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Is Putin And The Russians All Nuts?
A psychological perspective;
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Putin is deluded.
It must have dawned on him by now that he is losing the war and his best option is to end it ASAP. But he doesn't.
Whether that is pride, whether he thinks admitting defeat will end his presidency or that Russia will be more under threat than ever, who knows his motives for continuing?
Russia is fast approaching 1 million dead on the battlefield. His generals will soon decide enough is enough and demand an end. Ukraine is now doing the unheard of, and capturing Russian territory in the Kursk region. The Black Sea fleet has been bombed out and Putin has had to moved what remains to a safe haven. Crimea is now worthless to him.
He should use the winter to quietly pull out and go away and have a big sulk.
To that end, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is commonly referred to as ‘the DSM’ (5th edition published in March 2022), is a publication by the American Psychiatric Association that classifies mental disorders and their standard criteria. It is the main book for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in both the US and Australia, and one I and thousands of others refer to as part of our work in the mental health sector.
The DSM holds that schizophrenia has the following symptoms:
Hallucinations: Hearing, seeing, or otherwise perceiving things that are not there.
Delusions: A strongly-held belief in something despite evidence that the belief is false. Significantly, paranoia, or being persecuted, controlled, or harmed in some way, can be a common theme in delusions.
Disorganised speech: Incoherent, rambling, or loosely-connected speech that can be hard for others to understand or follow.
Disorganised behaviour: This can mean abnormal functioning or increased agitation.
If we consider the rhetoric, actions and behaviours of both Russia’s leadership and millions of everyday Russians over the last period, there is much resonance with a potential diagnosis of national schizophrenia. As an exercise, let’s examine the symptoms in turn.
Hallucinations. The concept of fighting Nazis in Ukraine – while now completely debunked and lacking any credibility in the West – continues to feature in the statements of both Russian elites and the Russian general public. With absolutely no fact base or basis in objective reality, Russians claim to see Nazis where there are literally none; it is nothing less than bizarre and hallucinatory behaviour. In this respect, there is quite obviously the role of the massive machine of domestic Russian propaganda in fuelling and feeding this delusion as a pretext for sending hundreds of thousands of young Russians to their deaths on Ukrainian soil.
Delusions. A key part of Russians’ pro-war narrative has been the concept that Russians are somehow aggrieved and therefore need to ‘defend themselves’. The grievance – perpetuated by elites and promulgated at societal level – is widespread and includes the (false) allegation of Russian-language speakers being persecuted or even murdered, or the (again false) argument that Nato was incurring on Russia via Ukraine, or the (once again false) view that there is an international Russophobic conspiracy.
Essentially, wherever the contemporary Russian mind casts its gaze through its paranoid lens, it sees parties and people who hate Russia and seek its demise. At the pinnacle of Russian society, there is Russia’s schizophrenic-in-chief Vladimir Putin whose public statements are typically populated with paranoid delusions. Most recently, on the basis of defending Russia from some (non-existent) Nato threat, he has again demanded Ukraine’s deNazification and the handover of four provinces (to which there is no historical claim and where Russian forces are not even fully present). It’s nothing short of mad.
Disorganised Speech. Here, we have the constantly changing and often contradictory narratives of Moscow. While sober analysts search the Kremlin’s statements for strategic clues, they are unlikely to find them in the inchoate, illogical, and delusional verbiage offered by Putin, Lavrov, Simonyan, Solovyov, and many others. It’s a mess that reflects the messy and diseased Russian national mind.
Here, it is interesting that Russia’s schizophrenia may in fact be its asset in its propaganda war. Namely, a key aspect of that war is to destroy the capacity of the public to discern factual truth. Indeed, modern propaganda’s goal is not to convince a public of something, but to emotionally confuse and disable key groups. As the highly regarded author and propaganda critic Peter Pomerantzev has said: ‘If nothing is true, then anything is possible.’
Disorganised Behaviour. The evidence is Russia’s war effort itself; in part through its own disorganisation, Europe’s second-largest military is at a de facto standstill and has suffered humiliating defeats. In that regard, it is difficult to conceive of any professional, trained military leader committing hundreds of thousands of troops to near-certain death in exchange for literally streets of small villages. In July, for example, Russian forces advanced in Ukraine by 177 square kilometres (of Ukraine’s total of 604,000 square kilometres). In doing so, they lost some 200 soldiers per square kilometre – or more than 35,000 total casualties.
One would need to be truly sick to make those kinds of bloody and pointless command decisions – or completely immersed in a sick context where objective logic, humanistic moral standards and normal emotional responses have been suspended. A group think of madness.
So, the ‘diagnosis’ of national schizophrenia would seem to conceptually fit modern Russia. That then begs the question of treatment and cure.
Generally speaking, a person with a mental illness can best manage their illness, no less recover from it, if he/she has a degree of insight about that illness. Namely, one has to recognise that one is sick before one can successfully move forward with treatment – be it medication or therapy or lifestyle changes. Importantly, insight often only occurs after a sufferer has experienced very severe impacts from one’s schizophrenia – such as loss of status, relationships, reputation, housing and the like. Namely, it’s only after major crisis of consequences that some people beset with schizophrenia become better.
In the case of Russia, such is the argument for its defeat in its war on Ukraine and the West. In the same way that Nazi Germany had to be utterly crushed for mainstream Germans to abandon fascism and racism and to cathartically heal themselves into a tolerant and progressive society, so too Russia may need to be devastated before it can move forward as a democratic rather than diseased society.
Defeat is part of the cure for Russia’s national illness and it’s in the world’s interest to administer that cure.
As if more evidence were needed;
they were doing this in the sixties
Sinyafsky and Daniel = in the marxist Beeb version one was played by Ben Gazzara
https:/
Easy to say from the West, Putin I suspect is fearful of assasination so wont back down, The Generals having seen what happened to the Wagner groups will be fearful og high Windows and aircraft too, anyone in secret opposition will fear too.
Having said that the russians always seem to think differently and many will see the 1 million as a price worth paying especailly sonce they dont come from places like Moscow but in the main from the pooerer outlying areas.
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