I’m currently reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr. It deals in large measure with a young German orphan who is sent to a Nazi youth paramilitary training camp prior to World War II, only to encounter hell after the war starts. I haven’t finished the book, but in time the protagonist does come to question the purpose of Germany’s war of aggression and his role it, so I expect the book will end in the triumph of the human spirit. In the meantime, though, 40 to 50 million people will die before the war is over.
I mention the book because it is such a close study of how indoctrination of the young works.
Young people are so earnest; they trust their elders and don’t know the difference between platitudes and propaganda. Just feed them on the grandiosity of their future role in society, and on the great debt they owe to soldiers who have sacrificed their lives so that they could be safe. The message to the youngsters is that they are obligated to follow in such footsteps, and the state will provide the training. The protagonist in the novel certainly becomes a true believer before he has his awakening, but most of his peers never come to see Nazism for what it really is.
This is not a book review, however. Quite coincidentally, almost as if by fate, I recently came across an article in The Guardian newspaper titled, “How Putin is preparing children to ‘die for the motherland.”
“Russia is turbocharging its indoctrination of young people, using games and influencers to draw them into a militarized Youth Army,” it read. Read the full article here.
The Youth Army, which the article says is increasingly popular with Russian youth, relies on encouragement from well-known media personalities and Internet influencers, and often showcases testimony from smiling soldiers at the front who are at present liberating Ukraine from the fascists. Young members of the Youth Army are interviewed and reveal how great it feels to be a part of something this big, to have wonderful friends who share their vision of a good and great Russia.
For Hitler and the Nazis, it was racial and national superiority and the thousand-year Reich. For Putin and his acolytes, it’s “Russia World,” which roughly equates with the old Tsarist empire and the former Soviet Union’s borders, but also references a distinct and superior culture, a Russian culture. (Oddly, the proponents of Russia World seem to know nothing about 19th Russian nihilism, which knocked any notion of transcendent and unprovable values).
I fear Russia is not really “losing” the war in Ukraine, as so many blind optimists seem to be proclaiming in the media of late. Their defeats can easily be seen as tactical retreats into more defensible positions while they regroup and rearm and, of course, continue to terrorize the civilian population in Ukraine and destroy all sources of energy and water. Think about this latter point – no modern society can survive without power or water. After all, all’s fair in love and war, but forget the part about “love,” of course.
I fear Russia is buying time. If so, the campaign to indoctrinate the teenagers of today to be the successors to the Red Army in two or three years may very well pay big dividends for Putin and Russia World. Think of the resentment they will be taught to feel at the humiliation their parents suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union, then the loss of Russian life allegedly caused by NATO in the current defensive war in Ukraine. Teaching resentment is effective – it’s how Hitler taught even non-Nazi Germans to view World War I and its aftermath.
Certainly, all societies preach patriotism and the debt we owe to those who came before us, but what the Nazis did, and what Putin is doing today, is different by an order of magnitude. There can be no dissent or competing visions of a nation’s history or destiny, for one thing, in these authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. And the indoctrinators are never saying, ‘Pray for peace but prepare for war.’ They are always preparing for war, period.
Thank you for this take and eye opening look at what Putin is doing to his country’s youth. Very much so similar to Hitler. I just hope Democracy will hold the day, albeit a long “”day.”