Understanding the war not as arising out of systemic contradictions that determined objective interests cutting across the whole post-Soviet space and globally, but out of the idiosyncrasies of a very narrow clique or just Putin alone, facilitated by the regressive dynamics of a personalist regime, casts the war, of course, as much easier to prevent. And if it was conceivable to prevent it from within Russia by more collective action, then all Russians share collective responsibility.
I am ruminating about living in a German state where large numbers of people show such anxiety about the political choices of their neighbors that they openly call for criminalizing a political party which garners one quarter of the national vote. Each day’s headlines carry bellicose illegal nonsensical threats by a seeming madman bully in the American White House. The UK’s prime ministers enter and exit government through what seems to now be well-oiled revolving doors. And the media of these societies apportions guilt for the war in Ukraine to Russian citizens, who are apparently assumed to bear a responsibility for their state’s actions which German, British, and US citizens do not seem to feel they bear for the actions of their own respective states.
At a book club meeting yesterday several people commented on it being somewhat unusual for a group to meet and discuss non-fiction. It was a brief, light-hearted flicker of conversation here, nothing “heavy” 😀 but the observation was made that it sometimes seemed to the group that people had lost the ability to rationally discuss, argue, persuade about serious topics without conversation degenerating into emotional attacks. This does not seem an environment which sees itself as carrying much civic burden.