Shunning

(Photo by Mykhaylo Palinchak at Scopio)

Sanctions are not enough to do much to Russia.

Shunning has the power to hobble Russia, as we can now see. Ostracism from most of the rest of society. A collective turning of backs and denial of interaction. It has much more heft than mere sanctions.

I could not have imagined it might be possible for so much of the world to rally together to do this at all, let alone so fast and so thoroughly. It is not limited to sanctions imposed by governments. It is also a matter of businesses turning off their spigots in Russia, severing contracts, walking away. That’s often for pragmatic reasons rather than ideals, recognizing that the blowback if they don’t will hurt them more than the cost of getting out. Most companies are usually tone deaf far too long about this type of decision. That they are being quick about it is a measure of how extreme the situation is.

It is a real-world Distributed Denial Of Service campaign, but the way it works is the opposite of DDOS in cyberspace. Online, DDOS overwhelms a server with pointless interactions so that genuine interactions cannot get attention. Russia is experiencing actual distributed refusal to engage in services with it. Russia has everyone’s attention in the worst of ways but cannot get attention in most of the world for productive or necessary purposes.

Much else is happening too, of course. Shipments of armaments and supplies to Ukraine. Cyber attacks against Russia. Movements of NATO troops toward the very borders where Putin wanted them thinned out.

But Russia is shunned and that has pulled the rug from beneath their economy.

This is why the United Nations, the EU and other such institutions exist. This is part of what such organizations are meant to do, finding ways to counteract war with non-violence.

The “nothing to lose” scenario could easily kick in at any moment, and indeed may have begun now that Putin has found a way to play the nuclear card by attacking a nuclear power station instead of dropping a nuclear bomb. I wrote about the nothing to lose factor as part of my post about The Face of Rage.

The Face of Rage

I have more to say, but the remainder of this post is not material that should be splashed all over cyberspace. This is not the first time I have published some material for only the paying subscribers to keep it from spreading indiscriminately, but it is the first time I am putting the paywall in mid-post. (Apologies, this does limit comments to paying subscribers instead of keeping them open to everyone.) There is no deep dark secret behind the paywall, just something I believe should be held among people who can remain steady in a storm.