 “Power and violence are opposites; where the
one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears
where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends
in power's disappearance.”
- Hannah Arendt, “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics,
Civil Disobedience, on Violence, Thoughts on Politics and
Revolution”, 1972
We are watching one of the greatest military blunders in modern
European history unfold in real time. There are many analyses of
Vladimir Putin’s motive for invading Ukraine. One is his
often-stated revanchist desire to reassemble the USSR after its
collapse on December 31, 1991 – a dissolution that he describes
as the “geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. Another
explanation is that, as an autocratic ruler, Putin has become
isolated and uninformed due to the cadre of yes-men that
surround him in his own fortress, putting him out of touch with
the political currents that surround him. Masha Gessen described
Putin in her 2013 book entitled: The Man Without a Face: The
Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, as a junk-yard dog. He was a
product of a deprived and brutal childhood in St. Petersburg who
then went on to become a KGB operative, and then, in 1999, to
become Boris Yeltsin’s Prime Minister. Only three months later,
Putin became Yeltsin’s successor.
While there are probably more interesting analyses of Putin that
will emerge, the thing that strikes me most is that Putin
appears to be copying and pasting from the Brezhnev playbook of
1968. It was then that the USSR invaded a democratizing
Czechoslovakia which was under the leadership of the reformist,
Alexander Dubček. Dubček was deposed by the Soviets and replaced
by Gustáv Husák, who proceeded to reverse most of Dubček’s
reforms. But not until Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 did
the USSR finally begin to respond to its own moribund economy by
enacting economic and political reforms. But by 1991, the Iron
Curtain had fallen, and the USSR had fallen, breaking into 15
separate republics.
The USSR fell because of many factors: massive corruption, an
enormous bureaucracy, a grinding war in Afghanistan, and the
effects of Gorbachev’s reforms that effectively collapsed
Russia’s command economy. No, it wasn’t because the movie star,
Ronald Reagan, dramatically demanded that Gorbachev “tear down
this wall”. That was made-for-TV Republican propaganda. The USSR
crumbled from the inside out because it was not structured to
respond to the currents of global economic and political change.
And that appears to be what is happening to Putin’s Russia
today. Underneath all the patriotic talk about empire and
Russia’s rights to dominion over its former republics lies the
reality: Russia really is, as Sen. John McCain described it in
2014, “a gas station masquerading as a country”. In 2016, Barack
Obama said Russia’s economy “doesn’t produce anything that
anybody wants to buy,” except oil, gas and arms. The only way
Russia can affect the U.S., he said, is “if we lose track of who
we are” and “abandon our values”.
But clearly, as Americans face the midterm elections in
November, we appear to have lost track of who we are. And yes,
we have, indeed, abandoned our values. Our politics now resemble
the maelstrom of Germany in the 1930s.
This is who we are now:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the [German]
masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time,
believe everything and nothing, think that everything was
possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda
discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe
the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object
to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie
anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on
the correct psychological assumption that, under such
conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic
statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were
given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take
refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had
lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along
that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for
their superior tactical cleverness.” - Hannah Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Our politics are increasingly leading us toward the same
ideological Thugocracy as Russia. It is America, not Russia,
that is in jeopardy here. While Ukrainians struggle to stay
alive under this Russian invasion, our Republicans celebrate the
savagery of Vladimir Putin with hoots and chest-thumping. They
have found their Dear Leader, and he is not an American. He is a
ruthless dictator who lives in a previous era, a world
characterized by barbarity and ferocious cruelty.
On February 22, 2022, Yuri Shevchuk, a Russian critic of
Vladimir Putin, said of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "Our
future is being taken from us. We’re being pulled like through
an ice hole into the past, into the 19th, 18th, 17th centuries.
And people refuse to accept it."
Joe Biden’s efforts to coalesce the power of a united NATO by
imposing crushing sanctions against a revanchist Russia will
likely prevent Putin from terrorizing its former satellite
nations in the future. And hopefully, these sanctions will
breathe new life into the democracy movement there and bring
about new leadership in Russia.
But we must recognize how this same Russian authoritarian regime
has terrorized us, as well.
Putin affected our own 2016 presidential elections, and Donald
Trump’s ascent to the presidency was achieved, in fact, by the
same tactics Putin and the USSR have used in the past –
intensive propaganda, vote tampering and suppression, and
installing a puppet government into a perceived rival nation’s
leadership – a puppet leadership that will execute Kremlin
directives. Shortly after his election, Donald Trump attempted
to withdraw the U.S. from NATO – the collective military
security organization established in 1949 to protect the western
powers from a resurgent Germany and from any future incursions
into their territory by the USSR. Trump publicly welcomed
Putin’s interference in our elections, and he orchestrated an
insurrection on January 6th, 2021 in order to prevent his
legitimate removal from office. These are the actions of a
political puppet. As Hillary Clinton tweeted in 2019, "Like I
said: A puppet," referencing her statement about Trump's
relationship with Putin during her third and final presidential
debate with Trump in 2016.
In all the chaos of the Trump Administration, America has been
foundering in a Sargasso Sea of currents pulling from all
directions: white supremacy, antisemitism, anti-government
sentiments, disinformation, and the violence of far-right
extremists. We now face a midterm election where, should the
Republicans win both the House and the Senate, we will have lost
track of who we are and what we stand for. And like Yuri
Shevchuk’s fears, America is also being pulled through an ice
hole into the past by a backward Republican Party.
Donald Trump was placed in the Presidency of the United States
by a foreign dictator named Vladimir Putin. He was bought off by
Vladimir Putin, and like the Russians, we refuse to accept it.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced
Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of
experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e.,
the standards of thought) no longer exist.” - Hannah Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951 |
