Umberto Eco - Ur Fascism

[Martin Dietze]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2022 at 07:55, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> So why would you pour more weapons, why would you tempt one Ukrainian—now
> the leadership of Ukraine has changed—but why would you tempt one or
> another Ukrainian leadership to broaden the war, where you want above all
> to bring peace?


This is absurd. Ukraine has been attacked by Russia twice, now one part of
Ukraine has been annexed with Russia claiming this to be part of Russia
now, the second being de facto occupied by Russian troops led by Russian
proxy warlords. The Ukrainan army stands no chance against its aggressive
neighbour with one of the world's three most powerful armies. And your
worry is that helping them out with some weapons could "tempt" them to
"broaden the war". That's what comes out when people whose thinking is
entirely focused on Russia start rambling about post Soviet countries not
Russia..

The actual truth is Russia "broadending" and "narrowing" the war in
Ukraine's east at will - destabilising the country and cutting it off the
structures (NATO, EU) which could help it keeping things like these from
happening in the future.


>
> But, nonetheless, much of central Ukraine and almost all of southern
> Ukraine look to Russia as brethren, as kinfolk, as family.

It's not getting better. I used to spend a lot of time in Central Ukraine
between 2000 and  2010. As simple as that: they don't. That does not mean
they don't like Russians, but really noone subscribes to that "brotherly
slavic peoples" bullshit. People have their own problems to solve. And
after 2005, when Putin tried to punish Ukrainians for electing the "wrong"
president by drastically increasing gas prices thus causing hundreds of
thousands of Ukrainians sit in the cold in middle of the winter, people
know very well what kind of regime Putin represents and what he was trying
to do.

People usually distinguish between personal relations to Russians and
politics rather well. However 2014 brought some change: families and
friendships broke up as people in Russia were so brainwashed by their
government's propaganda on TV that they started thinking all kinds of
nonsense about Ukraine and its people. I heard stories from friends where
their relatives asked them to come to Russia "to safety" because of all the
fascists in Ukraine; being told that this was not true, and things were
fine, they started swearing and accusing their Ukrainian "kinfolks" of
being fascist themselves.

Russian narrative goes like this: we used to be brothers (with us the elder
and wiser brother of course), until the Ukrainians all became russophobes.
Researchers and journalists who had spent their whole lives on Russia were
usually rather prone to picking up this narrative, that's why stuff like
what Cohen wrote pops up rather frequently. When things got rough in 2014,
lots of European news agencies covered this from their offices in Moscow.
Because of cost cuts many of them had abandoned their offices in Kyiv long
before. Those who were actually on site and told people what they saw were
later often blamed of not being "objective" or even telling lies.


> To trespass in a family spat, which is not a good idea in our everyday
> lives, in geopolitics it’s a greater mistake.
>
So, sticking to family terminology, if a husband beats his wife to death,
that's al family business, so better not trespass. Seems like a great idea.

When trying to understand Ukraine, why stick to experts on Russia? The talk
given by Timothy Snyder (though on propaganda, but also telling lots of
interesting stuff about Ukraine's history, here's the link again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFObB6_naw) helps far better when trying
to understand what's happening there than Cohens ramblings...