Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Lacking an Ideology, Putin Regime Increasingly Relies on Terror Alone But Can’t Do So for Long, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 19 – Authoritarian and totalitarian states typically rely on a combination of ideology and terror because terror alone to be effective must become ever more expensive, something that eventually proves beyond the capacity of the regime to carry it out, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan who writes under the pen name El Murid.

            But the Putin regime because it lacks an ideology is forced to rely on terror alone, introducing ever more hyperbolic threats and actions, a trend that has the effect of transforming a bandit state into a terrorist ones, an apparently “natural process” involving the collapse of the first in an attempt to retain power” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=643F818E0B5BB).

            That pattern puts it on the way to self-destruction because to be effective each new wave of terror must be more extreme, something that involves the expenditure of ever more resources, something that “will very quickly lead to the exhaustion of the stability of an already terrorist regime” and put it on course to decay and ultimately collapse.

            Because of this pattern, “terror is always a short-term process, specialized and finite in time” since “the more savagely the population is terrorized,” El Murid continues, “the shorter the life of such an entity.” And that means there will be a search for some ideology to provide additional support.

            However, in Putin’s Russia, not only is there no ideology on offer but there are no signs that it is being developed. Patriotism isn’t enough. And that means this: “since there is no ideology and never will be, only terror remains, inevitably involving coercion through fear and violence.

            Thus, for the powers to remain in place, they must run faster and faster, eventually beyond their own capacity to do so. The sign of this, El Murid concludes, is the increasingly absurd ideas that Duma deputies and others offer for more repression since those making such offers do not see that what they are involved in is the agony of the system they support.

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