Julia Ioffe: Mothers for Putin

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Julia Ioffe
@juliaioffe
"There won’t be any protests, not economic protests, not mothers’ protests, and the reason for this is very simple: the propaganda machine has been turned all the way up and it’s swallowing people whole."

puck.news
Mothers for Putin
Vladimir Putin’s misbegotten war is a blatant attempt to restore his vision of the Russky mir—a pan-Slavic neo-Soviet nation state built on Russian dominance. And yet his war is being waged by the...
10:42 AM · Apr 23, 2022

https://puck.news/mothers-for-putin/?utm_code=[e-mail]

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Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine eight weeks ago, Americans—both news anchors and regular people—have been asking me the same question: When coffins of Russian soldiers start coming home, won’t Russians rise up against the war, and against Vladimir Putin? Won’t grieving Russian mothers go out into the streets to protest the senseless conflict that took the lives of their children?

Setting aside the deeply patriarchal assumption embedded in the latter question—why is it the responsibility of women to end a war that men started without their input?—the whole idea has always struck me as impossibly solipsistic and naive. It assumes that everyone else, including Russians who live on the other side of the world and have their own history and culture, sees the world exactly as we do. It assumes that what is obvious to me and to most of us in the West—namely, that this is an unprovoked and unjustified war of Russian aggression—is obvious to the Russians themselves. It ignores the reality of what it is like not just to live in an authoritarian state with full control of the media, but to have lived in one for over two decades, an entire generation.

Many of the Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine right now were born in and around 2000, the year Putin became president. They have known no president other than Putin, no system other than his, no truth other than the one his propaganda machine has fed them both in the classroom and through the media. It took Fox News and the right-wing media just one year to convince a majority of Republicans that Joe Biden didn’t really win the 2020 election, and that’s in a country with a free press, where other sources of information are easily and readily available. Now imagine what Fox News and Breitbart could do if they and their ilk were the only media outlets in the country—for twenty years.

This point of view also ignores what happened in the United States after the invasion of Iraq in 2003—or rather, what didn’t happen. When coffins draped in American flags began coming from Iraq, how many American mothers took to the streets? How many instead believed that their sons were heroes who died fighting for their country and the very idea of freedom? True, Americans made their discontent known at the ballot box, especially in the elections of 2006 and 2008, but a huge portion of the American public doubled down in its support for the Iraq war because to not support it was, in their view, to betray the American soldiers fighting it—and dying.

*snip*

[JT45242]

1. Ignores the scale

Putin's army has already, in only 8 weeks, had over ten times more casualties than the US had in 20 years in the gulf war fights.

We lost a couple of thousand soldiers, they have already lost over 30k.

The point about brain washing through Russian state media and the myth of the great Soviet state, that was really a world power from 1945 to the late 1990s when it collapsed under the weight of its own ineptitude, size, and amoral leaders who pocketed money that should have been for the people.

But, the Russian people have been sheeple throughout history, following one corrupt dictator after another with blips of reformers who never gain much long term traction like Stolypin and Gorbachev. Who are then replaced by corrupt autocrats like Putin. Sometimes, there are a few extra steps.

I remember reading that the serf mentality is ingrained in Russian people by their culture and the Russian Orthodox church when I studied there social history as an undergrad history major.

Maybe the scale of the coffins will change things, or maybe mobile crematorium and not bringing back the dead will make the anguish trickle rather than form a monsoon that overwhelms Putin.

More likely, one or more of the oligarchs will realize his family is next for a staged family annihilator murder/suicide and go after Putin first.