Putin's complaint is not NATO, it is with the idea that Slavic nations do not need dictators to run their own affairs. He's making bad analogies
One of the obscene ideas I heard bandied about in the cloud of whataboutism and whataboutery is that there is supposedly some sort of genetic predisposition for Slavic peoples to "need" bone crushing despotic rulers in order to 'keep them in line'. This is similar to trollips as to Asians allegedly having an affinity for killer despots due to the alleged tendency of Asian workers being very hard to 'boss' around, and needing a merciless despot to 'control' things. I am certain that the people of North Korea really appreciate , NOT, this trollip, and that the example of South Korea, warts and all is a pretty direct answer. But in case you missed it, this meme is broadcast daily by Vladimir Putin.
Now see this
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Russia’s apparent lack of concern over Finland’s NATO accession raises obvious questions about the validity of Vladimir Putin’s?efforts ?to portray the invasion of Ukraine as a reasonable response to creeping NATO enlargement. If Putin genuinely felt NATO posed a security threat to Russia, he could have attempted to derail Finland’s membership bid via a combination of diplomatic and military pressure. At the very least, he could have dramatically increased the Russian army presence in the region. Instead, he did next to nothing.
During the period since Helsinki’s May 2022 NATO application, Moscow has largely limited itself to grumbling about the accession process. At the same time, Russia has reportedly withdrawn up to 80% of its forces from the Finnish border zone. “The drawdown we’ve seen from this region in the past seven months is very significant. Russia had this ground force posture facing us for decades that is now effectively just gone,” a senior Nordic defense official told?Foreign Policy ?in September 2022.
Kremlin officials have since reacted to confirmation of Finnish membership by?vowing ?to strengthen Russia’s military potential in the border area, but this belated bluster merely serves to highlight how underwhelming Russia’s overall response has been. The contrast with Moscow’s devastating use of force in nearby Ukraine could hardly be greater.
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In a word, the entire rationale for the Putin invasion has been really anchored on a racist interpretation of Slavic humanity, and more which means that the entire harping over NATO is merely goose for the gander
The next time you hear this, just remember apologists for Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and the alleged 'necessity' of a despotic family cult centered upon Juche , i.e. 'self reliance' which is merely another way of saying that N. Koreans are genetically programmed to need slave labor camps and worse. Its the same rationale which is bandied about by Putin and it has an obvious answer, as in both N. Korea and in Ukraine
and here is the ideology, which Putin wants to cement on both Ukraine and Russia
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Juche, which roughly translates as “self-reliance,” is an odd blend of several different ideas. It borrows much of its language from Marxism but also draws on Confucianism, 20th-century Japanese imperialism, and traditional Korean nationalism. Its core idea is that North Korea is a country that must remain separate and distinct from the world, dependent solely on its own strength and the guidance of a near-godlike leader.
The doctrine’s meaning has shifted over time, depending on the needs of the North Korean leadership. It’s not actually clear how much of it North Korea’s leadership actually believes and how much of it is simple propaganda. But experts on North Korea believe that the country’s indoctrination into juche ideology is profound and deep, with an unknown-but-significant number of ordinary North Koreans actually believing its loopiest claims.
“Of course they [believe it],” says David Kang, a North Korea expert at the University of Southern California. “I always object to putting in terms such as brainwashing, because every society has rituals and cultures and norms and values ... when they’re very clear, and everyone else is doing them, you just do it too.”
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Well, remember how in the 1950s Stalinists told their people that RUSSIA developed manned flight before anyone else ?
Some things never change
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NATO poses a threat to Russian imperialism not Russian security
FILTER RESULTS
Finland has just become the thirty-first member of?NATO ?and the silence from across the border in Russia is deafening. For more than a year, the Kremlin has been using the distant prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership to justify the largest European conflict since World War II. In stark contrast, Moscow has offered virtually no resistance whatsoever to neighboring Finland joining the alliance, despite the fact that this has more than doubled the length of NATO’s shared border with Russia.
Russia’s apparent lack of concern over Finland’s NATO accession raises obvious questions about the validity of Vladimir Putin’s?efforts ?to portray the invasion of Ukraine as a reasonable response to creeping NATO enlargement. If Putin genuinely felt NATO posed a security threat to Russia, he could have attempted to derail Finland’s membership bid via a combination of diplomatic and military pressure. At the very least, he could have dramatically increased the Russian army presence in the region. Instead, he did next to nothing.
During the period since Helsinki’s May 2022 NATO application, Moscow has largely limited itself to grumbling about the accession process. At the same time, Russia has reportedly withdrawn up to 80% of its forces from the Finnish border zone. “The drawdown we’ve seen from this region in the past seven months is very significant. Russia had this ground force posture facing us for decades that is now effectively just gone,” a senior Nordic defense official told?Foreign Policy ?in September 2022.
Kremlin officials have since reacted to confirmation of Finnish membership by?vowing ?to strengthen Russia’s military potential in the border area, but this belated bluster merely serves to highlight how underwhelming Russia’s overall response has been. The contrast with Moscow’s devastating use of force in nearby Ukraine could hardly be greater.
Why has Putin remained so calm over the NATO membership of one neighbor while waging a major war over the unlikely NATO aspirations of another? After all, even with the Russian army heavily committed in Ukraine, Putin still has vast additional military, diplomatic, cyber, and economic resources at his disposal and could conceivably have opposed Finland’s NATO bid in a wide range of ways. This inconsistency has little to do with legitimate security concerns. Instead, it reflects the unapologetic imperialism that shapes Putin’s personal worldview and defines modern Russia’s national identity.
Ever since the early years of his reign, Putin has made no secret of his bitterness over the Soviet collapse, which he has always viewed as a Russian defeat. In 2005, when he famously?referred ?to the disintegration of the USSR as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he stressed that it was a tragedy for “the Russian people” and the millions of Russians who suddenly found themselves living beyond Russia’s borders in newly independent countries such as Ukraine. Putin went even further in 2021,?lamenting ?the fall of the USSR as “the collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.” In other words, he regards the entire Soviet era as a continuation of the Czarist Russian Empire, and sees the settlement of 1991 as anything but final.
Putin’s sense of historical injustice has led to an unhealthy obsession with Ukraine, which he insists is an?inherent ?part of historical Russia that has been subjected to artificial separation. He is fond of claiming that Ukrainians are in fact Russians (“one people”), and took the unusual but revealing step in July 2021 of publishing a lengthy?essay ?arguing against the legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood.
This fixation has been further fueled by fears that the emergence of a democratic Ukraine could serve as a catalyst for similar changes inside Russia itself. Putin remains haunted by the pro-democracy uprisings that swept Central Europe in the late 1980s while he was a young KGB officer in East Germany, and views modern Ukraine’s embrace of democracy as a direct threat to his own authoritarian regime. It is no coincidence that in the buildup to last year’s invasion, Putin began referring to Ukraine as an intolerable “anti-Russia.”
Over the past 13 months of full-scale war, Putin’s imperial objectives in Ukraine have become increasingly evident. Has has compared his invasion to the eighteenth century imperial conquests of Russian Czar?Peter the Great , and has repeatedly spoken of returning?historical Russian lands ?while attempting to annex four partially occupied Ukrainian regions representing almost 20% of the war-torn country. Meanwhile, his army has imposed brutal policies of russification throughout occupied Ukraine, complete with summary executions, forced deportations, the suppression of Ukrainian national symbols, and widespread use of torture against anyone deemed a potential opponent of Russian rule.
EURASIA CENTER EVENTS
Putin’s imperialistic views on Ukraine are regarded as uncontroversial by domestic Russian audiences. While public enthusiasm for the invasion may vary, many Russians share Putin’s rejection of Ukrainian statehood, while millions appear comfortable embracing an unambiguously imperial agenda. However, such messaging would be disastrous on the international stage. To counter this, Putin has sought to frame the invasion of Ukraine as a defensive measure by emphasizing Russia’s longstanding grievances over NATO’s post-1991 enlargement.
This approach has played well in an international climate colored by anti-Western sentiment and widespread suspicion of America’s dominant role in global affairs. Over the past year or so, the NATO expansion argument has proved easily the most effective of the multiple narratives promoted by the Kremlin to defend the invasion. While international audiences have remained largely unconvinced by Russian attempts to portray the war as a fight against everything from Western?cancel culture ?to?Satanists ?and fictitious “Ukrainian Nazis ,” Moscow’s accusations toward NATO have resonated around the world. Kremlin claims of NATO responsibility for the war have been echoed by everyone from Chinese President?Xi Jinping ?to prominent?Western academics ?and even?Pope Francis .
The success of Russia’s NATO expansion narrative has distorted international perceptions of what is the most brazen example of European aggression since the days of Hitler and Stalin. It has encouraged many commentators to view the war as a clash between two competing superpowers rather than a genocidal invasion by an expansionist empire. This has naturally impacted efforts to end the war, with calls to help Ukraine defend itself often met by demands for NATO to deescalate.
In reality, Russia’s accusations regarding NATO involvement in Ukraine have never stood up to serous scrutiny. Far from pursuing Ukraine, the alliance actually sidestepped calls to grant the country a Membership Action Plan in 2008, settling instead for vague promises of future membership. NATO has consistently refused to revise this position, even after the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine with the 2014 seizure of Crimea. On the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, Ukraine was widely recognized as being decades away from potentially joining NATO.
The Kremlin has argued that even without Ukrainian membership, any deepening of cooperation between NATO and Ukraine represents an unacceptable security threat. However, this conveniently ignores the existing NATO status of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which border Russia. The three Baltic states are just as close to Moscow as Ukraine, and have been full members of the alliance for almost two decades without any major incident.
The Kremlin’s passive acceptance of Finnish accession has now further undermined Russian attempts to pose as victims of NATO aggression. After insisting for years that NATO’s largely imaginary presence in Ukraine posed an existential threat to Russia, Moscow must explain why the recent advance of the alliance to Russia’s 1,340 km Finnish border is so comparatively inconsequential. They may wish to present a very different picture to international audiences, but Putin and his Kremlin colleagues clearly recognize that any talk of a NATO attack on Russia is absurd.
This is not to say that Russian displeasure over NATO enlargement is entirely manufactured. On the contrary, Moscow’s objections are real enough, but they are rooted in resentment rather than genuine security concerns. The Kremlin’s frustration over the expanding presence of the alliance is not difficult to understand. While NATO poses no plausible security threat to Russia itself, it does create major obstacles for Russian imperialism. Put simply, NATO prevents Russia from bullying its neighbors.
This should provide critics of NATO enlargement with food for thought. Opponents have long accused the alliance of provoking Russia by welcoming countries from the former Eastern Bloc, but it is now painfully apparent that the decision to keep Ukraine internationally isolated was actually far more provocative in practice. Indeed, the security guarantees that come with NATO membership are probably the only reason why we are not currently confronted by an even larger war and further Russian invasions. Unless Ukraine can secure similar security guarantees, a lasting peace in Eastern Europe will likely remain elusive.
Peter Dickinson is Editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert Service.
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And see this about Juche
领英推荐
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Juche, the state ideology that makes North Koreans revere Kim Jong Un, explained
The North Korean ideology supports the claim that the country cured AIDS and invented the hamburger.
By?Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp [email protected] ??Jun 18, 2018, 8:30am EDT
Zack Beauchamp ?is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. Before coming to Vox in 2014, he edited TP Ideas, a section of Think Progress devoted to the ideas shaping our political world.
There are some things about North Korea, as a society and government, that seem almost too strange to be believed. It’s a country where thousands of people celebrate their weddings in front of a statue of its first leader,?Kim Il Sung , as a kind of quasi-religious ritual. It is an official belief that the state’s second leader, Kim Jong Il,?invented the hamburger ?(or “double bread with meat,“ as it‘s referred to there). Under Kim Jong Un, the North Korean government has claimed to have developed a wonder drug that can cure both?AIDS and Ebola .
North Korea’s repressive government survives in no small part because it has convinced its people of the legitimacy of its government. As hard as it may be for Americans to grasp, millions of North Koreans appear to truly believe their government’s pronouncements. And the tool the state has used to convince of them of these ideas is a unique official philosophy called “juche” (pronounced JOO-chay).
Juche, which roughly translates as “self-reliance,” is an odd blend of several different ideas. It borrows much of its language from Marxism but also draws on Confucianism, 20th-century Japanese imperialism, and traditional Korean nationalism. Its core idea is that North Korea is a country that must remain separate and distinct from the world, dependent solely on its own strength and the guidance of a near-godlike leader.
The doctrine’s meaning has shifted over time, depending on the needs of the North Korean leadership. It’s not actually clear how much of it North Korea’s leadership actually believes and how much of it is simple propaganda. But experts on North Korea believe that the country’s indoctrination into juche ideology is profound and deep, with an unknown-but-significant number of ordinary North Koreans actually believing its loopiest claims.
“Of course they [believe it],” says David Kang, a North Korea expert at the University of Southern California. “I always object to putting in terms such as brainwashing, because every society has rituals and cultures and norms and values ... when they’re very clear, and everyone else is doing them, you just do it too.”
Grappling with juche, as well as Kim Jong Un‘s innovation on its core ideas, is actually quite important to grasping what Kim wants from the world. And it helps explain why Kim is suddenly trying to play nice with both President Donald Trump and the world.
North Korea’s ideas may be weird. But that’s doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them seriously.
Juche turns Kim into a godlike figure
From its inception, juche has meant more or less whatever the North Korean government needed it to mean.
In the 1950s, North Korea was in a tough situation both politically and economically. It was a poor Marxist country located near the world’s two largest socialist states: the Soviet Union and China.
Those two countries didn’t always see eye to eye. But Pyongyang couldn’t afford to alienate either of them by seeming to align itself more with one than the other; as a result, it couldn’t fully adopt the Soviet Union’s Stalinist ideology, nor could it take up China’s Maoism.
It also was a young country, with a dubious claim to legitimacy — it was one half of the formerly united Korea — and its new leader actually grew up in the Soviet Union. Juche, as developed by Kim Il Sung and his cronies, was designed to solve both of these problems.
The initial juche ideal of “self-reliance” centered on three elements: ideological autonomy, economic self-sufficiency, and military independence from imperial influence. These ideas were never implemented literally — North Korea‘s economy depended heavily on aid from the Soviets, in particular — but were useful diplomatically. By elevating autonomy as an ideal over all things, North Korea could claim to be fully aligned with neither the Soviets nor the Chinese.
Domestically, juche served to connect Kim Il Sung and the nascent North Korean state to ideas that would resonate with ordinary Koreans. It paired the Marxist language of the country’s communist patrons with?traditional Korean nationalism , arguing that South Korea was not a legitimate government because it was the tool of imperialist-capitalist foreign powers like the United States.
It also developed a doctrine of?Korean racial purity , drawing on historically Korean beliefs and language used by Japanese imperialists, to argue against opening up to the global economy. Even today, North Koreans are still taught that?the first humans emerged there , and that part of the reason they’re superior to other countries is that they’ve preserved their purity while others have become mongrels.
Perhaps most interestingly, juche modified a traditional Confucian doctrine — that human beings can transform the world if they possess the correct mindset — to explain why Kim Il Sung deserved the Korean people’s respect. Juche holds that the only the possessor of truly correct consciousness is the “suryong” (leader) of North Korea. Kim was?so uniquely gifted , so incredibly accomplished, that the only way to make one’s life better was to align your own will with that of the suryong’s.
“Human beings don’t need God. They now have the Kim family,” as Don Baker, a scholar of Korean philosophy at the University of British Columbia, summarizes it.
This is why North Koreans visit statues of Kim Il Sung when they get married, and why North Korean state propaganda attributes nearly divine power to its leaders (both Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un have reportedly altered the weather on the country’s quasi-sacred mountain, Mt. Paektu,?simply by visiting it ).
Juche ideology demands total fealty to the leader. But to convince people they also owe fealty to the state required something even more profound than a cult of personality around the Kims: a set of rituals and beliefs that amounted to a form of religion.?State media ?literally refers to the tomb where Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are interred as the “the sacred temple of juche.”
Because North Korea has such tight controls over the information its people get, most of them have no way of knowing that their state religion isn’t exactly supported by the facts. There is no such thing as an independent media in North Korea, aside from what people can glean from secretly consuming foreign media. With citizens completely in the dark about the world, dependent almost wholly on state-run media for information, it’s quite easy to convince people that the Kim family can perform nearly divine feats.
The vagueness of juche as a political philosophy — self-reliance can mean practically anything — combined with media control and the elevation of the suryong to near-divine status serves to give the Kims incredible policy flexibility. The policies that are necessary to achieve “self-reliance” are entirely up to the will of the member of the Kim family in power.
“I don’t think it’s a series of precepts, like a Bible or something,“ says Kang. “Juche is some kind of loosy-goosey thing that can be deployed however the leader wants.”
You saw this very clearly under Kim Jong Il’s rule. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, North Korea lost its primary source of food aid, which led to a?massive and devastating famine . So Kim Jong Il developed an addendum to traditional juche, which he called songun (or “military first”).
Songun held that to be self-reliant and independent, North Korea needed a strong military first and foremost. This served as the state’s justification for feeding soldiers before ordinary citizens, something Kim needed to do to avoid risking a military coup.
Songun also served to justify the state’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Though its nuclear program incurred international condemnation and sanctions that hurt the economy, Kim argued that it was worth it in order to secure the state’s military independence. The Korean people had to suffer for the Korean nation to survive.
Songun didn’t supersede juche, which remains the official state ideology. Instead, it’s more like an interpretation of its doctrines — one tailored to fit the needs of the North Korean government at the time.
Why juche matters for understanding the Trump-Kim diplomacy
Given the fundamental vagueness of juche, and the way it changes based on what the regime requires, it’s tempting to say that juche is mostly irrelevant to North Korean politics.
But the North Korea experts I spoke to say this isn’t quite right.?How?the current suryong interprets juche, and the ways he explains its precepts to his people, is actually quite significant.
“Every ideology is malleable,” John Ishiyama, a political scientist at the University of Texas, tells me. “There are, however, parameters.”
In 2013, Kim Jong Un‘s second year in power, he developed his own school of juche thought —?“byungjin” ?(“side by side”). The basic idea of byungjin was dual-track development: building up the economy and the military equally, without prioritizing one over the other. This was an abandonment of songun, though Pyongyang would never put it in those terms, in favor of a renewed emphasis on economic development.
Once Kim announced the byungjin line, actual economic development became vitally important. While his father and grandfather argued that Koreans needed to suffer for the nation to survive, thus allowing the economy to remain stagnant, Kim Jong Un argued that the North Korean people deserved higher living standards.
All of a sudden, the basic legitimacy of juche is bound up in the state actually delivering on its economic promises. Even a controlled media architecture can’t convince people that they aren’t starving when they are.
“He’s telling his people a story: I care about you, and you should not be hungry anymore,” Kang, the USC expert, explains. “There’s only so long you can go down that line without it affecting what people want you to do ... he’s really staked his claim on being able to move the [economic] needle.”
This doesn’t mean that if Kim fails to secure economic benefits in the near term, there will be a revolt against the government. It does mean, though, that Kim runs the risk of unrest and dissent, even from his own top advisers, if he fails to follow through on his new version of juche.
So Kim has embarked on a project of economic reform, incrementally lifting restrictions on owning private property and foreign investment, to spur economic growth without sacrificing the most fundamental juche ideals of self-reliance and independence from foreign control.
“They want development — but they want it their way,” explains Joshua Pollack, a North Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “That includes trade and investment but carefully controlled.”
The byungjin line partly explains Kim’s outreach to Trump: The more military tension there is with the United States, the harder it will be to focus on improving the economy. When you get tweets like this, by contrast, it feels like less of a risk for foreign corporations and tourist agencies to do business with North Korea:
The summit also served a second ideological goal: reinforcing to the North Korean people that byungjin isn’t sacrificing self-reliance on the altar of prosperity.
The images circulating around?North Korean state media ?of Trump shaking hands with Kim and literally saluting North Korean generals serve as tangible proof that Kim is following through on some of the core juche ideals.
Kim has, through the strength of his nuclear arsenal, gotten an American president to sit down with him as an equal for the very first time. It shows that the byungjin line, dual military-economic development, is working at both intended goals.
“For him, [the summit was] a great propaganda coup,” says Ishiyama. “He got exactly what he wanted, which was legitimacy by meeting with the most powerful leader in the world face to face. It’s what they’ve been wanting for at least three decades.”
So while the juche ideology may be malleable, it defines the basic conditions under which the government in Pyongyang makes decisions. And, inside those parameters, Kim Jong Un has to view the diplomacy of the past week as a great success.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD