Paul Goble
Staunton,
May 15 – Some in the West are now beginning to say that Putin and his entourage
are “’copying the Nazis,’” Aleksandr Skobov says; but in fact, given what they
are saying and doing in Ukraine, it is far more appropriate to day that they “are
not ‘copying the Nazis’ but that ‘they are Nazis.’”
Indeed,
he says, “the threat to humanity from Putin is no less than that from Hitler.”
And just as no compromise was possible with Hitler, so too no compromise is
possible with Putin. He and his regime must be “liquidated, an international court
convened, and the de-Putinization, de-militarization, de-nuclearization, and
de-verticalization of Russia must take place.”
After
the advance of democracy in 1989-1991, Skobov continues, “no one expected that
a comprador kleptocratic and peripheral country with two percent of the world’s
GDP would challenge the entire international order and aspire to world rule,” especially
when the elite of that country had become so rich (graniru.org/opinion/skobov/m.285163.html).
“Why
should they try to burn down this home?” The answer lies in the fundamental
nature of Putin and the people around him, about what they believe and hope
for, and in particular about what they hate: liberal democracy, freedom,
equality, the supremacy of law, and humanism.
For
them now just like the Nazis earlier, “the world is a place of eternal struggle
for domination. Force decides everything. Those who have power decide
everything. This natural law of the right of the strong cannot be limited by
the weak. The fate of the latter is to subordinate themselves to the rulers
established by the strong.”
“This
still was not an ideology,” Skobov says. “This was the worldview of the Russian
ruling class which considered itself the caste of the elect” and who were ready
to use force to achieve their goals. They went looking for a theoretical justification
of this and found one ready-made in fascist ideology.
Having
violated with little cost to themselves the fundamental rights of liberal
civilization within their own country, they decided on that basis to attack
liberal civilization because they viewed it as “their own existential enemy.”
And as they did so, they picked up and applied ever more provisions of Nazi
thinking.
They
built their system into one based on “an ultra-conservative thought with its notion
of their exclusiveness, supremacy and messianism of the Russian people which in
their view was distinguished by its unique spirituality from the individualistic,
consumerist, and pragmatic West.”
According
to Skobov, Putin has not simply violated the Potsdam system of prohibiting
aggression and annexation but has attacked “all its principles: the supremacy
of law, the equality of peoples, and collective responsibility for maintaining
rules common for all.” It is thus “no
accident” that he has unleashed a war abroad as he has moved to totalitarianism
at home.
In
all these ways, the Moscow commentator says, “Putin is acting exactly as Putin
did in the 1930s. He shakes up the world order by creating a series of
precedents for the brutal violation of both international law. He even draws on
Hitler’s propaganda themes such as the notion of “a divided people.”
But
his convergence with Nazism is clearest of all in his statements about Ukraine,
Skobov argues. There he and his acolytes have spoken about the need to destroy Ukraine
and Ukrainians because they are opposed to Russia and thus are “an anti-people”
which must be liquidated.
In Putin’s
understanding as in Hitler’s, “force and cruelty in fascism are not just
instruments for the achievement of some specific goals. They are goals in and
of themselves.” That reality is one that the West is only beginning to
understand. It took the West a long time to take Hitler’s measure; one can only
hope it won’t take as long to recognize the threat Putin is.
