The New Yorker's Terrifying Look into Putin's "Ruscism" (My word for it) [View all]

[True Blue Door]

I knew there was something abyssal going on in Russia when I first started encountering Vladimir Putin's troll army propaganda-bombing the comments sections of every major (and some minor) Western information and entertainment websites with a vast web of unhinged Orwellian lies. If it had just been limited to the laughable canned slogans written in broken English, which were also ubiquitous, then the campaign would have been easy to dismiss as the pathetic and tone-deaf sausage of a solipsistic dictatorship swimming outside its own small and heavily polluted intellectual pond.

But it went beyond that - it was no mere depraved advertising campaign waged by amoral ciphers drawing a Kremlin paycheck. There was deeper structure to the madness that hinted at sincere psychotic beliefs and cultivated social delusions. Even while saying things that on their face amounted to "2 + 2 = 5" you could sense that some of these people were not just cavalierly flinging around nonsense as a job - they were in fact engaging in the kind of psychological self-torture that genuine ideologues engage in to force their minds to believe things that the universe continually tells them are not true. However vast the legions of pay-per-keystroke troll whores were, there were among them a number of people engaging in a kind of Information Jihad they clearly believed in.

If it had just been the former, I could have dismissed the phenomenon entirely and laughed it off, but sensing the latter made the propaganda campaign so much more menacing in a country with a dead superpower's nuclear weapons arsenal. These bizarre points of inky darkness in the idea space were not cynical bureaucrats hollowly lip-synching to a memo, but zealous advocates for a vision completely and deliberately divorced from both reality and accountability. These few seemed to be people driven by a bottomless hatred so complete that even the lack of rational motivation for it merely gave it fuel, as if the "Western conspiracies" they railed inchoately against were all the more monstrous for arrogantly daring not to exist despite Glorious Leader Putin's demands that they do.

What their attitude represented was so abhorrent that I've mostly avoided thinking about it, but then I read a piece in the New Yorker detailing the strange trajectory of post-Soviet Russia from chaotic experimentation with democracy to being devoured body and soul by Vladimir Putin's increasingly dark and apocalyptic vision. And suddenly the whiff of Death and shadow of circling vultures that always seem to hover subconsciously whenever arguing with the Russian troll network started to make sense in concrete terms. In the (very long) article, we see the descent of Russia through anecdotal experiences of former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, led in dread-inducing steps down the path of Putin's devolution from amorally pragmatic strongman to increasingly ideology-driven dictator.

Ultimately, we are shown the face of the ideology that now drives his regime and continues to spiral out of control: Radical, apocalyptic religious fanatics on the far-right fringe of the Russian Orthodox Church who articulate Putin in terms of divine prophecy and destiny; totalitarian theorists who sincerely propose that Russia and Putin (they regard the two as mystically identical) have made traditional conceptions of morality obsolete, and that service to them is now the definition of righteousness and justice; Neo-Nazi intellectuals who propose that elimination of all within or without who challenge (let alone dare to disprove) the aforementioned ideology must be pursued for the Motherland to survive and have dignity. These madmen's clinically insane beliefs are now more or less the state doctrines of the Russian Federation, fully supported by government funding and media exposure, and are being carefully woven into the fabric of the Russian people's collective identity.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Aside from de-emphasizing (but still clearly encouraging) racism, this emerging Russian totalitarian ideology basically is, at its roots, fascism: The attempt of a nakedly self-interested elite headed by an all-powerful dictator to overthrow rationalism in the minds and destroy compassion in the hearts of his subject population, replacing them with nonsensical Newspeak definitions that amount to Belief is Truth and Obedience is Justification. And unlike the Soviet Union's demonization of the West, which was always couched in rationalistic (though often far from actually rational) terms that tended to restrain more bellicose voices among them, the new "Ruscism" makes it a point of pride to be unencumbered by concern for consequences - to make the act of willful infliction a moral justification unto itself.

Now tell me, who does this sound like? What totalitarian ideology of the past arose from roots of nationalism and desire for redemption of humiliations suffered at the hands of democracies? What political mass-psychosis preached the replacement of rationalism and morality with absolute belief in the state and its Glorious Leader? What was that ideology called, that articulated Total War as a fundamental state of being and the highest aspirational expression of humankind? That treated the country as a mystical and eternal object whose actions were right and just by definition, and all who were harmed by them as wrong by definition? We've seen this movie before. Only those guys didn't have thousands of nuclear ICBMs.

What we appear to be witnessing is a dictator who is gradually crawling up his own ass into murderous psychosis and dragging a nuclear-armed, two-continent-spanning former superpower with him. There is still evidence of pragmatic thinking on his part - i.e., he has not attempted to expand the scope of his territorial seizures in Ukraine beyond Crimea - but as he walls off Russia into a bubble of propaganda of his own making; as he empowers men who are natively far madder than himself; as he becomes more isolated both by his own choice and by the consequences of his actions via Western sanctions; will he even notice when he himself falls off the cliff of his own making and becomes the character portrayed in his arrogant propaganda fiction?

As the article notes, there is ample reason to believe he has always partly bought into it - believed in grandiose conspiracy theories attributing Russia's troubles to Western malevolence. So how far down that rabbit hole will this tyrant fall, and how far down will Russia as a whole be dragged? Make no mistake, that hole is now huge, and they are standing on the edge of it staring down into its depths. There is no mistaking the vehemence with which a painfully large number of Russians now buy into these notions. I find myself wondering whether someone who sees the "glory of Mother Russia" as some mystical eternal force that transcends time, space, and human morality would see anything wrong with cementing it by being the nation that tries (perhaps succeeds) to end the world? Murder-suicide occurs on the part of individuals, so make no mistake, it becomes a possibility on the part of entire nations when individuals hold absolute power.

No one on Earth today holds more absolute absolute power than Vladimir Putin. You can say that the state of North Korea is more total in its control of its subjects' lives, but the fact is that Putin holds the power to end the world. His power is not leavened by vast self-interested bureaucracies as in the Soviet Union, where anyone could be toppled if a sufficient alliance of interests turned against them, or by self-interested oligarchs and thugs as under Yeltsin: He has crushed them all, and now there is only him. He is the state, and to the extent his propaganda is resonating with the Russian people (it clearly is), he is increasingly also the nation. So who tells him No when he decides to do something truly insane? What happens if, say, he gets some bad medical news and is told that he only has a short while to live...would someone like that rather go out with a bang than a whimper?

Someone like that, who already held paranoid notions about Western hostility before he started making them into self-fulfilling prophecies, is probably worried about plots against his person. So perhaps he wants to guarantee that if anything happens to him, even a heart attack (since surely that's one of the possible ways they might get to him) absolute and total vengeance would automatically be unleashed. It sounds like a comic book villain, but this is a real man in control of thousands of real hydrogen bombs that would fly on real rockets and incinerate real billions, and this man's state is promoting what is essentially Nazi ideology on the nature of morality, the state, and leadership.

So, thank you New Yorker, for making me shit myself. If you've got some time and a change of underwear ready, here's that article:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse