JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin’s Forever War” – New York Times
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“… Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?”
“I spent a month in Russia … searching for clues that might explain its nationalist lurch into an unprovoked war and its [current] mood …. The war … [reportedly] has … taken 200,000 lives since Feb. 24, 2022, roughly split between the two sides …. [In Russia] I encountered fear … fervid bellicosity … [and] stubborn patience to see out a long war. … Homo sovieticus … has lived on in modified form, along with habits of subservience. … [W]ith the aid of relentless [state TV] propaganda … the old Putin playbook — money, mythmaking and menace of murder — has just about held. But I also heard ambivalent voices … along with a few raised in outright dissent, especially from young people … with[in] a stark generational divide. … Above all, it is in the fear that causes people to lower voices and hesitate before uttering … [the word] ‘war.’ …. Repression has become fierce and the war [] Putin started … has been waged with near total unconcern for the consequences …. Putinism[‘s] … contradictions[] … combine[] mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families, ferocious attacks on a ‘unipolar’ American world with revived Russian imperialist aggression — all held together by the ruthless suppression of dissident voices and recourse to violence when necessary. [] Putin has largely rehabilitated Stalin, his gulag notwithstanding, as the thread to the past remains unbroken. …”