You Have To Wonder

When I was a kid I used to try to figure out why so many Germans had supported genocide during World War II. How had Germany changed so much in only a few years, from a civilized country to one that committed atrocities? Pretty much all of my parents’ friends were either survivors of concentration camps or had been in hiding, and I would look at them and wonder how such ordinary men and women had come to be seen as enemies, as people who had to be erased from the earth.
 

What I came up with, finally, was that the entire populace had become psychopathic. An evil leader had put them under a spell, and I imagined people running in circles and waving their arms in the air and screaming slogans, spittle spraying from their mouths.

Lately I’ve been watching Russian propagandists on television, translated and presented by Julia Davis. The experience is mind-bending, as if high-level Nazis had gone on talk shows. Ukraine attacked them, they say, and they had no choice but to defend themselves. The next day the reason for the invasion changes; now it’s to rid Ukraine of Nazis. The day after that they’re no longer fighting Nazis but Satanists; one commentator even maintains that Zelenskyy is the antichrist. They rarely admit to losses, but every so often they will say that things are “difficult.” But it’s not the Ukrainians who are behind these difficulties; it’s the US, or NATO, or the entire world.

And so the entire world needs to suffer. They talk calmly about blockading grain to starve parts of Africa, or dropping nukes on Berlin or Washington. A day later the US is no longer a power capable of fighting them to a standstill; now they laugh about how weak we are, about to fall apart at any moment.

They run rings around our homegrown propagandists on Fox News and AM radio. Our guys act the way I’d imagined the Germans of the 30s and 40s acting: they scream, they yell, their veins stand out on their foreheads. They’re continually outraged, usually over some outlandish culture war dispute. The Russians state their views blandly, reasonably. Each one speaks in turn, agreeing with the others and adding their own comments, until finally they reach a realm of pure fantasy. By the end of their discussion about the US collapsing they can practically see the scenes of chaos, hear the bombs going off, smell smoke and gunpowder.

And so I realized I was wrong about those Germans. This show especially stuck in my mind, for a number of reasons.
 

The anchor in this video, Anton Krasovsky, is admittedly one of the very worst. Russia’s Investigative Committee even looked into him based on his comments here, though in the end he was exonerated. Julia Davis says that’s unsurprising, but I was surprised. Really? This is what passes for normal discourse in Russia these days?

Among the things he says: Ukrainian children who deny being Russian should be drowned in the river. Houses in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine are “awful, monstrous” and should be burned, along with the people inside them. Ukraine shouldn’t exist. And some other things which I’m not going to repeat.
 

Then there’s the person he’s talking to, who happens to be a Guest of Honor at WorldCon this year. (Yeah, I haven’t forgotten about you, Sergei Lukyanenko.) He isn’t as extreme, but he doesn’t look surprised or horrified by anything Krasovsky says, and he doesn’t argue. When the discussion gets too heated he changes the subject or tries to bring it down a few degrees, explaining that using the rod on children works better than drowning them. When Krasovsky mentions that Ukraine shouldn’t exist, Lukyanenko weasels out of taking the official position, saying that he wouldn’t want Ukraine to be part of Russia because he doesn’t want to live in the same country as Ukrainians. It’s clear from his servility that he wants to keep being invited on television. Well, what science fiction author wouldn’t?

To me Krasovsky sounds sociopathic, though I should say I’m not a psychiatrist and don’t have experience in diagnosing mental illness. But whether he is or isn’t doesn’t matter. His job is to move the conversation further and further from the convictions we take for granted, until he leaves the bounds of civilized discourse entirely. Once the forbidden has been said out loud, it’s easier to think about those ideas, to flirt with things that used to be considered illegal or indecent. Lukyanenko follows the trail he’s broken, maybe going a little slower but still headed in the same direction. We don’t drown children, but it’s fine to hit them with rods. We don’t deny that Ukrainians exist, but we can make fun of them, taunt them like we’re back in grade school. Things become normalized, normal, until everyone has the same opinions -- and if they don’t, they keep it to themselves.

The words they use are no different from those of the Nazis, only replacing Jews with Ukrainians. Krasovsky even uses a slur popular in Russia for Ukrainians. And yet the tone of their voice is infinitely reasonable, as if they’re explaining how to unblock a drain or walk to the post office. They don’t raise their voices; they don’t grimace or slobber. This is what war criminals look like, I finally realized. They look like us.

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About those Carpathian houses: I remember them from when I visited Ukraine. They’re small, two or three rooms, with low slanting roofs. They’re made of brick or concrete or tin; the most unfortunate are of a kind of wood that’s rotted over the years. On some of them the concrete has peeled away in places to show the brick beneath.

And yeah, they’re pretty ugly. They’re ugly because the whole region had been colonized by the Soviet Union, which, like Russia today, didn’t consider Ukraine to be a real place, and certainly not a place that deserved aid and resources. Like colonies all over the world they were robbed of everything valuable, and then blamed for their poverty.