Not P just TRP's love of 1984...."carved from Ukraine in 2014". First criminal acts of Putin's crazy "vision".

[Mark Kohut]

>From the pretty great Timothy Snyder. His *On Tyranny *is now also a
graphic work for those who don't read much anymore; all those who may not
have read a print-only book on Vlad Putin.


“…Of the articles I had been planning to reread, only one still remained
<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Femail.mg2.substack.com%2Fc%2FeJw1kc3upCAMwJ9muGmUIsKBw172NQxKnSGDMIHixv_TL-5kk6Zt-pn-ulnCZ8qX-aRC7FYLXR80Ef-UgESYWS2YF-_MCMMEWgjmjHCjmhTzZdkz4mF9MJQrsk9dg98s-RTvDhgHpWf2MjiDdiAQ-LyvHIVGDmraFUiuJY7bd7GtzmPc0OCJ-UoRWTAvok95wK8H_90kptNe9ml_kGyfa4vYTH4LWJrLB86bGeC_er8SecIu-O68ukKWurTim9LRnd2ZfMTux3a-UMreV-bNPWGAQY4wzqB63oO2GvSm5Kra9fve88QPAj49xHA8eV_q2sZu735LB8vGHpj928Y7a3N52RB6dPXGsrSKo0ZP14LRrgHdlxh9wf9juDwxYm4PcYslM0ohp5lLKQH4F1BDKrQaxMgVa6tdal3RlHg5zH8B21SYgQ&data=04%7C01%7Camerikan%40marshall.edu%7C22519d78937c410b328908d9ff740209%7C239ab2783bba4c78b41d8508a541e025%7C0%7C0%7C637821696182281428%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=wFrtieZGfI9k1sbGcMEdDBRCJ421K986lhrxPfwzqxM%3D&reserved=0>:
about how Russian schools were reacting to the war.  It is a chronicle
recording questions from parents, responses from school officials, and
government guidance, which is rather interesting.  In the school your
children attend there is probably a lesson about "critical thinking" in the
use of the internet.  It turns out that this lesson is also taught in
Russia, with the twist that "critical thinking" means treating the
pronouncements of Russia's president as the most reliable source.

This puts everyone in a surreal position when that president begins a
murderous war on the basis of foul lies.  One approach is to treat them as
official truth.  A regional school authority, faced with questions from
parents about what to do in time of war, issued the guidance that "Vladimir
Putin's speech on February 21, 2022" is "the main historical revelation of
recent years and a major guide to our our own times."

Those familiar with Soviet history will be struck by that Stalinist tone.
The latest speech of the leader is truth.  The leader is the authority in
all fields, botany, physics, in this case history.  Whatever he says
determines not only what is knowledge but how we are to see the world
around us.  We genuflect before his genius.

Lesson plans have been updated to account for some of what the Russian
president has said about the war.  History is to be taught on the basis of
the "unity of the nations of Russia and Ukraine."  This echoes the title of
a long essay Putin published last July (to which I am not linking because
the Kremlin website is still down).  Putin has the idea
<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Femail.mg2.substack.com%2Fc%2FeJwlkcuuriAMhZ_mZ_YbLl5wwGBPzmuYKlWJCgbKMb79xm1CSpPVlZV-nYBwCfE2Z0jEnjLQfaLxeKUdiTCynDAOzhqheKP6umbW1FboRjOXhjkiHuB2QzEjO_O4uwnIBf84lOC679hqRgm80aPsLdRd00wwd9jZxmrdIUrB32DI1qGf0OB_jHfwyHazEp3po34-8l9513VVF6TV-YWCf0zVFI4ihEx7CFvpJJeyfFw8vS7lzOT8N-aUHHzzFsF5_B43ramIzJnHwBVvhRKd0pWsVA-96ifdjrqsPM-VDPIgJZtPzY9FVimPiWDanmgWDRwY3Qb-USGmFfa9QpsfFkOZOLJ3dA_oYdzRvpjopf0HbljQYyxXsAOQEW3dNp1s21Yp-VIpHOte81pIzUq0DcXlTfK3xfgL5N-U-A&data=04%7C01%7Camerikan%40marshall.edu%7C22519d78937c410b328908d9ff740209%7C239ab2783bba4c78b41d8508a541e025%7C0%7C0%7C637821696182281428%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=I1WrNSlQBx6%2BT0O87ZDSnXpbo8J6W0uf7cABsVTncFY%3D&reserved=0>,
expressed over the last decade, that God wants Russia and Ukraine to be
together eternally
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of something that a Viking warlord might have done a thousand years ago,
when neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor for that matter the notion of modern
nations existed.

The imagined past enforces a deadened future.  A historiosophy that weird
can only be made true by a war, which it is used to justify.  If Ukrainians
don't recognize the truth as revealed to Putin, that means they must be hit
harder, killed in greater numbers.  Only force can bend a resistant real
world towards a lonely dictator's dream of eternity.

That baptism was carried out in Kyiv, and so Putin believes that the
Ukrainian capital is the mother of Russian cities.  Family metaphors
arising from myth have a certain naive brutality.  In this war, Kyiv will
have to be destroyed to prove that it is Russian.  Matricide will prove
maternity.

Meanwhile, Russian children must be given a narrative that links a baptism
in the tenth century to the ruins Putin is making of the twenty-first.  In
the official guidance for teachers, the end point of the story is Russia's
recognition of the self-proclaimed "Luhansk People's Republic" and "Donetsk
People's Republic" that Russia carved from Ukraine in 2014.  The first
event somehow justifies or leads to second one: "predetermines" it, to use
a word Putin likes. “