Fanaticism, Whataboutism, Dictatorship, and Worrying Support for Russia from Indonesian Netizens

Arya Wiguna
7 min readMar 29, 2022

The latest invasion of Ukraine by Russia has revealed rather disturbing facts about some of the netizens in our country

Putin at different stages of his life. Source: MARCA

Social media, as it does in many aspects in this era, plays a heavy role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It either gives the world — that includes some of the still sane and anti-war Russians — the latest information/truths from the ground, or unfortunately provides a dangerous set of tools for Russian to spread their propagandas.

In case of Indonesia, it’s neither.

Instead, there’s this rather worrying — and this is really an understatement — trend among some of the Indonesian netizens towards the invasion. They’ve been encouraging people to stop talking or caring about Ukraine. Worse, in a rather borderline traitorous style, they’ve even been personally supporting Putin and singing praises for his effort. These happen both on the comment sections and on their posts.

If you’re reading this and you’re not one of them, I’m sure you’d be feeling really sick. Maybe disgusted, even. We’re a democratic country with long history of unfortunate encounters with occupations by other countries. Hundreds of years no less. And once we were independent, we even had to go through two violent regime changes, with one not even too long ago in 1996, before we could become fully democratic.

In those events, our people fought hard, suffering, and even dying, all in the name of better and fairer Indonesia, a place we’re living in now and a place we have to strive for every day, for better or worse. And yet, these misguided netizens wish that a democratic country with their own democratic system gets swallowed by an authoritarian one led by no less than a Hitler’s Russian counterpart. Let that sink in.

Exactly what’s going on here is a bit complex, but the core reason itself comes down to this: Religious fanaticism — I’m not going to explicitly say which one — exacerbated by lack of proper education and general knowledge of geopolitics. From here, it then emanates into two other reasons that unfortunately make them reach the conclusion that Ukraine needs to be vanished from the earth and Putin needs to succeed.

The fanaticism comes in many forms, but the key part here is these “fanatics’ “— I will refer to our worrying netizens as this from now on — feelings towards the West, especially the United States. They have a deep hatred towards the coalition, as these countries have caused too many wars and too much suffering in the Middle East, whose people are in majority sharing the same religion as theirs.

I’m not going to argue whether any of these wars are necessary or not, but in the eyes of the fanatics, without any critical thinking involved, these wars are all atrocities, and no matter the reasons, the West are always their enemies. Again, exacerbated by lack of proper education and awareness of geopolitics.

As we already know, Ukraine has been heavily supported by the West in form of NATO alliance, virtually led none other by the United States. With the fanatics having made the West their enemies, this is where it all starts to emanates into the other reasons.

First, there’s something called “Whataboutism”. Per Wikipedia, it’s a form of “Logical Fallacy” where a person tries to bury their opponent’s argument only by accusing them of hypocrisy without trying to refute or disprove their arguments directly. That is, if your opponent is a hypocrite, no matter whether what they do or say now is true or not, you always consider them wrong.

And the fanatics think that the people and media, especially from the West, are giving Ukraine and its people too much attention, while they tend to dismiss the wars in the Middle East — the fanatics often bring up Palestine as an example — and even be biased towards supporting the US and its allies. Because of that, they want people to simply stop caring about Ukraine too, as they are only a bunch of hypocrites, and what they’re doing is wrong.

While in some cases it’s not completely true — some of the MSNBC hosts like Ali Velshi heavily condemns the latest Israel’s aggression towards Palestine, and many Americans also went down the street to protest against it— I do agree that the West often become quite hypocritical. However, at the same time, I can’t deny what the West have been doing to support Ukraine is correct.

Despite that, the fanatics never see past the hypocrisy. They couldn’t even stop for a while, turn off their hating switch, try to support the West and Ukraine for now, and then continue criticising the hypocrisy later for the sake of humanity. Not at all. They simply go straight to their most extreme conclusion with Ukrainians being blown apart and dying in the hands of a maniac.

There’s also something else they can’t see past the hypocrisy regarding the wars in the Middle East. The US has scaled back their Middle East operation dramatically after Afghanistan. Then, there’s a tension between them and Israel where the latter are somehow mulling over the possibilities of supporting Russia instead.

No more US-led Middle East wars and the US supporting Israel’s aggression towards Palestine? These could very well happen in the future. But the fanatics are not even thinking about that prospect in the slightest.

Meanwhile, on the other half of the story is the fanatics’ obsession towards dictators or strongmen. It comes with the territory, though, as the most radical part of their religion, also most of the Middle East countries they care so much about, have been heavily interconnected with long list of brutal and anti-democratic leaders throughout the history. They are heavily inspired by these leaders, as they consider them the ones who could further push their religious agendas and also ruthlessly fight against whoever comes in the way.

At times, though, they can shift their preferences towards other strongmen if necessary, even though they’re not practising the same religion or the same values, as long as they share the same enemies, and again, could ruthlessly fight whoever having sinned against their religion. And amidst all of this, naturally, Putin is the perfect counterpart they’re looking for.

Of course, the next step is to ensure they keep shouting their support to the world from their tiny spaces on the Internet, because if Putin succeeds, they would also succeed in “defeating” the West. This means that Ukraine needs to be burnt down, fully occupied, and recognised as Russia. To hell with humanity or the fact that Putin is neither religious nor a part of their brotherhood, as long as another barrier to their religious agendas could finally come down.

After all of this, what we could only conclude in the end is these fanatics, shouting hypocrisy in the first place, are also hypocrites themselves.

This is not a zero sum game where there’s only the Middle East coming out as winners, and the one in the Eastern Europe must be annihilated. This is not a cockfight of two world superpowers where instead of only the cocks, people surrounding them are dying too.

This is — I can’t make this any simpler — a war. A war that has created probably the worst humanitarian crisis in a very long time. A war that serves no purposes but to serve the ambition of a mindless, heartless, psychopathic Russian with ballooning ego. A war that needs to be immediately stopped for the sake of the world and all of its people.

This is exactly what these fanatics don’t want to happen, wish hadn’t happened, and hope will not happen, in the Middle East. Yet, they keep adding fuel to the fire simply because Ukraine is not in the Middle East, and its people are not part of their kinds, and they are both too fanatical and dumb they have this petty jealousy towards the West. There’s really no humanity left in them, even the slightest. Once again, sickening and disgusting.

And even if — I really wish it won’t happen — Putin defies the odds and achieves what he wants, do these fanatics really think the West will be “defeated”? The coalition has been getting even stronger since the first day of the invasion. It would only become stronger if Putin’s getting increasingly murderous. And as history has taught us many times, the West are still here, while the shadow of former Russia, the Soviet, crumbled into pieces long ago. Eventually, that “defeat” of the West would only be a mere symbolism, symbolised by the deaths of Ukrainians nonetheless.

For now, all we could do is to keep reminding them what’s right and telling them the truths. But if the shells of their heads are too thick no logic could ever penetrate, and their hearts are buried too deep no amount of humanity would ever light them up, then I guess we could only hope. Hope that Ukraine would survive, hope that the West would learn their lessons, hope that our country could educate future generations better, and hope that this would be the last war we would ever see in this planet earth.

Slava Ukraini!

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Arya Wiguna

25-year-old freelancer making op-eds about life and politics in general.