МЫ ПРОТИВ ВОЙНЫ!
WE ARE AGAINST WAR!

Люди призывающие к войне или идиоты или преступники. Люди наделенные властью, работники СМИ - преступники вдвойне.
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People who call for war are either idiots or criminals. People in power and people in the media are criminals twice as much.

Севастополь | Sevastopol, 2014.

#closeuprussia #alexanderaksakov
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@z428 @closeuprussia

People who call for war are either idiots or criminals.

On that we agree. That was the easy part. Now to the tough one: who are those “people” in your opinion?

@z428 @closeuprussia Thanks for your take. Let me push it farther, it’s good for clarifying thoughts and getting a good conversation.

People on all sides of the fence/conflict that think in black/white patterns, in “us vs them” and ideas all along violence as the … approach of choice.

I am with you there and would sign it. But there’s something what bugs me over the last couple of years. So let me just expand on that position to see where it leads to.

As I am getting older, I observe this:

1. for cooperation, you need two+ willing parties
2. for a conflict, you need just one and what the other thinks is actually irrelevant, if one decides so, there will be a conflict

I want peace and cooperation, in my life I want to focus on making my life and life of others just a tad bit better. Now, if there is a party which decides, for whatever reason, they want to harm me, I have two options: 1) play a pacifist and get beaten (because, recall, the decision was already made by somebody else and that I do not want the conflict does not matter much); or 2) accept that there will be conflict and defend myself/work towards minimal harm/etc. Either way, it’s a war footing.

Anyhow, if you chose the path #2, you end up in a place where you were forced into a “us vs. them” thinking and you accept it - again, the choice was not yours, but it’s so. Maybe you have compassion with the bully, but either you get harmed, or you harm back - there’s no middle ground there. Bullies by definition of them being a bully simply do not compromise.

To extend this: the middle-ground position is untenable in a hot conflict. You cannot claim “everybody is a fool” and think it absolves you from being a party to the conflict or from guilt. Just look what happened in Rwanda - I am absolutely not saying it resembles today’s issues, but learning about what we did and didn’t there was a brutal wake up call for me - an idealist by nature. There’s a collective guilt of non-action in that conflict and others too we carry. That’s where taking the passive middle-ground position leads to. An ugly place.

So I am now the reprehensible person on one side of the fence who thinks in black/white?

@z428

Thank you. I appreciate this conversation. It’s clear it’s not a topic we enjoy, but it’s here and it helps to sharpen one’s thoughts by brushing them against somebody else’s.

some of the aspects you voiced seem just the tip of the literal iceberg to me.

Of course! This is a history of humankind and the meaning of life we speak about. And I do not mean it as a joke. We both know there are libraries of books neither of us read in entirety written on exactly these topics.

It seems to boil down to the question of who do you believe in this mess, which side actually gives a reason to believe in, these days

Very correct. But I think, I do see a way through this mess which I developed over the years, because this type of configuration happens a lot also on personal level to all of us - as far as we interact with others.

My take is this: There are two levels to the world around us: 1) what is said; and 2) what is done. I have these observations:

1. #1 is messy, full of contradictions, difficult to understand. #2 sometimes too, but much much less so.
2. #1 typically does not matter, while #2 almost always does (of course, there’s more to day on the topic when when words cause change in reality, but I hope you get my point).

So my method is simple: mostly disregard what is said and look at what is done. That’s how I can see clearer what is going on. Of course one might say that that how can you know what is being done? Well, if the actor publicly proclaims what others observe, I guess we can trust it, right? So that is how I filter information coming to me. And suddenly many things are less messy.

From a pure pragmatic approach, my idea would be that every external force should get the __ out of that country (both including Russian forces in the East and any kind of military, strategic, financial support by US and NATO in the west)

I think this is the crux of the problem. Either we agree that societies and thus countries have a sovereign right to decide for themselves, or not. Given that, it’s also easy to go and ask what do Ukrainians want. There seems to be plenty of evidence that they want to move towards EU style of managing their society and they actually want to receive all that support you mention (in that sense it’s not far away from normal business transaction). Also, it’s relatively clear they do not want to have their country torn apart or invaded, or somebody proclaiming an arbitrary state of their territory. It seems to me quite consistent what they say. How can we know Ukrainians actually want all this? Well, they held elections and voted for all this stuff, so in that sense there’s little doubt, is there?

would rather be to have something like, well, a “peace army”

We have that. It’s called UN peacekeapers. And we also have a body helping us to resolve international conflicts. It’s called United Nations. Today’s general assembly meeting was for all to observe. Not a nice business.

At the moment, it seems the idea of “they’re the aggressor, we’re just defending ourselves” also is a pattern of explanation all sides are pretty good at using.

That is right. And in a landscape where for me or you it’s very hard to see through what actually is the truth and who is right and who is wrong, it’s a mess.

Let me conclude on a very personal note: I picked my side very simply and in a harsh manner: as I said, words can be ignored, it’s the actions which matter. And here, it’s clear for me that actions of one of the parties are a direct assault on my own way of life, on the fundamentals of my world. How so? I come from a small country. A small country is always vulnerable to big strong bullies. In Europe, we are all small and medium sized countries. The only way we can get along is to rely on a system of rules. On a system where we can trust each other that even though we disagree on many things, some rules are sacrosanct. One of them is that borders of countries shall not be moved by aggression. We agreed on that after WWII and that is the fundament of what we call often “European security architecture”. And here somebody not only breaks those rules, they also claim those rules are garbage and shall be disregarded just because their view on history (c.f., the very instructive speech by Mr. Putin two days ago). if that rule is gone, my country is in danger too. That’s why it’s not a theory, or semantics for me and why it’s easy to pick sides even though I am not a direct party to the today’s conflict.

I hope it makes sense.

@closeuprussia