Audio Version
 |
| Putin: wasted his political capital on memes, Russia Today, and wonky pipelines. |
The present war between Putin and the Ukraine (and the Ukraine's backers) is a rich source of misunderstanding and a mass generator of false positions. Yes, people are sincerely trying hard to understand things and come to sensible, consistent, and moral positions. But few, if any, have succeeded.
What we are seeing can only be properly understood by taking the most macro view possible and then zooming in on the detail. Almost nobody has the necessary detachment from irrelevant minutiae and distorting emotion to achieve this.
The correct macro frame to view all this is as an ideological struggle between what the West is and what Russia only partly is. Putin offers an ideological alternative to the West, but it is a half-borrowed, much distorted, and not fully formed alternative.
Before explaining what Putinism is and is not, first we must consider the West and its ruling ideology.
The West exists under an ideological system called Liberal Democracy. This is not some mere euphemism or ironic meme not meant seriously. The West truly is liberal, and it truly is democratic. The Dissident Right, however, believes that this is just "window dressing" for oligarchic power. We are then told by the Diss Right that the ones pulling the strings are "Jews" or "globalist pedophiles," etc. Usually we are told this by people who are themselves Jews and quite possibly pedophiles, and almost certainly "sub-White" and "sub-masculine."
No, the West definitely does have an ideology of Liberal Democracy, and it is in fact both liberal and democratic.
"Love Island": Surprisingly Westerners do not need to have a gun pointed at their heads to watch this toxic trash.
The Diss Right can only launch cheap shots against this truth. For example, Diss-Righters will say things like:
The West is not democratic because most people support immigration restriction but "the System" merely delivers more mass immigration.
This is just the intellectual shell-and-pea game, and it sounds convincing to the intellectually challenged who have a tendency to micro-focus on single issues. But governments and societies are not one-issue entities.
Yes, even with constant cultural indoctrination, most people do not want mass immigration and racial replacement -- but only if you ask them a disembodied question on the matter. The fact is that if you look at what else they want and the choices they make then they clearly do want mass immigration and racial replacement.
The immigration-hating population of the West is also the same population that is made up of people who want to screw around till well into their thirties, and then live in a growing economy with a burgeoning population, driving up incomes, shares, property prices, and economic activity. The job of the democratic side of Liberal Democracy is merely to manage the contradictions of the sovereign voters and "kind of, sort of" give them what they want, which in this case is a slowly "browning" society that doesn't crash the economy and which doesn't make too many demands on their individual freedoms.
That is exactly what our elites have been giving us since the franchise was extended to the mass of the adult population.
The real problem in the West is that we are not ruled by elites and oligarchs, but sadly by our own liberated, democratic, logically incoherent selves, all mediated through our obedient political servants who do their level best to get our lame ducks in a line.
In the Russo-Ukrainian context this is exactly what President Zelenksyy and Russian opposition leaders like the murdered Boris Nemetsov and the imprisoned Alexei Navalny stand or stood for.
But does Vladimir Putin stand for anything different? Is there such a thing as Putinism?
Putinism, if it really exists, differs from Liberal Democracy in that it is anti-democratic. Putin has perfected a number of manipulative tools that subvert and control democracy to make it much more of a top-down than a bottom-up process. This is not the place to go into what these are and how they work, but the Putinist state has developed a largely effective apparatus of control from above.
Watch out West, here comes one of Putin's top ideological "bottle rockets"
The real question here is whether Putinism is an ideological alternative to Liberal Democracy or just a temporary kink or distortion in Russia's own inherently Liberal-Democratic "idea space."
On the plus side there is occasionally a sense that Putinism understands the toxic nature of Liberal Democracy and fights back against the rampant personal freedom that people naturally want. It does this by critiquing homosexualism (i.e. the spearpoint of radical Western individualism) and by supporting old, moribund religious codes like Orthodox Christianity and even Islam. There has also been a modest push for mildly pro-natalist policies, but nothing too radical or that would upset a college of Russian air stewardesses keen to focus on their exciting careers.
On the negative side Putinism shares the West's obsession with materialism, consumerism, and the individualism of choices as a metric of its justification. This means that under Putin the Russian population has continued to fall with similar "racial replacement" policies to those in the West being implemented.
"Mosque-cow": Putin opening a giant mosque in the "Third Rome."
Also, Putinism, while having several technical fixes or "hacks" that reverse the power dynamic of democracy (bottom-up to top-down), appears to have few true ideological counters to Western Liberal Democracy. The Soviet Union, frankly, was a lot better at this, with its concepts of "Socialist Democracy" and "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," even though, here too, it did not make a real case for a true guiding elite.
As opposed to the West, where our elites try to give the masses more or less what they want with the awkward contradictions ironed out, the Soviet elites, in theory, tried to give the masses what they felt they needed, even if it had to kill, imprison, and crush the tender sensibilities of many of them in order to do so.
Compared to this, Putinism has no real ideological counter to Western Democracy. In fact, Putin's whole schtick is to con the voters into believing they have freely chosen him, when in fact most Russians, deep down, are probably sick to death of him by now. However, Putin owns or controls all the media and the only prominent "opposition" figures are clowns like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and whichever lump of rock is leading the remnants of the once mighty Communist party.
 |
| Dugin: "Something about the Satanic liberal globalist Sea Dragon..." |
Putinism, to be a real ideology, has to put aside its petty tools of propaganda, democratic manipulation, and revanchist pseudo-traditionalism, and instead develop a modern, ideologically consistent critique and counter ideology to Western Liberal Democracy. Some, like Alexander Dugin have at least tried, but Dugin was clearly unequal to the task.
But really, it should not have been too difficult to create an ideological alternative: Western Liberal Democracy by efficiently giving the masses more or less what they want, when they want, and even how they want, is totally toxic as a means of demographic continuity and civilisational health. This is undeniable. This is the point of attack and also the basis on which to build an alternative ideology to Western Liberal Democracy, and, by effectively opposing it, to force the West to reject it as well.
But it is probably too late for Putin to pull that off. He is nearly 70 years old and may have cancer. He has wasted his 23 years of political capital in creating a ridiculous "Potemkin village" version of Western Democracy and Western consumerism.
But really, it should not have been too difficult to create an ideological alternative: Western Liberal Democracy by efficiently giving the masses more or less what they want, when they want, and even how they want, is totally toxic as a means of demographic continuity and civilisational health. This is undeniable. This is the point of attack and also the basis on which to build an alternative ideology to Western Liberal Democracy, and, by effectively opposing it, to force the West to reject it as well.
But it is probably too late for Putin to pull that off. He is nearly 70 years old and may have cancer. He has wasted his 23 years of political capital in creating a ridiculous "Potemkin village" version of Western Democracy and Western consumerism.
Right now he is engaged in a war where his moral and ideological ammunition is stolen from the West: he is "stopping genocide" in the Donbass and "de-Nazifying" the Ukraine! Yes, instead of fighting his true enemy, the ideological weapons of the West, he is partly embracing them in an attempt to use then against the West. The likelihood that they will simply blow up in his face in the weeks and months ahead is extremely high. China, we note, has not been playing this game, and is in a much better and more ideologically consistent position with regard to the West.
___________________________________
Colin Liddell was the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
I don't know enough about Russia to make a decent opinion one way or the other but it seems to me that the best way of defeating Modernism is to develop a fixed eternal point of reference. This can only be done through religion or myth, and religion/myth relies on eternal truths concerning human nature and a moral universe, or at least a system of rules. Intellectuals have actually damaged our ability to discern these laws because they have objectified the world to such an extent that, paradoxically, we Moderns are unable to open ourselves up to underlying reality. I can tell you that:
ReplyDelete1. form is more important than content, and
2. beautiful things are harder to create than ugly things.
The sad fact is we humans aren't as smart as we think we are. This, of course, is the sin of pride, or hubris, and invites Nemesis.
This is a remarkably good analysis.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Hope you're not just saying that because it agrees with your opinions.
Delete