Pietro Senaldi March 19, 2022
We witnessed the suicide of a president. The gathering of the people that Putin convened yesterday at Moscow Stadium to mark the eighth anniversary since Crimea’s annexation was a kamikaze gesture by a leader who was also respected by much of the West. Tsar Vladimir spoke under the influence of a mysticalreligious drift very much like that of an ISIS leader, urging his people to martyrdom in a flag riot because “there is no greater love than to give life for friends.” Having disowned and partially imprisoned the leaders of the KGB as well as the Red Army Commissariat, Putin now has as his only interlocutors his magic circle of incompetent ministers and neogenerals, and the Orthodox Church of Moscow, represented by the Primate Kirill, whose increasingly delusional verb caused a schism. Russia was a country that went into space. Today it cannot export hydrocarbons and its economy is based only on the sale of wheat and raw materials. It has lost a million residents in a year and seems doomed for irreversible decline.
HEIGHTS OF MADNESS
Like all dictators in trouble, Putin withdrew, giving Russia an even more autocratic turn. He is aiming for a new Stalinization of the country and has for the Ukrainian middle class the same plan that the Georgian butcher used for the Polish bourgeoisie when he exterminated twentytwo thousand people in the Katyn mines. It is no coincidence that Warsaw yesterday became the first NATO country to agree to send troops to defend Ukraine, but now we can tell the whole West, from a man who seems increasingly out of touch with reality. Not even Gaddafi or Saddam reached the current heights of the insanity of Putin, who is plotting an ethnic annihilation reminiscent of that of the Serb Milosevic against the Bosnians, even if at the time the military response to the breakup of a nation, Yugoslavia, was immediate and not over postponed for thirty years. The situation is more dangerous than it might seem, partly because economic sanctions are powerless against a leader willing to sacrifice the lives of all his people. Geopoliticians are trying to justify the dictator’s new drift with the encirclement syndrome he and all of Russia would suffer from in the grip of a West increasingly encroaching on its borders. But if that was the fuse that started the crisis in part, the fire now feeds mostly on the ghosts populating Putin, who believes he is Peter the Great but is afraid of his namesake Vladimir, Luxuria and the tanks around Mother To save Russia from the threat of trans and gay men who, in the leader’s narrative, have corrupted the West and could corrupt Moscow.
INTERNAL DISSENT
The stadium was full and applauding yesterday, there was a feeling that the majority of people are on the side of the dictator. Perhaps this is still the case in the country’s rural areas, where mothers have not yet heard of the soldiers’ children killed at the front, but it would be imprudent to describe the Russians as a people subject to the dictator. University professors, students, information professionals, ordinary people are distancing themselves at the risk of their lives, and not for economic reasons, but because they don’t want to leave the nation in the hands of a madman. Along with the generals of the Red Army, who have not yet bowed the knee to the new tsar, these are the real hopes for peace and Zelenskyy. Certainly more to them than a European Union with no political strategy and Joe Biden’s United States, another planetary tragedy, a president who plays with the world, who has next fall’s midterm elections as his main horizon and who, alongside that of the sphincter he is, has not even control of his own tongue. The Russians are in the hands of a madman capable of anything. We of smart guys who are capable of anything. With a few exceptions, of course, but the decline of the West is also due to the fact that the more one understands, the less one understands in this country.
