Russia, Ukraine, and the problem of Mutually Assured Bulls___ (Podcast)
Professor Steven Fish is a political scientist at UC Berkeley who has spent decades studying Russia, Putin, and the rise of authoritarianism. But before he was a political scientist, he was a young student visiting Russia on a tourist visa. And he noticed something odd: people were lying to him in Russia. He knew they were lying to him. They knew they were lying to him. And they knew that he knew they were lying to him. But they told the lies anyway. It was mutually assured bulls__, lies that become so endemic and obvious that no one even bothers to point out that they are lies.
Listen to the conversation with Steve Fish at The Green Pill Podcast
That odd experience in the mid 1980s is instructive of where we are today: on the brink of nuclear war. Because it shows what can happen when a government, insistent on accepting only the “party line” – i.e., the version of the facts established by the people in power – becomes detached from reality. Driving the Russian aggression in Ukraine is a belief that Ukraine is simply a part of Russia, a false belief driven by decades of bulls___ that was never checked.
But this conversation has relevance far beyond the crisis in Ukraine. We are, after all, facing an age of unprecedented misinformation, but also unprecedented demands to follow the “party line.” That’s dangerous for our nation’s ability to grapple with any of the major decisions in the coming years. If people can’t speak candidly about what they actually think and believe, due to fear of reprisal, then how will we have any confidence that we’re not making a catastrophic mistake?
Steve walks us through how this all happened in Russia. A Faustian bargain with Russian oligarchs over a BBQ. A political ideology of Russian grievance that became so powerful that it drowned out opposing views. And a political elite in Russia that now lives in terror of breaking with the party line.
But what he shares also has lessons for us here at home. Are we living in a society of mutually assured bulls___, where people are saying things because they’re expected to say them, and not because they believe them? And if so, what can we do about it?
We should not only say what we think but what we feel too. Most of the time anyway. I think that most animals are like this. But if we have a bad and unjust thought what do we do with it? I think we should do nothing with it, just let it pass through our minds, like the Buddhists let it do.
Speaking of bulls___ your introduction to this piece is. President Gorbachev agreed to the reunification of the two Germanys and the withdrawal of 130,000 Soviet troops in 1990. This was contingent a promise made to Gorbachev by Secretary of State James Baker and other government officials that NATO would not expand “one inch” east of Germany toward Russia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and beginning with President Clinton in the late 90s, NATO has embraced fourteen other countries including Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia right on Russia’s western border. NATO, which is to say the United States, has stationed troops in these former Soviet republics with nuclear capable missile batteries.
Putin, even the Western puppet Yeltsin, have long been opposed to what they perceive as the security threat of NATO expansion. As far back as 2014 Putin has been adamant that NATO would not be allowed to incorporate Ukraine. The Minkst Accords create a road map to peace that the US has refused to honor because it wants to remain the hegemon and set the terms of the “rules based international order.” That is to say, whatever the US and the corporations that own it, want.
In 2014 the US sponsored a coup in Ukraine that deposed a democratically elected president, and brought to power another Western puppet. The coup government outlawed the Russian language and customs. At this the majority ethnic Russian-speaking people of the Donbas in east Ukraine seceded. There has been a civil war there since.
When there is international conflict what is usually the causitive factor? The origins of the current crisis should be traced to the 2014 US-sponsored coup.