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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

> That said, few saw a war with Russia coming

It was public doctrine in textbooks, taught at university. The warnings about moves at the chessboard (which in diplomacy often are issued in advance, contrary to chess) have been stated for decades, publicly and face to face. The products of the propaganda machine were quite reachable, and not really ambiguous.

Really, that «few saw» is farcical.

Edit: and it is quite worrisome to think that said "doctrine" is now implemented only up to a small fraction, and those expressions suggest blindness not just about the current actions, but the openly planned, stated future ones.

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> It was public doctrine in textbooks, taught at university.

Which book(s), at which university? Genuinely curious.

> Genuinely curious

Of course! I think you just should (or at least that it makes full sense to ask).

I remember - to the best of my memory, it was probably well over five years ago when I read the articles - it was the geopolitics course at Uni Moscow; the professor is/was an ideologist influential in the circle of the core decision makers. The list included a pretty large number of objectives, of which the current topic is just a line.

When, after the war really started¹ and of course you think of the tick-mark in the list, I looked for the original article, I found it definitely not the most immediate needle in the haystack. A few weeks later, though, as the ideologists started to present their point of view to the western public, one interview emerged which I have good reasons to believe was from the above said professor.

I will check for you later when I will have some contiguous time: the name of that interviewed professor (easier to find: I have it in my RSS harvest) should be a better lead to retrieve the articles about his course about the national geopolitical objectives.

¹With reference to those commentators which gave it for a fact well before the actual border trespassing - e.g. Niall Ferguson.

Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, Foundations of Geopolitics (1997).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Exactly that, thank you!

Correctly, as I remembered, he was one of the voices that gave interviews to spread the "creed" in the past weeks - I recognized the name. And he stated in the interviews: "We will get hurt immensely, but we will reach the goal" - this shall be an intellectual warning to the adopters of naïve rational-agentism ("homo oeconomicus would never").

I see that I remembered the wrong faculty: he worked at the Department of Sociology (I probably confused the book name with the department). And I see that the use as textbook has been sparse - adopted and celebrated here and there.

I must recommend that readers go through that list: it is "quite strong". The presence of the UK in the list as an entity that should be separated from Europe is what woke up some commentators after Brexit, with the question "Could they have helped it - surely they expressed they wanted it".

Reported words of that author, that may give a sketchy profile:

> I think that Internet as such, as a phenomenon is worth prohibiting because it gives nobody anything good

> If we want to liberate ourselves from the West, it is needed to liberate ourselves from textbooks on physics and chemistry

...And those lines should again be flashing hints to those who like to consider the players at the chessboard agents following a common rational framework.

> Really, that «few saw» is farcical.

War is always unthinkable. Yes, there were warning signs that, in retrospect, were obvious, but Russia invading Ukraine was so profoundly dumb it was difficult to expect for Putin to really go through with it. He did, his country is suffering in result, and he wants to make it mutual, WWI style. You can't really blame Germany for doing their best on making a war unthinkable through economic interdependence.

> warning signs that, in retrospect, were obvious

An intention spelt out in textbooks?! Quite an understatement.

Q: "So the part had been expressing an explicit, literal intention, public, codified, written, divulgated, explained et cetera?" // A: "...Heart, Hope, Daily routine, Expectation, Being alike..."

You are defending a perspective of intentional removal of reality, and the principle of reality constraint, from conscience.

> You can't really blame... for doing their best on making a war unthinkable through

In that '«unthinkable»' you show the whole point. It was very much duly thinkable.

Surely those who overrode reality, and in favour of illusion, and clinging unprepared in a cage of "que será", are to blame, and to blame, and to blame.

The onus on you to show is this supposed 'doctrine' in 'textbooks' or we should assume you're wrong.

I don't even agree in 'hindsight' this situation was obvious. It's a hugely risky and crazy manoeuvre by Putin that may very well be his undoing.

The Russian economy is starting to crack, vast elements of key industrial sectors are collapsing.

There are no good cars being made in Russia, and even their garbage Lada's, which nobody wants, might not get made due to sanctions.

Car sales have dropped 80%, there's a vicious black market for spare parts.

Most Russians drive foreign cars. What happens when the all need parts?

Russian airline fleets cannot get maintenance or parts. They are being grounded.

Nothing about this invasion is obvious or doctrinal.

Entirely a surprise? Maybe not - but certainly not expected by anyone, even those paying attention.

> The onus on you to show is this supposed 'doctrine' in 'textbooks' or we should assume you're wrong

Illogical. You could do your own research. Hint, anyway: some material was found as "most interesting" by investigative journalism after Brexit.

Likewise,

> Nothing about this invasion is obvious or doctrinal

is a fully irrational statement.

About the substantive part of your post: you are committing the error of confusing reasoning, under subjective value assumptions, as a ground for prediction. You do not go "certainly they would not do that" projecting in others the role of "rational agents" according to criteria you defined for them. Generic actors do not act "like you would", they act like _they_ would.

"Illogical, you could do your own reasearch"

No, it's not illogical for us to ask you to validate your completely made up, speculative claims that have no basis in reality.

I've already 'done my research'. I know there is nothing 'doctrinal' about Russia's invasion.

You're making claims about other's rhetorical posture (i.e. "you are committing the error of confusing reasoning") - at the same time you're unsubstantiated fantasy statements.

Your claims about 'Russian doctrine' are a bit outrageous and I suggest you might not even know what the term 'doctrine' even means.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, so again, provide evidence for your wild claims.

Looking forward to it (I really am actually, prove me wrong ...).

Recheck the thread. (And your attitude.)

(And your logic: I never said it was «illogical to ask». You never even asked.)

A basis in reality:

"In the days leading up to Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin gave a televised address that rejected the idea of Ukraine as an independent country. It never had the 'stable traditions of real statehood,' Putin said. Instead, modern Ukraine was 'entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.'

More than prelude and pretext for a bloody war, Putin's words echo the writings of a man who has proselytized this idea for almost three decades: Aleksandr Dugin. A Russian political philosopher, Dugin has been influential with Russian military and political elites — even with Putin himself."[0]

Dugin's textbook in question, translated from Russian:

"On the key question of Ukraine, Dugin underlines: 'Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness" (377). 'Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions,' he warns, 'represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics' (348)"[1]

[0]:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aleksandr-dugin-russia-ukraine-... [1]:https://web.archive.org/web/20160607175004/https://www2.gwu....

A book "influential" with Russian elites doesn't mean it's teachings are in textbooks or doctrine. The mere fact that many soldiers sent into Ukraine in the first days were surprised, and at least one whole unit surrendered, indicates that popular as Dugin might be among the elites, the common people didn't really know or care.

Why should the "«common people»" be relevant? They have been indoctrinated in other ways - as emerged also through recent reports and as I reminded with «The products of the propaganda machine were quite reachable, and not really ambiguous».

What is relevant are the decision makers - although to the analyst all phenomena are differently relevant, but to reconstruct decision making - and said mention of «teachings [] in textbooks or doctrine» is obscure with regard to the point.

I wrote «It was public doctrine in textbooks, taught at university». I very clearly intended to mean that those doctrines were shown in the open, and that they should have "rung warning bells" together with many other puzzle pieces. Nothing secret, not "documents in safes". And there have been occasions to remind analysts of them.

When the "Ruler formerly known as Mr" (the intention of a change of title was news of the past few hours) took Presidents one by one and clearly spelt out conditions - as they witness -, when doctrine was formulated in clear words and infographics available at your best bookstore (but you can probably attend a lecture), it becomes farcical to act as if Las Vegas had no signs.

If she is wearing a T-shirt, read it: it may contain a message. Otherwise they will complain rightfully you do not listen.

The one chief question about the "book" is how extensive analysts valuated its penetration. Being there, it was there.

Will the frigging snipers pace their reading or be productive.

Quite the contrary, you can and should blame Germany for hiding their head in the sand for the past 10+ years, while a massive threat was growing next to them. It was obviously a catastrophic policy failure. They must have some intelligence services warning the leaders what Russia is really up to. They were being warned by Poland's leadership for quite a while as well. They chose to ignore all that and instead chose to pretend that the threat isn't real - for the sake of short-term convenience and, no doubt, some profits under the table as well.

> hiding their head in the sand

You may enjoy the following cartoon (20 Jan 2022) from Zemgus Zaharans from Riga - I literally just met it:

https://cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/germany-and-russia

Which by the way is about having kept the stance until the last moment.

No, this is false.

It was absolutely not 'doctrine' on either side, in any sense, either military or economic, that dependency on Russian Oil would bring war.

Nor was it 'doctrine' that Russia would ultimately invade Ukraine 'full on'. Even most Russian elite were surprised.

The only 'doctrine' we have to rely on is a) how Russia will use nuclear weapons, b) how they generally operate on the battlefield (aka heavy on Army, esp. Artillery), and how they basically 'lie about everything' in foreign policy.

It was in many ways rational to contemplate that economic ties would diminish hostility, it mostly worked for the rest of Europe.

Were Putin to have eventually retired, his replacement would not have had the power necessary to do, almost alone, what he and a very small cadre of people did.

> either military or economic, that dependency on Russian Oil would bring war

This is something you conjured - it was not in the original post.

> Nor was it 'doctrine'

And this is something you cannot state.

The documents were there: I read articles about them many years ago.

> surprised

May that possibly be because of a "they would never" bad reasoning, as mentioned in the other sibling post?

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