I remember one weeknight in 2008 sitting at a table in a cafe' in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. I was working on my (sadly all too topical) doctoral dissertation involving Vladimir Putin's suppression of political activism. All of a sudden, I heard a rumbling sound on the main thoroughfare outside. When I looked out the window, a line of tanks had appeared on the main street. This was no national holiday with a military parade, but the government had evidently decided to run a training exercise through the city to place part of its shiny arsenal on display. Many of those around me didn't even give the tanks a passing glance, nor admittedly was I that surprised.
Still, that random and ominous display of military might would not have been possible at the start of Putin's reign. Russian streets were then still a chaotic, colorful mix of market stalls, migrants speaking a cacophony of different languages, and vendors selling newspapers and magazines on almost any topic imaginable. By 2008, however, those streets had been cleared and many vendors were afraid to set up shop lest their activities be deemed offensive.
I told a Russian friend of mine whose academic research focused specifically on casualties within the armed forces during the Chechen wars about those tanks. She had already begun to face harassment and anonymous threats of violence from those who found her work "insulting to the armed forces of Russia."
"Here in Russia," she warned me, "we are like slowly boiling frogs."
Just as "Nazi" has come to represent anything that offends the personal wishes of Russian elites or gets in the way of their political and imperial desires, so has "terrorism" come to stand in for so much here in America. Despite the vast differences between us and our political foe, leaders on both sides focus on funding armed conflicts even as deficits wrought by prolonged war have deprived and angered ordinary citizens.
Russia is a warning of what we might someday face as a nation if we become inured to violence at home and abroad. It's not just Israel's response that's at issue now, though there's ample evidence to suggest that a brutal counterinsurgency war in Gaza will only weaken an already divided, anti-democratic government. The U.S. decision to continue to fund and fight our war on terror, not to speak of wars and cold wars of various kinds globally, will determine the environment in which we and our children live going forward. All too sadly, war, when we are the ones fighting it, has been largely missing in action in our own media sphere and that, believe me, is anything but healthy.
Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
