NYTimes essay: Russia is f*****t
May 19, 2022 21:01:01 #
"A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as f*****t."
Essay by Timothy Snyder in the NY Times:
We Should Say It. Russia Is F*****t.
May 19, 2022, 1:00 a.m. ET
F*****m was never defeated as an idea.
As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as N**i Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that f*****m was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a f*****t war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, f*****ts around the world will be comforted.
We err in limiting our fears of f*****m to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. F*****m was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where f*****ts were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.
Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes f*****m. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.
It’s not the first time Ukraine has been the object of f*****t war. The conquest of the country was Hitler’s main war aim in 1941. Hitler thought that the Soviet Union, which then ruled Ukraine, was a Jewish state: He planned to replace Soviet rule with his own and claim Ukraine’s fertile agricultural soil. The Soviet Union would be starved, and Germany would become an empire. He imagined that this would be easy because the Soviet Union, to his mind, was an artificial creation and the Ukrainians a colonial people.
The similarities to Mr. Putin’s war are striking. The Kremlin defines Ukraine as an artificial state, whose Jewish president proves it cannot be real. After the elimination of a small elite, the thinking goes, the inchoate masses would happily accept Russian d******n. Today it is Russia that is denying Ukrainian food to the world, threatening famine in the global south.
Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as f*****t because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as a****ascist. But that usage did not help to define what f*****m is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated N**i Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to f*****m, however, was inconsistent.
Before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviets treated f*****ts as just one more form of capitalist enemy. C*******t parties in Europe were to treat all other parties as the enemy. This policy actually contributed to Hitler’s ascent: Though they outnumbered the N**is, German c*******ts and socialists could not cooperate. After that fiasco, Stalin adjusted his policy, demanding that European c*******t parties form coalitions to block f*****ts.
That didn’t last long. In 1939, the Soviet Union joined N**i Germany as a de facto ally, and the two powers invaded Poland together. N**i speeches were reprinted in the Soviet press and N**i officers admired Soviet efficiency in mass deportations. But Russians today do not speak of this fact, since memory laws make it a crime to do so. World War II is an element of Mr. Putin’s historical myth of Russian innocence and lost greatness — Russia must enjoy a monopoly on victimhood and on victory. The basic fact that Stalin enabled World War II by allying with Hitler must be unsayable and unthinkable.
Stalin’s flexibility about f*****m is the key to understanding Russia today. Under Stalin, f*****m was first indifferent, then it was bad, then it was fine until — when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union — it was bad again. But no one ever defined what it meant. It was a box into which anything could be put. C*******ts were purged as f*****ts in show trials. During the Cold War, the Americans and the British became the f*****ts. And “anti-f*****m” did not prevent Stalin from targeting Jews in his last purge, nor his successors from conflating Israel with N**i Germany.
Soviet anti-f*****m, in other words, was a politics of us and them. That is no answer to f*****m. After all, f*****t politics begins, as the N**i thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy. Because Soviet anti-f*****m just meant defining an enemy, it offered f*****m a backdoor through which to return to Russia.
In the Russia of the 21st century, “anti-f*****m” simply became the right of a Russian leader to define national enemies. Actual Russian f*****ts, such as Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov, were given time in mass media. And Mr. Putin himself has drawn on the work of the interwar Russian f*****t Ivan Ilyin. For the president, a “f*****t” or a “N**i” is simply someone who opposes him or his plan to destroy Ukraine. Ukrainians are “N**is” because they do not accept that they are Russians and resist.
A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as f*****t. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional f*****t battleground, but also a return to traditional f*****t language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.
Because Mr. Putin speaks of f*****ts as the enemy, we might find it hard to grasp that he could in fact be f*****t. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, “N**i” just means “subhuman enemy”— someone Russians can k**l. H**e speech directed at Ukrainians makes it easier to murder them, as we see in Bucha, Mariupol and every part of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation. Mass graves are not some accident of war, but an expected consequence of a f*****t war of destruction.
F*****ts calling other people “f*****ts” is f*****m taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where h**e speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others f*****ts while being a f*****t is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizof*****m.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”
We understand more about f*****m than we did in the 1930s. We now know where it led. We should recognize f*****m, because then we know what we are dealing with. But to recognize it is not to undo it. F*****m is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end. It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The f*****t leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose f*****m have to do what is necessary to defeat him. Only then do the myths come crashing down.
As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and f*****ts have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. F*****t battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.
Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world. If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.
Essay by Timothy Snyder in the NY Times:
We Should Say It. Russia Is F*****t.
May 19, 2022, 1:00 a.m. ET
F*****m was never defeated as an idea.
As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as N**i Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that f*****m was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a f*****t war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, f*****ts around the world will be comforted.
We err in limiting our fears of f*****m to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. F*****m was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where f*****ts were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.
Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes f*****m. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.
It’s not the first time Ukraine has been the object of f*****t war. The conquest of the country was Hitler’s main war aim in 1941. Hitler thought that the Soviet Union, which then ruled Ukraine, was a Jewish state: He planned to replace Soviet rule with his own and claim Ukraine’s fertile agricultural soil. The Soviet Union would be starved, and Germany would become an empire. He imagined that this would be easy because the Soviet Union, to his mind, was an artificial creation and the Ukrainians a colonial people.
The similarities to Mr. Putin’s war are striking. The Kremlin defines Ukraine as an artificial state, whose Jewish president proves it cannot be real. After the elimination of a small elite, the thinking goes, the inchoate masses would happily accept Russian d******n. Today it is Russia that is denying Ukrainian food to the world, threatening famine in the global south.
Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as f*****t because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as a****ascist. But that usage did not help to define what f*****m is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated N**i Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to f*****m, however, was inconsistent.
Before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviets treated f*****ts as just one more form of capitalist enemy. C*******t parties in Europe were to treat all other parties as the enemy. This policy actually contributed to Hitler’s ascent: Though they outnumbered the N**is, German c*******ts and socialists could not cooperate. After that fiasco, Stalin adjusted his policy, demanding that European c*******t parties form coalitions to block f*****ts.
That didn’t last long. In 1939, the Soviet Union joined N**i Germany as a de facto ally, and the two powers invaded Poland together. N**i speeches were reprinted in the Soviet press and N**i officers admired Soviet efficiency in mass deportations. But Russians today do not speak of this fact, since memory laws make it a crime to do so. World War II is an element of Mr. Putin’s historical myth of Russian innocence and lost greatness — Russia must enjoy a monopoly on victimhood and on victory. The basic fact that Stalin enabled World War II by allying with Hitler must be unsayable and unthinkable.
Stalin’s flexibility about f*****m is the key to understanding Russia today. Under Stalin, f*****m was first indifferent, then it was bad, then it was fine until — when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union — it was bad again. But no one ever defined what it meant. It was a box into which anything could be put. C*******ts were purged as f*****ts in show trials. During the Cold War, the Americans and the British became the f*****ts. And “anti-f*****m” did not prevent Stalin from targeting Jews in his last purge, nor his successors from conflating Israel with N**i Germany.
Soviet anti-f*****m, in other words, was a politics of us and them. That is no answer to f*****m. After all, f*****t politics begins, as the N**i thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy. Because Soviet anti-f*****m just meant defining an enemy, it offered f*****m a backdoor through which to return to Russia.
In the Russia of the 21st century, “anti-f*****m” simply became the right of a Russian leader to define national enemies. Actual Russian f*****ts, such as Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov, were given time in mass media. And Mr. Putin himself has drawn on the work of the interwar Russian f*****t Ivan Ilyin. For the president, a “f*****t” or a “N**i” is simply someone who opposes him or his plan to destroy Ukraine. Ukrainians are “N**is” because they do not accept that they are Russians and resist.
A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as f*****t. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional f*****t battleground, but also a return to traditional f*****t language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.
Because Mr. Putin speaks of f*****ts as the enemy, we might find it hard to grasp that he could in fact be f*****t. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, “N**i” just means “subhuman enemy”— someone Russians can k**l. H**e speech directed at Ukrainians makes it easier to murder them, as we see in Bucha, Mariupol and every part of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation. Mass graves are not some accident of war, but an expected consequence of a f*****t war of destruction.
F*****ts calling other people “f*****ts” is f*****m taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where h**e speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others f*****ts while being a f*****t is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizof*****m.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”
We understand more about f*****m than we did in the 1930s. We now know where it led. We should recognize f*****m, because then we know what we are dealing with. But to recognize it is not to undo it. F*****m is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end. It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The f*****t leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose f*****m have to do what is necessary to defeat him. Only then do the myths come crashing down.
As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and f*****ts have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. F*****t battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.
Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world. If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.
May 20, 2022 07:31:32 #
bluezzzzz wrote:
"A time traveler from the 1930s would have no... (show quote)
Best description of Russia to date is "A Gas Station with its own missiles, not one thing better."
May 20, 2022 21:16:08 #
May 20, 2022 21:41:31 #
bluezzzzz wrote:
"A time traveler from the 1930s would have no... (show quote)
What a hot steaming pile of mess.
May 21, 2022 01:29:52 #
bluezzzzz wrote:
"A time traveler from the 1930s would have no... (show quote)
C*******m has always been F*****tic. When has any c*******t system ever been for the people. Just a bunch of dictators bent on total control of their empires.
May 21, 2022 13:14:08 #
Shutterbug1697
Loc: Northeast
Fotoartist wrote:
Then what does that make Donald Trump?
Or anyone who doesn't support Ukraine in their war against Russia?
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