Mick Hartley

The latest from historian Timothy Snyder, after Putin's cosy chat with Tucker Carlson – Putin's genocidal myth:

Everyone who does not fit Putin's neat story (Russia is eternal, so Russians can do whatever they want) has to be removed, first from the narrative of the past, and then from those counted as human in present.  On Putin's logic, it does not matter what people believe or how people understand their own past.  It is he who decides which souls are bound to which other souls.  Other views have no place in nature, because they arose from events which (in his story) should never have happened.  His view must govern the past, which requires violence in the present: genocide. 

If there are people who say that Ukraine is real, they must be destroyed.  That has been the logic of Russia's mass murder from the start.  Putin expected Ukraine to fall in a few days because he thought he needed to eliminate a few Ukrainians in an artificial elite.  The more Ukrainians there turned out to be, the more people had to be killed. The same holds for physical expressions of Ukrainian culture.  Russia has destroyed thousands of Ukrainian schools.  Everywhere Russian troops reach, they burn Ukrainian books….

Putin is the dictator of the largest country in the world and personally controls tens and more likely hundreds of billions of dollars.  And yet in his story he is a longwinded victim, because not everyone agrees with him.  Russia is a victim because Russians can tell a story about how they need to fight a genocidal war, and not everyone agrees.  Ukrainians are the aggressors, because they do not agree that they and their country do not exist. 

Indeed, says Putin, Ukrainians are "Nazis," a word that in his mouth just means "people who refuse to accept that Russians are pure no matter what we do."  This is a victim claim: if the Ukrainians are "Nazis," then Russians — even though they started the war and have killed tens of thousands of people and kidnapped tens of thousands of children and carry out war crimes every single day — must be the righteous sufferers. 

This is how myth matters. If all the wrong in the past was done by others, as Putin says, then all the wrong in the present must be done by others.  Putin's story divides good and evil perfectly.  Russia is always right, others are always wrong. Russians can behave like Nazis while calling others "Nazis" and all is well.  Russia is a people with a special purpose, resisted by conspiracies.  Putin's war has been fought with fascist slogans and by fascist means, with mass propaganda and mass mobilization.

There follows a history lesson which is very much worth reading. A shame that Putin won't read it.

And this:

Putin makes a mistake about the Ukrainian language, over and over, that is typical of imperial deafness.  It is true that Ukrainians today can speak Russian (although many also, for understandable reasons, refuse to do so) as well as Ukrainian.  When they encountered Russians, until very recently, Ukrainians would switch to Russian.  This courtesy gave Russians the impression that Ukrainian was just a dialect of Russian or that Ukrainian did not exist.  The simple truth is that Ukrainians know Russian because they learned it.  Russians do not know Ukrainian because they do not learn it.  Russian soldiers right now, two years into the war, persist in calling the Ukrainian they hear on radio intercepts "Polish" because they are unable to grasp the obvious: that there is a Ukrainian language, and they do not understand it.  Putin's notion that there is no Ukrainian language is like his idea that there is no Ukrainian country or Ukrainian people: it is genocidal, because only mass killing can make it true.  And of course one thing that is clear from this interview is that Putin takes it for granted that killing any number of people is preferable to admitting a mistake.  Ideas matter.  It is because he is wrong about everything that he must kill.