Reader Ed asks an excellent question in the post about ideology and morality:
Does modern Russia have any sort of ideology? Do Russians in Russia have any of these problems?
My mother-in-law is 76. She used to love traveling. Her younger daughter is rich, a hockey wife, and she used to sponsor her mother’s trips. She also loved gardening at her dacha.
All that has been abandoned. She now dons a military uniform and marches to the sound of military songs with other grandmas. She’s selling off her property to pay for membership in this club. She never served, never was in any wars, so it’s not a throwback to her youth. Neither is she senile. This is a woman who has options. She could be living it up in America, surrounded by her children and grandchild. She could go to any resort on the planet with the daughter who is devoted to her. Instead, she’s putting herself in the poorhouse in exchange for the privilege of singing bloodthirsty songs in uniform.
This is the Russian ideology. War is their ideology. It’s people of all ages, happy, excited, not interested in anything beyond their ideology. That Russian girl who came to teach at my department 3 years ago. She was only 24. I thought it would be possible to interest her in something. I tried very hard, took her everywhere, talked about everything. But she was glassy-eyed, happy in her ideological bliss. There was not the smallest chink in her armor. I tried to do the Christian thing, treated her with endless kindness. And I failed worse than I ever failed at anything. Her religion was stronger than mine. She had that luminous look of cult members that can’t be reached by any outside engagement.
War, war, war. Teenagers at a rave, jumping up happily to war songs, screaming slogans. And against that background, replacement migration with all its terrible stories. A migrant nanny who cut off the head of the child she was minding and walked around with that head in her hand, blood dripping on the sidewalk. Endless stories of migrant rape. Empty churches, full mosques. Political assassinations. The utter evisceration of the middle class that had barely had time to form since 1991. Nobody cares because they’ve got their war and it’s making everything else seem unimportant. Talented artists, movie stars, writers, all suddenly bloodthirsty, all wishing more war.
People who said the nation-state should go away because that will end wars were badly wrong. Neoliberal war is war without purpose because it is its own purpose. War without end because it makes every other neoliberal surprise acceptable. Fluid war in a fluid world with no morality other than raw pleasure.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Neoliberal war is war without purpose because it is its own purpose”
No russian I’ve asked can come close to actually articulating any real goal or articulate how the war will make anyone’s life (apart from a few oligarchs’) better.
But they still support it.
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That’s precisely why it’s so dangerous. There’s no end goal. There’s no victory possible after which peace would be embraced. Nation-state wars were very destructive but they always ended when the aggressor was defeated. But here there’s no plan for stopping. Because war is the entirety of the plan.
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“Because war is the entirety of the plan.”
Because they have a historic memory of being a great people; of conquering not only eastern Europe, but sizable areas of Asia. Somes Muslim radicals seem to display similar feelings.
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Yes, precisely, there’s never been any other achievement, so war is what’s left.
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People like to get behind the team. You can see this in rugby, which is basically a substitute for tribal wars, where New Zealand perform the haka (a Maori war dance) before matches.
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Thank you for answering my question Clarissa. Very informative as always.
Would it the be accurate to say that Russia’s ideology is militaristic nationalism? If that was the case, isn’t this a strong manifestation of the idea of the nation state?
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Nationalism believes that the nation is the Volk, or the people. That there’s a certain ineffable quality or essence carried by its people. That Germans have the quality of Germanness which is very different from the Spanishness of the Spaniards or the Englishness of the English. The Germanness of the Germans, in the nationalist view, arises from the shared history, culture, language and natural environment of the Germans.
No nationalist would ever – and I mean EVER – suggest swapping out the people of Germany for some other group of people and suggest that they would still be German. That’s anathema to a nationalist.
Russia is in the midst of the largest population replacement of our times. The name of a cocktail is what will remain of a white Russian soon about. That a Kyrgyz or a Chechen make a better Russian than a Russian is the opposite of nationalism. We can like it or hate it but it’s not nationalism.
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Seems so twisted. Russians are weird. Feel very bad for their neighbors that have to take the brunt of their insecurity.
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“Russia’s ideology is militaristic nationalism?”
As an outsider who tries to keep up with some things…. it’s a death cult devoted to the soviet union… (a weird kind of ancestor worship).
It’s not about building or constructing anything (a typical part of nationalism).
Here, a traitor and stooge for russians says that russia has no plans to return drinking water to Donetsk (a thriving city before russia invaded).
Now residents wait for water trucks, fight over water or try to use the brown sludge that comes from (some) taps.
The reason is they want to encourage people to move to Siberia.
A lot of russia-controlled Ukraine is full of central Asians.
The goal? there is no goal, they’re just enacting a grotesque pantomime of Soviet population transfers.
https://x.com/victoriaslog/status/1967324304657588530
Also performative cruelty is a big part of russian ideology. There are lots of videos of russian soldiers being brutalized and tortured (or killed). At one point they threw two of them in a pit and told them to fight to the death. This is how they treat their own side….
Here, a young russian shoots and kills a horse with a machine gun… for no real reason while others laugh.
https://x.com/VyshnyaOstap/status/1967721814643314995
Any questions about their ideology?
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The incident with the horse is horrible and very illustrative. There was no reason to kill the horse. There’s no additional purpose. The only purpose is to kill and destroy.
I know it’s hard to understand and people are trying to figure this out but there truly is no other purpose beyond killing and destruction.
There’s nothing one can give Russians to make them stop. Because they already have what they want. War is what they want.
What is the likelihood that Trump will figure this out in the next decade and stop embarrassing us with talks of deals?
None.
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So I understand they long for the days of the Soviet Union. But doesn’t seem like they were actually very happy back then? That’s the part I don’t understand, seems their ideology is grounded on a past that was not actually very good for them. I get that ego and feeling like a powerful nation is a huge part of their psyche.
There is something I keep thinking about that they started the war in Ukraine because they were becoming irrelevant, and that’s probably a huge wound to their collective ego. USA and the world were not paying attention to them and instead focusing on China and other areas. Then they start this massive war and all the attention is on them.
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The part about attention is spot on. After being the main focus of the American attention throughout the Cold War, suddenly they become irrelevant. It’s got to hurt.
In the USSR, there were some dissidents. Plus, the ethnics who perceived themselves as ethnic were unhappy. But these are the tiniest of minorities. Everybody else was very content. Life in totalitarianism is life with no decisions. The entire course of your life is charted out for you. Even the people who didn’t like the USSR realized they didn’t like what came after it a lot more. All the decisions, all the personal responsibility. That’s very onerous.
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cliff arroyo
Well I have hunted and fished for most of my life, one must show respect when taking a life. The idiot killing the horse was either incompetent, as in inaccurate, or an ignorantly cruel SOB.
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“ignorantly cruel SOB”
russia is one of the world leaders in the production of those…
If you go looking you can find lots and lots of videos of them engaging in incredibly vile stuff…. a guy kicking old ladies down stair cases to rob them (and kicking them again as he leaves)… and it gets worse… a lot worse….
A very big part of modern russian identity is built around senseless violence. And… they’re not embarrassed or ashamed of this. One wrote that it’s just a symptom of the infinite nature of the russian soul…
Make of that what you will…
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The term is jingoism. My country right or wrong. Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.
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