“Ah, now you make sense!”
June 7, 2017 2:35 PM   Subscribe

As the Trump-Russia scandal continues to unravel, no one blinked when former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, “It is in [the Russian people’s] genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to US and western democracies.” Excuse me? I had no idea that my DNA depended on an outdated, racist clash of civilizations. Tell me, sir: as a Russian-American Jew, will medical tests show trace amounts of Fifth Column in my blood?
American Russophobia is real — and it’s helping Putin.
posted by griphus (31 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Clapper was making a metaphorical statement about the Russian state being opposed to American interests, not a statement about Russian genetics, obviously.
posted by empath at 2:39 PM on June 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


Are you clarifying that to the Russian-American who wrote the article or the Russian-American who posted it here?
posted by griphus at 2:42 PM on June 7, 2017 [13 favorites]


Paragraph two of the linked article begins: Many will argue that statements like Clapper’s should be taken seriously but not literally. Even metaphorically, however, the statement is crap.
posted by beerperson at 2:45 PM on June 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


I feel pretty conflicted about this. On the one hand, I can appreciate the article's point, that we shouldn't lump all Russians in with the actions and attitudes of their government. On the other hand, that government and people connected with it have done a pretty terrific amount of harm to the US recently. I don't know if I can accept that without any help from them, we would still be where we are today.

I want to meet Russians as individuals, and would like to think that we could find a lot to enjoy in each others' company.
posted by Alensin at 2:55 PM on June 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


I think there's...well, I'm not sure Americans are afraid of/hate actual Russians, since most Americans don't actually meet any...but there's a lot of setting up an empty stereotype and then hating on the stereotype, and it does worry me. I've heard a lot of media people and online acquaintances say "the Russians" or just "Russians" when they mean "Putin and his government" or "Russian police forces" or whatever. Russians aren't their government any more than Americans are ours.

Based on having worked with actual Russians, I will say that it seems like Russian and American norms make the two societies ripe for miscommunication. IMO, it is very easy for us to think we can read each other's clothes, verbal style, body language, etc according to our own cultures' meanings, when in fact they mean really different things.

The other day a young conservative mentioned to me how much he loved that Russia “doesn’t care about human rights” — a dangerous sentiment we’re hearing echoes of from Trump and Theresa May.

This in particular makes me sad, because it obscures real political struggles in Russian history and the many, many Russian citizens and activists who have worked very hard for liberation/human rights/etc. And it obscures the material causes of Russia's current situation - which, yes, the USSR and mistakes were made, but also the crooked, crooked Americans who got involved right after the USSR collapsed. Today's Russia is a super-capitalist one and it's one that we in large part made.

Also, I think that these beliefs about Russia and Russians are rooted in Cold War propaganda in several ways. First, the American insistence that the problems the Soviets tried to solve (and in part did solve - vide health care and education) were not real problems - the specific ways that the USSR attacked the problems of wild inequality, poverty, lack of education, lack of food, lack of housing, lack of medical care were often not that great, but something should have been done about them, and the fact that many Russians bought into the Soviet project was not rooted in mysterious communist evil but in the entirely appropriate desire to fix actually existing problems. Second, the American insistence that nothing good came out of the Soviet revolution, which means that when actual Russians wax nostalgic for, like, everyone having housing or government stability or state-provided vacations for workers or whatever, it must be because they are evil commie liars, not because some of those things were good.

So basically, we have been taught to believe that the foundational thing of communism is not an attempt at equality - however flawed the actual results - but an attempt at tyranny. And therefore anything Russian must inexorably be about tyranny. We don't see Russia as living in this sort of collapsed utopia; we see it as this perpetual swamp of cruelty and misery. So we don't have any actual historical/political tools to think about Russia, just really clumsy ideological ones.

(And because no comment on an article like this is complete without a little stereotyping, I will add that if there's one difference between Russians and Americans that I've really noticed, it's that Russians don't despise intelligence or complexity the way Americans tend to.)
posted by Frowner at 3:00 PM on June 7, 2017 [53 favorites]


The current American fixation on Russia looks very strange from my viewpoint in Australia.
A broke and enfeebled ex-super power is apparently an existential threat to the US because of, what? Some twitter posts or 'fake news'? Or some meetings with campaign teams?
The amount of oxygen given to this seems way out of proportion to the tepid influence Russia wields.
I don't even get it as a political beat up. The possible tiny influence the Russians maybe had cost Clinton the election? Really? The Russians caused 49% of the US electorate to vote for Trump?
posted by bystander at 3:03 PM on June 7, 2017 [8 favorites]


In re the election and Russia - there were a lot of bad factors in the election, each a tiny slice of a bad pie. Without any single slice, we wouldn't be in our current situation. Unfortunately, the only slice that everyone agrees is bad is the Putin slice, so that's the only slice people hope they can take out of the pie. In a way it's not an unreasonable position to take - I'm not especially thrilled that a terrible, polarizing election could have gone another way if this intervention hadn't happened.

But the reason "everyone" agrees it's a bad slice is basically "lots of people have lizard brain reflexes from the Cold War", so it's a lousy situation. If it were all "intervention/collusion is bad because it's undemocratic!" we'd be fine; instead it's mostly "intervention is bad because Russia!!!!" as if it would be totally okay if Trump had been canoodling with, like, Finnish banks.
posted by Frowner at 3:08 PM on June 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


I wish I could envision the situation if he were accused of colluding with Finnish anything. :) Sadly, my imagination isn't up to figuring out how we'd have responded.
posted by Alensin at 3:14 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Whoa, this article is dishonest. Here is the quote from the original news article:

He told the Canberra press club the two countries could not be allies because they had irreconcilable differences. It was in Russia’s “genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and western democracies”.

In this context it is disingenuous to edit that to read:

“It is in [the Russian people’s] genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to US and western democracies.”

He is a foreign policy wonk talking about the Russian state acting on the world stage. It's limited to the elites making Russian foreign policy. How has this author never seen this sort of language? It is the basis of foreign policy/history writing.
posted by boubelium at 3:25 PM on June 7, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm absolutely not saying that there isn't any kind of a problem here, but the framing of Clapper's quote as "It is in [the Russian people’s] genes" is incredibly misleading. That edit of the quote eliminates all the context. I dig up the tape, and here it is with some more context (my transcription, typos are my fault). He's asked about how the Trump Administration seems to be courting Russia and responds talking about the need to continue the ongoing investigation "to get to the bottom of this" and determine if there is "a smoking gun with all the smoke":
In the interim, no, I cannot explain the solicitousness of the Russians. During my one and only, first and last ever, I'm sure, sojurn to Trump Tower, then President-elect Trump commented to be that, you know, wouldn't it be a good thing that we could get along with the Russians? I said "sure," you know whenever our interests converge, and they do occasionally, fine. But as far as our being intimate allies trusting buds with the Russians, that is just not going to happen. It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to the United States and the Western democracies.
It's not at all invalid to object to the framing and wish that he took more pains to separate the current Russian Government from "Russians" and the Russian People. You can argue that "in their genes" inappropriately makes this out to be a permanent never-ending condition. But the context here is incredibly important. Clapper is recounting a conversation with Donald Trump in which he is trying to warn him that the country that just violated our sovereignty to get him elected is not a friend so we shouldn't do idiotic things like reshape our foreign policy to benefit Russia's interests.

The context of these remarks is a guy who has just spent the longest year of his professional life addressing Russian interference in our election trying to convince the President-elect that he has to take this stuff seriously. That's a really far cry from a racist attack on all Russian people as having blood incompatible with democracy.
posted by zachlipton at 3:31 PM on June 7, 2017 [34 favorites]


To be clear, I do think there is a problem with anti-Russian sentiment that extends well past the government, but I don't think this article makes the best arguments of that.
posted by zachlipton at 4:06 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


I would expect better of The Anti-Nihilist Institute.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 4:15 PM on June 7, 2017


I do think there is a problem with anti-Russian sentiment that extends well past the government, but I don't think this article makes the best arguments of that.

I actually think that Obama and Clinton unnecessarily antagonized Russia during Obama's presidency in a lot of ways and sort of brought the current situation on themselves, overestimating the effect of sanctions and underestimating the capability and willingness of Russia to strike back, and NATO made a mistake by admitting the Baltic states and otherwise encroaching on Russia's borders after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I think that we absolutely need a new relationship with Russia, but it's still a fact that Russia is an existential threat right now to American democracy and institutions, and until the Trump administration is unwound, and the truth of what happened in 2016 fully revealed, all of that needs to take a back burner.
posted by empath at 4:26 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


My default word for "Oligarchical interests that coordinate with certain countries in Arabia against Ukraine and to manipulate the US against the rest of the world" is Rosneft. Glencore and Exxon are tied for second. If you look at who stands to profit, it seems pretty clear.
posted by eustatic at 4:28 PM on June 7, 2017


I know quite a few Russians as individuals, and even more than the usual way in which meeting someone in person tends to bridge national divides, I've always felt that Americans and Russians, if there is any cultural reason at all why we might end up being adversarial, might perhaps be too similar, at least relative to the rest of Europe which has served as the two sides' chessboard since the mid-40s. Both Americans and Russians, at least in my experience, have a steak of nationalist exceptionalism that is a mile deep and a mile wide (and distinguishing from most contemporary Europeans outside of the far right). Both Americans and Russians have what appear to be eyewateringly socially conservative cultures — with varying carved-out exceptions, but the kneejerk reaction is not one of embracing change; both have a surprising (at least, to me, given both nations' stated values) tolerance for authoritarianism and hierarchical, top-down structures. Both have love affair with their own militaries, and a not-unsubtle feeling that they're owed something for saving an insufficiently-grateful world from the Germans more than once.

Someone once jokingly said to me that it's a good thing that Americans and Russians don't speak the same language and (this was pre-Glasnost) view with some suspicion anyone who speaks the other's, because the rest of the world might be in a lot of trouble if we ever got together and realized hey, these guys aren't so bad after all and turned all that weaponry on the rest of the world for a change.

There was a moment in the 90s, and again briefly after 9/11, when it seemed like that might almost happen, but then it became more and more obvious that we were instead going to refight the Cold War and the moment passed.

The amount of oxygen given to this seems way out of proportion to the tepid influence Russia wields.

From Australia's perspective this is probably true, and fixating on Russia when China probably seems like obviously the more serious challenger to American geopolitical power is probably pretty weird. However, American foreign policy has always been and will probably for the foreseeable future — "pivot" or no — Eurocentric in focus. And Russian influence in, say, Poland or Estonia is certainly not "tepid". You can certainly argue about whether the AsiaPac or Euro areas are more important to the 21st century United States, and whether the US should marshal its resources to one at the expense of the other, but it's not a self-evident choice.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:33 PM on June 7, 2017 [26 favorites]


I often have a problem with articles that portray an ignorant stereotype of a large group of people to make the claim that those people have an ignorant stereotypical view of another large group of people.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:18 PM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


Mod note: Folks, can we keep the conversation on the actual article and the points therein? There are other threads if you want to talk geopolitics in general.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 5:30 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hmm, last comment deleted so trying again.

This article is basically just arguing against a strawman. Other than the one quote from Clapper (which seems out of context) and some anonymous young conservative, there is no real examples or evidence that there is widespread hatred of the Russian people.

News coverage is heavy about Russia because of Russia's actions (invasions, hacking, etc) and not because of stereotypes about the Russian people. In fact, the vast majority of the time I hear people specifically talking about Putin, not "Russians" in general.

Its true that sometimes people have trouble separating the citizens from the leaders (a partially justified point of view in a democracy, but even in a democracy a significant percentage of people disagree with the leaders usually). But thats a general, universal problem (people in other countries now assume all Americans don't believe in climate change, etc) and not specific to Russia.
posted by thefoxgod at 7:00 PM on June 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


I've been thinking a lot about how I perceive the monolithic "Russia" when articles come out about Russia.

I was raised steeped on Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative and Red Dawn. I for one am willing to own criticism that the "Russia" being discussed in the news is a very very Americanized version of Russia that's more John Wayne than it is reality.

Thanks for challenging us, griph.
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:06 PM on June 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


I just can't fathom viewing "Russia" or "Russians" as a monolith and I certainly can't imagine viewing Russians as "genetically engineered" to suffer under authoritarian strongman regimes that enrich oligarchs at the expense of the average Russian citizen. I mean, maybe there are people who think like this. Maybe Clapper was being literal. I've never met such a person myself. Even the guy I knew from Ukraine whose family escaped from a work camp to South and then North America didn't hate Russians or USSR/Russia as a whole. But while my experiences are anecdotal, I didn't find much in this article to convince me that Americans in general suffer from Russophobia in the manner the author describes. I do think Clapper's choice of words was very unfortunate and I do not agree with them at all if he meant it literally.

Like Annika Cicada, I grew up on The Day After and Red Dawn and I distinctly recall how I felt when the USSR dissolved. I didn't have a sense of RA RA, 'MURICA DEMOCRACY FUCK YEAH WE WIN at all. I thought about the Russian citizenry and how terrifying/exhilarating it must be to have all of this political sturm and drang erupting all around them and how invasive it must feel to have the world's eyes upon you, cheering for the collapse of everything you've known.
posted by xyzzy at 8:41 PM on June 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


One's experience can vary in re How People Think of Russians.

I've told this story elsewhere here, but it's eternally relevant and also I like telling it:

I grew up during the Reagan administration in a conservative, middle class suburb of Chicago (not one of the super wealthy ones, but definitely middle class). I was in the grade school honors program, which meant that one afternoon a week we got to leave class and do other things of varying degrees of interestingness. One day, we had a guest speaker. In memory, he was a youngish adult white man with some kind of vague qualification - I am confident that he was not a professor, although I guess he could have been a grad student. He gave us some kind of talk about how the Russians hated America and all Americans, the Cold War was dangerous, they hated us for our freedoms, etc. In retrospect, I think this was probably a year or so post-The Day After, which I had not been allowed to watch but which many of my classmates had seen.

My memories are dimmed by time and general school trauma, but I know that I challenged him on this, based on - I shit you not - a kids' biography of Catherine the Great which I'd just read and which had interested me in Russia. "I don't think Russians hate all Americans and want to kill us individually," I said, or something like it. The response of my gifted peers was to call me a communist. The teacher did not modulate this in any way and the gifted class session became about calling me a commie. I stress that at this time I had no sense of what communism was except for what the speaker had outlined.

Now, I admit that part of this was probably because I was an awkward fat kid with weird poor-person clothes and a funny voice, and I did get upset about things, so I'm sure it was fun for all concerned.

But I was known as a communist from fifth grade through high school. One time literally three or four years later I was at the pool - always a fraught summer event for a fat kid - and this girl I'd never seen before, someone not even from our school, came up to me and asked me if I was a communist. So I literally had a reputation as a communist around town based on one random occurrence in fourth or fifth grade.

Basically, "Russia", "communism" and "bad outsider" were so firmly conflated in everyone's minds that...the whole thing happened and persisted. Among gifted students. In an affluent suburb where almost everyone's parents were college educated.

This is my founding story, my ur-narrative, and it explains about 90% of why I am the way I am today - my disaffection, love-hate relationship with Marxism, general discomfort with "gifted" people, feeling of never, ever fitting in, general attraction to non-American things, conviction that I will be persecuted by yobs regardless of what I do, the way that my political feelings are tightly wound up with being fat and weird, ambiguous feelings about swimming...you name it.

My point being that in these United States, there is a long tradition of hatred of "Russians" that really does come out in stupid, generalizing, deep-rooted ways. I've heard a lot of chatter in the media and some here that strikes me as similar in tone and sophistication to "the communists want to murder Americans", and I grew up hearing that kind of thing.

What's more, I think that quote in the OP is fucked up, even though the guy would probably say, if asked, that he didn't think that "Russians" were terrible for genetic reasons. Just using that metaphor shows where people's thinking goes. Consider if I wrote, "My meetings with the Finnish anarchists were fraught. I cannot explain their solicitousness, but American anarchists can never work with Finnish anarchists - it is in their genes to be opposed to democratic anarchism". You wouldn't think "clearly this is a random metaphor that has nothing to do with distrust of a group's very nature, and clearly it means nothing about Finns in general and is only talking about the specific genetics of Finnish anarchists."

It's a bad metaphor, and doubly so because there are plenty of Russian-Americans. Start talking about how "Russians" are naturally treacherous or whatever and it will have a knock-on effect here against our own people.
posted by Frowner at 9:13 PM on June 7, 2017 [27 favorites]


I honestly have no idea how much ignorant stereotypes and bigotry and such are a factor in the current political situation in the US. Like Frowner, I grew up in the place and time when this was all very true about how most Americans viewed the USSR (but for me it was in an even more conservative small town that is culturally Texan), but that changed for me personally by the mid-80s, as I became much more knowledgeable. And it was probably around that time that I first became somewhat russophilic.

I am very anti-Putin but I am also knowledgeable enough about the last twenty years in Russia to understand why Putin is very popular there.

So my perspective is one that comes from a (in relative terms) strong, longtime interest in Russia, an affection for Russian culture, and a lot of sorrow and anger to see the embarrassment of the Yeltsin-era and the looting of Russia resulting in this era of oligarchs and proto-fascism, with Putin leading a cult of personality. And, yeah, I'm extremely critical of US policy from the Clinton ear onward -- we sent over Randian free-market ideologues who helped build intellectual cover for the looting of the country by criminals; then as the Russian public rightly became increasingly disenchanted with the version of western, liberal, market capitalism that the US was promoting, the US subsequently has done nothing but make Russia increasingly strategically insecure by aggressively taking NATO to its doorstep. I mean, I understand why the Baltics are afraid, rightly so, and why they and Ukraine and others have looked to the west to secure them ... but this didn't leave Russia with many directions to move, especially given the domestic politics and its economy.

But, all that said, basically everything Putin represents is abhorrent to me, with the exception of Russian cultural pride. And, more to the point, the Dugin doctrine both demonstrates many of these objectionable values, but is a roadmap for how Russia can and will do whatever is in its power to undermine western liberalism in Europe and anywhere else it can.

So my harsh criticism is not at all russophobia. But because I am so unrepresentative of most of my fellow Americans, I really have no good sense as to how much russophobic stereotypes and bigotry is involved in the shape of civic discourse about Russia these days. I fear that it could be considerable. On the other hand, many of the very people, the red state conservatives, you'd expect to be the most russophobic because they'd been conditioned by the Cold War to think in those terms -- which is the argument I think is often made -- are actually the ones least concerned by all this and among the most admiring of Putin. That causes me to strongly question how much this is about Cold War russophobia at all. I can see why on the left, when other parts of the left (as in my case) are very critical of Russia, that it might be perceived that way. And maybe sometimes it is. But what I think is telling is how little this is true of the American right.

Regardless, I think it's something we ought to be careful with. I sometimes worry about how some of the things I discuss and explain is received by less informed Americans. Americans are geopolitically very uninformed and prone to stereotypes (well, most everyone is). I think it's important to discuss the Russian government's actions, and the Russian public's sentiments, in ways that avoid encouraging this sort of lazy bigotry. It can be hard to avoid because Russian culture has a strong sense of Russian identity, in both good and bad respects, and it's far too easy to mistake a lot of sardonic Russian self-criticism as permission to utilize such stereotypes by the rest of us.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:41 PM on June 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


Thank you, Frowner, for that story. It really resonates with me. I am an emigrant from the Soviet Union who grew up in the US. As such, I have been identified by others as Russian for most of my life, and people have made their ideas about Russians clear to me on many, many occasions. In school, I got used to being asked whether I was a communist based solely on the other kids' vague awareness of my eastern European origins. Neither they nor I knew what that word meant, except that it was something sinister and related to Russia.

I was in middle school when the Kursk disaster took place, and I remember my chemistry teacher declaring to the class that the "Russians just don't care about their people." I have seen endless elaborations of this theme in pop history, movies, and comments from other students in college. More broadly, I have repeatedly felt that for many Americans, there is no clear sense where the Russian (or, for that matter, Soviet) state ends and the Russian people begin - that, I think, is a leftover of vague thinking about totalitarianism. Seeing Russian villains in every movie, encountering endless representations of Russian women as either attractive prostitutes or mannish farm workers, hearing over and over again that Russians were scary, that they were gangsters -- years of this material has given me a rich sense of the ideological background against which the contemporary discourse about Russian interference in the US electoral process inevitably takes place.

And it doesn't help that that discourse insistently conflates the Russian state with the most general Russia-related images and cultural associations. One sees this in the artwork employed by prestigious publications like The New Yorker and Time. In both those images, we clearly see that for the people responsible, St. Basil's Cathedral, as the most recognizable architectural sign of Russianness, serves as a convenient metonym for -- what, exactly? The Russian state? I think that there is an unavoidable conflation of the state, the country, and the culture (not to mention all sorts of other ideological material in the implication that St. Basil's Cathedral is like the alien spaceship from Independence Day).

I could easily cite more examples. The issue for me is that, in the present moment, my identification with Russians/as a Russian makes me feel vulnerable. I feel a twinge of unease whenever someone asks me where my name or my accent is from (and it happens quite often). The quotation from Clapper in the article is not quite true to his words, but the idea that there is something about "the Russians" that makes them profoundly different, both ripe for mockery and yet somewhat sinister or at least potentially dangerous is, I think, widely and deeply distributed in American culture.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 9:55 PM on June 7, 2017 [16 favorites]


I've noticed that only for some countries is it true that their people can be used as a sort of eponym for their government. For instance, a reporter wouldn't say that Britons are spying on Americans (although they are); they would say that the spying is carried out by the British Government. In contrast, we frequently hear about "the North Koreans" doing something irrational and aggressive, even though the average North Korean probably has far less agency than most people in the UK. It seems to me that it's a matter of friendliness and respect: the less friendly we are with a country, the less respect we have for its people, the more likely we are to treat its government 's statements and actions as coming from its people as a whole. I could even go out on a limb and say that there are several levels of this, ranging from a complete distinction ("the British government announced...") to metonymy ("Saudi Arabia said ...") to eponism ("the Russians are trying to interfere..."). This is only a general observation of course, but it seems to me that the last case, using a country's people as an eponym for their government, will necessarily affect the way we think about the people themselves.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:35 PM on June 7, 2017 [13 favorites]


I want to meet Russians as individuals, and would like to think that we could find a lot to enjoy in each others' company.

As a USese person who's lived with and worked with and studied with and befriended several people from Russia over the past ten years or so: (1) as usual, on the interpersonal small scale cultural differences are outweighed by individual idiosyncracies that can't be laid entirely or even mostly at the feet of national culture, i.e. they are regular people; (2) Kadin2048's comment about many Russian cultural characteristics mirroring USese ones is in my experience on point.
posted by busted_crayons at 1:23 AM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


NATO made a mistake by admitting the Baltic states and otherwise encroaching on Russia's borders after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That NATO "encroached" on Russia's borders is a useful fiction from the Russian perspective. The Baltic states have thrived since gaining independence from the Soviet Union, with some of the most innovative and responsible governments, and good economic performance (growth rates, emerging tech sectors, etc).

That the world should decide that they deserve to remain chattel for Moscow's interference and control is sad.

Also note that they have already suffered Russia pioneering aggressive "hybrid war" techniques against them, including shutting down the internet, the use of mob extortion, the capture of citizens on native soil, and aggressive disinformation programs.

There is no offensive threat to Russia from NATO presence in the Baltics or Eastern Europe. Those forces are so limited compared to what they face across the border they essentially act as trip wires, no more.

I actually think that Obama and Clinton unnecessarily antagonized Russia during Obama's presidency in a lot of ways and sort of brought the current situation on themselves, overestimating the effect of sanctions and underestimating the capability and willingness of Russia to strike back

Sanctions were imposed in response to Russia's attempt post-Maidan to seize control of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. The situation in Ukraine can not be dismissed so lightly. There is no good precedent in history for a major European power attempting to unilaterally change national borders of a sovereign country, one that supposedly has security guarantees from all relevant parties. Over 10k people have been killed since 2014. To describe sanctions as aggressive act by Obama/Clinton without noting they were EU wide, and in response to a military violation of national sovereignty, is at best a distortion. They have stalemated what might have been a far wider campaign.

My feeling is there is a bit of a hysteria about Russia at the moment, but with some justification. There is a belated understanding that Russia has been more active in far-right politics that serve its strategic interests, from the funding of anti-EU far right parties such as Le Pen in France (and likely Nigel Farage's UKIP), to the determined Kremlin opposition to a Clinton Presidency.

Note the increased use of Russia as a model for ethno-nationalists world-wide. The embrace of Russia by some evangelicals and racists in the US is disturbing, and the adoption of a kleptocratic governing class model by the Trump administration even more so

No one doubts that none of this would be possible without genuine division in the US and Western Europe, therefore to attribute all blame to Russia is a form of hysteria. And true to say that most of us carry little true understanding of the actual Russian people. Also its true to say that when discussing Russia's role in the West, often our own complicity is ignored. But this doesn't justify dismissal of Russia's government and organised criminal networks' current role in our world.

Of course the Russian people exist separately from their governing class, and we would do well to get to know them better. I would hope that the near future holds some other possibility for them than 78% wealth held by the top 1%, and a merged organised crime/oligarch/security state ruling class. But let's not dismiss all justified concerns out of hand.
posted by C.A.S. at 2:37 AM on June 8, 2017 [18 favorites]


Wait until they hear where Ayn Rand was from...
posted by acb at 2:59 AM on June 8, 2017


Okay, there's this rhetorical trope that I see a lot that I think is not useful, and I see it in this thread and in other threads all the time. It goes something like this:

Person A: "Russian individuals and Russian-Americans are blamed for the actions of the Russian state and various character flaws are imputed to them. This is a problem."

Person B: "Maybe Americans really don't understand Russians as individuals, but the real problem is that Russia is very sketchy. Here are some examples of how Russian oligarchs and the government do bad things."

These are two separate things. They are joined, if you will, by the study of Russian history and particularly Russian social history, but that's just sort of a little bridge between two separate things.

And then there's the added fillip of "how exactly does sloppy thinking about 'Russians' lead to good political outcomes?' for which considering not the evils of Putin's Russia but the social and political consequence in Cold War America seems really relevant.

Look, no one is denying that the current Russian government is a big, violent imperial power which means us ill. Unlike Donald Trump, I happen to think that while the US is also a big, violent imperial power, big violent imperial powers are still bad actors. But that is not the only problem facing us, and it is unlikely - based on past performance - that considering nothing else about Russia and Russians will get us where we want to go.

If the conversation is about prejudice against individual Russians or people of Russian descent, let's not turn it back to the crimes of the Russian state.
posted by Frowner at 7:37 AM on June 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


> This article is basically just arguing against a strawman. Other than the one quote from Clapper (which seems out of context) and some anonymous young conservative, there is no real examples or evidence that there is widespread hatred of the Russian people.

Your profile suggests you're American, so I can only suppose that you paid no attention to these things while you were growing up. I was born in 1951, and for my entire life the US has been filled with an atmosphere of anti-Russian paranoia, diminishing during the 1990s but returning in force with Putin's accession to power. This is not a matter of "oh, they have a bad government, what a pity for the people, who are much like us"; as you can see from the excellent comments by Frowner and a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich (currently my favorite MeFi username), it is a general prejudice that covers everything involving Russia/the USSR, which might as well have been Mordor. And it is not just because of the evils of communism; it goes way back into the nineteenth century, and we inherited it from the Brits, who got involved in the Crimean War (which would otherwise have been just another Russo-Turkish war) because Lord Palmerston considered Russia uniquely evil and uncivilized and a threat to Western civilization, even worse than the infidel Turks (with whom Britain allied itself). For the prerevolutionary period, you can consult Max Laserson's The American Impact on Russia 1784-1917 (interestingly, there was a brief upsurge of warm feeling toward Russia precisely during the Crimean War, because we were pissed at the British and French at the time); for the 1917-1934 period, I can highly recommend Carol Avins's brilliant Border Crossings: The West & Russian Identity In Soviet Literature... well, actually, I guess that's not too relevant because it's about Russia's relations with the West, not US attitudes to Russia, but what the hell, if you're interested in that subject you should give it a try.

As Anna Lind-Guzik writes in the linked article (name the author, people!): "Americans of every political stripe enjoy shitting on the Russians to make themselves feel superior." And that continues to be true, and pathetic and unhelpful, no matter how many quibbles about DNA you care to make.
posted by languagehat at 8:02 AM on June 8, 2017 [16 favorites]


I was born in 1951, and for my entire life the US has been filled with an atmosphere of anti-Russian paranoia, diminishing during the 1990s but returning in force with Putin's accession to power.

I was born in 1968 and this jibes with my experience.

there is no real examples or evidence that there is widespread hatred of the Russian people.

This is a "just because you haven't experienced it or witnessed it doesn't mean it doesn't exist" moment.
posted by maxsparber at 1:58 PM on June 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


If the conversation is about prejudice against individual Russians or people of Russian descent, let's not turn it back to the crimes of the Russian state.

The original post starts by looking at the response to acts of the Russian state. It then conflates concerns about acts by the Russian state/OC and the West's misunderstanding and prejudice against Russian people, but it offers no way to address the acts of the Russian state/OC, other than an invocation that we not conflate them or allow Russophobia to drive us.

I would say that what the current situation has done is put Russia back into the West's mind, where until 2014 the West had actually stopped thinking about Russians one way or the other very much at all. That changed from 2014.
posted by C.A.S. at 7:25 AM on June 9, 2017


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