Wagner

2 comments on Hacker News

1. NeutralairgapstopgapJun 25, 2023

   > Third observation

   Why would people not support Wagner over the regular army, and specifically over Shoigu and Gerasimov that he alleges to target? I can explain. None of the reasoning below is meant to excuse or praise Wagner or the rest of Russian actors in the region, but nevertheless, it's valuable to understand people's perspective.

   This stuff about Utkin's Nazism, with Prigozhin himself son of a Jewish man, is completely peripheral and not in any way more salient than fringe National Socialist elements and Azov symbolic on the Ukrainian side that Russians make much hay of (in spite of Zelensky, too, being Jewish). The accusation just doesn't bite when there's a Slav on Slav war going on, it's only good for propaganda and twitter point-scoring, neither side there is seriously making decisions with relation to WWII political compass.

   War crimes? This whole – unrecognized – war is a crime if we're serious about it, and regular Russian military is neck deep in war crimes, and it wasn't (far as anyone knows) Wagner that had terrorized Bucha, obliterated Mariupol or blew up the Kahovka dam, to name just three high-profile atrocities. Executions? The most recent case was them executing a defector (and a repeat criminal offender, from Ukraine, who had been serving a term for aggravated murder prior to his recruitment and defection). I don't think it's surprising when people in a rather harsh society shrug about such things (not to whatabout, but how many Americans would approve or at least not object to Snowden's execution?).

   On the other hand, there are very salient reasons Russians support Wagner.

   1. They just have a compelling, powerful image. It is known that they've succeeded in a few areas where regular forces have failed; Prigozhin is somewhat good at moving speeches; and they've been effective at exaggerating the difference and appropriating credit. Reminder that Prigozhin is a man of many talents and careers, one among those being management of the so-called Internet Research Agency [1]; catering business, paramilitary operations and illustration of children's books [2] aside, he's been in charge of propaganda for a long time now.

   2. Adding to that, they just have an outsized presence in people's minds, there are catchy edgy music videos [3] and decently made movies [4] of their production (with military history buffs praising that movie), many affiliated Telegram channels, they're just very online, including Prigozhin personally – unlike Russian Ministry of Defense that's infamously behind the times, secretive, prone to embarrassing transparent lies, "boomer-like". It's another Russian self-own, in a sense, because the MoD grasped at Wagnerite meme magic to rescue the perception of the campaign, and became overshadowed as a result.

   3. The war is not genuinely popular, especially now that it's clearly close to being lost. Surveys to the effect that 70% of Russians support the war omit details that this support is often in the form "we'll be exterminated if we surrender" [5], it's not driven by some positive expectation of Imperial greatness but by fear, very much like 1945 Germany but exacerbated by connectivity [6]; there was an awful lot of chauvinistic smugness early on, but not now. Prigozhin articulates criticism of the status quo (Ukraine never planned to attack, the operation was a mistake, it needlessly made Ukraine into a real threat, eroded Russian prestige, brought NATO closer to the heart of Russia than it'd have been otherwise etc.) [7] that resonates with people vastly more than coping output of the official organs.

   4. People really, truly hate and look down on Shoigu, even people in the regular army. Thus they did not open fire at Wagner forces, and there's such a volatile situation that soldiers at the frontline are often not given arms, due to fear of mutiny. It is known at this point, in large part thanks to Wagner propaganda, that Shoigu is a corrupt bureaucratic oaf not qualified for his job, who appopriates vast sums and even diverts military resources for his pampered daughter, who only became a Minister due to his ties within Russian elite (he's one of the most powerful members of the gang, jumping between top-level posts for three decades). He's a lightning rod for all aspects of dissatisfaction with the way the war has gone for Russia (which might be part of why Putin keeps him around). And he's specifically hated by the unorganized but powerful undercurrent of ethnic Russian nationalism, due to being perceived as a strongly identifying Tuvan Buddhist [8] feudal lord with a private army [9] who is completely beyond any reproach and glibly sends tens of thousands of Russians (plus of course other peoples) to the meatgrinder, in meat waves, for zero benefit. Shoigu is understood as "noviop" [10], a member of semi-artificial Soviet post-ethnic people, and the deeper one's ethno-nationalism, the less support he gets, with people really concerned about Slavic race and so on charging him with slaughter of Slavs on both sides. In contrast, Prigozhin plays up his Russophilic and Slavophilic attitude, has his son serving in Wagner, cries crocodile tears about the loss of lives, and very pointedly, repeatedly drives the connection, in very simple language: "the "Tuvan degenerate" Shoigu denies us materiel – thousands of our Russian boys are getting killed by the enemy". With Ukrainians apparently unbeatable and, frankly, acting in their right, the conclusion about ways to stop boys from being killed becomes obvious enough. Like Kadyrov, his fellow warlord, he conspicuously does not accuse the Supreme Leader of any wrongdoing, but the implication about actions he believes are legitimate for Putin to take are clear.

   In short, it's best to understand the situation not so much as Wagner group being popular with Russians on its own merits, but as Russia having arrived at the metastable condition where any cohesive military unit that seems competent and starts a mutiny against the Ministry of Defense can expect nontrivial cooperation from the masses and other forces. This is, I believe, is exactly why Prigozhin is acting in such a bizarre manner: he is making clear to Putin that he could easily move around and destabilize the war effort, all to secure his own survival – in the way that popular field commanders of "Novorossiya" failed to do, and got eliminated on Kremlin orders as potential competitors for control.

   Wagner is theoretically easy to destroy, but has enough momentum to topple the Army and potentially send the whole regime into tailspin, with how unpopular Shoigu is; yet Putin is too invested in his little mafia family to throw Shoigu to the dogs; and if he keeps covering for Shoigu, the whole "good Czar, bad boyars" scheme implodes. So the equilibrium is letting Prigozhin go, with his force. At least for now.

   I wonder when Prigozhin has started working on this.

   1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

   2. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/06/01/wagner-head-prigozhins-past-life-as-a-childrens-author-and-illustrator-a81358

   3. https://www.reddit.com/r/N_N_N/comments/xn4ky5/mc_wagner_released_a_promotional_video_of_course/

   4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1EXVrACxnk

   5. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/06/03/the-only-thing-worse-than-war-is-losing-one

   6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan#Wartime_consequences

   7. https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/3790

   8. https://nationalpost.com/news/world/the-pounds-12m-polite-palace-built-in-secret-by-putins-defence-minister

   9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(company)

   10. https://twitter.com/devarbol/status/1534020945660321792

2. NeutralunaloneFeb 21, 2009

   Cory Doctorow irritates me. Possibly it's because his name is thrown out as a big name when the only real thing he's done is launch a popular blog - and not a particularly good blog at that, considering most of his work involves just aggregating submissions. Possibly it's because he's a terrible, imprecise writer who finagled his way into a Nebula nomination on fame alone, who goes about making proclamations about the state of literature without ever seeming to have the faintest idea of what literature is about.

   His opinion on newspapers is correct, though blatant and obvious. Unstated, however, is the need for publications that aren't reliant on advertising, papers like the Atlantic and the New Yorker. These papers won't be going away. The New Yorker is more popular now than ever before, and it's likely to continue that way. If anything, we'll see new methods of aggregation that allow for much more copious doses of quality publishing, which will increase the magazine industry's potential. (That's a goal of the site I'm working on now, so it's a subject near to my heart.)

   The discussion of movies is a mixed bag. The thing that will cease the production of big-budget movies is the decreasing cost of special effects and powerful cameras, combined with the new-media concept of celebrity that lets most anybody become a star. Talentless celebrities will fade away. The really powerful actors, however, will still command top bill. So perhaps a big movie goes down to a hundred million dollars or fifty million, because things are cheaper and the top price for actors lowers slightly. That won't remove the need we have for big cinema.

   Doctorow ignores and always has ignored the inability of piracy and open media to impact physical media. Look at Broadway, which has suffered very little from new media. Look at opera. Movie theaters are a rank below in terms of being special locales, but if anything we'll see a shift towards larger and grander - but fewer - theaters. Larger-than-ever movies will be displayed there; the movies that aren't positively enormous will find other distribution methods.

   This quote in particular irked me:

   Which isn't to say that no one will make these things henceforth -- give it a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a going concern as a vanity/prestige form.

   Excuse the language, but going to attend Wagner isn't a fucking vanity. Wagner wrote incredibly powerful, demanding music, that requires performers who are all virtuoso in every way. Doctorow very obviously has never attended opera before, because opera is one of the sheer most powerful things you will ever see in your life. The people who attend it don't do it for vanity, they do it because opera offers an experience beyond anything else you will see in your life. Similarly, the power of, say, an IMAX screen, offers a moviegoing experience you will never see anywhere else, and so the power of cinema isn't going to up and vanish.

   With music Doctorow makes some good points. I doubt talentless bands will disappear, because people genuinely enjoy listening to Nickelback (for instance), but this is his area of expertise and he's correct in a lot of ways.

   Books: Doctorow is wrong about e-book readers. They're going to be huge among the small part of the population that enjoys reading. He's wrong about books shifting entirely to poetry: if anything, that's the best disproof for what he's saying. My friends read poetry. The love of poetry occurs when people learn to love and appreciate language, and Billy Collins has done an incredible job of spreading awareness of poetic appreciation to youth. Poetry and prose is selling incredibly well. (Has nobody noticed that despite these claims of the book as a dying form, sales of books in every genre have gone up?)

   Doctorow refers to literature as "culturally relevant", which - excuse the language - is bullshit as well. Guess how many people read Ulysses when it was published, or Moby Dick, or The Great Gatsby? These are all hailed as masterpieces not because the culture picked them up, but because people with taste fell in love with them, and because those are the people who get followed as time goes on.

   That's the clincher. Doctorow makes these assumptions that quality and appreciation rely on the masses, and they don't. They never will. Appreciation stems entirely from the power of the piece being made. Most people will never watch Citizen Kane, or even 2001. They won't read King Lear or Dune unless they're forced to. The people who do read them won't do it to look sophisticated. They'll do it because they're in love with cinema, in love with reading, in a way that most people never will be. A rare few of those people will go on to make something just as powerful and moving, and things will pick up and continue. That's what keeps these so-called passed-over mediums afloat: not mass, not relevance, but quality. It's why opera will never die, why playwriting will never die, why there will always be novelists who care more about the quality of their work than they care about how many people will read their work.

   A final thought on the state of the novel:

   When Moby Dick was published people called it the end of the novel. When Ulysses was published people said the same, and again after the same writer published Finnegans Wake. They said it after every novel Beckett wrote, and they said the short story was dead after Borges became known in America. They said it after Gravity's Rainbow. They said it after House of Leaves, which was published in 2000 and is one of the greatest pieces of literature I've ever had the joy of reading. They say it after every writer, even the lesser ones like Steven King and J. K. Rowling, who offer something to literature nonetheless. The novel is still going strong.

   So: can somebody explain to me why Cory Doctorow has the following he does? I've never seen him say anything remotely unique or interesting. He just seems to get noticed because he has such a large blog readership, which makes noticing him make about as much sense as turning to Michael Arrington for writings about cutting-edge technology.