I listened to this at 1.25 because I have no patience but then 3/4s of the way through I disagreed but at the same time agree. His argument is that we are all responsible for what our country does which I disagreed with because I don't feel that I have any power over what the government does.
He's Russian and talks about the war but more philosophically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1pOahq4TCk&ab_channel=VladVexler
Why All Russians Are Responsible for Putin's War
He opens with Thomas Mann who I never heard of but I am sure many of you have. He wrote an essay entitled "That Man is my Brother" then changed it to "Brother Hitler".
But he isn't referring to guilt by association. He is referring to political responsibility by association. He isn't denying that Hitler was radical evil rather he is saying look lets not face evil with our back to it instead lets sit there and ask ourselves look even though I am not to blame how am I responsible for this? (This is allVlad explaining Mann not me) Then he moves on to another essay written later.
He argued that there isn't a bad Germany and a good Germany. You can't claim Beethovan then deny Hitler. You can't claim Tolstoy then deny Putin. He says Russians are not citizens but a kind of population living on a shared territory a population that's outsourced its politics and instead just prioritized and focused on pesonal substinence.
It's when people strive to be morally good in a narrow sphere but in a wider sphere they are completely morally absent. Then he cuts to another man talking about thin relations and thick relations which boils down to we care about the people in our immediate circle. People think as long as they make their thick world a better place their thin world doesn't really matter. That's wrong because the thin world can eventually impact your thick world.
He says Russians lack a shared civic space so they only care about their territory. (This reminded me of LNR and DNR refusing to fight for each other's territories, I did wonder why they didn't work together.) People in St. Petersburg and Moscow are kind of protected from the war. Few soldiers come from there so they don't have coffins arriving. Because there is a lack of civic belonging they don't feel impacted by the invasion.
Mann wasn't just talking about Germany he was talking about the capacity of cultures to bring out the worst or the best in their inhabitants. The lesson is do not divide your country into good and bad simplistically but try to say it is all within me because it is one country not two no matter how divided it is. The West has stopped taking responsibility for political decisions that go against us because of how divided we are we have stopped taking political responsibility for the follies of our opponents. Ask yourself if this political leader stands against everything that you believe in how come your culture produced them?
He then goes to say the classic way to reject responsibility is to reject politics which is what Russia did.