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What you said about the importance of creating an alternate authority, such as a government in exile, to short-circuit the "obey authority" programming, is profound. Also profound, and profoundly disturbing, is what you noted about the willingness of most people to follow orders from an authority figure, no matter how threadbare that figure's claim to legitimacy may be, if those people have no other authority figure readily available to follow. As Stanley Milgrim's experiments on obeying authority showed, "just following orders" is usually the default for most people, and as you noted, pragmatism demands working with that aspect of human nature rather than against it.

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Aug 8, 2022Liked by Rurik Skywalker

Because some people do... Consider WW2: in 1943 it was quite clear on the western front that the Axis had lost the war. The italian army dissolved, and spared themselves a lot of deaths, the german and japanese militaries continued to fight to the bitter end, pointlessly. To some extent it was a question of authority: the german and japanese lower officers *might* have imagined that continuing to fight might have resulted in better terms for the inevitable surrender, but surely the higher and general officers could not have such an illusion. In Afghanistan recently a NATO general said that they expected the afghan army to last 6 months before surrendering to the Taliban, and instead it dissolved: but of course, why should have they risked being killed for a further 6 months, given that surrender was regardless inevitable?

As to Ukraine here is a quote from a swiss military analyst:

https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine/?s=09

“In 2014, when I was at NATO, I was responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we were trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels, to see if Moscow was involved. The information we received then came almost entirely from Polish intelligence services and did not “fit” with the information coming from the OSCE — despite rather crude allegations, there were no deliveries of weapons and military equipment from Russia. The rebels were armed thanks to the defection of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that went over to the rebel side. As Ukrainian failures continued, tank, artillery and anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushed the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.

[...] The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 from illnesses, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisonings (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides. In fact, the army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Fall 2017” recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country.

[...] The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more “attractive.” Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move quickly. So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially composed of foreign mercenaries, often extreme right-wing militants. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities — including Swiss.”

So during the 8 year long war of aggression by the ukrainian fascists against the Donbas, the much bigger ukrainian armed forces were beaten and stalled by a much smaller Donbas force because they did not have a will to fight.

In the current situation it is mostly the fanatical fascists and ruthenian xenophobes who have been fighting hard and the rest (the reservists) are at best for garrison duty. The fanatical fascists and ruthenians have been ground down slowly, because as they numbered 100,000-150,000 then they were the same size as the "special military operation" counter-attacking forces rather than 1/3 the size. At some point not many fanatics will be left, the reservists will not be that enthusiastic to die for Biden, and there will be a tipping point. Especially as millions and millions of ukrainian wives and children have moved safely to other countries.

Then the insurgency phase will begin.

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founding
Aug 9, 2022Liked by Rurik Skywalker

Thank you Rolo for your thoughtful depiction of the lack of effective psychological operations towards the Ukrainians. This is even more puzzling since it was one of KGB's strong points and many Ukrainians appear ripe for swaying. Furthermore Russia has plenty of material on Zelensky and his backers, and on the Ukrainian government; plus the evidence from the biological labs raided in the first weeks of the invasion. I wonder whether Russian simply waits for the top officials to flee with their loot and leave the population entirely disgusted and demoralised.

Devoting energy to rounding up harmless Ukrainian civilians living in Russia shows that the operational decay post-Soviet collapse has not been overcome. If the example of Blissex on the African Socialist Peoples Party is true, I would be extremely worried that anyone relies on the FSB for information or enforcement. Better dissolve it. Putin should merely phone Raul Castro and get some reliable intel on the American and European populace from him.

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Aug 8, 2022Liked by Rurik Skywalker

«Russia should have set up an alternative government in Ukraine and started issuing orders from it. [...] Where is the Ukrainian government-in-exile? Why haven’t they found a pro-Russian with a Ukrainian passport and declared him the legitimate authority over Ukraine?»

They have sort started to extend LNR/DNR/RF administration to the "Novorossya" region, but note that the "special military operation" is not called a "war", and describing it as a "war" is criminal offense in the RF.

My impression is that V. Putin in particular but in general the RF government are extremely legalistic, and "war" and "war propaganda" are illegal both in RF law and in the U.N. Charter, and so is regime change. So the "special military operation" is/was technically just a limited "police operation" (as the Korean war of 1950 was called in "the west") to defend LNR and DNR under U.N. Charter article 51, and a change of ukrainian government is not technically part of the aims of the operation.

The USA are also legalistic but *after the fact*, that is they know that winners write history and decide what was and was not legal.

Ron Suskind, NYTimes Magazine (2004-10-17)

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors [...] and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

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"We all need to start getting more serious about this stuff, folks. We gotta start figuring things out. We gotta start coming up with some strategies beyond, “let’s wait and see”."

This is what I hate about the people who have such a strong opinion about the war (or anything else) but they do not take the time to seriously look at the issue, to get any information other than what they are fed by the media. They talk as if they are in a serious discussion but they are just playing around.

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Once you trigger critical thinking, if you can, blind obedience goes out the window. But dissenters who teach this meet untimely ends. The inventor of the Socratic method himself was executed, for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth, presumably by teaching them to think for themselves.

There's constant tension, between our inclination to follow tribal leaders, kings, medicine men, wise men or social heroes, and the spiritual tension of the individual to use his own sense of truth, justice and critical thinking, to reach independently honest assessments.

The tension projects into the political realm, with the propagandists usually in the stronger position, which is why conformity is the rule rather than the exception.

But there are always a few dissenters who don't have the sense to know that they've been defeated.

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The ingroup/outgroup model is, I think, more useful than the normie/heretic model. No one wants to be cast out of ingroup and most people will put up with quite a lot of hardship to stay inside of it.

Ukrainian troops sound unhappy about being fed into the meat grinder but what can they do? What could the French soldiers do in WWI? Eventually, they refused to charge into machine gun fire but they couldn't desert or rebel. They'd have been put down. Problem is, there's no coordination. Anyone who wants to switch from ingroup to newgroup has to believe that newgroup will triumph and subsume ingroup. Otherwise, he's a traitor and a bad person.

Any Ukrainian thinking about surrendering to Russia is in a sort of mental limbo. He can't discuss this thought with the rest of his unit. He can only guess how they feel and, if he judges they'll go along, make the call to surrender. This applies to officers too who will be fearful of their own men turning on them. In addition, these men have to consider their situation when the war concludes. What will the Ukrainian government look like? How will it treat those who surrendered? Will ordinary people jeer at them for cowardice?

Nobody knows and people prefer death to shame.

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Brilliant article. Deeply thought-provoking.

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> Hippy-style appeals to the power of the people to organize themselves without hierarchies or appeals to authority fall flat on their face because only a certain percentage of people are capable of thinking this way.

The hippies who spout these points are self-serving mouthbreathers. The more convinced they seem in uttering their crap, the more standing they get in their own circles.

I don't know whether they are just going through the motions, well knowing that their 'horizontal' talking points bear no practical value to reality, or whether they are completely detached from said reality, not aware of their own ridiculousness. In the latter case they are not self-serving, I should make amends. They simply can't help themselves. Anyways in ten years time, the few still mouthbreathing will rehearse their shtick from nursing homes.

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Were I to guess some are career soldiers, but most are either impressed into service or Kiev is using mercenaries, (which I'm sure they are) they fight for profit not glory or patria. Also it must be said the campaign from the Russian vantage point was not that well thought out. I was on general staff for several yeas in the guard. What got off to a great start fizzled. By now Kiev should've fallen and the Ukraine cut into two. Zelensky and his "minion" (Who knows what that is?) would be in exile, captured or dead. A new government created and the eastern Ukraine annexed as Russian Federation territory.

From what I read in another of your posts the Russian army has the problem of top heavy command and control. Meaning no individual initiative is part of the chain of command. In the US military you're trained to act, attack, flank, rear guard actions, infiltrate and ambush when appropriate. If the field grade officers aren't around the company grades decides if they are absent the senior NCO's or warrant officers take command. They are the boots on the ground and know what's happening in their sectors of the skirmish lines. The field grade officer that counter ordered the company CO lost his balls and thought more about a promotion and kissing ass than winning a victory in his sector, that would have earned him kudo's a medal promotion or both. The key is to be audacious.

As a great man often said, " Audace, audace toujours audace !" - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) he conquered Europe.

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«Regardless, Russia simply does not use “active measures” - a point that seems to be becoming readily more apparent as the months go by»

Stop the presses! :-) The FBI claim that there is a vast communist-russian "active measures" operation, as reported by https://niccolo.substack.com/p/saturday-commentary-and-review-92

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/fbi-raids-st-louis-black-liberation-group-alleging-russian-ties-38194284

«Officials of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and African People’s Socialist Party say the FBI performed a "violent" raid with flash grenades and drones around 5 a.m. Friday morning. At a news conference Friday, Chairman Omali Yeshitela said he and his wife were handcuffed during the raid as investigators searched their home. He said the FBI threw flash grenades into his home and performed the raid without knocking or showing him a search warrant.

Yeshitela said the FBI believes the Uhuru Movement and African People’s Socialist Party may somehow be involved with Russia’s tampering in U.S. elections. “What they have claimed is that they are indicting someone, a Russian nationalist who is in Russia,” Yeshitela said. “They have claimed that they were investigating the African People’s Socialist Party that I lead in the Uhuru Movement because of some association that we might have with the Russian government.”

[...] Ionov recruited members of various political groups to attend government-sponsored conferences in Russia to encourage participating groups to advocate for “separating from their home countries,” the indictment states.

The indictment does not explicitly name Yeshitela or the African People’s Socialist Party but describes two co-conspirators as residents of St. Petersburg, Florida and St. Louis. The indictment against Ionov identifies him as the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, a Moscow-based organization that advocated for “sovereignty of nation-states including the sovereignty of Russia.”»

Same old, same old.

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I think the lack of some of these activities (a Ukrainian government in exile) is mostly to limit the potential for significant escalation. It’s also global south pointed propaganda that Russia isn’t like the US. And/or, the plan is to take what Russia wants and then leaving a bleeding basket case of western Ukraine in NATO’s lap.

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