Especially if you’re Russian

I get the sentiment that the Russian people are responsible for their government. But repression in Russia goes far beyond “a couple of arrests and beatdowns” - they are openly killing people, torturing them, putting them in labor camps and throwing them behind bars for years or decades for very minor stuff.

I have a lot to discuss there, yet I won’t, as this topic may be easily driven into a pit when we consider too many things in that complex and maddening situation.

From the european pov it’s needed to take out agency from individual russians and see only the state calling the shots. Because it is. And it really doesn’t matter how many of them do believe the myth, how many are pushed by the guns to their backs, they still shoot and dig trenches.

There is no use of going deeper as long as this power structure persists. And the time for protests and opposition is long gone by that point. The only thing to make one’s empathy matter and for russians to get a hold of their state is to first crush the cancer core of putinism. It’s not someone other’s responsibility to make their state right, yeah, but they can’t do it themselves, and as it exists now it is a threat to others, so for many eliminating it’d be a guranantee of their own safety first and foremost. That’s in their own interest, even if they’d want to put a 3m concrete wall around that cursed place after that.

Being a russian myself* I find it’s heartwarming to see others empathising with my folks on some basic human level and that’s alright, it’s healthy, but it misleads them from wanting to stop this state from butchering another country. Let’s see it as a monolithical structure instead because it acts as a one. For if russians can’t have a saying and aren’t even informed, that’s only their state to be worth of targeting.

Deciding on who threw their sieg hail and who didn’t can wait until this war finally ends.

* As a proof, a phrase in c2 Russian: Я смотрел как её распидорашенное в мясо лицо собиралось по деталям роботом-хирургом. Он щедро лил биоклейстер на стыках тканей стараясь собрать эту головоломку, и работал тонко. Только я знал, что как бы тонко он ни работал с её ошмётками, оставшимися после выстрела, она непременно разобьёт первое зеркало в котором себя увидит. В нём она уже не увидит себя.

Unfortunately I am identifying more and more with the Russians. It’s becoming increasingly clear that most of my fellow citizens are not interested in the fact that we are slipping into autocracy/idiocracy, and it is also affecting my motivation to do something about it. Maybe in 20 years I will be so resigned to the situation that I allow them to send my son for slaughter.

Sorry, really depressed in the moment. Also, Slavs Ukraine for setting the best example possible at the moment.

So when are you next personally using direct action to halt arms sales to Israel?

Leave it to the chickenhawks to make big, sweeping statements in support of a war they’ll never have to fight themselves.

“volunteers”. Press gangs are real.

It is a national emergency and most front line fighters are not volunteers. Russians are not, either, but most are willing because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking Ukraine shouldn’t exist.