Strawberries, a Ukrainian I spoke described what her sister was saying.
Her sister was living in Mariupol and went to Russia where she had relatives. She had spent a lot of her childhood in various parts of the USSR.
Her sister KNEW that Mariupol was being bombed by the Russians BECAUSE SHE WAS THERE. Yet she was saying she didn't trust the Ukrainian government and she didn't trust the Russian government.
She RETURNED to Mariupol to see the state of her home because she didn't believe what she was being told and she wanted to 'claim' her property as she was told if she didn't she'd lose it. When she returned she found it was condemned. But she didn't believe it until she saw it with her own eyes.
I think it sums things up so well.
She had been told contridactory things, and things that both matched her lived experience and didn't match her lived experience. She clearly didn't know where to find trusted information sources.
The net result after a lifetime of living under Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian corruption and disinformation is that she had no trust in any authority. So she KNEW she was being lied to, but she also didn't know the truth or how to find the truth.
Deprieved of the ability to do that, it limited what she felt her choices were. She could only do things that related directly to her. She couldn't do any 'big actions' because she didn't know how. Her sister in the UK was telling her to get out of Russia (she probably could have still at this point). But she didn't know how to action it, or if she actioned it whether she'd have a home to go back to, cos ultimately all she wanted to do was go back to her house in Mariupol and live there. And she didn't know how to break out the system she was in. She was locked in by passive acceptance and an inability to navigate out of what she was told to do.
She doesn't care about the politics of other people, because these things are for other people - the big people in authority. She is not of this class. It doesn't matter to her, she is not expected to be involved in these conversations. Her opinion on affairs matters this little and she knows it. So whats the point of having an opinion, because you can't change the situation you find yourself in. The only thing that matters is living day to day and surviving.
This is the point: The destruction of the ability to disearn the truth, renders you powerless. If you have no way of knowing what the truth is, you have no power to challenge authority. It is the ultimate device to destroy the power of the citizen and reduce them to a level of passive acceptance of their lot in life which they only have the power to accept and not to question. In this way you learn, you only obey authority because you know if you don't, your day to day life will be even harder, in a country where the culture is so hierachical and punches down on those below.
Critical thought relies on the ability to identify arguments and build an argument on the basis of logical fact. But if there are no logical facts that you can accurately identify and trust, how can you do this? We take this for granted in the UK, as we are allowed freedom of speech and we value the promotion of the truth. Which is why we find it so hard to imagine feeling like we are so unimportant that our opinions are utterly pointless.
I've seen a number of Russians, commenting on Russian culture and its people and how they are extremely passive and merely do what they are told rather mindlessly. It starts to make sense when you realise they have been conditioned from birth to be like this and just repeat what they are told, even if they know it to be a lie because they know that this 'keeps them safe'. In reality at this point, we know here that repeating the lie doesn't keep them safe anymore, but such is the extent of the lie and their conditioning they don't know how to do anything different.
Hannah Arendt talks a lot about this, in her writing about totalitarianism:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.
She also goes on to say:
There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.
Putin can only destroy the concept of the truth within his own country. He can not change reality as it exists though. Much of what he is doing is nothing to do with Ukraine and is everything to do with maintaining his own power and authority domestically, which relies on the destruction of the very concept of truth. In blurring reality, no one can say for sure if its 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 Russians who have died. All they can say is 'a lot of Russians have died'. They can't quantify the scale of the risk and threats that it poses to them on an individual level. It is only when they see it for themselves and it becomes apparent that their survival depends on their actions at that desparate point that they will cease to be anything other than utterly passive as politics isn't for them, its for elites.
In democracies politics is something we participate in. This is the point.
Hope this makes sense.