In every era of conflict, whole new words and phrases have appeared: cold war, search and destroy, shock and awe, fog of war, brainwashing (called cognitive warfare today), and IEDs, among them.
And Russia keeps adding to that syllabus. Its President Vladimir Putin has been in the forefront. When he invaded Ukraine three years ago, he termed it a “military operation.” But in a meeting with a journalist not so long ago he said that what happened in Ukraine was a “non-invasion.” Yeah, sure, for when the U.S. took over Japan and Nazi Germany after World War II, it wasn’t an “invasion.” In the old days when you “spun” the news it was a matter of perspective: Is the glass half full or half empty? But today you deny that the glass even existed. The Russians are the true masters of this.
As an American Latvian refugee, I am deeply concerned, as this is the same type of language the Soviet Union used when it invaded Latvia and other Baltic states in 1940.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy predicts the Baltics will be Putin’s next “non-invasion” — and with no U.S. objection or participation from NATO, it will happen. When Russia went into Ukraine, President Donald Trump described it as “genius” and “savvy.” Putin wants to put the old Soviet Union together by taking away the freedom of 15 sovereign countries that left the old Soviet Union.
I have a unique perspective, even as a Minnesotan now. My father was chief of the Voice of America (now being disbanded by Trump, to Putin’s delight) and brought home transcripts of what the Russians were saying. We escaped the Russians, but all our farm neighbors were sent off to Siberia for five years and their farms burned down.
The Baltics were flooded with imported Russians to work in Russian factories and Russian became the official language. Russia is neurotic about the Baltics, yet it is 200 times larger than Latvia and the largest country on earth. Russians refer to the Latvian language as a dog bark: “Sabaka Yazik.” Latvia endured the Soviet invasion for 51 years, and that led many to flee to the West. To show our appreciation, when Latvia became a free country, it used its scarce foreign exchange to put up 70,000 reflective road signs solely in Latvian (road signs in the Soviet occupation were both in Russian and Latvian with Russian on top). Naturally, the Russians claimed these new signs were “cultural genocide,” as was using only Latvian in publicly funded schools.
Preparing for the worst, the Baltics have all left the “antipersonnel land mine convention,” officially called the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. And the Baltics have separated themselves from the Russian power grid and are no longer tied to Russia for energy.
Hypermasculine leaders do not find massive success everywhere in the world, but uneducated Russians love struggling nations that are specifically vulnerable to their manipulation. Overall, it is due to their propaganda campaigns that Putin’s government has been able to spur nationalism (“Mother Russia”) and form the public’s conception on what masculinity should and should not be.
Uneducated Russians love Putin kicking the Baltics around. And U.S. President Abraham Lincoln must have been thinking of those Russians when, according to Quora, he said , "God must have loved the people of lower status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.”
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John Freivalds of Orono, Minnesota, is a commodities broker, the author of six books, the retired honorary consul of Latvia in Minnesota, and a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page. His website is jfamarkets.com.
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