by framersqool:
A link to the IMDB video of Breaking Point: - The War for Democracy in Ukraine
Including this video does not imply any endorsement of what it has to say. Nor do I offer it as any kind of proof or evidence or affirmation of any component of Ukraine's official position on its own historic events.
It is, there is no other word to describe it, propaganda.
I don't know who was ever really behind this production, whose money was invested in making it nor what their stipulations on its contents may have been, who selected the interviewees nor what contents may have been left out as unfit to uphold the narrative; what I do know is that it is very well-made propaganda, that it makes a strong pitch for a particular point of view, that it relies on a standard docudrama recipe of incitement to moral outrage against the Bad Guys combined with a scripted spirit of heroism in the Good Guys. And most of all, that any time people know there's a camera pointed at them, they put on a show, one which may reveal much about the truth of the events thus captured, or perhaps enshroud them in a special brand of lies. Or both.
And, that wisdom dictates that we remember there isn't much of a way to tell the difference.
So then, am I 'pro-Ukraine' in all this?
Not particularly. I hardly know anything about the place, for as much as I have tried to catch up since February about a part of the world I had theretofore, like most of the world, regarded as just another former Soviet republic, maybe even as Russian as Russia itself. A breakaway province, a secession movement, or even as the Kremlin insists, a colony of CIA adventurism and NATO expansionism.
I have a feeling all those views are just simplistic western cliches, and that what is really going on doesn't even translate into terms we would understand.
I've been trying to work out what has motivated me for all these years in trying to decode the Cold War, along with its historic antecedents as well as its post-1991 aftermath. I do know it was stupid and naive and the worst kind of wishful thinking to have ever bought into this 'end of history' nonsense, just because some fat old drunk climbed on a tank in the middle of a riot and gave a speech.
This was tempting for me, too. Events in my own life made it a path of lesser resistance for me to mostly abandon my own interest in current world affairs back around then, mostly inspired by the extreme anxiety that Desert Storm had set off in me, even though I could never articulate why, to anyone, and least of all myself.
I'm trying to think of a way to explain what the night when the bombing of Baghdad started in January '91 did to me. It was not pretty, the way I acted that night, and yes, personal matters played a hand in it. But I became overwhelmed with a dreadful sense that a terrible error was being made, that historic events were being set in motion for generations to come by that colossally stupid and inauthentic decision to drag my country into a war that had zero to do with any genuine American 'interests'. And the past three decades of our history have not proven that purely instinctive feeling wrong.
We never knew what we were dealing with regarding the Soviet Union, from its very beginnings even as the doughboys were setting off for the trenches of France in 1917, and we still don't have a clue what we are facing in this Putin creature, nor what his regime's intentions or true capabilities consist of.
But I can single out the one time I ever agreed with that drooling idiot of an imposter Ronald Reagan, even though as always he was just reading the script someone handed him, from the epic 1980s adventure 'Frank Capra Goes to Washington' which he had been selected to star in:
'evil empire'
But not for the reasons he was selling. I doubt that towering mediocrity ever knew a tenth, a hundredth, of what I now know of Russia's history, or even of what I did while he was still being propped up in the White House.
Something about the most vast rural backwater on earth, blessed with unimaginable natural resources but cursed for centuries with a happenstance of shorelines too damn far north and too few warm-water harbors to join in the bonanza of global trade since the time of Magellan, has long since bred mindsets and folkways in her people which seem to have become stuck in a far-distant past. Along with so many thousands of miles of remote, indefensible and ill-defined borders, with permanent enemies on the other side along every inch of them, this unparalleled condition of vast wealth, attended to by staggering poverty and ignorance, has held Russia in a state of continual feudalism, run by local bosses who salute whatever flag keeps them in power in their own territories, and indulge in a kind of evil entirely unknown to us in the cosmopolitan 'west', because they can and because if they ever knew any better, it offers them no profits to show it.
Putin is no dictator. The ladies who scrub the Kremlin floors know Russia better than he ever has, and the bosses who run their turfs across eleven time zones and from central Asia to the Arctic have far more power over his regime than he does. He was a low-level KGB propagandist-apparatchik of no particular achievements, who was hand-picked by vestigial interests of a failed communist-party coup who had since grown opulently wealthy on western opportunism in their country, who propped him up to assume power when no one else wanted it, mostly because he is such a narcissistic sociopath that he could always be counted on to play the part of an autocrat because he believed it himself. His job is to keep the bosses rolling in the fat of the land, and the people too ignorant and superstitious to want for anything better.
So whatever it is the Ukrainian people ever hoped for out of their own independence from Russia, I certainly can't say I blame them. But whatever it is they expect to construct by way of their own nation instead, I don't take their propaganda at face value any more than Russia's. They seem like very nice people, maybe more prone to a self-image of noble sacrifice and brave heroism in each others' behalf, re-written out of their Cossack heritage, than we really grasp, but certainly as loving and loyal toward their own kinfolk as anyone.
They kind of remind me of the American-born but historically pre-United-States Chicanopeople of New Mexico, and are probably every bit as prone to duplicity and corruption, anchored in secretive antique codes of clan loyalties, as the American southwest's own version of a landlocked Sicily.
But this affectation of being more European than Europe itself just doesn't add up. Maybe the new Ukrainian middle class feels this way, a tiny minority mostly to be found west of the Dnipro, but Ukraine is still as much an ancient rural backwater as Russia in many ways. But they do have those lovely warm-water harbors, and Muscovy has coveted these in quite bloody fashion since the Mongols.
So did the Third Reich: Ukrainian farmlands plus Ukrainian ports were the whole meaning of lebensraum.
I expect there are a lot more reasons than any American could ever grasp for why the EU and NATO, and all the other mishmash of European edificial attempts at unity, have dragged their feet over ever really embracing Ukraine as just another European state.
As it is, Hungary isn't really playing ball with this 'united states of Europe' daydream, while Kosovo and Serbia might explode into a whole new Balkan war any day now. Italy keeps right on being, well, run by Italians, and the Greece-Turkey thing is the powderkeg it always has been; I doubt there really is much enthusiasm for Ukraine being added to that chaotic mess passing as 'union.'
What this documentary has to sell is an idea, that a couple of long-term protests in Kyiv, and the supposed 'revolution of dignity' the second one was re-branded into after it turned violent, which of course was never the fault of the protesters according to the protesters, plus some volunteer militias that got off a few shots to the east before being routed and massacred, all adds up to a template for nationhood.
The film, released in 2017, does indeed for today's viewer portray a sort of eerily prophetic sense, as things have indeed gotten a whole lot worse for Ukraine in terms of its dealings with Russia, since then.
But you won't see me going all 'Slava Ukrain' over it. I sympathize with any people whose country is invaded and whose innocent civilians are targeted with atrocities, but none of that has anything to do with my endorsing some formula of nationhood.
I mean yeah, any head of state who shows up at the White House in fatigues and a sweatshirt to dictate terms to the President of the United States, then holds the entire Congress spellbound in the worst English ever spoken before that august body, certainly has my respect as a performer, even as a diplomat.
But meanwhile, his party has a chokehold on power in the legislature back home, and his recent moves of nationalizing industries and implementing stringent censorship laws might leave him with a lot more fans out our way than he has left back home. His is a martial-law wartime administration, and his public presence on the world stage has built him up into a personality cult, which may have little to do with what sort of domestic leadership he provides.
It might actually prove more about Ukraine's sincerity in its national ambitions, to vote him right out of office and carry right on with this war, than it would to allow yet another portrait of yet another post-Soviet eastern European strongman to come to define government itself.
I like the guy, he's got moxie, and he's certainly proven himself the right man for the moment. But he's just a man, and I can't ever long forget that like Reagan, he is primarily an entertainer by trade.
I watched another feature film last night, a fiction piece about life behind Russian lines in Donbass between the 2014 occupation and the 2022 invasion. It was one of the most disturbing and bizarre pieces of surreal wartime drama I ever saw, on the level of A Clockwork Orange. The whole thing was about staged attacks, actors hired to recite scripts for the TV news crews, and separatist soldiers firing on separatist targets intentionally, to blame it all on the pro-Ukraine side.
And it was all produced right in Zelensky's home town of Kryvyi Rih, just north of Kherson, before he ever became president, while his stock in trade was still as a media mogul.
Huh.
So yes, it is the very meaning of evil for Russia to have invaded Ukraine.
It was no less evil for the USA to have invaded Mexico, the Black Hills, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. I see parallels every day, between Russia's Ukraine policies post-'91, and Manifest Destiny in seizing most of the modern USA's territory.
This is the hardest thing of all to try and explain: being pro-Ukraine doesn't even enter into it for me.
I am so anti-empire on the deepest principles in my soul, that I had an anxiety attack lasting several hours over the first night of Desert Storm, and have only concealed my visceral disgust over all the imperialist adventures DC has indulged in ever since, out of etiquette, and a certain understanding that cursing veterans for serving their country just doesn't lend itself to neighborly relations in this one.
It isn't even that I'm anti-Russia. I am anti-imperialism, inclusive of all empires.
Where that leaves me as an American has been an exercise in self-preserving diplomacy among my own countrymen for thirty-two years now. And the fact that 'the Russian people' haven't stopped this or learned to be more democratic is kind of a moot point, when my own people haven't restrained the impulses of empire, nor have a democratic bone in their collective body politic, either.
Sure, I want Ukraine to win, it's only right.
But by making the American empire stronger and more prestigious than ever in the world, I can't say I'm in favor of that.
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
Thanks for running this; I had written it some weeks back and almost forgotten about it, and now in reviewing the text I find to my relief that my own views have remained fairly consistent since then.
To your credit, Clayton, or maybe owing to some cage-rattling iconoclastic impulse similar to my own, we can probably both count on this not attracting the most enthusiastic of endorsements from either camp of American spectators of this war. Neither the ones who hang on the every word of pro-Ukraine propaganda as though it were scripture, nor the ones among the Trump-Carlson crew who would endorse a rancid ham sandwich if it made the correct anti-Biden noises for their purposes.
For me this war has presented a fascinating, continually challenging and entirely frustrating opportunity to continue my studies in the arts of propaganda itself.
One of my favorite academic quotes of all time comes from a book, written decades ago, about the history of the Bolshevik movement and its evolution into the first communist party-state in history. Without quoting it here verbatim, what author Leonard Schapiro points out is how the whole theory behind the Stalin cult's propaganda had nothing to do with persuading anyone to any particular point of view; its intent, rather, was always to instruct and update a captive audience among Soviet citizens on the particulars of what it is safe to be heard saying, from one day to the next, to such an effective extent that for anyone to hear something being said which goes against this fluid and ever-changing Party Line set off what he describes as 'a jarring dissonance' in their minds.
And as I have been observing for decades now in this idiotic spectacle of addictive-compulsive behavior known popularly as 'social media', it seems that the ultimate addiction for many is this very jarring dissonance, as a sensation in itself to be indulged in.
Scanning contents for views which depart from one's own preferred faction's utterances is about being confronted with that thrilling sense of moral outrage, whenever someone dares to depart from the current Groupthink, as though coming unglued when someone sticks their head up and speaks for themselves were the same thing as being 'on the right side of history', or at least close enough from a position of comfort and safety to enjoy the thrill of the feeling.
One cannot meaningfully interpret propaganda merely on a basis of whether its contents are truthful, or lies. Propaganda at its most effective utilizes both, interchangeably. The more instructive view is to look carefully at what feelings the contents incite, and then question one's own reactions mercilessly to determine whether the feeling is indeed what one actually feels, or is a reaction engineered to simulate a feeling, so convincingly that one might easily mistake it for a genuinely held belief.
For long enough to serve the propagandist's purpose, until the next version of whichever Party Line is delivered to them for their updated instruction, that is.
Don't believe everything you think you think, just because someone, anyone, has presented you with some very moving propaganda telling you what is the correct thing to think you think.
Better to, as our host might agree, Think Things Through.....