May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Clayton Craddock
One may have noticed (to the extent that anyone reads what I write) that in these various entries here which begin as lengthy emails sent to Clayton along with my implicit consent to his publishing them here with only limited review on my part, that my focus in them tends to wander.
Call it my style, if it helps. I tend to write with the intent in mind of addressing 'an audience of one', even when I have neither a particular reader in mind nor any expectation that anyone might read it at all, such as the rather caustic comments I tend to leave on various Youtube channels. Many of these tend to incite only brief dismissive replies of the 'get a life' variety, which is fine. My life may not amount to much in anyone's currently-trendy metric of how many views one receives on social media, but I do maintain that a life of only being told what to think and then striving to be seen thinking it for the sake of anonymous approval from the digital gallery might not be much of a life either....
Which has to do with the rather meandering focus of the piece above.
According to its headline, chosen as such by our gracious host here, this is an essay about sanctions against Russia during the current war in Ukraine, which it is but kinda-not-really.
But what it's really about is a theme I have maintained throughout most of what I have written, in any format, over the course of this war: considering the source.
Taken as its own three-word imperative, 'consider the source' is probably most commonly used as a taunt, meaning that because of who has said a thing, that thing is not worth listening to.
But this is not what I mean at all. To consider the source of any form of communication is to, well, give it consideration, in a larger process of maintaining and updating a responsible point of view. Given that no source will ever be fully immune from its own biases, the point is to take these biases into account and factor them into a worthy assessment of the points the source is seeking to make.
Taken as such the topic of sanctions against Russia in itself is as much an exercise of this process as it meant as a topic to be examined as though it were in a vacuum all to itself. It is not.
Sanctions are in effect acts of war undertaken by other means, to paraphrase an aphorism. Seen as such these means bear examination not only as to their moral justification, but also as to their effectiveness in achieving what amount to warlike aims.
Have sanctions damaged or diminished the Russian state's war efforts against Ukraine? One guess is as good as another on that question, but potential answers may be found by inserting another aphorism, that for every measure there is a countermeasure.
To assume that the Kremlin regime has no such countermeasures at its disposal is to assume that those conducting the war against Ukraine must be... stupid. Which is why I drifted on into the other sub-topic of the essay, the hazards of assuming in any conflict that the opponent is an idiot, whose very humanity, when considering the sources of its actions in that light, must not be worthy of consideration at all. Call them all orcs who watch too much state TV and beat their wives, and deny them access to parts for their auto-assembly plants, that'll teach those katsaps to go starting wars, this rather tortuous logic seems to go.
And meanwhile, just yesterday I read another lengthy and quite detailed research piece, again from Novaya Gazeta and again first published in Russian, on how these sanctions might be the best thing to ever happen for the Chinese automotive industry (what, those chinks can make cars???), which has in many ways begun to utterly dominate both the manufacturing and sales sectors of the Russian car market. Who'd a thunk it? A countermeasure, and a whole new set of unintended consequences to go along with it, and the war carries right on uninterrupted.
If it is, according to the trendy urban legends which social media is best at distributing, 'only a matter of time before Russia collapses', how much time does anyone think residents of Kherson have, for instance, as their recently-liberated city is systematically dismantled by Russian shelling every single day from right across the Dnipro? (I read about that, from yet another Russian-language source doing frontline journalism once again putting its western counterparts to shame, and bothered to translate it from the Russian.)
Enough time for the neo-cold-warriors along the Potomac to finally crawl out from their 1962-vintage bomb shelters and undertake to help Ukraine WIN this war, on Ukraine's terms? This is the very obstacle the Ukrainian state has to navigate every single day in its foreign relations: a growing body count of their own people, while their 'allies' sit around gambling on the effect of sanctions in magically causing the 'collapse' of a nation they are too scared of to just stand up to.
Ukraine is standing up, in a way the USA and NATO never have toward Moscow: toe to toe with the enemy and fighting back with everything they have, and yes, needing more still to get the job DONE. As meanwhile, US-NATO policy-dithering on the questions of arms supplies being determined primarily by some nuclear threat which may or may not even exist from the Kremlin, pretty much amount to a whole other form of sanctions, against Ukraine itself. Are their people expendable too?
One may have noticed (to the extent that anyone reads what I write) that in these various entries here which begin as lengthy emails sent to Clayton along with my implicit consent to his publishing them here with only limited review on my part, that my focus in them tends to wander.
Call it my style, if it helps. I tend to write with the intent in mind of addressing 'an audience of one', even when I have neither a particular reader in mind nor any expectation that anyone might read it at all, such as the rather caustic comments I tend to leave on various Youtube channels. Many of these tend to incite only brief dismissive replies of the 'get a life' variety, which is fine. My life may not amount to much in anyone's currently-trendy metric of how many views one receives on social media, but I do maintain that a life of only being told what to think and then striving to be seen thinking it for the sake of anonymous approval from the digital gallery might not be much of a life either....
Which has to do with the rather meandering focus of the piece above.
According to its headline, chosen as such by our gracious host here, this is an essay about sanctions against Russia during the current war in Ukraine, which it is but kinda-not-really.
But what it's really about is a theme I have maintained throughout most of what I have written, in any format, over the course of this war: considering the source.
Taken as its own three-word imperative, 'consider the source' is probably most commonly used as a taunt, meaning that because of who has said a thing, that thing is not worth listening to.
But this is not what I mean at all. To consider the source of any form of communication is to, well, give it consideration, in a larger process of maintaining and updating a responsible point of view. Given that no source will ever be fully immune from its own biases, the point is to take these biases into account and factor them into a worthy assessment of the points the source is seeking to make.
Taken as such the topic of sanctions against Russia in itself is as much an exercise of this process as it meant as a topic to be examined as though it were in a vacuum all to itself. It is not.
Sanctions are in effect acts of war undertaken by other means, to paraphrase an aphorism. Seen as such these means bear examination not only as to their moral justification, but also as to their effectiveness in achieving what amount to warlike aims.
Have sanctions damaged or diminished the Russian state's war efforts against Ukraine? One guess is as good as another on that question, but potential answers may be found by inserting another aphorism, that for every measure there is a countermeasure.
To assume that the Kremlin regime has no such countermeasures at its disposal is to assume that those conducting the war against Ukraine must be... stupid. Which is why I drifted on into the other sub-topic of the essay, the hazards of assuming in any conflict that the opponent is an idiot, whose very humanity, when considering the sources of its actions in that light, must not be worthy of consideration at all. Call them all orcs who watch too much state TV and beat their wives, and deny them access to parts for their auto-assembly plants, that'll teach those katsaps to go starting wars, this rather tortuous logic seems to go.
And meanwhile, just yesterday I read another lengthy and quite detailed research piece, again from Novaya Gazeta and again first published in Russian, on how these sanctions might be the best thing to ever happen for the Chinese automotive industry (what, those chinks can make cars???), which has in many ways begun to utterly dominate both the manufacturing and sales sectors of the Russian car market. Who'd a thunk it? A countermeasure, and a whole new set of unintended consequences to go along with it, and the war carries right on uninterrupted.
If it is, according to the trendy urban legends which social media is best at distributing, 'only a matter of time before Russia collapses', how much time does anyone think residents of Kherson have, for instance, as their recently-liberated city is systematically dismantled by Russian shelling every single day from right across the Dnipro? (I read about that, from yet another Russian-language source doing frontline journalism once again putting its western counterparts to shame, and bothered to translate it from the Russian.)
Enough time for the neo-cold-warriors along the Potomac to finally crawl out from their 1962-vintage bomb shelters and undertake to help Ukraine WIN this war, on Ukraine's terms? This is the very obstacle the Ukrainian state has to navigate every single day in its foreign relations: a growing body count of their own people, while their 'allies' sit around gambling on the effect of sanctions in magically causing the 'collapse' of a nation they are too scared of to just stand up to.
Ukraine is standing up, in a way the USA and NATO never have toward Moscow: toe to toe with the enemy and fighting back with everything they have, and yes, needing more still to get the job DONE. As meanwhile, US-NATO policy-dithering on the questions of arms supplies being determined primarily by some nuclear threat which may or may not even exist from the Kremlin, pretty much amount to a whole other form of sanctions, against Ukraine itself. Are their people expendable too?