kravietz 🦇<p><a class="hashtag" href="https://agora.echelon.pl/tag/russia" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Russia</a> ambassador Pavlovsky to <a class="hashtag" href="https://agora.echelon.pl/tag/australia" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Australia</a> speaking on ABC News[^0] is a very interesting anthropological artifact demonstrating how Russia’s nearly full return to the old Soviet ideological tropes. They no longer speak of <a class="hashtag" href="https://agora.echelon.pl/tag/marxism" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Marxism</a> but the whole remaining intellectual apparatus introduced by Marxism-Leninsm is back here.</p><p>The presenter continues to ask very specific questions about very specific events involving Russian war crimes, to which Pavlovsky never actually responds directly, but instead persistently drives his narrative towards one particular topic, best illustrated by this 3:00 quote:</p><blockquote><p>About the public being brainwashed it involves not being able to see events in a context. And especially in the context of a national history.</p></blockquote><p>I’m quite sensitive to this, as my interest in Marxism 30 years ago started exactly with this specific intellectual technique that I thought is just a primitive evasion but in in reality is a fundamental feature of Marxist philosophy - drawing attention away from the facts towards some vague “broader context”.</p><p>There’s nothing wrong with a broader context, in general, but Pavlovsky is just using it wrong. A historic context <em>could</em> help explains motives or origins of some Russian decisions, but no “historic context” can nullify the very specific actions, like killing of civilians or destroying towns, that the journalist is asking about.</p><p>To explain Pavlovsky’s thinking, let me bring one 1949 book I have: “Forensic evidence theory” by an infamous Stalinist prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky[^1] which I have even scanned an published in Polish[^2]. The title sounds boring, but it’s basically a textbook of Marxist-Leninist understanding of law, and a rather terrifying one. Let’s look at this quote:</p><blockquote><p>The Soviet court seeks to establish the material truth, or, in other words, the actual truth.</p></blockquote><p>Nothing wrong here, eh? What could be wrong in an attempt to “establish the actual truth”?</p><blockquote><p>As a result, the Soviet court, when hearing, for example, civil cases, acts <strong>not only on the basis of the material presented by the parties,</strong> not only from the point of view of its external conformity with the requirements of the law, but from its duty to penetrate into the real essence of these or other legal relations. (p. 257) The Soviet system of evidence is <strong>based on the principle of internal conviction, namely the socialist conviction of the judge armed with a socialist legal consciousness</strong> and a truly scientific Marxism-Leninism methodology (p. 302)</p></blockquote><p>This summarizes the Soviet approach to law and justice: the spirit and letter of law (Roman <em>Ius</em> and <em>Lex</em>), the actual evidence and established facts <strong>don’t really matter in a Soviet court.</strong> What does matter is the “internal conviction” of a Soviet judge “armed with socialist consciousness”.</p><p><strong>It’s literally the opposite of “establishing the actual truth”.</strong></p><p>What this means in practice is that presence of a qualifying evidence for a murder didn’t have to result in conviction, and in the same way you could have ben convicted in the absence of evidence… as long as <strong>the judge had a subjective perception of your actions being favourable or unfavourable for the Party.</strong></p><p>That’s it. That was all the apparently complex philosophy behind thousands of innocent people killed in Great Purges or actual Soviet criminals - thieves, sadists and killers - never put for trial, because that was in the interest of the Party.</p><p>What Pavlovsky and countless other Russian politicians are today bringing back into the public discourse is just that dialectical way of thinking: a war crime is not what we can objectively qualify as a war crime based on evidence, but what is unfavourable from the point of view of Russian imperial expansion. Acts favourable to that objective are not war crimes, on the same basis.</p><p>Fortunately for us, Marxist <a class="hashtag" href="https://agora.echelon.pl/tag/dialectics" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dialectics</a> was not really any “truly scientific” methodology, it was just a sophisticated tool for reinforcing confirmation biases and self-delusion[^3]. It was the primary factor that was driving <a class="hashtag" href="https://agora.echelon.pl/tag/ussr" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#USSR</a> into the collapse during 1970-1980’s, and it was the primary factor that drove Russia into starting the war in 2014 and then the full-scale war in 2022.</p><p>Hopefully this retrospection will help you a bit with understanding the psychology of Russian leadership, especially its apparently irrational denial of reality. Adoption of Soviet “dialectical thinking” is very tempting, as it gives you an instant empowering impression of suddenly understanding the “broader context” of literally everything. In reality, it’s nothing different than what we today call conspiracy theorising, with all its consequences.</p><p>[^0]: <a href="https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=5e3NsA8mDt4&t=181" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=5e3NsA8mDt4&t=181</a> [^1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Vyshinsky" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Vyshinsky</a> [^2]: <a href="https://echelon.pl/andriej-wyszyski-teoria-dowodw-sdowych-1949.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://echelon.pl/andriej-wyszyski-teoria-dowodw-sdowych-1949.html</a> [^3]: <a href="https://write.as/arcadian/marxist-dialectics-as-a-instrument-of-self-delusion" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://write.as/arcadian/marxist-dialectics-as-a-instrument-of-self-delusion</a></p>