For the Record: Kamil Galeev works at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a DC based think tank. His Ukraine-War threads on twitter are informative, but to be taken with a grain of salt.
And I think in the case of "To put it simply, [Russia]'s going full fascist." with a couple of grains more.
True, but it should be the giveaway (if not the open call for regime change in Moscow).
After reading it again I have to say: The thread is remarkably shallow.
Its length seems overwhelming but upon further inspection makes a lot of detours into individuals then circles back to the "grand scheme of things" and (thus) in each spot takes things out of context (e.g. Putin's "I only have Ivans and Marias in my family" quote - what the Author leaves out: what was said before and thereafter, and why it was said at all: In response to some alledgedly heoric act in this war by a young boy from an ethnic minority).
What's the deal with the Woodrow Wilson Center? It seems to have good credentials, albeit connected to the US government. Are there other examples of it producing obvious propaganda?
idk, but it seems like it's not involved in this case as these are just independent Twitter threads from an account that isn't referenced by any of the Wilson Center's own verified accounts which are busy posting their own analysis...
I think this thread actually highlights how the modern internet can "hack" normal human perception due to the way it makes it very difficult to see how much support an idea/position actually has.
I mean, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that there is some portion, even a sizable portion, of the Russian populace that supports the invasion of Ukraine. But, suppose the support is on the order of 5-10% (I have no idea what it is - more on that below). In the days before telecommunications, if you all had to go out to the town square, or heck just gossip with your neighbors, it would be easy to see that the invasion has so little support most people would just discount it entirely.
With the Internet, though, that 5-10% represents millions of people, which would make it easy to find video after video of people supporting the invasion. Worse, if you were someone on the fence about this issue (or any issue really), it's very easy to go down "the YouTube rabbit hole", see video after video of people telling you how noble the fight to "deNazify Ukraine" is, and convince yourself that all the sane people must be pro-invasion.
When it comes to present-day Russia, Putin obviously has a huge base of real support, but is it a majority? Hard to say given how opaque Russia's institutions are.
Once we had things we called newspapers. It was similar to what you describe. It was possible to read an entire newspaper and have it tell you about just a single facet of a multi-faceted reality.
Navalny, defacto Russian opposition leader (jailed), has an organization that has been doing internet polls on the support for war. See [0] for recent results. As it's an internet poll, and skews young, urban and liberal, it should provide a lower bound for the support of the war.
How does an internet poll conducted by an organization working for an already jailed opposition leader overcome the polling-in-authoritarian states problem of people not trusting the polling not to be monitored and not to be a black mark in a government file if someone doesn't like the answer?
You do have a point. But those people would rather avoid answering the poll in the first place. Those answering the poll are self-selected for strong anti-war sentiment.
The methodology is a bit a of a mystery, perhaps I'm wrong to assume this poll was conducted on an unaffiliated internet property, so no connection to the opposition leader would be evident.
In any case these are the most anti-war numbers of any poll out there, and still over 50 % put the blame on Ukraine and the West.
Though content is over the top I think he makes a good point about avoiding using Telegram. Same goes for Tik-Tok, if you have something to hide i.e. not using it for entertainment.
I think hackernews has a lot of hate for Telegram.
But it does feel a little silly and betrays the point that they target Durov; a person who has had nearly all his assets seized by the Russian government and has lost his company (VK) to government control.
Telegram was his “fuck you” to the Russian authorities and they tried to ban it a bunch of times (which caused chaos for a lot of people using the cloud during those times).
I don’t think he’s some kind of Russian asset, bowing to your government does not make him complicit, Zuck is not responsible for Iraq because Facebook complies with court orders for example, and it’s hard for me not to think he’s against Russia; especially not when he’s in exile.
I think it's the lack of transparency, claims that Telegram is the most secure messenger despite the fact that e2e encryption is off by default and therefore hardly used, unclear source of funds used to run the whole operation.
There are few scandals from his past that draw at least a controversial picture of Durov's morals (throwing paper money from the top of the building in the center of the city, working quietly with the FSB during the protest, deleting messages from the Telegram account of his opponent who accused his brother in firing him over a girl, and so on). He persistently keeps throwing out loosely supported accusations towards the rival messengers like Signal, Whatsapp and so on.
There was a great article in The Wired lately and following discussion on Hacker News [0]
Western world thinks of the situation mostly as "Bad Putin oppressing good people of Russia" but unfortunately fascism does not work that way. And if Russia "wins" over Ukraine, fascism would demand the next victory.
Man, France also have neo-Nazi batallions, we actually have articles written on this like every two years, with followup article saying nothing was done and the problem is worse (i think one divison was disolved, because they were a bit too obvious on social media). I'm pretty sure the US does too. Sadly, neo nazis are drawn to the army and as the recruiting is hard in the West, they are easily accepted. If you condemn a country as fascist because it has a high percentage of fascist in its army, all the power to you, my anarchist side would even agree, standings armies are a fascist tool. But my pragmatic side understand that standing armies are necessary, and even positive at least in the short to medium term.
The Ukrainians did not create song about their invasion, they did not force children to declare their support to an invading army. Also, i've seen a lot of reference to Makhno recently, i'm pretty sure any Neonazi would have had issues with that (well, cultured fascists would have)(yeah, nevermind, maybe they wouldn't then).
So what's the play? Jewish people and neo-Nazis collaborating to gain power? And then later turn on each other? The Wikipedia article on them says there are Jewish people serving in Azov Battalion.
If Azov are neo-Nazis, who is their enemy? Obviously the Islamic Chechen military who have been deployed against them but other than that, who? Chechnya isn't on their border. Other Slavs? Where are the non-white people they are fighting?
Could it be that the Nazi emblems were adopted more for historical and anti-Russian sentiment? I honestly can't make much sense of it all. They may be National Socialists, but they seem pretty okay allying closely with Jews and there are few non-white people to fight.
So one battalion are extreme nationalists and definitely pretty fucked up. That hardly condemns the whole country. And in a war for survival, anyone would let them fight. I'm very open to changing my mind about any of this but I fail to see the pressing issue right now.
And I think in the case of "To put it simply, [Russia]'s going full fascist." with a couple of grains more.