s been going on for so long we’ve forgotten who was crafting the details. It’s a story about language and truth — creation and destruction.
Some free philosophy to numb your synapses:
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins ~Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
Cue the rolling of eyes and involuntary shuddering of every graduate student I’ve ever taught…
…or the deer-in-the-headlights look that I’m sure I’d see were I able to see you, dear reader, right now.
My attempt at a summary: What you think of as an obvious truth is, according to Nietzsche, just a trick of language and perception (that which the eye can see in context) which has been codified into an agreed-upon reality over time. Our language, our words, create the structures of our reality.
A ridiculously simple example: All trees are the same tree
It’s undeniably true, you see, that the giant green thing outside of my window is a tree. Do you have one outside your window? It must be the same tree, then! It has the exact same form of tree-ness and we both call it tree, yes? In fact, every writer who has ever written tree has, at some point or another, been in my yard! Right?
We have eclipsed the differences in the very atoms of each entity by calling them both tree without respect to the fact, the truth, of each individual physical structure. Humans have all agreed, likely long before you were born, that a single word should be employed and a single image should be codified into our cultural brains. But who cares? We all know the trees are different. And why am I telling you this?
A deadly example: Ukraine is Russia.
From Putin’s address to the Russian people, February 21, 2022, on his reasons for invading southern Ukraine:
So, I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.…Going back to history, I would like to repeat that the Soviet Union was established in the place of the former Russian Empire in 1922. But practice showed immediately that it was impossible to preserve or govern such a vast and complex territory on the amorphous principles that amounted to confederation. They were far removed from reality and the historical tradition.
Let’s say that last one again: They were far removed from reality and the historical tradition. For Putin’s constructed reality to work, the agreed-upon truth had to be that Ukraine and Russia have been the same tree forever and that someone nefarious had instead called it a flower. Putin was merely trying to fix that error and bring Ukraine back into the tree family. This speech is his opening salvo into that creation.
In the US Department of State’s Fact Sheet (January, 20, 2022) Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives, released a month before the invasion of Ukraine, the fifth most recurring theme is: “Reality is Whatever the Kremlin Wants It to Be.” The second theme is “Historical Revisionism.” In short, the world is Putin’s to create, with flowers as trees.
In the past, this strategy has worked for Putin. His “annexation” of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014 followed the same logic. Crimea is Russia. At the time, however, the rest of the world accepted the perception shift. We allowed the flower to be subsumed into the tree family without (much) argument. Had more time passed, our grandchildren would have the reality that Crimea is Russia.
But Vladimir Putin bit off more reality than he could chew. The rest of the world noticed.
And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is no fucking flower.
How I see it:
1. For Vladimir Putin, the truth is not just irrelevant; it is an illusion he controls with every word he puts into the world.
2. When the truth becomes an illusion, reality becomes a collection of agreed-upon intentions — communal thoughts — ideologies. Putin seeks to construct those thoughts. He seeks to solidify his created ideological prominence.
3. Ideologies then, in Putin’s mind, have more substance than people. They are more materially real than, say, your arms and legs, your eyes and mouth. For Vladimir Putin, ideologies have become more important and more defensible than your breath, your blood. You, human being, are expendable to him.
What is Vladimir Putin’s ideology?** What has replaced the individual atoms of the individual Russian people? Nationalism is perhaps too simplistic of a word, but it comes close. And given what we’ve already come to understand, it’s the single guiding principle of both his domestic and foreign policy. In this case, though, it’s what I’ll call Anthropomorphic Nationalism.
Putin is Russia. Russia is Putin. MRGA. Make Russian Great Again.
Remember this when you wonder whether or not he’ll employ a nuclear solution. I have no doubt he will destroy the world to save one tree.
Works Cited
Hair, Umair. “Is This World War III?” Eudaimonia &Co. 3 March, 2022. https://eand.co/is-this-world-war-iii-eed6d0e2dec1
Huber, Beth Ann. “There is Definitely a Bear.” The Zero Point. 15 Jan., 2022 https://bethannhuber.medium.com/there-is-definitely-a-bear-6fa3360732af
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. 1873. CreateSpace IP Platform. 24 August, 2012.
Putin, Vladimir. “Address to the People of Russia on the Donbas Problem and the Situation in Ukraine. Translation: Kremlin. American Rhetoric. 21, February, 2022. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/vladimirputindonbassandukraine.htm
United States’ Department of State. Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives. 20 January, 2022.
United States’ Department of State. Global Engagement Center. GEC Special Report: Russia’s Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda. August, 2022.
Acknowledgments:
*Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the Hero
**Special thanks to my editor Tim Shead for asking the most important question to get me to this article’s topic when he said “Do you think there’s something wrong with [Putin]?”
