Why the f*** would #Putin try to coopt the legacy of Immanuel #Kant?
It's probably not a serious question. Maybe it's just a silly immature dunk on #Germany / #German pride. Or maybe there's something darker in Kant's writings that #Russia thinks supports recent #Russian behavior (I have no reason to believe there is, I'm just openly musing).
Either way it's certainly a bizarre new front in the conflict: #philosophy war.
@benroyce It probably makes sense, somehow, in the head of a neo-Stalinist thinker who feels like an ethnicity is an important essential aspect of a human.
@benroyce I may have ranted a couple of times about how American adoption of birth certificates was originally motivated by trying to enforce heritage and immutability of "race" on people.
Bolsheviks did the same with "ethnicity". In late thirties, at about the same time the high-ranking politicians were being Purged, the Little Peoples' "internal passport" system was amended to record everybody's ethnicity, which would be immutable, and in the later years get sort-of-inherited (although in practice, in some places, people were able to self-identity their immutable ethnicity when they got their first passport at 16).
I don't know enough about Bolshevik history to tell if this is a strong causal link, but Stalin's experience as being tin charge of the "Ethnicities Desk" in Lenin's early cabinet makes me at least wonder. Then again, using ethnic labels for people serving in the royal court goes back centuries even in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
while the st. petersburg and moscow rich russians will never fight in ukraine
it's doubly insidious because you would expect the death toll to produce discontent in russia. but there will be no effective discontent, because you've killed all the youth of the ethnic minorities in your stupid war. and russian elites don't care
@benroyce Except if they get caught protesting. Then, they can get drafted and sent to the war.
Speaking of discontent, a relatively influential movement in Russia's last few decades used to be the associations of mothers of soldiers. They used to play a significant rôle in ending Russia's entanglement with Afghanistan, and, for obvious reasons, were becoming a point of discontent wrt the war against Ukraine. Guess what happened to them last year?
@benroyce If you wrote in a dystopian YA book that an association of mothers of fallen soldiers was declared a foreign agent, literary critics would complain about it being an implausible plot device. But the real world dystopias are not constrained by plausibility.