by Betsy Dorminey
Mature Language Warning
Faced with the horror of the unfolding war in Ukraine a young linguist of my acquaintance decided to conduct a bit of “man in the street” polling, 21st-century style. The original post featured a screen shot of a Russian language post: her notes and translation appear below.
I speak a little Russian, so I’ve been reading the Russian-language side of Reddit. Selection bias since it’s Russians posting on Western media, but since it’s *in* Russian it should be mostly free of trolls. Most of them are really not happy with Putin. Again, my language skills are rough but my translation:
Title: Jesus Christ, where we’re headed is completely insane
Text: Fucking hell, it’s already been six days of this shit. Six days of following this clusterfuck and I can’t believe this isn’t a simulation, that it’s not some experiment on hamsters. I’ve already gone stark raving mad, I can’t sleep from the panic. What’s next? How can we live like this? Why are the war hawks yelling “this is what Ukrainians deserve, our fight is righteous!” Why the fuck does anyone support this goddamn regime? God fucking fuck dammit HELP
Translator’s note: hard for me to translate the vast arsenal of curse words in the Russian language, the post was peppered with them.
The official line, of course, is different. State-controlled media portrays it as a “special military operation,” “de-nazification,” or “protection of Russian-speaking peoples. But as Sean Illing reports in Vox dissenting journalists have fled and we know Russians are protesting the Ukraine invasion. The state has imposed draconian penalties on dissent. (Fifteen years in the slammer for using the “w” word!) This expletive-laden cri de coeur really brings it home.
Good news is hard to find. As Kyle Smith observes in The New York Post, journalism suffers when “what neutral principles do we stand for?” is replaced by “which side are we on?” Either you live in an authoritarian country like Russia where government controls the media, or you live in an authoritarian country like the U.S. where the media controls the government. Ironic, isn’t it, since technology empowers anyone with internet access and a keyboard to reach the world. You have to hunt, and peck. Fortunately there are clever youngsters out there who know how to bypass parental/governmental controls through social media.
Forget war crimes, treaties, the UN, and international tribunals. War is a crime against humanity. Killing people and destroying their homes is bad, and wrong. Pious accords and laws on the conduct of warfare don’t make it right, or better. An exceptional article by Dexter Filkins in the September 8, 2021 New Yorker asks, “Did Making the Rules of War Better Make the World Worse?” Our obsession with rules has attempted to persuade us that wars can be legally waged in accordance with them. No fair targeting civilians, okay?
Filkiins focuses on Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, by Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and of jurisprudence at Yale. Moyn evokes Clausewitz and Tolstoy, Sherman, Afghanistan, and the My Lai massacre, and identifies a turning point in 1977 when the Geneva Convention was updated to impose rules on combatants where hitherto only destructive force had prevailed. Moyn bemoans such legal niceties for damping the public outcry that should induce politicians to end such conflicts: “”Humane” war [i]s a consolation prize for the failure to constrain the resort to force in the first place.” (extra quotation marks mine.) Protest is how a population responds to war and strives to end it. See above.
It’s far from clear that having military lawyers second-guess generals has produced less war, or a safer world. In the end, force will out. As Joseph Stalin reportedly asked, how many divisions has the Pope? I’ve got to believe Putin is familiar with that line.
Filkins takes issue with some of Moyn’s conclusions, but agrees in the end that “efforts to curb the cruelty of military force may have backfired.” Fleets of drones and “smart bombs” and oceans of intel haven’t kept us out of armed conflicts. For all its military might the United States hasn’t really “won” a war since 1945. And, having just concluded two “forever wars” – Iraq and Afghanistan – Filkins cautions that the U.S. may be on the brink of a new cold war. Or a hot one.
Conventions about how to wage war within limits have reduced the incentives to stop fighting. I can only hope that the players moving these lethal chess pieces around the Kievan Rus will stop and think a minute. Assuming, of course, that they can gain access to reliable news about it.
Because, to echo the Russian post, what the fuck? We can’t live like this.
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Betsy Dorminey is an attorney in Georgia and an entrepreneur in Vermont. Her columns have appeared in the American Spectator, Western Journal, Townhall, Vermont Digger, and The Hill.
