Category Archives: Tyranny and Fascism

More Blood  

Books, Genocide, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022), ,

 

Today, by a remarkable coincidence, one day after I posted about the Bloodlands as they were called by Timothy Snyder, Winnipeg Free Press columnist Allan Levine commented on the same issue based on Snyder’s other book. Levine’s maternal grandfather born in those Bloodlands west of Kyiv. He was 12 years old when World I broke out and 15 years old when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia after the horrors of that war. In my post I quoted how as Snyder said this in his book   The Road to Unfreedom, “together, some ten million people were killed in a decade as a result of two rival colonizations of the same Ukrainian territory”.

 

Levine’s grandfather was a Jew who lived in a part of that region that was constantly fought over by various powerful and brutal  forces.  This reminded me of another book I had recently read by Phillipe Sands called East West Street. It is a fascinating book about the origins of the notion of crimes against humanity and genocide. It is no accident that a number of the most important people involved in that history also came from that same region. One of them was Rafael Lemkin who invented the word “genocide.” He came from Lviv a city much in the news these past 2 months, but I had never heard of it before I read that book. Here is a section of the opening chapter of the book about that city:

 

“Between September 1914 and July 1944 control of the city changed eight times. After a long spell as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and the Grand Duchy  of Kraków with the Duchies of Auschwitz and Zator”—yes it is that Auschwitz—the city passed from the hands of Austria to Russia, then back to Austria, then briefly to western Ukraine, then to Poland, then to the Soviet Union, then to Germany, then back to Soviet Union, and finally to Ukraine where control resides today…the  streets of Lviv are a microcosm of Europe’s turbulent twentieth century, the focus of bloody conflicts that tore cultures apart.”

 

It is like hyenas and lions fighting over a carcass. During these times the city never moved, but its name changed many times from Lemberg, Lviv, Lvov, and Lwów. Now Putin wants to rip it back into Russia one more time and he doesn’t care about how many people he has to kill to do that  or whether they are women or children.

 

Levine’s grandfather was lucky—very lucky—to escape to Canada in 1921. Levine says that during the 12 years of 1933 to 1945, “upwards of 50 million civilians and soldiers were killed during those 12 terrible years.”  I think he meant they were killed around the world.  But this was the bloodiest part of that world because more than 10 million people died there. But that was then; this is now. As Levine said,

“Now, with the atrocities perpetrated by Russian soldiers on Ukrainian civilians near Kyiv, Mariupol, Bucha, and other cities, Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again reignited the horrors of the bloodlands. And to what end?”

 

Levine quotes from Snyder’s other book, Bloodlands, about how Stalin and Hitler “pursued transformative agendas with no concern for the lives of individual human beings.”  That is what fascist dictators do. And that is exactly what Putin is now doing. He, like them, is trying to build up a society on the basis of lives which are meant to be sacrificed. And sacrifice them Hitler and Stalin did and now Putin wants to do exactly the same thing. This is another great moment in history. Are we up to the challenge of confronting this radical evil? That is why this issue is so important and why I am obsessed with what is happening in Ukraine. I fear there will be more blood.

Bloodlands

Books, Exploitation, Modern History, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022), ,

Many of us have not paid much attention to Ukraine until this year. That is a mistake. Ukraine is important. And very interesting.

Europe is well known around the world for colonizing countries for its own benefit. When I was young, I actually believed they did that to spread civilization to the world. That seems almost unimaginably naive now.

What is not commented on as much is Europe colonizing other parts of Europe–colonizing itself in other words.  In no part of Europe was this more significant than Ukraine. First, the Soviet Union under Stalin colonized Ukraine. That was Stalin’s attempt to make Ukraine and Soviet Union one. It was a shot gun wedding.  After that there was the attempt by Nazi Germany to colonize Ukraine. Again this was another bloody union. Neither of these imperial powers used seduction—only brute force. When this also failed, Russia quickly stepped in to fill the void. It would do what Germany was not able to do for long.  As Yale Historian Timothy Snyder who is an expert on Ukraine,  said  in his book The Road to Unfreedom “No other land attracted as much attention within Europe. This reveals the rule: European history turns on colonization and decolonization.” That is why Snyder in another book referred to this area, that included Ukraine, as “the Bloodlands.”  He named an earlier book after that. That  is what Putin is trying to do again.  He wants to join the ranks of Stalin and Hitler.

Everyone wanted the bread basket of Europe. That was and is Ukraine. That is still true. Joseph Stalin realized that Soviet Russia unlike other European countries had no overseas possessions such as India, North America, or South America. He did not think that was fair. It really wasn’t fair for any country to possess other countries, but that was not relevant. Every European country thought it had the God-given right to exploit other countries. As a result, Soviet Russia had no alternative but to exploit its hinterland. Since Germany had no hinterland left, it exploited what it could. Here are some astonishing numbers that Snyder drew to our attention:

 

“Ukraine was therefore to yield its agricultural bounty to Soviet central planners in the First Five-Year Plan of 1928-1933. State control of agriculture killed between three and four million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine by starvation. Adolf Hitler saw Ukraine as the fertile territory that would transform Germany into a world power. Control of its black earth was his aim.  As a result of the German occupation that began in 1941, more than three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine were killed, including about 1.6 million Jews murdered by Germany and local policemen and militias. In addition to those losses, some three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in combat as Red Army soldiers. Taken together, some ten million people were killed in a decade as a result of two rival colonizations of the same Ukrainian territory.”

 

Think about that. Let those numbers sink in. And I learned none of this in High School. How ignorant could I be?  Answer: very ignorant. For good reason, Snyder has called these lands “Bloodlands.”

In the western Ukraine the western districts which had been part of Poland before World War II, Ukrainian nationalists resisted the imposition of Soviet rule over them. Hundreds of thousands of those Ukrainian resisters were deported to the concentration camps called the Gulag. More bloodshed again.

Many of those prisoners were still alive when Stalin died in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Stalin. In the 1960s and 1970s Ukrainian communists joined their Russian communist comrades and together ruled the largest country in the world. According to Snyder, Russian communists never denied that Ukraine was a nation, they just thought Ukraine would be better off under Russian rule. That is what colonists always believe. They are exploiting the colonized for their own good.

In 1991 the failed coup against Gorbachev opened the way for Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian ruler, to lead Russia out of the Soviet Union. At the same time, Ukrainian communists agreed with Ukrainian oppositionists that Ukraine should also leave the Soviet Union. As Snyder said, “In a referendum, 92% of the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine, including a majority in every Ukrainian region, voted for independence.”

These are the people that Putin says are tyrannized by Neo-Nazi Ukrainian leaders into forcing Ukrainians to stay separate from Russia. Many Russian agree with Putin.  According to Gwynne Dyer, writing in the Winnipeg Free Press,

“In a telephone survey of Russians three weeks ago by Lord Ashworth Polls 76% said they supported the “special military operation” in Ukraine, 81 % said it was necessary to protect Russian security, and 85% had a favorable view of Vladimir Putin. The numbers are untrustworthy of course; would you always tell the truth to a stranger ringing up out of the blue and asking dangerous questions? It was also striking that a majority of the youngest group (18-24 years old) actually opposed the war, so there’s some hope if you want it. But a clear majority of Russians strongly back the invasion of Ukraine.”

 

It seems unbelievable that so many Russians would support their leader. It shows the power of lies. It shows what happens when powerful countries fight over weaker ones. Blood land is created.

George Orwell once said if you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stomping a human face forever.

 

 

Sexual Politics: from western democracy to Russian Christian fascism

Books, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Long before Putin, Russia’s political leader, Leonid Brezhnev had a permanent enemy—the decadent west.

 

Later, Putin found the same enemy to be useful, but he added a twist—a sexual twist. Ivan Ilyin had described his enemies as sexual perverts. By that he meant homosexuality.  Putin found this accretion to his enemy of choice complementary.

 

In the Russian elections of 2001 and 2012 people who wanted their votes counted were painted as mindless agents of sexual decadence rather than believers in democracy. In accordance with the teachings of Ivan Ilyin, Putin and friends saw the sexual deviants, as they described them, as a threat against the purity of Russia.

 

On December 6, 2011 one day after people protested against the fraudulent elections in Moscow the president of the Russian federation at the time referred to them by a  homophobic slur. Vladimir Putin, at the time the prime minister about to become President said on national TV that the white ribbons the protesters wore reminded him of condoms. A little later when Putin was visiting Germany he told Angela Merkel that the protesters in Russia were “sexually deformed.”

This has been a repeating theme among Russian fascists, not unlike American fascists. They are united in Christian opposition to what they considered  the sexual deviants.

Timothy Snyder described a conference on human rights in China where a Russian diplomat argued that

“Gay rights were nothing more than the chosen weapon of a global neoliberal conspiracy meant to prepare virtuous societies such as Russia and China for exploitation. President Putin took the next step at this personal global summit at Valdai, a few days later, comparing same-sex partnerships to Satanism. He associated gay rights with a Western model that “opens up a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.”

 

I find this repeating theme in fascist societies around the world interesting. What is the connection between sexual hatred and fascist camaraderie across international borders? It has been as clear and consistent in the US as it has been in Russia. Why is that?

 

According to Snyder, this was all part of an organized campaign of deflection:

“Human sexuality is an inexhaustible raw material for the manufacture of anxiety. The attempt to place heterosexuality within Russia and homosexuality beyond was factually ludicrous, but the facts were beside the point. The purpose of the anti-gay campaign was to transform demands for democracy into a nebulous threat to Russian innocence: voting = West= sodomy. Russia has to be innocent, and all problems had to be the responsibility of others.”

 

The fascists disparaged their opposition as sexual deviants because they have no good arguments on their side.  So they called them names instead.  That is a common way to defend an indefensible position. That is part of the reason Snyder referred to theme as Christian fascists.

 

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.

 

Fiction Written in blood: Managed Democracy

Corruption, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism,

 

President Yeltsin was for a while considered the savior of Russia. That did not last long. Too many considered him a drunkard and buffoon. Briefly he was the hero of the anti-communist revolution. In 1996 his own team admitted that he had faked an election in which he won another term as president.

 

In 1999 it was recognized that he was in ill health and a successor should be chosen. By this time, they had a lot of power.  Vast amounts of money will do that. The oligarchs of course wanted to manage this process so that someone who would be sympathetic to their cause would come to power. They wanted to manage the process for their own benefit. They wanted someone who would allow them to retain their gains, maintain their wealth, and keep them alive.

 

It took a while for Yeltsin to choose his successor but eventually picked  Putin. Later, he told Bill Clinton it was a big mistake. Vladimir Putin was hardly a likely prospect because he was so little known. Putin held a meaningless KGB post in East Germany. From there he took a post as assistant to the mayor of St. Petersburg and used that position to enrich himself. After all that was the Russian way.

Putin was considered to be a team player in the Kremlin. When Yeltsin appointed Putin as his prime minister he was not a plausible candidate because his approval rate was only 2%. That was not because so many despised him. That was because so few people knew him.

That all changed in 1999 after a series of bombs exploded in Russian cities killing hundreds of Russians.  It was possible that the perpetrators were FSB officers. The FSB was the new Russian intelligence service that succeeded the well-known KGB. Some thought the FSB had engineered the attacks for their own private gain. Timothy Snyder described the situation this way:

“Though the possibility of self-terrorism was noticed at the time, the factual questions were overwhelmed by righteous patriotism as Putin ordered a new war against the part of Russia deemed responsible for the bombings: the Chechen republic of southwestern Russia, in the Caucasus region, which had declared independence in 1993 and then fought the Russian army to a standstill.   Thanks to the Second Chechen War, Putin’s approval rating reached 45% in 1993. In December, Yeltsin announced his resignation and endorsed Putin as his successor. Thanks to unequal television coverage, manipulation of the vote-tally, and the atmosphere of terrorism and war, Putin was accorded the absolute majority needed to win the presidential election of March 2000. The ink of political fiction is blood.”

This launched Putin into a career of what was then called “managed democracy.” That  of course, was fiction written in blood. There seems to be an endless supply of blood.

 

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.