Many admired bravery of Kadyrov who personally went to Ukraine and posted a lot of cool photos from the frontline. Consider this: Kadyrov is praying having put his gun lays nearby. It's a shame we see a Pulsar gas station nearby. So it's not Ukraine. It's Russia🧵
Pulsar gas stations belong to the Russian oil company Rosneft (Роснефть) which is led by Igor Sechin, Putin's close aide. Russia has lots of these gas stations but there are none in Ukraine. Kadyrov took tough-guy-photos in Russia and claimed he did it in Ukraine
So is Kadyrov lying? Consider Peskov's answers on a press conference. When asked if Kremlin knows about Kadyrov's visit to Ukraine, Peskov responded:
- No, we don't have such data (=he didn't go there)
Peskov also clarified that Kadyrov "didn't directly say he went to Ukraine"
Russian TV host Tina Kandelaki wrote a post praising Kadyrov and he reposted it his channel. I'll quote it because it might give an insight into how Russia works:
"Ramzan confidently entered the social media space and immediately realised it is the modern battlefield"
"Kadyrov's Telegram grew unprecedentedly: at the start of Special operation it had 60 thousand subscribers and now it has 1 250 thousand. The Head of Chechnya became an absolute headliner in covering the current events - many my journalist colleagues have a lot to learn from him"
"Kadyrov's reports are much more interesting, lively, better than those produced by our TV channels. Showing his readers the very frontline, Kadyrov created the best military blog in Telegram. That's amazing. We are a country of content producers, too. We can do it, too"
"Elon Musk and Pavel Durov are responding to Ramzan. We are literally in one step from Biden himself starting to publicly react to Kadyrov's Telegram - that's a unique case in political technologies"
"The key factor are the endless memes [about Kadyrov], modern folklore. Stars - bloggers, tiktokers, macro and micro influencers exist for few days, being lost in terabytes of new content. But folklore puts you beyond the time & circumstances. That's how true success looks like"
Kadyrov shared this post and commented:
"Thank you, Tina. I didn't know I'm so famous 😂🤷🏻"
Tina Kandelaki's post with praising Kadyrov's PR skills was considered important enough to make an article about it in a Chechen official media Chechnya Today
(also notice the headline on the left they want to show you "Ramzan Kadyrov became the most quoted governor in Russia)
Naive Westerners perceive Kadyrov as a premodern person. A true, authentic spirit. In reality he's very postmodern. He's a PRmaxer, attention seeker obsessed with likes and dreaming that one day not only Elon Musk, but also Joe Biden will react to him. That's what defines success
Now why is he doing it? Well, because it works. Kadyrov is pursuing a thorough PRmaxing strategy which is entirely based on assumption that you guys are dumb. That you see no difference between the phenomena and noumena, what is perceived and what truly is
Kadyrov's troops are very tough. How do we know it? Just watch endless videos they are posting "from the frontline". We see strong, heavily armed and equipped bearded men. What do they do on these videos? Mostly interviewing civilians about and forcing them to shout "Ahmat Sila!"
Kadyrov's henchman is interviewing civilians who are fleeing from Mariupol:
- Tell me boys, how did those Bandera criminals torture you? They didn't allow you to leave, yeah? And who did help you out?
- You did
Only after making them yell "Ahmat Sila!" he allows them to leave
Kadyrov's TikTok troops seem to be "real fighters". Meanwhile these lightly equipped, tired and soiled guys don't look that tough. And yet, these Chechen mujahideen smashed Russia in the First Chechen War. A particular case of @nntaleb rule: real warriors don't look like warriors
Why do Kadyrov's soldiers take so much stuff to the "battlefield"? Why are the always so fresh, their uniforms so clean, without even a little bit of dirt? Well, because they don't fight. They are TikTok troops of a TikTok warlord. Watch him reading a poem with threats to Ukraine
And you know what? This TikTok warlord has a very high place in Russian dominance hierarchy. Watch this video with the commander of 8th army:
- Ahmat is really strong!
- That's what our commander says, the best commander!
The body language is telling. You see who's a boss here
Technically Kadyrov and 8th army commander Mordvichev have the same army rank: they're both lieutenant generals. And yet, during their meeting a (somewhat) professional military Mordvichev will be reporting to this TikTok warlord Kadyrov as if he were his superior. Because he is
What does incredibly high status of a TikTok warlord Kadyrov in Russian dominance hierarchy tell us about modern Russia? It reflects a general tendency of Russian ruling class to PRmaxing. If Soviet Union was the Evil Empire, than Russian Federation is Bullshit Empire. End of🧵
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Yes. Behind all the breaking news about the capture of small villages, we are missing the bigger pattern which is:
The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper
If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk (that is here) and Rabotino, you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person
The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast
Yes, and that is super duper quadruper important to understand
Koreans are poor (don't have an empire) and, therefore, must do productive work to earn their living. So, if the Americans want to learn how to do anything productive they must learn it from Koreans etc
There is this stupid idea that the ultra high level of life and consumption in the United States has something to do with their productivity. That is of course a complete sham. An average American doesn't do anything useful or important to justify (or earn!) his kingly lifestyle
The kingly lifestyle of an average American is not based on his "productivity" (what a BS, lol) but on the global empire Americans are holding currently. Part of the imperial dynamics being, all the actually useful work, all the material production is getting outsourced abroad
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other
"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education
Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s
There's a subtle point here that 99,999% of Western commentariat is missing. Like, totally blind to. And that point is:
Building a huuuuuuuuuuge dam (or steel plant, or whatever) has been EVERYONE's plan of development. Like absolutely every developing country, no exceptions
Almost everyone who tried to develop did it in a USSR-ish way, via prestige projects. Build a dam. A steel plant. A huge plant. And then an even bigger one
And then you run out of money, and it all goes bust and all you have is postapocalyptic ruins for the kids to play in
If China did not go bust, in a way like almost every development project from the USSR to South Asia did, that probably means that you guys are wrong about China. Like totally wrong
What you describe is not China but the USSR, and its copies & emulations elsewhere
What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)