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Jim Tung's avatar

"I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to process this fact. How could Russians not revere the man who climbed down from total power over them and then willingly went away?"

I think it's easy to process this fact. As a kid with a familial connection to anti-Communism, I was pretty down with "the Soviet Union and World Communism is an evil empire" and so I'm happy that Soviet Communism collapsed. Sometimes, we get nice things.

On the other side of the coin, it's pretty clear that the end of the Soviet Union was a massive loss in national pride. From that perspective, it's not a surprise that the person responsible for that would be denigrated. (It is a damned shame that the Russia of Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon" never came to be, i.e. a struggling fledgling democracy that was finally going to commercialize its natural resources on a world-class scale.) It makes you wonder if the rest of the world bungled the intervening years by not offering an opportunity to regain that pride in a different way.

I like what JVL said regarding Gorbachev stepping down voluntarily. Americans have a great tradition of that, and we're proud of it. George Washington stepped down after two terms, and by God, if it was good enough for ol' George, it was pretty darn good for ~150 years until FDR, and up until the last feller, we've had a long tradition of leaders leaving office. It's a shame that Russians (and Trump) don't recognize what a gift that is.

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Travis's avatar

On part 1/3: The Russian people are by and large machismo as shit via national culture. That's why they see Gorbachav as a weakling who let the Russia Empire collapse and become a victory lap for the west. This is the central cultural rage that drives Putin. He was in East Berlin at the KGB field office when there was a mob of protestors outside of the building and the Kremlin hung up the phone on him. It was at that inflection point that Putin decided that he had had enough with weak Russian leadership and that someone like him would have to take charge of the country so as to not let that kind of cultural humiliation befall its people. That's when he started blowing up the Moscow apartments of his political competition in the 90's and blaming it on Chechen separatists. Just ask Anne Applebaum or Cathy Young. They'll tell ya.

On part 3/3: The moral injury paired with the lack of leadership accountability during the Afghan pullout is going to drive some of the AFG veterans *insane*. The part where the article talks about staying busy to keep from processing what you're going through, that's 100% the only way you cope out there. Repression. The problem is, that rage is going to come and find them as soon as their lives slow down post-service. I didn't start feeling my real anger until about 10 years after I had gotten out, mostly because I had kept busy. The psychological/emotional check is already in the mail for these dudes, and who knows what it will look like when they all finally start having to confront it. I worry about that often. This is the part that stuck out to me because it hit home so hard. Task & Purpose really has some terrific authors:

"Many of them spoke on condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly, *without fear of reprisal or being ostracized for sharing details about their mental health* (emphasis my own). While their experiences differed based on where they were and what they were doing during those two weeks, there were common threads throughout their stories: They felt the military wanted to move on as quickly and quietly as possible from the withdrawal. *Many said their commands brushed the trauma they brought home with them under the rug and were slow-rolling awards and recognition for the mission, for reasons they didn’t understand* (emphasis my own)."

This quote points to something sick I saw in the culture of our ground combat branches over and over, both while I served and what I saw in guys who served after me. The forced repression of some really heavy emotional shit because ground combat force culture views depression/anxiety in the aftermath of witnessing/participating in extreme violence as a sign of weakness--as a sign of the first guy in the squad who is going to drop his pack and force the others to carry his slack because he can't hack it at war emotionally-speaking. They fear that kind of weakness will spread to more squad members and that their squad will deteriorate in the field. It *really* fucks with your sense of self afterwards when you get back home and finally have to start dealing with the emotional baggage. It saddles you with an internal guilt for feeling emotionally-broken. A kind of feeling that you don't deserve to feel sad and that you need to just continuously "suck it the fuck up." That sticks with you for life. It's one of the reasons a lot of guys end up killing themselves in their 50's. They're too fucked in the head to maintain healthy relationships with others but too conditioned to repress emotions rather than seeking emotional support for them. It leaves you in a kind of fucked state where you can't maintain relationships successfully but are also conditioned to not seek help for fear of judgement (rather from peers or from the self). I feel so so terrible for the guys who went to Afghanistan. As defunct as Iraqi politics are, at least ISIS didn't win there and they had the opportunity to pursue *some* kind of democracy. Afghanistan is just absolutely fucked now, and so are so many of the men and women who came back from there are going to be shells of themselves by the time they process everything once their lives slow down.

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