Email from Russia: We, the middle class of Russia, don't want any war ...

[pampango]

12:50: Boris Sergeev in Novosibirsk, Russia emails: I'm a Russian, live in the centre of Russia - Siberia. No idea why Putin did this, this must be some mistake. We, the middle class of Russia, don't want any war, we don't want any imperial ambitions to be established. We want a decent life for us and our children and good relations with the whole world and with our neighbours. But even if he made this mistake, Putin has never retreated and he never said he was wrong. And this is what scares me most.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26405082

Sounds like the Russian middle class and the US middle class have something huge in common.

Don't want war;
Don't want imperial ambitions;
Want a decent life for us and our children;
Want good relations with the whole world and with our neighbours.

Unfortunately, the militarists in Russia and the militarists in the US have something huge (and diametrically opposed) in common, too.

Do want war;
Do harbor imperial ambitions;
Don't care about a decent life for the middle class and the next generation;
Don't value good relations with the whole world and with our neighbors.

[SmittynMo]

1. For the most part.....

people in general, want a good life for themselves and their children. When you put a crazy bastard and his cronies in power, this is the result. Look at Saddam Hussein. All those innocent lives lost. My fear is that it is about to happen again.

[Ed Suspicious]

2. It seems it's getting a lot tougher to use

nationalism as the leverage to engage in empire building in the borderless age of the internet.

[jwirr]

3. I think it was much like this in the cold war era. That is one of the reasons that our two countries

were not communicating on a personal level. Too keep the middle class blind.

[Igel]

4. Yesterday a Ukrainian warship allegedly defected to the Russian side.

The report originated with a Russian senator.

The rebuttal came from a former-officer-become-reporter that was attached to the ship and who posted the rebuttal on his Facebook page.

The typical response on DU was, "What? A Facebook page is taken as accurate?"


In this case, an email is taken as representative of an economic class?


I found the revealing of an inside-job Goldman-Sachs twitter expose to be enlightening. People assumed that the details of what went on inside an elevator were real because an anonymous person on twitter said it was real. Even if it turned out to be from a non-Goldman-Sachs employee in Texas.

We have a flat, non-hierarchical way of evaluating information. If it's there, and we like it, it must be true. Truly, we've enhanced our capacity for high-level pitiful thinking skills.