Putin’s war against the West
In 1938, Aurel Kolnai published War Against The West, a remarkable and prescient book, which used the Nazis’ own words to reveal the National Socialist project as inimical to the West. There was no choice, Kolnai warned. The Nazi regime would have to be confronted and defeated by a revitalised Western alliance.
Reading Kolnai in the light of today’s Russian aggression, it’s hard to avoid the parallels.
“There exists today in Europe a great nation, of the highest achievements in the past, which now professes a creed of unbridled and irrational power. [….] a fountain-head of propaganda and a menace of war.”
Or how about this?
“It will always ‘irritate’ those who nurse dark designs if those around them, who cannot help being ‘around’ them, arrange for their own protection.”
Incidentally, this article from the Telegraph is very good on the Nazi roots of Putin’s mystical theo-fascism. In 2005, Putin ordered the corpse of Ivan Ilyin to be disinterred from its Swiss grave and flown back to Russia to be buried with all the honour his regime could provide.
“Ilyin was a conservative philosopher exiled from communist Russia for his opposition to the Bolsheviks. He washed up in Berlin just as the new ideology of fascism was taking off in Italy and Germany. Ilyin saw in Mussolini and Hitler models for the reinvention of a new Russian tsarism, in which a strong leader could abolish the individuality of his people and bind them into one spiritual, collective whole, free of corruption and impurities.
“Putin is clearly no philosopher, but of all the intellectuals in Russian history, it is Ilyin whom he quotes the most. According to the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, just as troops were being readied to invade Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin arranged for all of Russia’s senior officials and regional governors to be sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks, in which the philosopher predicts the emergence of a ‘national dictator’ who will be ‘the living organ of Russia’.“
Terrifying. For a deeper dive, the BBC Radio podcast series on Putin is full of interesting detail on Russia’s new living organ.
As Kolnai saw, National Socialism was a conscious rejection of the Western tradition. Yet Putin’s Russia shares the delusion that Nazism was instead a Western evil, which is how he can proclaim himself the true “anti-fascist”. According to the sociologist Lev Gudkov, under Putin’s tutelage many Russians have now come to understand the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 as the most important event in Russia’s history, because it was “a victory not only over Germany but also over the West”.
They are wrong about that. Let us hope proving them wrong can be done without a deepening war.
Here is Kolnai again, on how to prepare against such terrible delusions.
“The only possible course is to provide for such an incontestable and crushing superiority – moral and juridical, material and strategic – as will either deter irresponsible anti-European powers from taking arms to pursue their schemes, or else will ensure that those desperate adventurers who still prefer to take the sword shall ‘perish by the sword’.”
In 1938, Aurel Kolnai published War Against The West, a remarkable and prescient book, which used the Nazis’ own words to reveal the National Socialist project as inimical to the West. There was no choice, Kolnai warned. The Nazi regime would have to be confronted and defeated by a revitalised Western alliance.
Reading Kolnai in the light of today’s Russian aggression, it’s hard to avoid the parallels.
“There exists today in Europe a great nation, of the highest achievements in the past, which now professes a creed of unbridled and irrational power. [….] a fountain-head of propaganda and a menace of war.”
Or how about this?
“It will always ‘irritate’ those who nurse dark designs if those around them, who cannot help being ‘around’ them, arrange for their own protection.”
Incidentally, this article from the Telegraph is very good on the Nazi roots of Putin’s mystical theo-fascism. In 2005, Putin ordered the corpse of Ivan Ilyin to be disinterred from its Swiss grave and flown back to Russia to be buried with all the honour his regime could provide.
“Ilyin was a conservative philosopher exiled from communist Russia for his opposition to the Bolsheviks. He washed up in Berlin just as the new ideology of fascism was taking off in Italy and Germany. Ilyin saw in Mussolini and Hitler models for the reinvention of a new Russian tsarism, in which a strong leader could abolish the individuality of his people and bind them into one spiritual, collective whole, free of corruption and impurities.
“Putin is clearly no philosopher, but of all the intellectuals in Russian history, it is Ilyin whom he quotes the most. According to the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, just as troops were being readied to invade Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin arranged for all of Russia’s senior officials and regional governors to be sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks, in which the philosopher predicts the emergence of a ‘national dictator’ who will be ‘the living organ of Russia’.”
Terrifying. For a deeper dive, the BBC Radio podcast series on Putin is full of interesting detail on Russia’s new living organ.
As Kolnai saw, National Socialism was a conscious rejection of the Western tradition. Yet Putin’s Russia shares the delusion that Nazism was instead a Western evil, which is how he can proclaim himself the true “anti-fascist”. According to the sociologist Lev Gudkov, under Putin’s tutelage many Russians have now come to understand the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 as the most important event in Russia’s history, because it was “a victory not only over Germany but also over the West”.
They are wrong about that. Let us hope proving them wrong can be done without a deepening war.
Here is Kolnai again, on how to prepare against such terrible delusions.
“The only possible course is to provide for such an incontestable and crushing superiority – moral and juridical, material and strategic – as will either deter irresponsible anti-European powers from taking arms to pursue their schemes, or else will ensure that those desperate adventurers who still prefer to take the sword shall ‘perish by the sword’.”