I'm 100% on the side of Ukraine, but
I saw the picture of the missile dud that had "for the children" scrawled on it in Russian and it seemed too obvious and contrived. I've heard the drumbeat to war before and it always tugs at the heartstrings with propaganda. Remember when Saddam was dumping babies from bassinets?
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I ran through several scenarios in my mind, like enlisted Russians on the firing line painting it or Putin demanding it be done at the factory. The only reasonable way that could show up there was if it was painted on after it landed to garner more support. No one else has a reason to do it.
Through my 6 decades I've learned that every war mixed ordinance with an equal amountof deceit.
= new reply since forum marked as read
my point was that a few people, based of the BI article, were trying to misconstrue it into an even more inflammatory thing (as if the monsters' actions alone are not bad enough)
sorry if I came across as a bit of a berk
You can't trust anybody, so that means you can ignore everything.
I've seen that adduced for Russian societal polls. "Russians are apathetic." (Not "pathetic." Well, that's *their* claim.)
Say one thing ("Yes, Ukrainians fascists, Russian soldiers virtuous"
, think one thing ("you're an effing dork-pollster, and that khyilo in charge" , do another ("Yes, sir, I'll have that report on how profitable the business is tomorrow, sir."
This isn't a socialist approach. It's a totalitarian approach where the totalitarian-in-chief requires not just outward compliance but attempts for ideological compliance. (That ain't Hitler. Mao? Stalin? Oh, yeah. Obedience isn't enough.)
Earlier somebody tried to draw a bright line between Soviet communism and Soviet socialism; there isn't one. the USSR wasn't communist in practice, it was communist in belief. They were *building towards* communism, they were building *socialism." Socialism was a good thing, they said, where the means of production were owned, maintained and run by the state. In communism--at least a couple of generations away in 1990--the state would wither and the means would be distributed, each person willingly working towards only the common good and the government reduced to a minor role of records keeping. They never explained how that would work, minus world revolution, but it was a belief, after all. "I'm a communist," a Stalinist-Russian acquaintance said, stating her beliefs. She believed herself a democrat. And she regretted the collapse of socialist. Because from Lenin to Gorbachov they were building socialism to reach communism, but always deepening democracy. They had other mental illnesses, but those don't matter here.
(Their definition of democracy is not the traditional US definition. Theirs was a "managed democracy" or "militant democracy"--a system run by a few ostensibly to benefit and train the "demos", not so much rule by the mob or rule by the people as rule for the people, rouseable into a mob on command. When you see anybody say that the majority are idiots and need to be taught or corrected, *that* is your model for those claimants. The US in 1820 had slaves, but in a majoritarian democracy where 50% + 1 like that idea, slavery is utterly democratic if 50% + 1 of the voters think it is. Reprehensible? Sure. The alternative is a representational democracy. I think that majoritarian democracy = mob rule in a suit and tie. Because slavery.)
за детей takes possession by context. It contains neither article "the, a" or possessor (my, our, your, their). Interlinearly it would say "for children". The rest is interpretation, but that's usually straightforward.
"I did it за детей" really depends on me and my context. Do I have kids? What did I do? If I don't have kids then it can't be *my* kids. I have one child. If I do *anything* за детей it's not for mine.
If I had 3 kids, I *could* say, "I needed to divorce my wife. She was cruel and vicious. I did it за детей." For my kids. I could also say I worked hard and saved money за детей--"for my kids."
"What? Tigreans are dying? I donated my IRA, $25k. I did it за детей." For "the" children, but the context says it's for the Tigrean kids. There are times when I'd want "think of the children" to be translated "do it за детей". "Vote Democratic. Think of the children." No, really you want action based on that thinking. Telling somebody to stop and think after telling them it's important to actually do something is moderately insane, if that's what you really mean.
I can imagine a context in which a Russian 20-year-old would daub за детей on the side of a missile. If he believed that *his* kids were at risk because of the Ukrainian juggernaut threatening his family, for example, or perhaps *Russian* kids in general. Haven't seen that in Ru agitprop. Yes, Ru is threatened ... by NATO and the West. Not Ukr. Nobody's seriously said that Russia's under risk of mass invasion by Ukrainians narco-fascists.
I have seen widespread the idea that it's necessary to save the "Russian" children in Ukraine. That can mean the russkiy kids in the Donbas, killed daily by Ukrainian assaults (all fictional until 2/24, at the very least). But Russia media for years has said that the Donbas was under constant assault by genocidal fascist Ukrainians and needed to be freed from their hate. And by "years" I mean 8 years. ("Russian" is either russkiy, culture and ethnicity, or rossiyskiy, citizenship. I've gone sloppy in distinguishing them. No so after this.)
I've seen the claim that the Ukrainians are russkie but deceived--it's not too late to save the kids in Kyiv, in Chernihiw, in Lwiw, from being corrupted and made to think that they're not just russkie with a funny accent. They need to be "saved," as well.
Given that, it's not the soldiers' kids that are at issue--it's за the Ukrainian's детей that they're killing the "fascists." Note that the first reports in the Ru media were on Telegram--the soldiers were convinced they hit a train station bristling with "Ukrofascists" and they were proud to have targeted and killed a bunch of all-male Ukrainian kid-corrupting fascists.
State media "corrected" those with first-hand knowledge. Mostly for the public at large. But I wouldn't be in the least surprised if the soldiers who fired that missile were told that it missed and landed in an empty field--they only assumed that the explosion that was timed for the impact of the missile *they* launched was *their* missile, in fact their missile landed in an empty llama pasture 50 miles east of Perth, Namibia. These are Russians in their early 20s, gee-og-raff-ee ain't their strong sute.
