24172

You should go into politics.

“The congressman wasn’t lying, he was just telling a story. He’s a storyteller!”

The truth is the truth. Telling people lies may make them better foot soldiers for the state, but that doesn’t make it right.

I find this whole idea that states lie to their people to help them utterly reprehensible. It’s the same patronizing logic and faux-altruism that tyrants have always used to justify their misbehavior. States lie to help themselves.

24173

Eh? National myths generally have a pretty firm foundation in reality. They tend to omit nuance in their interpretation of the past, and some (but not all) are of course be much more distorted, but disdaining them as mere lies and propaganda is to thouroughly miss the point.

24174

I guess the common explanation would be that myths are easier to grasp. I won’t tell my 5-year-old son about how rational egoism leads to humanism and understanding that cooperation and improving society as a whole is beneficial to him individually. I’ll have to explain that sharing is good and when you make someone angry it’s bad. National myths help society function just like moral codes and other simplifications.

24175

I like Russian political scientist Ekaterina Shulman (lives in Germany since last year). Here’s her take on this recent Putin’s grand speech.

So we are trying to outline the picture of the world that the message paints. It lasted, let me remind you, two hours.
What is it about? (…) The war was always waged It is still going on. It does not consist of any advances on the ground; it consists of heroic confrontation. But this, in general, is not bad. You, dear listeners, dear audience of the message, will even like it. Why should you like it? First, because of what has happened, we have an incredible popular unity. What is striking about this message is the absolute absence of an enemy within. Contrary to expectations that a wave of repression would be announced (it may well happen; in fact, it never particularly stopped), but the text itself said, yes, some people have left and betrayed their homeland, but we won’t persecute them.
(…)
We are doing particularly well in the economy. The economy is booming. We were promised collapse. It hasn’t happened. We are growing here and there, and even the fall that Rosstat [Russian service of statstics] counted is just a joke, not a flal.
Unemployment is at an all-time low, it has been said, I think, twice. (…) If more people are killed and chased away, then there will be no unemployment at all, it turns out, there will be no one to work. Jobs will remain, but people will disappear. But let’s not be picky.
Many good words have been said about domestic private business. The Soviet Union had somehow damaged its own economy. It was not said that it was damaged by the arms race, but it was implied. Which is, of course, the answer to the warmongers and those who like to put the economy on war footing. We don’t switch to war economy. Why - because everything is fine as it is. In general everything is great, very great.
He then turns to his elites: “We know that you have been siphoning money to the West and buying luxury real estate, yachts and cars there. We don’t condemn you for that.” (…)
But now you realize how bad it is for you in the West. They have taken everything away from you, you are second-class people there. So we urge you to make the only right decision - to return to the embrace of your homeland. Here, of course, we are not taking anything away from anyone. We’ll slaughter you in the detention center for nothing, without any confiscations. [this was a sarcastic joke but it probably doesn’t translate well in the text] You are strong and powerful people, we have known you for a long time, you are capable of turning over a new leaf.
Citizens are promised all kinds of social support. That is to say, dear citizens, this is all extremely beneficial for you too. Even if you were to be murdered out of the blue, first of all, you would be heroes, and secondly, your family would be provided for. And you, dear bureaucrats, also benefit from it all, because we are not planning any confiscations and witch hunts, not a word about the fight against corruption at all. We understand your desire to get rich. We used to understand your desire to live luxuriously in the West. It didn’t work out, but you will live perfectly well in Russia. Everything will be absolutely wonderful for you.
Here are the outlines of a new social contract to replace the previous one. And what does it ask of the people? After all, the previous social contract was supposed to be that the state stays out of the way of the citizens, they live their private lives, and the citizens stay out of political affairs for that. Accordingly, for the elites, the covenant was that they could enrich themselves and consume at the highest international level. For this, they should be unfailingly loyal to the existing government and also not contemplate having a larger stake in it or somehow overplaying this contract, this agreement, in favor of their group, than here it is now established.
What does this agreement look like now? The citizens are being told that yes, we will mobilize you if we have to, and we are already mobilizing you, but we will pay you for it, you and your families. The elites are told, "Yes, we’ve cut off your access to the first world - we’ll feed you here, and you’ll look great. Moreover, although it is not pronounced, but is implied, we will not persecute you. That is, do not be afraid: no Stalinism, no emergency laws, no ‘troika’, no reprisals. Not a word was said at all about anyone who was short on ammunition or negligent in what they were doing, or who was not up to the challenge of the moment. Absolutely everyone is awesome. That was just two hours of praise for everyone.
This can really speak of only one thing: the fact that there is fear of disloyalty from the very groups that are being bribed. If someone is being bribed, it means someone is feared. As you understand, no successes or victories are rewarded, especially since there are none in particular, but potential disloyalty is rewarded, however paradoxical that may sound. That is, those who are suspicious in the sense of whether they are not plotting something, whether they have not become so dissatisfied with what is happening over the year that they are thinking about possible changes - here they are told: “Do not even think about it…!” And it doesn’t mean “we’ll tear your head off,” but "don’t even think about it, you’ll be fine, you’re fine now, and you’ll be even better, so you’re not really interested in change, you’re interested in the endless continuation of the same thing.

The translation might be not the smoothest one, but I think it might be interesting to see this evaluation of current Russian internal politics.

24176

Heh, truth is for science, for humans it’s stories, and stories always have a POV / interpretation.

24177

Clearly you are not an academic! :) “Truth” is a tricky concept, especially when talking about the past. All history is narratives constructed out of perceptions of the past. We differentiate them based on how they use evidence, what evidence they use, and other things, but in the end, there is a reason why anything from the past that is remotely interesting generates multiple narratives.

Of course, for practical purposes, some narratives are very clearly better substantiated according to what many would see as necessary evidentiary and epistemological standards than other narratives. We can call these “truth” I suppose but I prefer to just call them “better.”

24178

I feel silly just for having to state this, but education exists to bring people the truth, not to weigh them down with myths.

If going to school means being told pretty lies, what on earth is the point? I wasted hours listening to that bullshit, which could’ve been spent actually learning about the world.

Some people genuinely kid themselves that they live in the greatest countries on earth because of the teaching of national myths. They have no fucking idea what the world looks like, or what they look like to other people!

I don’t know that Timothy Snyder is making this point specifically, but it’s a subtext of the lecture that the ahistorical nature of our societies allows demagogues like Putin to play off vague national myths to justify contemporary crimes, like the invasion of Ukraine.

He’s not alone. Extremists in our countries do it too. To hear your justifications, that’s just spilled milk.

I don’t understand why you’d ever choose to accept that, when you could mitigate it by simply telling the truth.

Most people don’t read books, let alone history books, so how on earth would they ever be equipped to challenge people like that, when what they’ve been taught in school is also just a bunch of pretty lies and junk history?

To say nothing for the fact that the far right is obsessed with the idea that their governments lie to them. Thanks to the paternalistic arrogance of some politicians, sadly, they’re not always wrong.

With all due respect, I feel like this it too personal to engage with. There’s a lot to unwrap here, especially the word “easier”. Why, how, and for whom?

I don’t know your son, and I don’t know your parenting style, and I suspect we’re probably all very different in that regard. That’s something to be respected, so I’m not sure I wanna engage with it more than that.

Right. We can argue about why someone sent a telegram when they did, but we cannot argue about the fact that the telegram exists, when they did send it, or what it says.

But when you pretend that the telegram doesn’t exist, or you leave out important things in that telegram because you aim to tell a specific story, you should really be going before whatever ethics board exists at your university.

24179
24180

Well, just in case, I don’t have a 5-year-old son and maybe it’s a bad example.

You’re too quick to call things lies. Saying “out country is the greatest and the freest so we should all keep it good, look at how previous generations made this land great” does not sound like a lesser truth to me compared to something like “you will personally benefit from supporting the current status quo in regards to social structures both local and global, look at how previous generations earned the hegemony”. Both are primitive versions of some grander vision. You will always give people an abridged and sanitized version by the very nature of the teaching process, as you can never pass on your full knowledge on any matter.

24181

idrink

I’m not asking anyone to give kids a university level education.

I’m asking them not to teach that George Washington was the most honest man that ever lived, unless they also teach that he was a slave owner who had Oney Judge chased halfway across the country, and likely wore dentures that were made from the teeth of his slaves.

It’s not a very good example of what I’m talking about, but it’s an example.

I don’t know that I’ll prosecute it a lot further than that, but suffice it to say that if you examine most peoples ideas of their own history, including my own countrymen - “Denmark has existed for a thousand years, we have always been good and just, Germans and Swedes are big and dumb and cruel and evil and ruin everything” - there are a lot of falsehoods and omissions, which are regularly exploited by people who have the worst of intentions.

There’s plenty the state could do about that, but to do so it would have to act against its own immediate interests.

24182
24183

Hear, hear. Also, he could tell a lie.

The thing about national myths is that they’re the part of your national story that aren’t really true. The true parts are…history.

24184

Thanks for posting this. It helped reinforce to me that Putin is scared of internal threats and will likely increasingly make decisions based on that rather than on winning the war. In fact, the last bit made me think about the possibility that any general who had too much success in Ukraine and started to become popular would suddenly become a big threat to Vlad and probably not last long.

24185

I would say the national myth is the shared context in which the history is viewed. It exists whether the history that is taught is an accurate approximation, a selective misrepresentation, or a pure fiction.

24186

I think my favorite part of this was (paraphrasing) “If enough people die in the war, then more jobs will be available and unemployment will drop to 0%!!!”. That’s - quite the spin.

24187

Don’t remember if I quoted this part, but she highlights that there’s no talk about victory or resolving the conflict in any way. It’s a new reality, the war is here to stay and it’s good actually because of a variety of reasons. We’ll just stand there defending from a gender-neutral god for eternity and life will be good.

Naturally, it was an interpretation of the political scientists, but it is bizarre to brag about low unemployment during mobilization and a war with huge losses.

24188

Unless you have evidence to the contrary, of course, but in general, yeah, some things are pretty much givens. I would differ about “what it says,” if one is talking about “what it means,” but if you are talking about the tangible record of the exact words for instance, sure, that’s a given.

Agreed. The central point here though isn’t about truth or fiction, it’s about process. Pretending it doesn’t exist flies in the face of the rules of evidence we nearly universally accept.

24189

OK MoD thinks Russia may be gearing up to attack Vuhledar again, under the same command (now promoted to Colonel General!) as the first time. Because it went so well.

24190

Meanwhile, another top manager from Russian oil/gas industry has died under strange circumstances. Eight such cases since the start of the war.

You might think there were more of them but some of the reports were about statesmen or businessmen from other sectors, this is about natural resources.

24191

Seriously, did Putin just lift his speech from an unpublished draft of 1984?

Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. – George Orwell, 1984

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. – George Orwell, 1984