There are many answers to that question, and you’ll hear plenty over the coming days and weeks. My answer to that question goes like this. Putin wants a Third Reich. For Russia. Think of the first one as Tsarist Russia. The second as the Soviet Union. Putin wants something like a cross between both of those — but the Reich part is that he means it in a Nazi way.
Hence, he’s acting eerily like Hitler
See the pic above? That’s how Eastern Europe’s democracies actually think of Putin. As another Hitler. Romania’s biggest newspaper writes, “”Joseph Adolf Putin — this is the name publicly acquired by the President of Russia, after the baptism of the blood of others. Is it too much? No, it’s not an exaggeration.” So before you dismiss it as hyperbole, take a second to understand what’s really at stake here.
The UK’s Defence Minister has compared Putin’s behaviour to Hitler’s, saying, “In Munich in 1938, Adolf Hitler all along had a plan to invade parts of Europe, and all the diplomacy was about a straw man attempt by him to buy time…Putin has been set on this for many many months and certainly over a year.” The Ukrainian government posted an eerie drawing of Hitler smiling down at Putin, with the comment, “This is not a ‘meme’, but our and your reality right now.” Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, says, “These were Hitler’s moves in 1938, just as they are Putin’s now.” A Ukrainian MPsaid, “Putin is Hitler for the 21st Century.”
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has chilling echoes of Hitler taking the Anschluss or invading Poland for no good reason. He wants a Third Reich…for Russia. To understand all this, we need only look to Putin himself. What are his words? His own explanations and justifications of his goals and ambitions?
The first thing that’s apparent is that Putin wants to reconstitute the Soviet Empire — not in a communist sense, but geospatially and economically and politically in the larger sense of an authoritarian union.
Hence, Putin’s already effectively said that this isn’t just “a” war, but a war campaign. Not just “a” war on Ukraine, but that it’s going to be — if we let it be — a war campaign across Eastern Europe. Don’t take it from me — just listen to Putin himself.
Here’s what he said in his speechdeclaring war on Ukraine:
“What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?
“The answer is simple. Everything is clear and obvious. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union grew weaker and subsequently broke apart. That experience should serve as a good lesson for us, because it has shown us that the paralysis of power and will is the first step towards complete degradation and oblivion. We lost confidence for only one moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world.”
Putin, thinks, in other words, that the reason Russia is failing today as a nation is because the Soviet Empire broke up. And so he wants to reconstitute it. If he can do that, he believes, he won’t be under the thumb of a West which is constantly trying to sabotage and undermine Russia.
So why attack Ukraine in particular?
“The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons.”
Ukraine was dangerous to Putin and his oligarchs because it was becoming a modern democracy, a Westernized country, free, open, tolerant, warm, gentle. To Putin, Ukraine was becoming an “anti-Russia.” How dangerous is that?
“For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”
Read that again. For Putin, all this is a matter of “life and death.” It’s not just some kind of game. He has a far deeper ideological commitment to this war campaign than you might think. For him, it’s about a decadent West in decline, pitted against the triumph of a noble Fatherland. In fact, Putin thinks this a genetic struggle, a biological one.
As Michel Eltchaninoff writes, “Putin leans here on a strange theory advanced by the 20th-century historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev. The son of two of Russia’s most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev maintains that every people possesses a distinct life force: a ‘bio-cosmic’ inner energy or passionate substance that he calls passionarnost. Putin may have known Gumilev in St Petersburg at the start of the 1990s. At any rate, he has embraced his ideas and never misses an opportunity to refer to them. In February last year, he said: ‘I believe in passionarnost. In nature as in society, there is development, climax and decline. Russia has not yet attained its highest point. We are on the way.’ According to him, Russia carries the power and potential of a young people. “We possess an infinite genetic code,” he has said.”
Now you’re beginning to understand what this is really all about — for Putin. It’s not just a “paranoid worldview,” where Russia’s always under attack. It’s several steps further than that. In his mind, Russians are “bio-cosmically” superior, but have yet to to “attain their highest point.” The West, meanwhile, is inferior, in decline, and having hemmed Russia in for decades or centuries, it’s time to strike back. Russia’s woes aren’t its own fault — economic stagnation, widespread poverty, a failure to develop into a modern society — they’re the fault of the West. And the way out of this trap is to reconstitute the Soviet Empire, and unleash the “bio-cosmic” life-force of the superior race.
If all that sounds pretty fascist to you, that’s because it is. It’s textbook fascist. Superior genetics? A persecuted master race, heroic but kept down by a malign world order? Who must rise to dominance — and prove its superiority through war? If Putin is being compared to Hitler thesedays, by people with significant experience in international relations, by the Ukrainian government itself, they are righter than they know.
In his mind, this isn’t just a political conflict, it’s a philosophical struggle — a genuinely fascist one, about master races and subhumans, oppressed empires and declining world orders, just as it was for the Nazis.
How deep does that philosophical struggle go? To Putin, this appears to be about cosmology. “Bio-cosmic” life forces. That is to say — what is a people’s rightful place in the universe?
Let’s go back to the Nazis. They weren’t just idiots with guns. Hitler offered Germans a whole cosmology, a mystical sort of secular religion. They had a rightful place in the universe — above all others. Uber alles. Nazism was about a cosmology — a hierarchy of being. And the world order they wanted to construct was just a reflection of that cosmology — master race at the top, then all the lower races below them, to the point of annihilation. The Nazis were trying to regain what they saw as their rightful place in the universe — and put everyone else back in theirs. That is why they spoke of a thousand-year Reich. They were hoping to build something immortal, something beyond, uber, superhuman. Their cosmology was about the scorned rising to wreak vengeance on their persecutors, and regain their rightful place in the universe.
And just that cosmology is what Putin appears to believe in, too. What is Russia’s rightful place in the universe? Above the decadent West. What is the rightful place of Russia’s neighbours? As vassals to it. What is that rightful place in the universe that Putin seeks for Russia called?
We’re about to come to that.
First, understand how all this connects right back to his call not just for “a” war, but for a whole campaign. That’s what it takes to make your cosmology real, and regain your rightful place in the universe. You do it even if you need to, like the Nazis, wreck the entire world.
That may be weird to us. We don’t reallyhave a cosmology. Or if we do, it’s something pretty simple, like, well the universe is there for most of us to be free and equal and peaceful. We don’t think about it much. You don’t need to think about a cosmology a lot if your society works, because you’re not preoccupied with existential questions of what your rightful place in the universe is.
That is why Putin more or less announced, in his speech on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that this wouldn’t just be “a” war, but a war campaign. The stakes for Putin are much, much larger than many of us in the West know or believe. Let me say it again. It’s not just about politics — it’s a philosophical struggle of master races and subhumans and world orders. It’s Nazism for the 22nd century.
In case you don’t believe me, that is exactly why, for example, Putin’s own security chiefs call Ukrainians “nonhumans.” It’s why Putin has gone to great lengths to delude the average Russian into believing that Ukraine is a country overrun by neo-Nazis who are committing genocide on ethnically “pure” Russians. Ukraine’s a democracy who’s President is Jewish, whose grandfather’s family died in the Holocaust. Putin has spun these myths precisely because he is weaving a web of Nazism for the 22nd century — a mythology and philosophy of subhumans and master races and world orders and Reichs.
Perhaps the best to think about what Putin really wants, then, is this: he wants to establish a Reich. Just like the Nazis did. A Reich means a political order of subhumans and master races, an empire that cuts through millennia, in which the genetically superior resume their rightful place at the top. Reich means “realm.” Making more sense? Putin wants a realm — a world of his own, where political order is based on power and aggression, not democracy and peace.
Think of how the Nazis used the term “Third Reich.” That is more or less what Putin seeks for Russia. “The designation “Third Reich” was coined in 1922 by the romantic-conservative, völkisch-nationalist writer-intellectual Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. In his publication Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), Moeller envisioned the rise of an anti-liberal, anti-Marxist Germanic Empire in which all social class divisions would be reconciled in national unity under a charismatic “Führer” (leader). Moeller’s “Third Reich” referred to two previous Germanic Empires: Charlemagne’s medieval Frankish Empire and the German Empire under the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty (1871–1918).”
Now put that in Putin’s context. Doesn’t that sound eerily like what he’s after for Russia — and its neighbours? The first Russian reich might be thought of as the Imperial Russia of tsars and so forth. The second, the Soviet Union. And now Putin wants a Third Reich.
This Reich is a weird remix of the first two. It’s a reconstituted Soviet Union — but it’s not run by “soviets,” which means literally “workers’ councils.” Instead, it’s run by modern-day tsars, oligarchs, under the thumb of an all-powerful Fuhrer. Putin. And in this Reich, there are subhumans and superhumans, the genetically pure, the true of faith, and everyone else. There is no dissent or democracy, because, well, why should there be, in a “realm” where “bio-cosmic genetics” determine the “development” and “climax” of a people?
So. Let me try to clarify some of that. Putin is after a Third Reich. For Russia and its neighbours.
He wants to revive the Soviet Empire, but also Imperial Russia, by way of the Nazis. The Nazis used the political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One people, one Reich, one leader”). Putin might as well be saying exactly the same thing in his recent speeches.
What he is doing in those speeches is trying to explain his worldview to the rest of us. Demand that we acknowledge it. They aren’t just speeches — they’re manifestos. They contain hints at a philosophy which structures a certain world order, and they contain the demands of that way of thinking, too. They point very, very clearly to the idea that Putin wants a Third Reich all his own — they are manifestos for a kind of 21st century imperial Nazism.
Let’s go even deeper, in case you think I’m kidding. When I say that Putin is outlining an essentially Nazi worldview, in which he thinks of Russians as having a superior “bio-cosmic” life-force, and therefore, deserving of a Third Reich, what does all that complicated jargon really mean?
“For Putin — in stark contrast to the tired westerner, lost in the search for profit and material comfort, ‘the Russian man thinks first of all … in relation to a superior moral principle.’ And he is prepared to die for it. Putin often cites a well-known Russian saying: for Russians, even death is beautiful.’”
How superior is the Russian mind and soul to the decadent Western one? Let’s go back to Putin’s own words.
“One can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same “empire of lies.”
The West is an “empire of lies.” Putin is challenging not just the politics of the West here, not just NATO, Biden, Macron. He is challenging the idea of the West. He is saying that the West thinks of itself as a democracy and a peaceful region and so forth but in fact it is nothing of the kind. It is a malicious persecutor. Of whom? Of what? Of those with superior “bio-cosmic” potential and genetics…like Russia. And the answer to all that is to forge a Third Soviet Reich.
Why? So that Russia is never humiliated again.
“As for our country, after the disintegration of the USSR, given the entire unprecedented openness of the new, modern Russia, its readiness to work honestly with the United States and other Western partners, and its practically unilateral disarmament, they immediately tried to put the final squeeze on us, finish us off, and utterly destroy us.”
In Putin’s mind, the humiliation of Russia — its descent into a failed state — isn’t the fault of oligarchs looting its capital and seizing its resources and buying up half of London, Manhattan, and Miami. It’s not even his own intransigence in addressing those problems, but encouraging them. It’s that when the Soviet Union broke up, the West “put the final squeeze on us” and “utterly destroyed us.”
Is that what really happened? We all have our own interpretations of history. And here it’s hard not to feel a little pity for Russia. Because when Europe was wrecked by World War, America brought it back to life with the Marshall Plan. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, no such help or lifeline was really offered. Societies really did descend into anarchy and chaos. And the scars of such humiliations cut deep — and never really fade. For figures like Putin, they seem to last forever, and have bred a hostile, paranoid, deluded worldview, which is trapped in the need for vengeance over a West which failed Russia as the USSR broke up.
In that way, you could see Putin as a broken man. Even Macron spoke of him acting different, strange, deluded. Psychology aside, though, in the real world, in the final analysis, Putin is a madman with Hitler level ambitions…and nuclear weapons.
That is a very, very bad turn for the world.
Now you know what Putin really wants. A Third Reich for Russia, a humiliated Russia, one that crosses Tsarist Russia’s imperial designs with the Soviet Union’s empire, one founded on a fascist philosophy of genetics and superiority and persecuted master races and life forces and even cosmology, a rightful place in the universe. It’s that weird, big, disturbing — and serious. That’s why he’s acting like Hitler. Because he wants a Third Reich all his own.
The question you should be asking is: are our leaders doing enough to stop him?
Umair
No comments:
Post a Comment