Freedom is fragile, and when demagogues speak, and others start following them, it is wise to pay attention. Jeffrey C. Isaac, professor of political science, Indiana University Bloomington, 2016
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. .... But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social & Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, 1957
The basis of almost every honest political disagreement is mostly or completely grounded in one or both of two essential ingredients, differences in perception of facts and differences in application of reasoning or logic to the facts. The basis of almost every dishonest political disagreement is at least significantly, probably usually mostly, grounded in assertions of dark free speech by at least one side among parties in disagreement. One major problem is that it is often hard or impossible to know when a person is being honest with themself and when they aren't. Unconscious biases and flawed logic are unconscious and so are the distortions and flaws they routinely inject into reality and reason. Dishonest disagreements can be either knowingly or unknowingly dishonest. The former are usually immoral and usually damaging to society, democracy and/or the rule of law. The latter are regrettable, but still damaging. Germaine, today
This is a review of Chapter 1 of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall and tyrannies rise (my review is here). My review of the prologue of this book is here.
Chapter 1, Individualism or Totalitarianism (2011), is a detailed description of one of the major influences on the political-spiritual ideology that Vladimir Putin claims to rely on to describe Russia and the world. He justifies the things he does in the name of an ideology that Snyder calls Russian Christian fascism. According to Snyder, the source of Putin’s ideology is the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954). Until Putin latched onto his mystical religious-political ideology, Ilyin had been relegated to historically insignificant obscurity. Now, Ilyin’s writings are mandatory reading for all major Russian politicians, oligarchs and military leaders.
Ilyin was a Russian political and religious philosopher and a hard core ideologue. European fascism of the 1920s and 1930s shaped his thinking. The fascist mindset of the day was based on three core beliefs, violence should dominate facts, reason and laws, the nation's leader has a vital, deep mystical-religious connection to the nation and its people, and globalization is a dangerous conspiracy against the sacred nation, and not a mundane reality that needs to be rationally managed via international cooperation.
Ilyn started out as a bitter opponent of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He was a counterrevolutionary who advocated violence against the revolution. He later formulated a Christian fascism ideology intended to defeat Bolshevism. Snyder writes of Ilyin’s rise to prominence and his role in modern events:
“After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin’s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005. .... By [2006] Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly to the Russian parliament. .... In the 2010s, Putin relied on Ilyin’s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine. .... The Russian political class followed Putin’s example. His master propagandist Vladislav Surkov adapted Ilyin’s ideas to the world of modern media.
Ilyin was a politician of eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and 2000s. As Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic inequality reached stupefying proportions, Ilyin’s influence peaked. The Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed, by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin ignored or despised: individualism, [democratic political] succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.”
Ilyin’s ideology believes that individualism is evil and must be swallowed and subjugated in service to the mystical sanctity of the innocent but always besieged Russian nation. He also believed that God erred in creating a world of human with their facts, knowledge and passions, calling God's act “frenetic, committing error upon error,” and evidence that God had lost “his harmonious unity, logical reason, and organizational purpose.” For Ilyin, human facts and passions are senseless and impediments to attaining the ultimate goal. Snyder describes this as totalitarian, anti-individualism thinking:
“The vision was a totalitarian one. We should long for a condition in which we think and feel as one, which means not to think and feel at all. We must cease to exist as individual human beings. ‘Evil begins’, Ilyin wrote, ‘where the person begins. .... the empirical fragmentation of human existence is an incorrect, a transitory, and a metaphysically untrue condition of the world.’ .... To belong to a layer of society that offered to individuals social advancement was to be the worst kind of human being: ‘this estate constitutes the very lowest level of social existence.’”
That is at the core of Putin’s professed ideology. What that means for average Russians is not anything good. They are mere things to be used to serve the defense and goals of the sacred and innocent but besieged Russian nation, which just happens to include Ukraine. The siege of Russia includes siege by social progress and belief in individualism. What the sacred defense and goals demand of people is whatever Putin says is demanded. Chapter 1 continues in this incoherent, metaphysical vein.
In his thinking, Ilyin saw Russian people as obliged to be happy with a totalitarian political arrangement: “We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.” By ‘our freedom’, Ilyin refers to the freedom of the Russian people to serve the Russian patriot-savior, not to exercise their individual choice. The freedom is a mirage.
Ilyin’s ideology puts the middle class at the bottom of society in support of the righteousness of his fascist ideal of inequality. This bit of ideology fits perfectly with Putin's kleptocracy mindset. It both precludes upward social and justifies oligarchy or rule according to what wealthy people want and Putin as Oligarch-in Chief allows. In this regard, Putin might be seen as not quite totalitarian, but that is negated by Putin’s willingness to strip wealth from any oligarch who crosses him or irritated him too much. In practice, Russia is a totalitarian police state, with oligarchs ruling only at the pleasure of the tyrant at the top.
What is going on here??
If one accepts Snyder’s vision of history and recent events as basically correct, Putin appears to be a brutal but modern totalitarian akin to a Hitler or a Stalin. In essence, Putin’s ideology has an obvious, venal goal. He is simply protecting his power and the kleptocracy he has built. He relentlessly uses his power to oppress the Russian people and to steal the nation’s wealth from them. It is hard to imagine Putin giving a fig about God’s alleged mistake in creating humans, knowledge or the human urge to procreate. When Putin oppresses his people and murders political opponents, he can cite Ilyin and claim he is Russia’s redeemer who is only asking the Russian people to make the “chivalrous sacrifice” of killing others in the name of the sacred nation.The anti-fact, anti-rule of law aspects of Ilyin’s (and Putin’s) rancid ideology are important to keep in mind. When facts and laws do not matter or even exist in any meaningful sense, as Ilyin’s Russian Christian fascism posits, Russia’s leader incurs no moral or legal responsibility for whatever he does or doesn't do. Ilyin was clear about democracy and voting in secret. That allowed Russians to think of themselves as individuals with individual choice, which proves the evil character of a depraved world. Political parties and elections should only be rituals with no significant political importance.
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