AKA--tHE cOMMON gOOD:

For Putin, the death of the USSR in December 1991 was a personal tragedy. A national and global debacle. A victory for the wicked, rotten, decadent, degenerate, diabolical West. He lamented the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a brief interval, Putin lost two places he had loved: The GDR and the USSR. Keep this trauma in mind and you will understand the deep motivations of his kleptocratic imperialism. Putinism is a vindictively predatory fantasy.

What dark impulses and twisted visions of the world drive the Russian military to use torture against their prisoners, both military and civilian? After Nazi Germany's and imperial Japan's defeats in World War II, commissions supervised the defascization of the broadly defined cultural sphere. The documents of the Allied Commission in Japan are located at the University of Maryland in College Park, where I teach. They show the importance of a methodical analysis of the Fascists' propaganda weapons. A democratic Russia would need to overcome not only political neuroses but also, and even especially, the shackles of the mind. In other words, it must overcome a culture of violence, arrogance, subservience, and mystical worshipping of authority. The crucial point is to cultivate the sense of responsibility without which arbitrariness and cruelty prevail over decency and accountability. These truths need to be internalized by Russian men and women in the same way German and Japanese men and women came to understand the criminality of their vanquished dictatorships.

Ironically, decrying Western hegemony and expansionism, Putin, who annexes territories and sets up sham elections to feign legitimacy, while trying to conquer Ukraine, simultaneously does not hesitate to masquerade as a champion of anti-imperialism. Claiming he is leading an "anti-colonial movement" against the West, he proudly proclaims, "We need to turn this disgraceful page. Western hegemony will be smashed. This is inevitable. We must do this for our people, the great historical Russia." For Putin, modernity is the enemy. It's time for a return to Tradition, to the healthy, pristine, homogeneous community.

Russia's barbaric war in Ukraine has shown that tyrants despise humane behavior. Putin has no mercy for the Ukrainians and treats his own subjects as a statistical fiction. The 300,000 individuals drafted in the "partial mobilization" are, for him, just disposable figures. An heir to Stalin's amoral calculations, Putin treats human life scornfully. The individual has no God-given rights, only duties to the sacrosanct Motherland. The September 30th Red Square address was a testimony to delusional pragmatism. It is a paradoxical attempt to pursue both strategic and ideological goals. Kate Langdon and I have developed and applied Jacob L. Talmon's concept of totalitarian democracy to explain the Putin system (our book came out in spring 2020). In Putin's mind, Russia's special mission is to defend the world against Western degeneracy, rottenness, and, most notably, "Satanism." The Devil himself pretends to perform a planetary exorcism. In fact, Putinism is an updated, Russified version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's exaltation of the mythical General Will (la volonté générale). Whoever doubts the official triumphant narrative is an "enemy of the people."

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