Timothy Snyder’s 2018 “The Road to Unfreedom,” referenced here and here (I have not read it yet), formed the basis of Mehdi Hasan’s monologue last night on MSNBC. Snyder traces Vladimir Putin’s worldview to Ivan Ilyin (died 1954) who imagined “a Russian Christian fascism.” Snyder argues that Ilyin is Putin’s muse. Putin cites him frequently. “By 2014, the Kremlin was sending copies of Ilyin’s writings to regional governors as well as Russian civil servants,” Hasan continues.
Putin’s recent Moscow rally and rhetoric, Hasan argues, is a far worse incarnation of the authoritarian modern Republican Party led by Donald Trump. Ukraine is under attack now because, as Snyder wrote in 2018, “Putin has used Ilyin’s ideas about geopolitics to portray Ukraine, Europe, and the United States as existential dangers to Russia.”
After Ukrainian President Zelensky’s speech to the Israeli lawmakers, Hasan wrote to his Twitter critics, “[Y]ou don’t have to like Zelenskyy, agree with his pro-Israeli politics, or every word of his speech, to stand with Ukrainians against Russian aggression & my main objection is to the nonsensical ‘NATO imposed this war’ line. That’s indefensible, sorry.”
Putin apologists on the right see Putin as a standard-bearer for white nationalism. Apologists on the left see Russia as a victim and the U.S. as an insistent aggressor. European Union and NATO expansion forced Putin to invade Ukraine the way a perceived slight “forces” an abusive husband to beat his wife and kids. In this view, expanding the North Atlantic defense alliance is imperialism, weirdly defined, and Ukraine’s desire to join both coerced by Western puppet masters.
Striking in those arguments is any the lack of agency on the part of Europeans who, for economic and security reasons, see advantage in joining both. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine proves the latter.
No sooner had the Baltic States regained their independence than they sought security from invasion in NATO membership. President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia said in 2002 that the main impulse for joining the alliance was “the fact that you can go to bed and not worry about somebody knocking on the door and putting you on a train for Siberia” (Washington Post, 2002):
Latvians regard NATO as a “security blanket,” as a top Western diplomat here put it, and a means to separate themselves once and for all from Russia. Their constant frame of reference is World War II, when first the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again swallowed up the Baltics. “NATO has given security for people since the end of World War II,” said Girts Valdis Kristovskis, the Latvian defense minister. “More than anyone, we understand how important this is.”
Ethnic Russian were more reluctant, Susan B. Glasser found.
“Latvia will become a slave state again,” said Svetlana Khristicha, an ethnic Russian. The only difference, she said, is that this time “it will have to submit to NATO.”
Nonetheless the Baltic States sought stronger ties to Europe.
A Talking Points Memo reader JI from Finland wrote (subscription) to comment on Europe’s latest land war. While he does not call out Karl Rove, he suggests Putin has tried to weaken NATO in Rovian fashion by attacking NATO’s strongest member:
In short, I see your role for the Russians as a tool, as a rebound board, or as a western backdoor to Europe.
Since Western Europe and the USA together (in the form of NATO and otherwise) has been too strong for Russia to expand, and since the USA is the greatest military backup fortress of NATO/Europe, they simply circumvented Europe and went to the core of the power using the kitchen door, the internal political structure of the USA.
I understand you would like to see your heroic country as the navel of the world and as the main focus of any operation, but I am sorry to inform that, in this case, you are only cheap tools. You had to be weakened (and Britain manipulated to Brexit etc) in order to facilitate invasions to Ukraine, Belarussia and a list of other neighboring pieces of land in Putin’s future Menu.
How to do that?
They professionally built an operation web among the rural redneck cowboys, evangelical christians, the NRA, the most republican of all republicans, your law enforcement, some military people, big business etc etc. They popped up to the surface from within the “core americans”, but their long dive before that was planned and had started from the Kremlin’s operation board.
On January 6, Trump’s authoritarian GOP nearly succeeded. “It was no coincidence that some crucial (and criminal) incidents of the Trump term had to do with the Ukraine,” writes JI. “It was one of Putin’s main targets already then. Trump was because of Ukraine, not vice versa!” The problem now for the U.S. is that no one has held him/them to account, he ends, frustrated:
So, if you really want to do something for the Ukraine, for the Europe and to any other decent country or person, please also Do. Your. Own. Homework! Show to both your home audience and to the rest of the world that also the western flank of Putin’s army, the one located in your country, is kept accountable! No special treatment, just f**king enforce your old existing laws to ultra-rich/influential white dudes, as well! You are just tools, but you are very important tools for Putin also in the European front. Don’t let him use you.
As social media feeds reveal, many on the “dark cloud in every silver lining” left are lining up to be used as well, advocating fierce accountability for Trump and not so much for Putin. But it is also plain to see why a Russian Christian fascism attractes politically and culturally threatened conservatives in the U.S.
Ilyin, wote Snyder, “made of lawlessness a virtue so pure as to be invisible, and so absolute as to demand the destruction of the West. He shows us how kleptocrats feign innocence, fragile masculinity generates enemies, how a perverted Christianity denies mercy, and how fascist ideas flow into modern media. This is no longer just Russian philosophy. It is now American life.”
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