The book is still coming along slowly — I’m finding my style, plus there is a lot of other work. The chapter on the definition of war and why I use this specific one is ready. For those who read the book on ancap, my definition has long been no secret, but it was somewhat cumbersome; now a short form has been added: war is a conflict in which people are ready to kill.
For now, the relationships between individual subjects are being detailed, but in the next chapter, I will move on to collective theoretical subjects, which are far more familiar to us when it comes to war.
The main advantage of the book is still intended to be its size: it will be short.
I think it’s enough throwing unstructured notes at you; it’s time to get started on the book itself.
The current version of the book will be available on my website at a fixed location at https://ancapchan.info/war/. Currently, there is a rough table of contents available there, which gives an idea of how I envision the structure of the future text. And to get things started, I am immediately posting a short preface.
The scale of the task scares me a little. Moreover, I don’t want to drag out the writing process for over a year, as happened with the basic book on ancap, but rather manage it a bit faster. Wish me luck, cheer me up with donations, criticize the text as it appears — let’s together expand the horizon of human conceptions of the world a little (well, okay, in our case, not so much about the world as about war).
When I was writing the book on ancap, you could observe the results of the creative search process in real-time. After publication, the material was restructured; as a result of discussions in the comments, personal communication, and simply rereading the text, serious revisions to the wording were introduced, and a couple of chapters were discarded entirely, after which the second part of the book started over in a different vein. And this was while I was navigating relatively familiar territory: libertarian doctrine has long been and repeatedly laid out, and all that was required of me was its reimagining and a brief retelling.
As for the libertarian theory of war, this is uncharted territory, so I am not attempting to write a book right away, but am simply recording separate considerations for now. The only support I currently have are the questions laid out in the first part of the sketches that a libertarian theory of war should answer. These are the points I will go through.
How to determine when it is worth starting a war?
As a reminder, I define war as a class of conflicts in which, for at least one side, the survival of the opponent is not a deterrent factor. That is, to be strictly precise, the party to a conflict that is prepared to kill is waging war, while the party to a conflict that is not prepared to kill is not waging war, even if they are currently being attempted to be killed. Thus, even if someone is attacked with the intent to kill, they do not automatically find themselves in a state of war, but are free to choose for themselves whether to wage war or to evade it in some way.
Evasion can be direct: using passive defense, fleeing, hiding—something along those lines. Or it can be indirect: resorting to someone else’s protection. This immediately raises the problem of fuzzy boundaries. On one hand, even if a subject feeds and equips their protector, as well as pays them a salary and promises to recognize their ownership of captured trophies, they themselves are still not directly fighting. On the other hand, take a drone operator: they might be sitting a thousand kilometers from the target, sipping coffee and having nothing against the target of liquidation in general: should this operator be considered the one waging war—or their client, who feels enough antipathy toward the target of liquidation to shell out for the hire of an operator? How, fundamentally, does a drone operator differ from the drone itself? By the fact that they make the decision to kill? And what if the drone is controlled by AI and makes that decision itself?
In short, in conditions where there is a deep division of labor everywhere, finding someone who wages war completely independently is as easy as finding someone who lives entirely on subsistence farming.
By the way, this circumstance also complicates the precise determination of who started the war and, consequently, who the aggressor—that is, the initiator of violence—is. Parties can spend a long time inventively doing nasty things to each other, primarily through other people’s hands, and then some particular nasty act, for some reason, begins to be interpreted by observers as the start of a war and a legitimate reason to respond to aggression with all their military power.
What is my point in all this? That in the libertarian theory of war, it is not enough to simply say “NAP.” This is an abstract principle that can be applied to any interpersonal interaction to decide: in this specific elementary action, Vasya is the aggressor and Petya is the victim of aggression. And before that was an action in which Petya was the aggressor and Vasya the victim. And even earlier… and so on, until one grows tired. The aggressive IDF bombs Hamas. Well, yes, it bombs. If we take October 8, 2023, as the starting point, then the IDF is the aggressor. If October 7, 2023, then Hamas is the aggressor. Let’s wind further back into the past—and we slide into questions about land property rights, the content of sacred texts, and so on. In other words, the NAP as a criterion for when to start a war is inapplicable, at least in its pure form. At least when it comes to collective conflicts, rather than elementary situations like “you are just walking, someone lunges at you with a knife, and how to determine at what moment to shoot the attacker.”
With that, I conclude the second part of the notes; I didn’t even manage to fully analyze the first question, but it is better for me to post small notes more often, as the overall speed of work will be higher. In addition to sequential numbering and links to previous pieces of text, I will also use the tag LTV (libertarian theory of war) for these notes.
Not long ago, I was listening to one of Vladimir Zolotorev’s Saturday sermons on the Libertarian.site channel (I’m too lazy to search for the specific sermon—the channel’s navigation is very mediocre), and he noted that the theory of war is poorly developed within libertarianism. This observation seemed fair to me, which means it is worth thinking in this direction.
War is a type of conflict in which the necessity of the opponent’s survival is not a deterrent factor for at least one party. If one of the parties to the conflict is destroyed, it means that the conflict, for all intents and purposes, has been resolved. Granted, this may give rise to new conflicts—with those who consider such a manner of resolving conflicts by the winner as a reason to assert claims against them.
To minimize such claims, humanity has developed certain customs of war. For instance, if a reliable casus belli is presented before entering a war, and collateral damage is minimized during the war by attempting to destroy only legitimate military targets, then according to these customs, such a manner of conducting war should not entail any sanctions, and may even help in acquiring allies.
However, this is all empiricism operating with collective subjects such as states, armies, peoples, and so on. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is about methodological subjectivism and individual responsibility. The fact that some collective imaginary entities are in a state of war does not create any moral obligations for a specific person to enter the war on either side. At the same time, libertarian morality suggests entering conflicts on the just side, which means that libertarians may not be foreign to wars, even those where they are not the party subjected to a direct attack.
Vladimir Zolotorev proposes using the standard legal approach of peacetime to describe war within libertarianism: a lawsuit is filed against the party that caused the damage; in the case of collective actions, the lawsuit extends to the entire collective proportionally to their contribution; courts make decisions, the assets of the party that caused the damage are seized and sold on the market, and the proceeds are transferred to the plaintiff—and so on. Unfortunately, this model, which would have worked perfectly for a tribal society from the Icelandic sagas or, adjusted for capitalist realities, in some conditional Wild West, begins to stall heavily in a society where the system of kinship ties and personal obligations has been replaced by a system of formal hierarchy and various group identities, such as religion or nation.
Obviously, in this situation, an obvious solution suggests itself to a libertarian—to simplify the task. In other words, let’s abolish states and all other imaginary collective entities, and then the analysis of conflicts will elegantly be reduced to a simple and clear basis of property disputes. Abolishing these mental parasites in reality is, undoubtedly, a boon for all humanity; however, if we close our eyes to their existence right now and analyze reality as if these entities did not exist, they will not instantly disappear because of it.
This was simply a pointer to some difficulties in considering such a phenomenon as war; naturally, it is far from exhaustive.
A viable theory of war in libertarianism must answer several diverse questions:
How to determine when it is worth starting a war?
How to determine the just side in a war?
How to determine the appropriate degree of one’s own participation in a war?
How to determine that a war is being waged against you?
How to determine who is waging war against you?
How to determine what collateral damage is permissible?
How to determine appropriate compensation for direct and collateral damage?
How to determine when it is time to end the war?
How to determine on what terms the war should be ended?
I do not yet have the sought-after theory; I want to think about the necessary formulations in my spare time. Your comments may prove to be very useful. I hope to be able to share the results of these reflections soon.
It is quite difficult to add anything original to the explosion of all sorts of analytics and meme-making that has occurred over the last couple of days regarding the tank getting stuck in the circus gates.
The most realistic version of what happened seems to me to be the one proposed by Alexei Shustov, (who, by the way, recently released a new edition of his book After the State, I still can’t find the time to read it and post a review), so I am now spared the need to provide my own version.
The most balanced suggestion, in my view, on how this incident should have been utilized, was encountered with Roman Popkov. In short: it was an excellent demonstration for reasonable skeptics that the Putin regime can indeed be realistically overthrown by direct violence; for this, it is sufficient to have a small army. I remember when I spoke with Peter Young from the Free Private Cities fund, I mentioned that I consider Zelensky’s biggest mistake in this war to be the refusal to recruit a full-fledged contract army from Russian citizens.
I will add, however, that generals always prepare for past wars, and now Putin will almost certainly remove from the front those couple of divisions that are theoretically supposed to protect Moscow. Thus, repeating the Prigozhin maneuver will now require far more substantial forces. Therefore, something else will likely need to be invented. Well, at least this will slightly weaken the RF at the front, which is something.
If Ukraine still does not start ramping up the rhetoric about the need for international support for the collapse of the RF, then I simply do not know what other signs its leadership needs. Not that I have a high opinion of it, but the move seems completely obvious today. Simply announce that Ukraine will immediately recognize the statehood of any subject of the RF that secedes from it. It is not so important whether Ukraine can guarantee the protection of each such new state. It is important that this becomes a routine part of political rhetoric, a common place for any decent politician. Does a subject of the RF have the right to separate from the RF? Of course it does, because the Moscow regime is criminal and illegitimate. Period. Nothing more to discuss.
Only I fear that nothing will change in the Ukrainian fucking circus either. They will simply continue to grind down the Russian army in the designated corner and beg the West for equipment; no other lines were written for them.
Hi! I really dislike your answers regarding the prevention of nuclear war. You say that ancaps will shift the costs onto the nomenklatura, but these answers are far from reality. A bounty of 11 million euros was placed on Lukashenko’s head, yet there weren’t even any attempts to eliminate him.
Suppose there is a nomenklatura sitting in a very deep bunker under a densely populated city. They are protected by loyal security services. What will libertarians do if this nomenklatura starts a nuclear war against Ancapistan (=what do they threaten with to prevent it)? It would be preferable to provide some specific military measures.
Nenavision
Okay, let’s imagine such a picture. Zelensky arrives at the front to hand out another box of medals, and there he is suddenly kidnapped by an enemy sabotage and reconnaissance group and taken to the RF. Next, they push a peace treaty on him, which he agrees to sign publicly. At the solemn signing ceremony, he inevitably gets within handshake distance of Putin, after which he clenches his jaw, breaks a fake tooth—in short, some trash in the spirit of Frank Herbert happens, only Vladimir Putin turns out not to be as lucky as Vladimir Harkonnen, and also dies.
In the RF, power is seized by a club of angry patriots, who move into a bunker under Moscow, surround themselves with loyal security services, and give the order for an immediate general mobilization, as well as bring the Strategic Missile Forces to a state of highest combat readiness.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the central government is paralyzed by another Maidan; control over the supply of the front, as well as other state functions, are taken over by volunteers; the Maidan declares the complete abolition of taxes and complete freedom of private initiative, as well as general armament—in short, literally a month after the incident with the kidnapping of Zelensky, Ukraine becomes an ancap society in a first approximation.
Great, a minimally plausible picture of a deadly deadlock between a fanatic dictator and an ancap society with clear territorial borders has been established. How do the ancaps defend themselves against Girkin? They have no nuclear bomb, no medium-range missiles, no strategic aviation, no unified command, and no time to waste.
The ancaps react to the threat in their favorite manner: everyone does what they are best at. For the most part, this means occupying themselves with matters far more important than war. For example, importing goods from the EU into Ukraine duty-free, and also exporting them duty-free through the leaky Russian border in the area of a conditional Shebekino, and selling them there for bitcoins.
The front gradually collapses because the mobilized realize that there will be no criminal prosecution for desertion, provided their own don’t shoot them in the back immediately. Armaments and ammunition from warehouses gradually and mysteriously disappear into someone’s private stores. Several highly motivated groups prepare for partisan warfare, while the less flexible prepare to stand to the death on their tiny section of the front, but for some reason the enemy prefers to attack where they are not.
Girkin realizes that he no longer needs general mobilization, and that he can do without nuclear weapons as well. He focuses on organizing an effective occupation administration, plus he is forced to pay more and more attention to the internal agenda. He has to climb out of the bunker more and more often, travel through the regions, solve purely civilian issues—and after three months he is finally killed by Ukrainian partisans, somewhere on the way from Vladivostok airport to the city. The first car hits a mine, then the motorcade is shelled by mortars, and then the survivors are cleaned up with small arms. This episode becomes the occasion for previously scattered attacks on representatives of Girkin’s occupation administration to turn into a full-scale hunt.
Power in Russia is taken by Sobyanin, who orders an immediate retreat to the 2014 borders and begins bargaining with the international community for the lifting of sanctions in exchange for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Crimea as well, replacing them with UN peacekeepers. Along the way, he releases Navalny, stating that he would be happy to see his former opponent in the post of Moscow mayor, as he is not in doubt that this time he will definitely win the election. But that is a completely different story.
A column of light armored vehicles is an easy target
I looked at the poll results regarding the reasons why my readers are staying in Russia.
What pleases me most is that the smallest category is currently under a direct travel ban. For the vast majority, the path of retreat is at least not under fire.
I am equally pleased by the agorists who managed to find an excuse to avoid mobilization. I hope it is a good, high-quality excuse.
Those who are already packing their bags have surely studied the issue well and know where to go. There is plenty of material on emigration; while waiting for a foreign passport and other papers, one can study it inside and out.
Partisans, I am proud of you. You already have over a year of combat experience, and you certainly have no need for my advice. From time to time, something in Russia mysteriously burns or explodes, certain unpleasant individuals run into trouble, including fatal outcomes, secret information doesn’t stay within the narrow circle of authorized holders for long, the morale of the troops is low, state-sponsored patriots are eating each other, and so on. If any of you had a hand in any of this, or in something not covered by my imagination—I don’t want to know anything about it until the war ends or your evacuation is complete.
Now a few words of consolation for the lazy and those bound by insurmountable domestic difficulties. It is very unlikely that the rate of producing corpses and cripples on the front among Russians will exceed three hundred thousand people per year. Thus, even if the mobilization potential of the RF is only thirty million, the state will consume only one percent of those liable for military service per year. So, out of the hundred or so who answered that they intend to remain in the RF, only one or two people will die or be crippled in the war in a year. This is a good chance for survival, enough to keep from shaking with fear. I would shake with disgust, but that is a matter of habit. Nevertheless, I recommend buying bitcoins at every opportunity: if the rate skyrockets, perhaps you will reconsider your ambitions and finally head abroad.
Of course, the main reason not to go anywhere is the fear of the unknown. How to legalize oneself, how to live, how much will have to be spent, how to get money, how long one will have to live in such a suspended state—this worries many even more than they want to show.
I’ll try to share my experience.
It is believed that it is easiest for remote IT workers to emigrate. This is true. I am still sincerely surprised why even one IT worker remained in the RF. These gluttonous creatures have driven apartment rental prices into the sky and still dare to grumble that the level of service abroad is somehow worse than in Moscow. Even if another hundred thousand of them crowd into tiny Montenegro and prices double again from current levels—even then they will be able to live in comfort, denying themselves very little, while all other immigrants will have to pack their bags and migrate to Africa, or wherever else is relatively cheap.
Without IT skills, I was lucky enough to find a remote job requiring only basic computer literacy. ChatGPT cannot replace me, but a well-designed dispatch program could; however, it is easier to pay me 700 euros a month than an entire team of developers for such a program, so I don’t have to worry about my employment. Nevertheless, there isn’t much work of this sort, and without it, I would have to work offline and with my hands, which, however, is not a great tragedy. If you are not an IT worker, it is better to orient yourself toward such an outcome from the start.
To make ends meet, many immigrants rent apartments as a group of friends. This is very sensible. Concerns about privacy and domestic frictions take a back seat compared to the savings achieved. In the RF, I never lived with any one person for more than six months—tensions built up, and we gradually drifted apart. Here I have already broken that record: I have no time for petty whims, you know. Those who have experience living in a dormitory already have a head start.
There is another obvious pattern. On one hand, the further away, the more obstacles await new immigrants. This includes a higher cost of living and the increasing complexity of legalization in a new country. On the other hand, the further away, the fewer resources the average new immigrant has: Russia is getting poorer, it is becoming harder to sell property there for a good price before leaving, and so on. Therefore, the fact that the flow of refugees from the RF does not dwindle is only because the Russian state makes staying in the RF unbearable at a rate even higher than the rate of citizens’ impoverishment. Conclusion: if you leave now, it will be easier for you than if you leave in six months. Second conclusion: at some point, it will become almost impossible to leave the RF, even if you want to very badly.
In 2021, I went to Montenegro simply because an interesting project came up—let’s, they said, build a libertarian community here and create a kind of European New Hampshire (in American New Hampshire, as I recently heard, a former member of the LPR is sitting in the state congress). And the weakness of COVID restrictions also played a part (remember, there was this COVID, under whose pretext all states competed in who could ruin their subjects’ lives in the most absurd way). I rented the cheapest studio for 120 euros a month and received a residence permit just two months after arriving—actually two weeks later than established by government regulations, about which I even had the audacity to grumble. Now this same studio is rented to someone else for 200. After applying for a residence permit extension in June, I received the new document only in November, and I still haven’t been able to open a bank account for the company I acquired—I am literally not being given the opportunity to pay taxes, damn it. Those who arrive right now simply cannot physically apply for a residence permit—the queue starts at nine in the evening the night before; few can endure such a thing.
If I were deciding right now which country to flee to from Russia with my background and current job, I would probably settle on Kyrgyzstan, because Montenegro is already too lavish and too much of a headache. Kyrgyzstan also has mountains, also a sea (of possibilities), also plenty of Russian speakers, also meat cuisine, also people friendly to immigrants, also an unstable government—but at the same time, life is cheaper, and it seems slightly easier with the bureaucratic red tape.
And if I decided to go specifically to Montenegro right now—since there is no Montelibero in Kyrgyzstan—I would no longer count on any residence permit, but would simply do visa-runs every month—to Albania in the summer, to Serbia in the winter. Or maybe I’d just forget about it and live as an illegal. As long as you don’t try to cross the border, no one cares about the legality of your residence status. And when you try, and they pick on you—the maximum risk is a fine and a six-month ban on entry.
Forgive the awkwardly long and rambling post; I just wanted to vent. I simply believe it is important to support my readers, wherever they are stuck right now, and whatever status they hold. Even if you didn’t escape and ended up at the front—well, shoot something off of yourself, something not too vital for life, but necessary to fight. There is always a way out.
Since everyone is remembering how it was today, I will also go through some old materials. What I wrote about the war is easiest to find via the tag #war. Rereading it now, I realize that, in general, I expressed the key wish for the Russian people in the very first post on the day the invasion began: to scatter across the world, ridding themselves of their statehood. Now, a year later, I am glad to realize that a huge number of former Russian subjects are implementing this program, and I very much hope that they will live in peace and prosperity. Of course, I do not consider myself a Russian nationalist, and therefore I did not limit myself to anti-Russian posts, but also scribbled an anti-Ukrainian one, where, in essence, I wished for representatives of the brotherly people the same thing: the opportunity to freely move far away from the war, where they could build their peaceful lives far from interstate disputes. And this is despite the fact that, overall, I view the activity of the Ukrainian state in destroying the RF rather positively.
For those who wished to stay in the RF and become heroes, a recommendation was also provided, and I am glad that quite many followed it (or thought in a similar direction) — I am talking about burning down military enlistment offices. For expats, the most important tasks were identified as defeatist chatter and helping everyone fleeing the war. I can state that here too, in general, it was a total hit.
As for the positive agenda for international politics laid out by me, alas, it penetrates minds with terrible friction. What can one do — for the average bureaucrat, it is somehow too radical. Nevertheless, I note with satisfaction that the topic of the dismemberment of the RF is gradually ceasing to be marginal. Everyone is simply waiting for it to happen somehow on its own. And I am waiting too, for that matter. After all, territorial collapse goes much easier when the breaking-off scraps of the empire quickly receive international recognition, and for that, you shouldn’t come to me.
A month after the start of the invasion, it became clear that this was for the very long haul, which was the subject of my most pessimistic post, about the routinization of horror and about how not a single useful niche for activity remained for libertarian politics in the RF, and that both libertarian parties should get out of there in full force — it is a moral duty. Alas, only one party out of two left in full force; the other left hostages for the regime.
In April, the theme of future reparations began to play out on social media, and here, unexpectedly for myself, I took the same position as Mikhail Svetov, although within the framework of completely different argumentation. In short, reparations are an evil primarily for Ukrainians.
On July 1, I indicated that a transition from diversions to individual terror would soon be quite likely. At the end of August, the first fairly loud terrorist attack occurred, about which I did not fail to reflect. Perhaps, this was a collection of my most controversial reflections in connection with the war.
Before the elections, I published a rather beautiful idea, which, however, as far as I know, no one utilized. Then mobilization happened, and after putting out a couple more posts, I lost interest in further reflections on the war. Everything has been said, all conclusions have been drawn, sides have been chosen, there is no one left to persuade. Which village was captured today by Russian troops has finally become less important than the fact that the Montenegrin government nationalized the Kamenari-Lepetane ferry crossing.
It’s time, high time for aliens to invade or a machine uprising to occur, so that we can all with a clear conscience retrain from military analysts into xenopsychologists and artificial intelligence experts.
A sad picture of the state’s offensive against private business, which occupies me far more than the war somewhere in the east
In 2011, US Air Force psychologists conducted a mental health screening of 600 combat drone operators. As it turned out, 42% of UAV operators reported moderate or severe stress, and 20% reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. A later study showed that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as conventional combat crews. Many will immediately ask—why is this happening?
As far back as the 20th century, many military experts concluded that 98% of people experience strong internal resistance to committing murder, and only up to 2% of individuals with psychopathic predispositions do not. In analyzing the issue of modern warfare involving combat drones, it is important for us to pay attention to what these experts said about the factors influencing the ability to kill and the factors leading to psychological trauma on the battlefield. The conclusions drawn and listed in the works of Dave Grossman will be especially helpful to us in this regard.
Firstly, this example with combat drone operators confirms the conclusion that killing is the most traumatic experience for a human being. As Grossman writes, the contradiction between the necessity to kill and the inability to do so due to internal resistance traumatizes a soldier’s psyche more than any other difficulties of combat operations. And those soldiers who were still able to kill most often suffer for the rest of their lives after the war because of what they committed.
A drone operator does not experience cold, hunger, lack of sleep, physical injuries, the loss of comrades, the risk of dying at any moment, and many other things that an ordinary soldier faces in battle. The only thing that unites them is the necessity to kill. This, therefore, only proves the long-established conclusion that killing is absolutely unnatural for humans and is the most traumatic experience of all possible ones.
Secondly, although military experts of the past concluded that distancing allows one to bypass the resistance to killing, they apparently underestimated how strongly it is expressed in humans. Even for a UAV operator, who may be located on the other side of the planet from the combat operations, this resistance does not completely disappear. The mere awareness of committing a murder is enough to cause psychological trauma.
An analogy can be drawn with the trench warfare of the First World War, in which hand grenades proved to be psychologically effective weapons. A soldier simply threw a grenade toward the enemy trenches, and it was not necessary for him to directly observe the enemy for this or what his actions led to. However, if he did see the result of his actions, or even just heard it, for example in the form of the screams of enemy soldiers, it could already traumatize his psyche.
All of this shows us that as long as a human is fundamentally capable of realizing the fact of committing a murder, no means will make it an easy act for them. By the way, this also aligns with the assumption of the Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM) model. Although this mechanism is directly activated only when a person can observe the suffering of their victim, due to the process of conditioning (the formation of conditioned reflex reactions), its functioning from childhood develops the ability to experience a rejection reaction even at the mere thought of committing violence.
As we can see, one cannot underestimate how unnatural the act of killing is for a human being. Every mentally healthy individual possesses a violence inhibitor, the function of which cannot simply be bypassed or suppressed. Even if certain means and methods enable some people to commit murder, it still does not end well for them. Only a tiny percentage of psychopathic personalities are truly capable of easily committing murder.
After my previous post, I was criticized for inconsistency: on one hand, I claim that the leaders of the Russian opposition acted quite competently, and on the other, I write that the regime’s response was to ban everything in Russia, and that all roads lead to the disposal of the population.
Here I will simply briefly note that when the RF troops attacked Ukraine, the Ukrainian troops also acted quite competently, which did not prevent them from losing a large territory. The actions of the opposition could have been successful if they hadn’t been constantly lagging. But they couldn’t help lagging: you cannot immediately incite people to burn down administrative buildings and engage in individual terror while people, for the most part, believe in legal methods of struggle. Thus, the few extremists from the time when the regime was slightly more herbivorous turned out to be premature, and their impulse went to waste. Now all they have left is to say, “we warned you.”
Similarly, this is all that remains to be said by those who desperately called all their friends and relatives to leave the country, and now they would be glad to leave, but there are traffic jams at all borders, and departure may be banned entirely any moment now.
We do not know what reserves of strength the regime has. Perhaps it will fall like the Soviet one after Afghanistan or the Russian one after the First World War. Or perhaps it will survive, like the Iranian one after the war with Iraq. It is only in our power to nudge it toward collapse through our action or inaction—and, if possible, avoid getting a retaliation from the regime for it. You can flee the country. You can burn down a recruitment office. You can beat up a recruitment officer. You can end up at the front and destroy your tank or commander there, and then successfully surrender into captivity. Or, if you prefer a positive agenda, you can help an immigrant, hide a deserter, persuade a friend not to go to the recruitment office… Ah, yes, that’s some kind of negativity again. Either way, all of these will be competent actions, strategically bringing you closer to the bright goal of the fall of the Russian dictatorship, even if the tactical effect seems negligible.
And what actions would be incompetent? For example, mocking those who have just this moment opened their eyes and demonstrating to them the shimmering whiteness of your own coat. Thoughtlessly approving and trying to justify every single action of regimes hostile to Russia—many of their actions are no less cannibalistic. Paying the regime fines issued to you for participating in peaceful street protests. Wishing the Russian army victory.
