From the excerpt:
“Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.
I love the spirit, and even though many nowadays would call me an Obama Liberal for it, but I think that Nawalny could have made a change and was not just a pawn to Putin to prove to others trying to provoke an upheaval what dawned for them, but someone who could have made a change and shaken up the oligarchy that occupies the Kremlin. The problem is that the Russian society is what I have once quipped to be a "Turgenjew Youth": A country full of Nihilists: People who do not simply condone their ruler's actions but who just don't care either way and just want to be left to themselves [2]. They don't speak up because they know that even the slightes misdemeanour would be met with draconian punishment. And so, they cower to fly under the radar. We have seen how that has pitched up during the war, recently leading to the closure of Steam Community and Discord [3]. A German journalist mocked that now, all that Russians could still do in their free time would be to sit at home and drink vodka. While this is already the cliché and has been for years, now, it could become a bleak reality, and a test for how far the Russian autocracy could still go until they would finally rise and topple the government. Journalists in talk shows said that the Kremlin didn't need to mobilise more of the population because financial incentives already incentivised young men to join the army [4].
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| Образ из главы «Кушмар Ивана Фёдорович» кингы «Братя Карамазов» |
We may face in Russia with the population what we currently face in the West with people who vote for either outspoken or implicitly fringe right parties or figureheads: Hard and problematic truth lie out in the open for everyone to see and understand, but it doesn't bother a good part of the populace. Why is that so? In Russia, it could be the indifference and nihilism embedded within them that I have addressed beforehand, perhaps even the promises they make towards them. What unified both sides of the Western World--the West and the East under Russian influence--is the delivery of simple truths under a certain cloth: That of instigating hatred against incumbent powers or a distinctly opposite ideology or mainstream [5]. Now this is a bromide excessively recapitulated online as well as offline, but it is often simplified itself, so that people who utter it often end up on the same level as the threat they point out in our society. While it is true that simple truths often fail to provide long-term solutions to current problems, to claim that people ought not to vote for far-right parties because they were fascist, xenophobic and/or illiberal doesn't hit the mark for those who vote for them, as polls and elections show. We could break the appeal of such parties down to some other simple truths: That those who vote for them are mainly tired of the stronger, older parties have failed to pursue their interests and maintain a prosperous status quo, while those far-right parties and individuals are often newcomers with new, different ideas and the hope that they could bring the change everyone craved for. And while I am no fan of simple truths either, it helps us to bridge the gap to what follows therefrom: An idea of what to change in order to take the wind out of those domestic threats' sails: Improve governance[6]. What does that mean? It would be foolish to provide a unified theory for that question, although some benchmarks could perhaps be listed: Provide a market where jobs for everyone could be steadily created so that unemployment remains on a low, single-digit maximum; leave regulations on an equal minimum so that companies can act freely and deliver the prosperity no government could ever create, namely the financial one; feature migration rules that incentivise a brain influx rather than a society that creates a state of fear and terror and inevitably leads to a brain drain--something that happens in Putin's Russia[7], which is furthermore threatened by a loss of entire generations because the younglings either flee their country out of fear of being drafted, or the fear of death on the frontline. It is of course no surprise that wars are a great disincentivisation for societies to grow and become more prosperous, no matter how many old-fashioned left-wingers claim that it were the 'military industry complex' that craved for warfare in order to increase its sales [8].
It is wishful thinking to believe that the incumbents understood the writing on the wall and drew consequences therefrom. POTUS Joe Biden felled such a decision by giving in to his VPOTUS Kamala Harris because he knew, after a long, arduous period of contemplation, that he could not beat his old nemesis Donald J. Trump another time. Meanwhile, Olaf Scholz remains stubborn like a donkey, believing that he were the best choice of his party to run for chancellor in 2025 again. Many of the incumbents fit the allegation of power hunger despite the odds and the welfare of their country, so that to them, too, Daniel needed to come to interpret the writing on the wall, which, like for Belshazzar, read
“Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.“Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.“Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” (Daniel 5:26-28)
Medes and the Persians are gone already, but the division--so to say the oft-cited "house divided" by Abraham Lincoln in the debates for the Senate seat of Illinois--ran between more Liberal-minded people and those who wished for a strongman state again. Democracy fails in such situations because there will always be a loser, no matter how often this circumstance is sugarcoated as the equal chances of each side to come out victorious and the fulfilment of the majority's wish (an illusion that crushes especially when people only make a choice for the lesser evil, rather than a preferred candidate) I have written in great detail about that issue and how we can escape it (by more radical means, that is), but we are nowhere near a state in which we could achieve that. And so, we will inevitably perpetuate such faults, until they manifest irrevocably, if they haven't already.
We will not possibly fall into a pit as Russia has after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but we already can presage that some interests such as restrictive migration, even at the expense of national industries, will take place not because they were meritorious but because it serves some people's misconceptualisations of the economy[9]. It proves another fallacy of Democracy: To believe that the populace were able to decipher the thick of a complex world and extract decisions on governance therefrom, i.e. to select the most capable candidate to navigate the national ship through those tempests. We needn't speak about the Gordian knot of this issue too as this would steer too far away from the actual text, but for now we should jot down that Democracy is perhaps "le meilleur de tous les mondes" but by far not the best system we could have in this world. The best one would of course be an Anarchist one, as I have written in my main texts [10]. We will never achieve that, methinks, but it is soothing to imagine how a world like this would look like; where people whouldn't empower would-be autocrats and dictators because they were content with solving problems by themselves rather than employing central rulers to do the work for them. A first step towards such a better world would be the requirement of people to admit that they needed to take over more responsibilities within their communities. The second would be to treat public utilities more carefully as a sign of understanding that compassion is not an aesthetic but a duty. Just take a look around and (1) see how far we have come thereto; (2) see how far we need to go still; (3) realise what you can do to advance that pursuit. At no point must one start delegating such duties to others, or else we fall back into accustomed schemes; the same schemes that already brought us into this brédouille.
To close this text: If we can beat climate change, then we can also reform the world radically in this shape everywhere.
FINIS
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Some have called this system Political Nihilism, although in Russia, it was specified as Legal Nihilism. On the two concepts, read respectively one text:
+++ Veselin Draskovic & Mimo Draskovic, 2012. "Institutional Nihilism As A Basis For Anti-Development Policy," Montenegrin Journal of Economics, Economic Laboratory for Transition Research (ELIT), vol. 8(1), pages 119-136. Perm. Link: https://ideas.repec.org/a/mje/mjejnl/v8y2012i1p119-136.html
+++ Luparev G. (2020). To the question of legal nihilism. Gosudarstvo i pravo. no. 4, pp.68-75 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31857/S013207690009236-1
Perhaps this sentiment of indifference towards both the present and the future, while the government usually commands to rely on the glorious past--also because it has got nothing to offer for the present and the future; in the end, Putin, like Xi Jinping, tries to write his own passages in the history books by landing one more great coup, namely the reunification of an ancient empire. Ukraine is of interest in that regard because it is also one of the former Soviet states that does the best economically while still featuring a large Russian-speaking population, and for Jinping, it's the alleged outcast Taiwan that too does significantly better than they do, while also having a dominantly Mandarin-speaking population. Dictatorships must deliver to their people, or else discontent may spread within the population.
Anyway, Russians technically still live in the past, because the present is utterly Dickensian, while history books colourise a near Utopia. The French USSR historian Françoise Thom has picked that issue up too. As she wrote:
« Un peuple enclin au collectivisme et proche de l’économie de survie peut l’emporter dans une guerre sur des peuples techniquement plus avancés. C’est la leçon de la « grande guerre patriotique » de 1941-1945, présentée par la propagande officielle comme une victoire de la Russie sur l’Europe tout entière dressée contre elle. Celui qui gagne n’est pas celui qui possède les armements les plus avancés : c’est celui qui réussit le mieux à coordonner les forces et les moyens dont il dispose. Avec son régime autocratique, la Russie est la mieux placée de ce point de vue. »(Thom, Françoise (2018). Comprendre le Poutinisme. Paris : Desclée de Brouwer. Sony PRS-T2. Page 101)
But it was the Russian historian (with a peculiarly German name) Nikolaj Epple who has perhaps summarised the issue of political and legal nihilism in Russia best for today's time when he wrote that
«Государство также напрямую заинтересовано в создании нарратива о прошлом, не загоняющего тему в ‹общественное бессознательное›, не легитимирующего насилие и правовой нигилизм, не выключающего существенную часть граждан из разговора об истории страны, но позволяющего им чувствовать себя полноценными и полноправными гражданами. О том, что государство сознает невозможность молчания о советском терроре, свидетельствует открытие Мемориала жертвам репрессий в Москве, поддержка культа новомучеников и музейной ‹франшизы› ‹Россия – моя история›.»(Эппле, Николай (2020) . Неудобное прошлое. Н/А / Онлайн: Библиотека Журнала «Неприкосновенный запас». Строна 289)
[4] And otherwise, it's just smart marketing: https://cherta.media/story/stavki-na-sport/
[5] Françoise Thom (2018), pp. 54-55.
Main, T. J. (2022). The rise of illiberalism. Brookings Institution Press. Page 236.
[6] Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press. Pp. 41-42.
[7] Subbotin, A., Aref, S. Brain drain and brain gain in Russia: Analyzing international migration of researchers by discipline using Scopus bibliometric data 1996–2020. Scientometrics 126, 7875–7900 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04091-x
[8] Jumping from the frying pan into the fire, I would like to cite Ayn Rand in that conext, also because the whole debate about the military industry's influence on incumbent governments to start another war (Think about The Dead Kennedys' "Kinky Sex makes the world go round": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVGg_5grOTg ) is too abstract to grasp it at any point, I wanted to include her point of view on the subject. To no-one's surprise, she saw the root of all wars within the states, although she makes points that we could easily transpose onto the Kremlin of today:
“A dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his own country's economy, he attacks his neighbors.”(Rand, Ayn (1966 [1967]. The Roots of War. in: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. London, New York: Signet Books. Page 32.)
Russia has never been an economic powerhouse; it has of course got resources like uranium, LNG and (formerly more popular) asbestos, but neither can make up for the vast landscapes of alternately densely or scarcely populated areas. This way, while there are well-off people in the Muscovite oblasty, the rest of the country spanning from the Ural mountains to the Altai mountains and the Pacific coastline is, to speak more colloquially, piss poor. That's why recruitment happened firstly and attracted the most in the poorer landscapes of Siberia (https://cherta.media/story/nenec-podpisal-kontrakt-na-vojnu/) This aligns thus with what I have said before: Putin wants to leave his mark in the country, and the only chance he has got still is to revive the myth of the «Великая Отечественная война».
The military industry only exists because there are countries, governments that conduct warfare and countries that are victimised by the former ones. The former ones need this industry in order to conduct their wars, and the latter need it to defend themselves against the aggressors. The latter part of this truth is also often misunderstood or downright ignored by those who claim that at the moment, peace could be achieved by diplomatic means and that in order to pave the way thereto, arms supplies needed to be stopped in an instance. This would not lead to a diplomatic end of the war, but a surrender by Ukraine on the conditions of the Kremlin. We would not achieve a second Treaty of Jaffa, but a second Compiègne Wagon.
In order to secure Ukraine's survival and future prosperity, two things must be achieved: (1) Ukraine must become a part of both the EU and NATO. There is a reason why chances are low that Russia were ever going to invade Estonia, because it's part of NATO and would therefore have a giant backing to crush the Russian army coming from Petersburg. And (2), Russia must be freed from Putin et al., furthermore its economy and society must be freed, even if that went against the people's obtuse will. As Rand wrote:
“So long as a country is even semi-free, its mixed-economy profiteers are not the source of its warlike influences or policies, and are not the primary cause of its involvement in war. They are merely political scavengers cashing-in on a public trend. The primary cause of that trend is the mixed-economy intellectuals.” (ibid., page 36)
[9] Although there are researchers who claim that anti-immigration positions were not dominantly fuelled by socioeconomic concerns but functioned simply as a means to define distinctions between political parties. See:
Hadj-Abdou, L. (2021). Illiberal democracy and the politicization of immigration. In Routledge handbook of illiberalism (pp. 299-312). Routledge. Pp. 308-309.
Assuming that to be true, it would still be a rather saddening premise to utilise for this purpose, given that it still affects individual fates; human fates.
[10] Bender, Oliver (December 22, 2019). De Mundo pro Omniem. Rationalpolitik: https://politique-rationale.blogspot.com/2019/12/free-world-for-everyone.html#more
Bender, Oliver (2022). Capitalism & Anarchism. Rationalpolitik. Link: https://politique-rationale.blogspot.com/2022/11/capitalismanarchism.html#more
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