Sit Tight

On the subject of Russia’s war-obsessed youth, I recommend this article that reviews a recent book on this subject:

So we meet 19-year-old Alina from the Urals rust belt, whose timeline was once filled with make-up and nail design videos but now contains images of a burning White House in “Fashington DC” and rails against “Ukrofascists” as “rabid dogs”. Then there is Maria, a 14-year-old devotee of Putin’s Youth Army, or Yunarmiya, whose members parade in khaki fatigues and learn how to strip Kalashnikovs and prepare for nuclear attack.

If anything, Russian teenagers are much farther gone on the war than their grandparents because they don’t remember anything from before the war became fashionable. They’ve been trained up to glorify the war of extermination since birth.

The author of the article struggles with accepting this as true, let alone as the dominant phenomenon in today’s Russia. Once you realize it’s what there is – the only thing there is – it gets scary.

We sat on our asses when the country that owns the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet trained up its young to turn into a messianic cult that yearns to burn up the planet in a righteous rage. We are still mostly sitting on our asses, arguing about trivialities and navel-gazing to an extraordinary degree.