!Orthodox Christmas --- agk's diary 6 January 2023 @ 11:20 UTC --- written on Pinephone via st (simple terminal) at truck stop with coffee from the Bunn automatic --- Not the simple fool's passive faith something new will light up this dark. Faith of that other fool this Orthodox Christmas. She tries to understand the balance of forces, discard false knowledge and pride, grope blind for what's to be done. Cut from work at overstaffed hospital, rather than be a pest at home when my spouse expected a day without me, I repaired here to the truck stop. I alternated studying for state nursing license exam with reading to motivate me to keep studying. Endless multiple choice questions, poor explanat- ions of ones I get wrong demoralize; maybe rein- force what I learned in nursing school, who knows. I returned to Ukrainian sociologist Volodymir Ish- chenko, Brit sociologist Jeremy Morris, Hungarian sociologist Ivan Szelenyi, Serb economist Branko Milanovic for my reading. They write about power in Central and Eastern Europe, context to balance war news I read [^1] and my understanding of warmonger- ing social forces in my country. Of course my country's warmongers aren't the only ones. The political clan in power here's spoiled for war in Ukraine a long time. Escalation in 2008 & 2014 interrupted 4 years but resumed when they regained the president's seat. Kremlinological propaganda's effective. My mom knows little about post-Soviet societies. She's certain Putin's a crazed, murderous totalitarian dictator who personally directs the state. He's the same cartoon villian as Assad, Ghaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc. Fighting propaganda isn't defending Putin. During emergency it's about attacking my country's war- mongers' justification for war: Milosevic didn't sabotage the 1992 Lisbon peace agreement, escalate attacks til Bosnian war was unavoidable. US-backed mujahid veterans of Soviet-Afghan war did. Ghaddafi wasn't involved in bombing Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie. Iraqi troops didn't yank preemie Kuwaiti babies from incubators in 1990 or have weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Their worst sins were on par with stuff governments of my country and its allies do: torture, surveill- ance, mass incarceration, militarism, oppression of women and minorities, censorship, corruption, etc. Antiwar tendencies in my country fight their demon- ization in hopes of preventing destruction of countries, mass death of innocents by our Herods. Fighting propaganda isn't enough: an empty mind's vulnerable to new lies. Positive understanding's needed. Social forces in Eastern Europe are compre- hensible as those in my country. Putin's excellent speeches made the case for defensive war vs anti- Russian neonazi/ultranationalist paramilitaries increasing cadence of shelling Donbass civilians, offensive NATO expansion, renuclearization threats after many years of failed diplomacy; bad faith from US and NATO. Ukrainian militarized extremists serve the same end as mujaheddin in 1990s Bosnia and al-Qaeda extrem- ists in 2010s Libya and Syria. My country aided and supplied far-right extremists around the world to destabilize rivals since WWII. Our legacy of coups, death squads, permanent bases, aerial bombing, ass- assinations, currency manipulation, debt-trap dipl- omacy, money laundering in the ashes of countries we destroyed, and systematic dishonesty's horrible and unequaled in our time. Putin misleads by omission, as do Shoigu, Lavrov, and elite guests on Russian talk shows. What they omit perhaps they can't see. Like counterparts in my country, they don't serve the interests of the whole Russian people, but classes with power to command service. Understanding these social forces is an antidote to warmongers in the West's personal demonization of Putin. 1990s Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus transferred state property to personal ownership by politically connected guys. As far as ordinary people were con- cerned---people who worked for a living, pensioners and veterans who worked their whole lives---their countries were destroyed by the US-supervised loot- ing. No more pretending workingpeople were the pro- tagonists of history. They were robbed of homes, pensions, savings; their workplaces looted, sold for scrap, daughters off to Moscow, prostitutes for partying Western cold war victors. A generation died, a class was born: the oligarch. Like US robber barons after our 19th century civil war or Russian boyars before Peter the Great tamed them, oligarchs had their own small armies; personi- ally owned the media and politicians. In Ukraine they still do. Belarus's Lukashenko stopped oligarchs in 1994 with semi-soviet policy that produced less poverty, more equality than Belarus's neighbors or my country. In 2000 Putin tamed the Russian oligarchs. They stay out of politics or lose their property. The Russian oligarchs, of course, would like to own as much of Ukraine as they can get. The middle class that grew in Ukraine & Russia, small in Ukraine, big in more prosperous Russia, provides professional services: IT, financial, NGO/ charity, management, etc. As a class, they look west to the EU and strain against the power of the oligarchs, corruption, etc. In Ukraine, they're an important part of the anti-Russian social force, in Russia of the anti-Putin/anti-war force. Everyone I know in Ukraine and Russia is from this class. What about everyone else? What about people who make the cement, steel, glass, ammonia, who make and lay track, crew trains, make and fire artillery shells, stock supermarket shelves, serve burgers at Tasty, Period (formerly McDonalds), childcare and eldercare workers, janitors, maids, laborers on farms, construction crews, in slaughterhouses, yards and gardens, who build the pipelines, drill the wells, operate the refineries, operate mining equipment, run powerplants and maintain everything? In Russia and Ukraine, as far as I can tell, they matter about as much as we matter in my country. Oligarchs scaremonger with crap about LGBT to try to draw us into coalition vs professional & manag- erial class. Professionals, managers squawk crap about "he's a dictator!" to try to draw us into coalition vs the oligarchs. Neither has anything to offer beyond remains of socialism oligarchs destroy in Russia and of New Deal Keynesianism they destroy in my country. To say Putin isn't a madman or a cartoon villain isn't to cheerlead the system he represents. It's bad, maybe worse than the system in my country, though the comparison's too difficult to do: too complex, too shrouded in lies in both countries. Does the government of my country, Ukraine, or Russia care much about all the people who have died, been disabled, lost their homes & lifeworlds in this war? Nah, it's "regrettable." Nonetheless, Russia will win. It's more capable of industrial warfare than the collective West. A Western win would be an existential threat, beach- head for Russia's future dismemberment. A Russia win'd only embarrass the West. All my country'll get from this war's tighter political control over Europe & theft of some of its manufacturing base. For that a country'll be destroyed and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people will die again. To end this war, my country must stop funding it. --- [1]: moonofalabama.org & nakedcapitalism.com UPDATE: Latin American nations pressured by NATO to send heavy weapons & ammo to prolong slaughter in Ukraine said no. On 26 Jan, Brazil's president Lula took a principled position in a phone conver- sation with French president Macron. I think he's right. - Brazil acknowledges Vladimir Putin's Russia vio- lated Ukrainian territory and this is illegal. - But NATO's behavior in recent years hasn't coni- tributed to guaranteeing a relationship of trust with the Kremlin. - Brazil defends the establishment of negotiations with Russia so a ceasefire can be reached. - Brazil will help bring about peace, but won't contribute in any way to military operations. - Brazil's war is against an entirely different foe: poverty.