Category Archives: Trump

Fake Sex Kills Truth in Ukraine

Death of Truth, Politics & Religion, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

To deflect people from the truth, the Russians in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 used the same tactics they had done in their own country in 2011. They lied. Just as they did in Russia they convinced the people that the  Ukrainian protesters were homosexuals. The Christians are the good guys, even though they are fascists,  and their opponents are all perverts. This is part of what Timothy Snyder referred to as Christian fascism in his book The Road to Unfreedom. He described what happened in Ukraine this way:

“After two years of anti-gay propaganda in the Russian Federation, the ideologues and entertainers were sure of themselves. Their starting point was that the European Union was homosexual, and so  the Ukrainian movement towards Europe must be as well…[they] claimed the EU “groans under the weight of the LGBT lobby’s domination.”

It didn’t matter that none of this was true.  When the fascists are Christians or not,  truth does not matter. What matters is that they are fascists. Starting in November of 2013 and continuing after that the Russian media that covered the Maidan protesters in Ukraine were constantly described as engaging in gay sex. As if that was all they did. As Snyder said,

“the Russian media sought to fascinate its readers by conflating Ukrainian politics with handsome men and gay sex. A social media page of Vitali Klitschko, a heavyweight boxer who led a Ukrainian political party, was hacked and gay material introduced. Then this was presented as a news story for millions of Russians on a major television station, NTV. Before Russians could apprehend that pro-European protests were underway in a neighbouring country, they were invited to contemplate taboo sex.

Right after students began their protests on the Maidan, the Russian television channel NTV warned of “homodictatorship” in Ukraine.”

Again, truth was irrelevant. Dmitry Kiselev was a leading figure in Russian television and he quickly latched on to the sex stories. He was appointed a director of a new media conglomerate in Russia that wanted to dissolve the Russian media pursuit of news in favour of what he called “useful fiction.” To fascists, useful fiction is always more effective than truth at getting out the message. Kiselev told his new staff that “objectivity is a myth.” It certainly is when you want to obfuscate the truth. As Hitler and Donald Trump both learned, if you want to dissolve the truth, all you have to do is spread enough lies that no one knows where the truth lies and then you can get the people to believe anything. When Ukrainian riot police beat Ukrainian student protesters, his media company said it was all “sexual geopolitics” and they were all “warriors of sexual perversion.”

Russian propaganda tried to convince Russians that they were innocents surrounded by perversions from Europe.  They were quite successful in persuading the people. Timothy Snyder described the results this way:

“One eternal verity of Russian civilization turned out to be sexual anxiety. If Russia were indeed a virginal organism threatened by the world’s uncomprehending malice, as Ilyin had suggested, then Russian violence was righteous defense against penetration.”

 

Of course, Russia was hardly innocent. When the leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, reneged on his promise to have Ukraine join Europe he claimed that both Europe and Russia wanted to pay him off. Europe refused, and Putin was happy to oblige. According to Snyder, “On December 17, 2013 Putin offered Yanukovych a package of $15 billion in bond purchases and reduced prices for natural gas.”

Putin made it a condition of paying that Yanukovych cleared the protesters from the streets of Kyiv. He tried to do that, but could not do it without help from Russian experts in suppression of protests. But the Russians miscalculated the will power of Ukrainian protesters, just as later they miscalculated the ferocity of Ukrainian defense to the Russian invasion of 2022. Yanukovych was ousted in 2010. After he refused to sign the agreement to join the European Union, which he had said he wanted to do. Many suspected that Putin had bought him off or pressured him not to permit Ukraine to join the Union.

The politics of Ukraine and Russia, like its sex, are never simple or transparent.

 

Ukraine had Oligarchs Too

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Modern History, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Ukraine was far from a perfect democracy, but it was much better than Russia. Unlike Russia power changed hands democratically. Unlike Russia before the financial crisis of 2008 The European Union was seen by Ukrainians as a cure for the corruption that prevented social advancement and economic reforms to make income distribution more equitable. Ukraine’s leader at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, promoted the idea of a European future for the Ukraine even as his policies made that more unlikely.

 

As Timothy Snyder said, “Yanukovych’s career demonstrated the difference between Ukrainian oligarchical pluralism and Russian kleptocratic centralism.” He ran for the presidency of Ukraine in 2004 and won the election by virtue of voting manipulation. Russia supported him and declared him the victor. Yet there were 3 week’s of protests in Kyiv that were called the Maidan in 2013 as a result of Yanukovych reneging on his promise to bring Ukraine into the European Union. As Snyder said, “This was an important moment in Ukrainian history; it confirmed democracy as a succession principle. So long as the rule of law functioned at the height of politics, there was always hope that it might one day extend to everyday life.” As Timothy Snyder said in an interview with Ezra Klein in the New York Times, “So the Ukrainians think of Maidan as a moment where they were together and they resisted and they won.” As Snyder said in The Road to Unfreedom,

 

“After he lost the election, Yanukovych hired the American political consultant Paul Manafort, who later became famous for working on Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort tried to improve Yanukovych’s image. Manafort used the same technique in the Ukraine that he later used with Donald Trump. He emphasized cultural differences. As Snyder said, “In the United States, this means playing to the grievances of whites even though they were a majority whose members held almost all the wealth; in Ukraine it meant exaggerating the difficulties of people who spoke Russian, even though it was a major language of politics and economics of the country, and the first language of those who controlled the country’s resources. Like Manafort’s next client, Donald Trump, Yanukovych rose to power on a campaign of cultural grievance mixed with the hope that an oligarch might defend the people against oligarchy.”

 

 

In other words, this populist approach was exactly how Trump persuaded a large part of the American working class that what they needed against the elites was an elite business man who would look out for their interests. It was just as absurd in the US as it was in Ukraine. And in both places the strategy worked.

Yanukovych’s strategy worked just as the same as it did for Trump.. Yanukovych used his time in power to concentrate wealth in his own hands. He used Russian practices for his own advantage and stopped rotating oligarchs as had been done in Ukraine. As Snyder said, “His dentist son became one of the richest men in Ukraine.”

Although there was certainly corruption in Ukrainian politics at least, as Snyder said,

“Whatever the flaws of the Ukrainian political system, Ukrainians after 1991 had come to take for granted that political disputes would be settled without violence…In a country that has seen more violence in the twentieth century than any other, the civic peace of the twenty-first was a proud achievement.”

 

That was why the police attack on protesters in the Maidan came as such a shock to Ukrainians. When their children were beaten by police the Ukrainian people came to their support because they were bothered by the violence initiated by Yanukovych. All of this was in support of Ukrainians siding with Europe rather than Asia as Putin wanted. After the fact, Yanukovych legalized his use of force against the students and criminalized the action of the protesters. Copying Russian measures laws banned public gatherings, freedom of expression, and undefined “extremism” which ultimately meant anyone Yanukovych did not like. Russians helped him to do this.

At the end of 2013 Russian forces invaded Ukraine to rescue their puppet Yanukovych. Ukraine had many of the things Russia did, but it was not the same.

Ukraine had at least a rudimentary democracy. And that is important. From that beginning it grew.

 

Managed Democracy

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022),

 

After Vladimir Putin was in power he ushered in a new system that was called managed democracy. Russia became so skilled at this they began to export the system to its satellites such as Belarus and even, for a while Ukraine. The basic technique was derived from the Nazis of Germany. As Snyder explained, it involved “a mysterious candidate who used manufactured crises to assemble real power.  This technique really started with Hitler in Nazi Germany when the Nazis who had been elected took advantage of the burning of the Reichstag to consolidate tyrannical power. Many thought they had started the fire to do that.

 

Ivan Ilyin like the fascist he was, used a similar technique. As Snyder explained it:

 

“Ilyin had performed the same trick: he called his redeemer a “democratic dictator” since he supposedly represented the people. Surkov’s pillars of Russian statehood were ‘centralization, personification, and idealization’: the state must be unified, its authority granted to an individual, and that individual glorified. Citing Ilyin, Surkov concluded that the Russian people should have as much freedom as they were ready to have. Of course, what he meant by “freedom” was the freedom of the individual to submerge himself in a collectivity that subjugates itself to a leader.”

 

Snyder would not call that freedom. He would call that “unfreedom,” because that is what it is.

Surkov, first on behalf of Yeltsin, later on behalf of Putin, helped deliver to the Russian people things they liked, such as an average increase in the Russian economy of 7% per annum and a successful war in Chechnya in the first 8 years of the 21st century.  High prices for oil and gas provided the grease needed to keep the machine well-oiled. Some of those profits were even shared with the people of Russia not just oligarchs. Everybody was happy. To many Russians, a little loss of freedom, as they saw it, was worth what they got in exchange. All of this helped Putin secure  support to remain in power. In the long run of course, it helped the country to slide into fascism with Putin at the controls.

 

The Russian election of 2012 appeared to be democratic, but  was controlled by Putin. Like before he cheated and when he was caught, he even admitted it. After all he was now identified with the institution thanks to Surkov. Putin was able to convince enough people that more democracy than they had was not necessary.

 

This election proved important for many reasons. It taught Putin that there was more than one way to control “democracy.” As Snyder said,

“The fakery was repeated during the March 4, 2012 presidential election. Putin was accorded the majority that he needed to be named president after one round of balloting. This time most of the electoral manipulation was digital rather than manual. Tens of millions of cybervotes were added, diluting the vote cast by human beings, and giving Putin a fictional majority.”

 

Digital manipulation techniques featured prominently in subsequent Putin campaigns, first in Ukraine in 2014 and then in the UK and the United States in 2016.  He or his team were becoming increasingly sophisticated in producing the electoral results that they wanted.

 

Timothy Snyder summed up Putin’s victories in Russia this way:

“Putin chose to regard the transient illusion of winning on the first ballot as more important than law, and his own hurt feelings as more important than the convictions of his fellow citizens. Putin casually accepted that there had been fraud; Medvedev helpfully added that all Russian elections had been fraudulent. By dismissing the principle of “one person, one vote” while insisting that elections would continue, Putin was disregarding the choice of citizens while expecting them to take part in future rituals of support. He thereby accepted Ilyin’s attitude to democracy, rejecting what Ilyin had called “blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance,” not only in deed but in word. A claim to power was staked: he who fakes wins.

If Putin came to the office of president in 2000 as a mysterious hero from the realm of fiction, he returned in 2012 as a the vengeful destroyer of the rule of law.”

 

As was required by any Russian political leaders, Putin always claimed to be against Nazism, since their experience of Nazism in the Second World War was so horrific, but in reality, he learned the techniques of the Nazis and used them well. Like the magic elixir with which he could turn democracy into fascism and the people would accept it. It happened in Germany, then Russia and he tried it again in Ukraine in 2014, UK in 2016, and the US in 2016.

What is astonishing is how close he came to achieving his goals in the mature democracies.

The Big Lie and Putin as Redeemer

Books, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Vladimir Putin began his political career claiming to champion democracy.  That was how he persuaded Yeltsin to appoint him his successor.  Putin saw himself as the only person who could fill the position of the purely innocent redeemer.  Putin started off by discrediting democracy and its institutions. As timothy  Snyder said,

“In discrediting democratic elections in 2011 and 2012, Vladimir Putin took on the mantle of the heroic redeemer and placed his country on the horns of Ilyin’s dilemma. No one can change Russia for the better so long as he lives, and no one in Russia knows what will happen when he dies.”

 

The Soviet Union started out as a world revolution that failed.  After the collapse of Communism Russia, established a constitutional republic, legitimated by democracy. It would have a parliament with free elections. All of that was on paper.  But in Russia paper rarely matters.

Ivan Ilyin had thought that when the Soviet Union collapsed it would be replaced by a fascist dictatorship. What else would a Christian fascist propose? Although his ideas did nothing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs thought his ideas might be useful. Ilyin had thought a pure redeemer would emerge from a realm of fiction and act from a spirit of totality—i.e. the totality of Russia. The pure redeemer for the pure nation.  That miracle never happened, yet, as Timothy Snyder explained,

“Yet a feat of scenography by skilled propagandists (or, in the Russian phrase, “political technologists” might create the appearance of such an earthly miracle. The myth of a redeemer would have to be founded on lies so enormous that they could not be doubted, because doubting them would mean doubting everything.”

 

This is the fundamental insight of the autocrat. It was endorsed by Hitler then Putin and later Trump. A big lie could usher in big power. As Snyder said,

“It was not so much elections as fictions that allowed a transition of power a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Then Ilyin and Putin rose together, the philosopher and the politician of fiction.“

 

Sadly, democracy never took hold in Russia.  Power never changed hands after an election.  This is exactly what Trump tried in 2020, but he failed, because the US had enough democratic institutions with enough believers in democracy to thwart his grab for power, but this apparent stability seems more illusory than real.

Ivan Ilyin did not foresee one development of the transfer of power in Russia, namely, that the extremely wealthy would choose Russia’s redeemer. Snyder described that scramble for power this way:

“The wealthy few around Yeltsin, christened the “oligarchs” wished to manage democracy in his favor and theirs. The end of Soviet economic planning created a violent rush for profitable industries and resources and inspired arbitrage schemes, quickly creating a new class of wealthy men. Wild privatization was not all the same thing as a market economy, at least as conventionally understood. Markets require the rule of law, which was the most demanding aspect of the  post-Soviet transformation. Americans, taking the rule of law for granted, could fantasize that markets would create the necessary institutions. This was an error. It mattered whether newly independent states established the rule of law, and above all whether they managed a legal transition of power through free elections.”

 

The western countries, led by the GeorgeH.W.  Bush regime was incredibly naïve about this.  Putin was not. The redeemer was far from innocent. And as a result everyone was left with a mess. And now we are all paying a hefty price for that.

 

Enormous Lies

American Fascism, Books, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

The ideas of Ivan Ilyin played no role in the collapse of communism. They came to prominence after communism fell when the Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats began to consolidate authoritarian power. To do this with a colour of right they had to create a fiction that could justify this. And for this, they found Ilyin’s ideas enormously useful.

 

In the service of these ideas the Russians produced an incredible array of highly skilled propagandists so that “a Russian redeemer should emerge from a realm of fiction.” As Timothy Snyder said,  in his book The Road to Unfreedom these Russian,

 

“political technologists” might create the appearance of such an earthly miracle.  The myth of the redeemer would love to be found on lies so enormous that they could not be doubted, because doubting them would mean doubting everything.”

 

Again note the similarity to both Hitler and Trump both of whom also used the big lies. The bigger the better. What Hitler, Putin, and Trump all learned was that the bigger the lie the harder it is not to believe it.

Hitler under stood this: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” And Trump followed suit

Putin: Ivan Ilyin’s Disciple

American Fascism, Books, Capitalism, Politics & Religion, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Iraq ( Gulf or First War), War in Iraq (2nd war)

 

After he died Ivan Ilyin’s ideas were largely ignored for about 50 years. Then they were revived with vigour, by “post-Soviet billionaires.” The oligarchs in other words, found his ideas congenial. They found these ideas enormously convenient to justify the incredible inequality in Russia. As Timothy Snyder said,

“Putin and his friends and allies accumulated vast wealth beyond the law, and then remade the state to preserve their own gains. Having achieved this, Russian leaders had to define politics as being rather than doing. An ideology such as Ilyin’s purports to explain why certain men have wealth and power in terms other than greed and ambition. What robber would not prefer to be called a redeemer?”

Thus, the ideas of Ilyin became the ideology of Putin and his cronies. The ideology of Christian fascism replaced Marxist ideology. They are no more communist than the Chinese leaders. Of course, all of this was amazingly similar to the practice of Soviet power before the collapse of communism. All Soviet citizens had been educated in that system so this felt familiar and comfortable to them compared to the anarchic kleptocracy that followed a brief near neo-liberalism after the fall of communism. It came as a relief to Russians, as fascism came as a relief to Germans and Italians in the 1930s.

This brings me back to the politics of eternity.  As Snyder said,

“The politics of eternity cannot make Putin or any other man immortal. But it can make other ideas unthinkable.  And that is what eternity means: the same thing over and over again, a tedium exciting to believers because of the illusion that it is particularly theirs. Of course, this sense of “us and them,” or as fascists prefer, “friends and enemies,” is the least specific human experience of them all; to live within it is to sacrifice individuality.”

 

Once again, it is amazing how Trump fits in once more. He hinted he wanted to be president for life, like some of his dictator pals. He wanted to be added to Mount Rushmore. And he was serious. And of course, Trump saw the world as one of friends and enemies. Everyone who did not do and think like him was an enemy. Those who paid obeisance were friends, so long as they did not stop. Of course, the incredible inequality in Russia is mirrored in the United States.

 

Christian Fascism

American Fascism, Books, Capitalism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

I had never heard of the idea of Christian fascism before I read Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom.

 

According to  the historian Timothy Snyder, Ivan Ilyin was a philosopher from a noble family in Russia who found in the disastrous situation that Russia found itself in after World War I that he wanted to oppose Bolshevism and the instrument he chose for that purpose was Christian fascism.  Interestingly, this was the same instrument chosen by Putin and Trump. There are deep historical roots to that process. Ilyin’s ideas though became popular much later, after the fall of Communism even though Ilyin had died 30 years earlier in 1954.

 

Vladimir Putin adopted Ilyin’s views as the intellectual foundation for his oligarchy. According to Snyder, “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.”

 

Very few people in the west have been aware of the influence of Ilyin. I know I never heard of him before I read Snyder’s The road to Unfreedom. His name has come up much more often after the second war in Ukraine. Snyder says Ilyin reached magnificent heights in Russia after the fall of communism and the brief interlude that followed. Snyder said, “he has become the philosopher for our time. No thinker of the twentieth century has been rehabilitated in such grand style in the twenty-first, nor enjoyed such influence on world politics. If this went unnoticed it was because we are in the thrall of inevitability: we believe that ideas do not matter.”

 

According to the Romanian thinker E. M. Cioran, Christian fascism embraced the ideas that before history God is perfect and eternal. But once he begins history, God seems “frenetic, committing error upon error.” Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s inspiration, took up this idea. He thought it would take a philosopher like himself to regain the solid ground of reality—i.e. the divine totality that would avoid the spiritual and moral relativism” that God’s “mistake” led us into.

 

Ilyin realized that the politics of from the 1880s to the early 1910s were the politics of globalization, just as they were again later from the 1980s to 2010s. In both eras the conventional wisdom was that export led growth would bring enlightened politics and end fanaticism. During the First World that optimism broke down. In the 2010s Trump and the resentful class to whom he appealed, showed that this optimism had also broken down in America. As Snyder says, “Ilyin regarded fascism as the politics of the world to come.”  And of course so did Trump and his 73 million voters. The phrase politics of the world to come, reminds me of what George Orwell said, “If you want an image of the future imagine a boot stomping a human face forever.”

 

Ilyin in the 1920s was in exile in Italy and he was disappointed that the Italians arrived at fascism before the Russians. Just as Trump later yearned for fascism when he looked at Putin and a host of other tyrants around the world and wished he could be like them. Trump always found dictators and tyrants more congenial than the leaders of the world’s democracies. That is not as surprising as it might sound. Trump naturally swam in the waters of tyranny. That was where he felt most at home. Ilyin was also impressed with Hitler. Just as Trump was impressed with Putin. Like liked like.  Ilyin actually spent most of his time from 1922 to 1938 in Germany.

 

The attraction of Hitler for Ilyin was the same as for so many fascists: “Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism. The Führer, he wrote had “performed an enormous service for all of Europe” by preventing further revolutions on the Russian model.”

 

This is an important thought to remember. Capitalists are quite comfortable with fascists, because the real enemy is communism, or even socialism. In fact historically, capitalists are more friendly with fascism than democracy.

 

At this same time in Europe ,American capitalists were swarming to adopt Hitler as a congenial ally. Communists those were the real enemies of American capitalists. The connection between capitalism and fascism is deep. The connection to democracy is much more tenuous. It was therefore no surprise to see American capitalists enthralled by Trump, notwithstanding his obvious authoritarian tendencies. Later many were enthralled by Putin.

 

As Snyder pointed out, “Closely related to the fantasy of an eternally innocent Russia includes the fantasy of an eternally innocent redeemer, who does no wrong and therefore will not die.”

 

Fantasy: The Intellectual roots of Fascism

American Fascism, Capitalism, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

Timothy Snyder found the intellectual roots of fascism, at least Russian fascism, or Putin’s fascism,  in a little-known philosopher Ivan Ilyin who lived  in the first half of the 20th century.  Putin and his cronies revived him in the 1990s and 2000s.

According to Timothy Snyder who has spent his academic life studying fascism, the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s to which Ilyin was attracted,  had three core features:

 

  1. It celebrated will and violence over reason and law;
  2. It proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people;
  3. It characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than a set of problems to be solved

 

In the 21st century fascism has been revived by populist leaders around the world. According to Snyder the driving force of that process is inequality. I agree. I said earlier inequality promotes resentment and contempt, particularly self-contempt. And that leads directly to fascism.   According to Snyder,

“Fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and toward personalist regimes.”

 

In other words, the politics of eternity are what Putin has achieved and Trump did his best to achieve. I call that fascism. Trump was just a wanna be fascist. Of course in the last election in the US he had more than 73 million supporters many of whom now believe he was cheated out of his rightful second term as president of the United States. That is his fantasy and it has been taken up by his supporters. That makes Trump a force to be reckoned with. He could return in 2024 or earlier if there is successful insurrection, which cannot be ruled out. Even if Trump does not return, Trumpism is alive and well in the United States with millions supporters. In only 1 America election were more than 73 million votes needed to be elected President , and that was of course in 2020. The yearning for the politics of eternity, as Snyder calls it, is far from dead. It could come back to haunt the country and in fact the world at any time.

 

According to Snyder, Ilyin is “a guide on the darkening road to unfreedom, which leads from inevitability to eternity.”

 

Snyder also makes clear that eternity, like inevitability, as he calls it, “is another idea that says there are no ideas.”

Snyder explained this idea this way:

“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one.  The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that “there are no alternatives.” To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to  premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.

Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality, that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith in technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustration of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power. ”

 

Those are the ideas that Snyder uses to describe fascists from Hitler to Stalin, to Putin to Trump. And their essence is fantasies.

The Politics of Eternity

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

Timothy Snyder’s second difficult concept in his book The Road to Unfreedom was the politics of eternity.  This was the successor to the politics of inevitability.

As Snyder said,

“The collapse of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity.  Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the threats from the past.  Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

 

In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation  and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

 

The politics of eternity follows closely behind the politics of inevitability. There are two versions of it one western the other from eastern Europe, though the lines of separation can be porous. The politics of inevitability come first. After that,

“Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarchy spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle.  As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin escorted another, Donald Trump from fiction to power.”

 

Putin was Russia’s eternity leader and Trump was America’s version.

I don’t think it is fair to characterize Donald Trump as a fascist. Not quite anyway. He was an authoritarian who wanted to be a fascist, but he was held back, so far at least, and just barely, by the institutions of American democracy and honest government officials who thwarted his intentions in 2020 when he spelled out for the world to see that he wanted tyranny. The frightening thing is that more than 73 million Americans voted for him, after he made his intentions clear. After 4 years in power no American who paid any attention at all could honestly say they did not know the real Trump. Trump put himself front and forward at all times for all to see. He did not hide, he announced his intentions for all to hear. No one in the history of the world has been more in the public eye than Trump.

 

Yet America escaped tyranny by the thinnest of margins. It took a courageous Supreme Court packed with 3 members of Trump’s personal choosing, stalwart Republican and Democrat officials who refused to give in to his claims of a fraudulent election, solid lower courts, and a determined party of Democrats to hold Trump back from his goal—i.e. tyranny.

 

Of course, as we all know, Trump did not die. He is still hanging around. He could come back and realize his dreams of fascist power and there are many enablers, many in the Republican party, doing all they can do to bring about that result. We don’t know what will happen.

Inequality Breeds Contempt

American Fascism, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Modern History, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

I want to continue talking about Snyder’s idea of “the politics of inevitability” just a little bit more.

One of my readers pointed out that this theory that was employed by people in the west as well as the east is really a version of determinism.  And the problem with determinism is that even if  events are determined it is extremely difficult to predict the future.

 

What the Americans thought was their own inevitable dominance after that collapse of the Soviet Empire turned out to be one more dangerous illusion. The road to heaven turned out to be more complicated than that. In fact, the road to heaven turned out to be a road to unfreedom. Inevitability turned out to be a churlish illusion. As Timothy Snyder said,

 

“The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.”

 

The decline of America was set in motion. Nothing was inevitable except the crushing power of wealth.

Americans don’t believe this even though they so powerfully demonstrate it. Inequality breeds contempt. First inequality ushers in resentment, then contempt. First, the lowly feel resentment about their “betters” and then they feel contempt for themselves for failing to live up to their own ideals. They see themselves as losers. Their self-respect is curdled by envy.  It had happened earlier to African Americans enslaved for centuries until many of them lost their ability to love even themselves as shown in the novels of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We need a writer of equal power to tell us the truth of what happened after 2008. Instead, we have too many people who don’t want to look at the truth of modern North American society and prefer the contentment of looking at comfortable myths.

Such a situation is ripe for the demagogue.  America got exactly that. It got Donald Trump to make America (and of course Americans) great again. What a wonderful illusion. All they had to do was keep out the undesirables and have faith in their new leader. He could do it. And astonishingly, millions of Americans believed him, without any evidence that he could do it. They believed it because they wanted it so much to be true.

The same thing happened in Russia. They got Putin. He promised Russians that the Soviet Empire could be revived.  He would do that in Ukraine. So far he has just brought ruin without empire.  In Russia, as in the United States, some people achieved enormous wealth while ordinary people were left to suck socks. And that created huge problems in both countries.