Let's try to follow the "logic" of the Russian thinking. This can help us understand what's going on. The Russian "worldview". A thread. 1/7
Russians saying: Ukrainians and Russians are the same people. And then they bomb residential houses and hospitals, killing civilians. They are saying: we want to protect Russian speakers. And then they erase and destroy Russian-speaking cities like Mariupol or Kharkiv 2/7
But if they think Ukrainians and Russians are the same people, then they kill their own people, don't they? Or, by killing Russian-speaking people in Mariupol or Kharkiv, they are protecting them? They kill to protect. They annihilate to preserve. They murder to save. 3/7
This is typically Orwellian: war is peace, slavery is freedom, evil is good. And it's deep in the Russian culture and thinking. Russian intellectual tradition mistrusts formal logic, the law of identity, the A=A. It has been constantly looking for something different 4/7
This "different" was "dialectical logic": in Russian hegelianism, Marxism, religious mysticism. It has regularly tried to prove that A≠A. That A=B. Slavery is freedom, and war is peace. And that's a deep, deep problem of the Russian intellectual tradition, not just putinism 5/7
Within this thinking, there are no concepts, no stable meanings. Everything is fluid. Everything can mean everything else. These are the roots of Russian "disinformation", for example. Much deeper than we think 6/7
This needs to be analyzed and understood. Will soon make a more detailed thread on that 7/7
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