Paul Goble
Staunton, April 6 – The world is now confronted by “a new Nazism, Putin Nazism,” Aleksandr Skobov says, and to defeat it and the wars this new plague has brought with it, the Free World must form an anti-Putin coalition to defeat it or face the prospect that the world will be driven back into barbarism and suffering.
“The new Putin Nazism has shown the world its Nazi essence,” the Moscow commentator says, an essence that includes “the unrestrained use of force, unrestrained cruelty, and unrestrained barbarity” and seeks to overturn the existing world order with one based on force alone (graniru.org/opinion/skobov/m.284917.html).
“Any international legal order rests not only on formalized legal provisions of international organizations and international agreements,” Skobov says. It also relies on “informal ideas of millions of people regarding what is permissible and what is not.’ If those ideas are violated with impunity, the international order they reflect dies.
According to Skobov, “our far from perfect world for more than half a century has rested on the ideas of civilized humanity that the horrors of World War II and of Nazism cannot be repeated,” at least in anything like the size they were then or in the center of Europe, even if horrors do happen and in the periphery.
But in Europe, there was the belief that there would never again be a Guernica, Leningrad blockade, a Khatyn, or a Lidice” and that humanity would more step by step, albeit with many mistakes, toward a better world for ever more people. And that belief supported the world order that had existed.
Tragically, Putin rejects that vision and “tramples on all the norms of international law and simply civilized behavior. He commits Hitlerite evil, and civilized humanity is not in a position to stop him. This means,” Skobov concludes, “that the old world order has ceased to exist,” and that a new Putinist world order is replacing it.
“Welcome to Vladimir Putin’s world, a return of the world of Adolf Hitler.”
Many in Russia and the West find this difficult to acknowledge. And they are asking “how can we live with this?” But that is “the wrong question,” Skobov says. People should be asking “do you want to live with this? Putin has irreversibly destroyed our world. It won’t be restored.” But Putin’s world must be destroyed to allow a new and better one to emerge.
And that will require a real effort. “Putin’s world can be destroyed only by the same means by which Hitler’s was destroyed, by the infliction of a military defeat on the Putin regime which unleashed this war and by the creation of an anti-Putin coalition of states who recognize that no compromises with the Putin regime are possible.”
This coalition, the Moscow commentator says, “must directly declare as its goal the liquidation of the Putin regime and the de-Putinization of Russia. And then on the basis of this Anti-Putin coalition can be constructed a new system of international relations,” one that will intervene before repressions in one country lead it to aggression abroad.
Russian thinkers can make an important contribution to all that by insisting on three propositions. First, that “the Putin regime is using Nazi ideology.” Putin’s words about the need to destroy Ukrainians and Ukraine are “Nazism of the purest kind. This is a program of genocide in complete conformity with the international definition of that term.”
Second, they must point out that “the Putin regime uses purely Nazi-like criminalization of any disagreements and the totalitarian political mobilization of the population.” And third, they must insist that the threat of a return to barbarism that Putin presents is no less than the one Hitler did.
“These words must be spoken,” Skobov continues, “by intellectuals, scholars, cultural leaders and public figures. And finally they must be said and acted upon by the political leaders of the Free World. We must compel the political leaders of the Free World to do so” because “evil must be named or do you agree to live with all this?”
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