The content is interesting and describes connections many won’t be aware of. But the writing style is difficult and not very clearly organised.

The end chapters are a must read for a more than plausible explanation of the world of divisive influence. ( )

In suffering contrasts, in deprivation we truly recognize what is responsible freedom, when we lose love, we know what was love, when we lose liberty and fairness, svoboda of choice, chance and Will, then we recognize the iron grip of unfreedom. A new battleground for hearts and minds, unity, trust and cooperation. And as Sufis once called jihad the "inner battle of heart for goodness" so neoplatonics seen Gigantomachy of the soul in inner warfare of people. Dont let them sell the remnants of beautiful ideas to the thieves of Reality, words, symbols in an ongoing substitution of the humane for the corrupt and ugly. ( )

When Hillary Clinton compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler after Russia occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in early March 2014, I thought she had gone too far—and so did many of her critics. But Clinton’s analogy turned out to be far more prescient than hyperbolic. When, just weeks later, Putin boldly annexed Crimea following a mock referendum, and then sponsored puppet separatists to launch civil war in the Donbas in Ukraine’s east, she proved that her memory of European history—of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland and the Austrian Anschluss—correctly detected echoes in Putin’s recourse to fake ballots and real bullets.
Like most Americans, I believed at the time that the economic sanctions the Obama Administration imposed upon Russia represented a sound, measured policy that sidestepped unnecessary overreaction, rather than what was in retrospect clearly a tepid, ineffective response, especially given that shortly thereafter Russian proxies shot down a commercial airliner over Ukraine that killed nearly three hundred innocents. Hardly as blatant as Munich in 1938, the lack of meaningful repercussions here certainly emboldened Putin on the path to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that came in 2022—an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. It has hardly gone as planned, of course, but then it is not over yet, either.
Along the way, some have suggested that Putin’s fantasies of himself as a kind of latter-day Peter the Great have instead degenerated into a Putin-as-Stalin motif, but that strikes as somewhat inelegant. Rather, while Clinton was pilloried for flashing that “Hitler card” back when, she was indeed on to something. There is far more than mimicry in the Russian president’s seizure of a neighbor’s territory and denial of its very sovereignty, most significantly in the pretext and justification for his acts. Because when you deconstruct Putin, you find him not only glancing backward over his shoulder at der Führer, but working with quiet determination over the last two decades to reinvent that brand of fascism for the twenty-first century.
That Putin turns out to be the driving force behind the neofascism that has had the Western world increasingly in its sway since the turn of millennium is just one of the insights to emerge in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America [2018], the at-turns brilliant and chilling work by Yale professor and acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder, which traces the roots and more recent rise of the forces of the undemocratic right, along with its sometimes Byzantine web of connections that stretch to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Britain’s Brexit, and Trump’s MAGA—and all too many strands lead back to the Kremlin, some crisscrossing Ukraine on the way. In a narrative that is engaging and well-written, if often somewhat complex, Snyder channels the philosophical, psychological, and ideological to reveal the dangerous resurrection of principles that were fundamental to 1930s fascism, retooled and even transmogrified to suit new generations, new audiences. What’s especially striking about Snyder’s analysis is that this book, published in 2018, anticipates so much of what is to follow.
Fascism, born in Mussolini’s Italy almost a century ago, takes on many forms that have been catalogued by a number of scholars and writers, including—famously—Umberto Eco. Laurence W. Britt compiled perhaps the most comprehensive list of its known characteristics, although the specific expression can vary widely. Central to all is ultranationalism, typically coupled with a yearning for a mythical, bygone era of greatness that has been lost to liberal decadence. Mussolini looked to the glory of ancient Rome; Hitler to the more recent past of Imperial Germany. Contemporary neofascism is no different. Putin mourns the collapse of the Soviet Union and its larger sphere of influence that encompassed Eastern Europe. In the United States, it simmers beneath the ultrapatriotic flag-waving surface of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement as a dog-whistle that fondly looks back on a “whiter” America when blacks were more complacent and “brown” immigrants were not threatening our borders. (Trump himself recently and unrepentantly paraphrased Hitler with talk of immigrants "poisoning the blood" of America.) Racism is always a part of the equation. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews stood out in stark underscore, but antisemitism ever lurks. In the U.S., it is masked in the thinly veiled contempt spewed upon billionaire George Soros, who acts as a convenient placeholder for “liberal Jews.”
But targets of racism are not alone: they share space with a crowded field of “enemies” who threaten the harmony of the state and serve as scapegoats for society’s alleged ailments, including: communists, foreigners, lawbreakers, intellectual elites, nonconformist artists, members of the media, organized labor, minorities, feminists, homosexuals, etc. There’s always a list of grievances and national ills, real and imagined, for which the latter can be held responsible—and serve as a unifying force that must be opposed by those who seek to restore the nation’s greatness. Religion is often an ally in the combating of sin. There is an obsession with national security expressed by rampant militarism that on the domestic front translates to a hyperbolic law-and-order fixation on crime and punishment. Individuals and institutions alike are demonized. Since fascists have no respect for human rights, opponents are dehumanized, transformed into “the other,” deserving of persecution for both their actions and their ideas. Violence and the threat of violence are ever present or looming. Among institutions, democracy itself is the foremost adversary, and an early casualty to authoritarianism. The fascist leader becomes the self-appointed savior: only he and his corrupt cronies can solve the disorders of the state, but only if he is granted the absolute authority to do so. Elections become a sham: if you lose, just declare victory anyway. Keep lying until the lie becomes the truth.
The Road to Unfreedom identifies the commonality of these elements in right-wing parties across Europe and in the United States. It turns out to be pretty shocking how closely each of these movements resemble one another—and how similar they are to the fascism once associated with Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler! But the real epiphany is not only the role Putin has played in inspiring and encouraging today’s brand of neofascism, but how frequently the contemporary manifestations originated with Putin himself. Snyder chronicles how Putin managed to dismantle democracy in Russia while maintaining its outward forms, and how that has served as a blueprint of sleight-of-hand authoritarianism for his imitators abroad. (Donald Trump is just one of them.) But, more critically still, he details how it is that Putin resurrected and reinvented fascism for the new century by returning to the philosophy and ideology of fascists of the past while embracing and encouraging the neofascist thinkers of the present.
A large piece of The Road to Unfreedom is given to events in Ukraine, to Putin’s focused attempt to recover for Russia what for him is the central component of what he calls the “near abroad,” the now independent successor states once incorporated into the USSR. For those who have read Serhii Plokhy’s landmark chronicle, The Gates of Europe , or his more recent book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, there is nothing new here. But, significantly, Snyder deftly locates Putin’s brand of revanchism in the fascist-friendly political philosophy of the right that thrived before he was born, and which has been reshaped, with Putin’s patronage, for our own times. He identifies Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), a White Russian émigré who admired both Mussolini and Hitler, as a major influence on Putin. Ilyin was a key proponent for the socio-political “Eurasianism” that Putin holds dear, an antidemocratic imperialism that claims for Russia a distinct civilization that transcends geography and ethnicity to command a vast territory ruled by the Russian state. Perhaps today’s most prominent Eurasianist is Aleksandr Dugin, said to be close to the Kremlin. The point is that political philosophy serves as underpinning to Putin’s opportunism. It is not simply about seizing territory. There is a long-term blueprint.
Snyder traces the roots of “the road to unfreedom” to the naivety of a West swelling with triumphalism in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, blinded by what he brands the “politics of inevitability:” individuals and ideas were seen as obsolete, supplanted instead by an unyielding optimism in the conviction that the marriage of capitalism and democracy guaranteed ineluctable progress to a favorable future. The opposite of the “politics of inevitability,” Snyder argues, is “the politics of eternity,” that offers instead a cyclical tale of victimhood inflicted upon the state by age-old threats and enemies that ever reappear and must be vanquished. In the politics of eternity, only one man—and misogyny dictates that it must be a man—can save the nation, and because at root it is decidedly antidemocratic there can be no thought of succession. The “dear leader” is the only hope. The politics of eternity governs Putin’s Russia. It also, most certainly, governs Donald Trump’s MAGA vision for the United States.
Snyder is unforgiving towards Trump in The Road to Unfreedom, but hardly unfair, although he goes further than many dare in positioning Trump in Putin’s orbit. In a famous 2016 debate exchange, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Putin’s puppet, and the Trump that emerges here is not unlike a more malevolent (if less bright) incarnation of Pinocchio fashioned with the fingers of a Geppetto-like Putin. The reader may be forgiven for an eyeroll or two when Snyder posits that it was Putin who crafted the fictional character “Donald Trump successful businessman” who was then marketed to the American public as a political candidate. But that hardly seems an exaggeration when you learn that it was actually Putin who first floated the canard of Obama’s forged birth certificate, the banner of Trump’s political rise. That policies that opposed NATO, decried the EU, championed Brexit, demonized Islam, the LGBTQ community, and immigrants—all central to the MAGA machine—almost perfectly aligned and still align with Putin propaganda. To channel The Godfather, it turns out that it was not Barzini all along, but Vladimir Putin.
And again, so many of the “roads to unfreedom” lead through Ukraine. Snyder reminds us that the last advisor to the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia when he was deposed, was none other than Paul Manafort, who then became the campaign manager to fictional candidate “Donald Trump successful businessman.” It was then, Snyder goes on, that Manafort “oversaw the import of Russian-style political fiction … It was also on Manafort's watch that Trump publicly requested that Russia find and release Hillary Clinton’s emails. Manafort had to resign as Trump's campaign manager after it emerged that he had been paid $12.7 million in off-the-books cash by Yanukovych … In 2018, Manafort was convicted of eight counts of federal crimes and pled guilty to two more, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, in a deal made with federal prosecutors.” [p236]
It is remarkable that Snyder’s book, published in 2018, anticipates so much of what is to come, and not only the Russian tanks that rolled into Ukraine. The so-called “Mueller Report” that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election may not have found a smoking gun with Putin fingering the grip, but it did deem Donald Trump guilty of obstruction, even if that outcome was mischaracterized by then Attorney General William Barr. Throughout Trump’s presidency and beyond, Putin has remained his loudest public advocate. And then there was Trump’s “perfect phone call” that attempted to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for political purposes—the subject of Trump’s first impeachment trial. Also, on December 23, 2020, just weeks before the end of his presidency and the insurrection he sponsored in a crude attempt to extend his tenure, Trump issued Manafort a full pardon. As this review goes to press, just shortly after the third anniversary of that insurrection, Trump is in the news every day exploiting neofascist themes, threatening dictatorship, declaring the last election stolen, and running for president once more as Vladimir Putin cheers him on from the platform of Russian state TV, while Trump returns the favor at every opportunity. Perhaps the greatest gift comes via his allies in Congress, who are blocking desperately needed American military aid to Ukraine.
There is much more to give us all pause. One common feature of fascism is a celebration of hypermasculinity that also hosts a distinct antifeminism and asserts traditional roles for men and women in society. As Putin’s grip on authoritarianism in Russia grew, so too did scorn for feminists and for those who identified as LGBTQ, as he proclaimed a focus on “traditional family values,” supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, a reliable ally for his one-man rule as well as his war on Ukraine. Fascists poke fun at the soft, decadent underbelly of effeminate liberalism, hurling the expletive “cuck” at the male who does not live up to their patriarchal ideal of the man’s man. Today, sadly, that curse is no less likely to be heard on the avenues of Atlanta than it is on the streets of Moscow. Putin, who reportedly enjoys the sympathetic coverage he has come to expect from FOX News, likely chuckled to himself watching a 2021 episode when former FOX host Tucker Carlson mocked the “maternity flight suits” of pregnant women serving in the armed forces, lecturing that our military had become soft and feminine, in contrast to those of our adversaries that were tough and masculine. Of course, Putin is likely not laughing as hard these days as young Ukrainian women, some former fashion models, are at the front gunning down Russian soldiers daily.
Donald Trump is known to frequently employ projection as a defense mechanism. When Hillary dubbed him a Putin puppet, he shot back with “You’re the puppet!” When in a speech to mark the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection President Biden branded Trump a “threat to democracy,” Trump countered that it was Biden instead who was the threat to democracy. Putin is an expert at this craft, although naturally he is more articulate and his phrasing more elegant than Trump’s. Snyder notes that Putin is the master of what he calls “schizo-fascism,” that has fascists re-branding their enemies as fascists, as when Putin has styled has invasion of Ukraine as an effort to combat resurgent Nazis—despite the fact that Ukrainian president Zelensky is Jewish. Just lie, and then keep recycling the same lie. Rinse and repeat.
It's hard to find a real flaw in The Road to Unfreedom, other than that some of it strays to the arcane and may challenge the attention span of the popular audience that would most benefit from reading it. There is, however, terrain left unexplored. Putin gets his due as the brilliant villain he turned out to be, but the author overlooks how his rise could have been forestalled by a post-Soviet Russia given to prosperity and stability. The West, basking in the glow of Snyder’s “politics of inevitability,” failed to act consequentially when it could have, in that narrow window between Gorbachev and Putin. I would have liked to see Snyder probe those missed opportunities for economic aid and support for fledgling democratic institutions in Russia, a topic of adept analysis in Peter Conradi’s Who Lost Russia? Also, unlike Conradi, Snyder is unsympathetic to Russian fears stoked by NATO expansion and US withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. These anxieties were certainly opportunistically exaggerated and exploited by Putin, but they nevertheless were and would remain legitimate concerns—even to a democratic Russia. But these are quibbles. In this election year, with the very future of our fragile Republic at stake, read The Road to Unfreedom. It may be too late for Russia, but our vehicle of democracy, if a bit clunky, is still roadworthy, and there’s still time to save America. Let’s step on the gas.

Review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder – Regarp Book Blog https://regarp.com/2024/01/11/review-of-the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-amer... ( )

Very good. Central point was the succession issue. Fascism does not provide a mechanism for succession unlike democracy or monarchies and so within its own philosophy is its destruction. Russia through Putin is interested in a politics of eternity whereby there is a turn back to the pure world before the world, before facts—only god. Russia is the only country to bring about this return to god. Uhg. The whole Christian fascist, Eurasian racist and homophobic project is deeply disturbing and now being played out in America where a year ago we had a very serious challenge to a legitimate succession of power and now every day have challenges to gay rights, voters rights, and a world of facts. A brilliant history of how this all came to be.

Russland, eine Oligarchie, eine Neo-Diktatur, eine Kleptokratie, das Land mit der größten wirtschaftlichen Ungleichheit der Welt, hat längst erkannt, dass es wirtschaftlich und gesellschaftlich den Anschluss an den "Westen" nicht geschafft hat und nicht schaffen wird. Daher hat es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht, die EU und die USA auf das russische Niveau "per Ansteckung" hinunterzuziehen.
Ziel ist es, mittels der Rechten die Demokratie zu unterwandern. Die EU soll dabei zerstört und in neofaschistische Nationalstaaten umgewandelt werden. Daher unterstützte Russland zahlreiche Rechtsparteien in Europa, wie Le Pen, die FPÖ, Zeman und Nigel Farage mit dem Brexit. Die Technik dabei ist immer dieselbe: mittels (Millionen Twitter und Facebook) Bots, Fakeaccounts und Trollfabriken soll die EU als schwul, dekadent und schwach dargestellt werden.
Das russische System soll auch auf die USA adaptiert werden. Die Herrschaft russicher Clans soll als Vorbild für eine Herrschaft der Reichen in den USA dienen, die es mit den Trumps, Kochs und Mercers schon beinahe gibt. Russland hackte daher den Clinton Wahlkampf und unterstützte offen Trump mit Propaganda und Lügen. Russland hackte Clinton Emailaccounts und US-Wahlcomputer.

Russland bombardierte 2015 Kinderkliniken und Schulen in Syrien um damit eine Flüchtlingswelle in die EU auszulösen, um der EU-hassenden Rechten Rückenwind zu verleihen. Schaut man sie die Situation in Österreich an, mit großem Erfolg.

Die nach der EU-schielende Ukraine war Russland ein Dorn im Auge, worauf Russland einfach dort einmarschierte, die Ukraine von Russland aus beschoss, ein Linienflugzeug abschoss, die Krim Völkerrechtswidrig annektierte und das alles offen leugnete.

Ich frage mich nach dieser Lektüre und unglaublicher Faktenlage: Wie kann das alles möglich sein? Es ist neuer Kalter-(Cyber)-Krieg im Gange und niemand scheint es bemerken. Wo ist der Aufschrei? Wo wird es in den westlichen Medien thematisiert? Wo von den demokratischen Parteien aufgegriffen, offen bekämpft? Traut sich niemand Russland ob der Erdöl-abhängigkeit und seinem Nuklearsenal zu kritisieren? Wie kann die Aussenministerin vor Putin auf die Knie fallen? Die FPÖ einen Kooperationsvertrag mit dem Kreml schliessen?
Es steht viel auf dem Spiel. Die Errungenschaften von Wohlstand und liberaler, demokratischer Werte werden offen angegriffen. ( )

Frei Tamás összes hagymáza, meg Dan Brown Vatikán-fantáziái csak könnyed kávéházi bájcsevejek ahhoz képest, amiről ez a könyv szól. A baj csak az, hogy ennek a könyvnek nagy valószínűséggel igaza van. Snyder áttekinti a XXI. század egyre forróbb háborúját az orosz autoriter modell és a nyugat között, Putyin ukrajnai beavatkozásától kezdve egészen az amerikai választás manipulálásáig, ami Trump elnökségében csúcsosodott ki – ez utóbbi akkora győzelem Oroszország szempontjából, hogy tényleg csak Berlin 1945-ös elfoglalásához mérhető. Mindez egy átgondolt taktika orosz részről, amit a stratégiai relativizmus fogalmával ragadhatunk meg. Amikor ugyanis egy vezető érzékeli, hogy saját államát nem tudja versenyképessé tenni, tehet ehelyett valami mást: a nála sikeresebb államokban zavart támasztva, paranoiát keltve és tekintélyelvű (szélsőjobboldali) pártokat támogatva lehúzhatja őket a maga szintjére, ezzel megmutatva, hogy ha nekünk nem is jó, de máshol se jobb, következésképpen saját kleptokráciánk életképesebb, mint az ósdi, kaotikus liberális demokrácia*. És ezzel a taktikával bizony be is lehet betonozni egy egyszemélyi vezetőt, mert alapvető emberi tulajdonság, hogy addig elvan a polgár bármilyen tolvajjal a miniszterelnöki bársonyfotelben, amíg ez a tolvaj el tudja hitetni vele, hogy másnak még sokkal rosszabb dolga van, mint neki.

Ennek a folyamatnak a szabatos és alaposan alátámasztott leírásával, az orosz elképzelések ideológiai gyökereinek ábrázolásával (amely gyökerek leginkább a „fasizmus” szóval írhatóak körül), illetve számos újszerű definíció (pl: skizofasizmus**, szadopopulista***) bevezetésével Snyder önmagában olyan könyvet tenne le az asztalra, ami nélkülözhetetlen lenne a XXI. század megértéséhez. De ő többet tesz. Ezt az egész történelmi, politikai, filozófiai fejtegetést egyetlen fogalmi keretbe helyezi a szükségszerűség és az örökkévalóság politikájának elméletével. Ebben a kontextusban mindkét fogalom eltérés a történelmi tényszerűségtől: előbbi például azzal, hogy úgy véli, a szebb jövő szükségszerűen be fog következni, következésképpen minden ennek ellentmondó bizonyíték csak időleges, és kvázi magától, konkrét szakpolitikai intézkedés nélkül is megszűnik előbb-utóbb. (Efféle elmélet volt a forradalmi marxizmus, vagy épp a Fukuyama nyomán „történelem végének” nevezett gondolatsor.) Csakhogy ez a balhit oda vezetett, hogy a választók úgy érezték, az ő problémáikkal nem foglalkozik senki, mindenki csak türelemre inti őket („maaaajd jó lesz, csak ki kell várni”) – közben meg látni azt látják, hogy nő az egyenlőtlenség, romlik az egészségügy színvonala, és esik szét az infrastruktúra. És ezek az állampolgárok (jellemzően a legszegényebbek, a legkiszolgáltatottabbak) nyitottak voltak arra, amit a politikusok új nemzedéke, az örökkévalóság politikusai kínáltak nekik megvételre. Az örökkévalóság politikusai ugyanis nem hivatkoztak a szebb jövőre, ők a jövőt inkább állandó veszélyforrásként láttatták, olyasvalamiként, amitől csak az erőskezű vezető tud megvédeni minket****. Az ő retorikájukban nincs helye a valódi problémáknak – ha valaki az egyenlőségről vagy az egészségügyről kérdezne, rögtön másról kezdenek hadoválni –, mi több, a valódi problémák csak olyan dolgok, amelyeket felhozni tulajdonképpen hazaárulás, hisz eltereli a figyelmet a (hamis, általuk konstruált) legfőbb és jövőbeni problémáról. És ez az a pont, ahol a konstruált valóság diadalt arat a valódi valóságon, a választónak pedig nem marad más dolga, mint rituális (mert torzított) választásokon megerősíteni vezetőit abban, hogy továbbra is tőlük várja a megoldást. Amit pedig ezért cserébe kap, az nem a szebb jövő, hanem a dicső múlt: az, hogy egy olyan nemzet tagja lehet, aki az örökkévalóságtól fogva ártatlan, pedig az egész rajta kívüli világ az ő meggyalázására törekszik.

Azt állítom, hogy Fukuyama és Huntington művei óta nem született olyan geopolitikai konklúzió, ami erőteljesebb és alapvetőbb magyarázatot adna a világ dolgaira, mint Snyder műve. (És bizony: ez a könyv – ha volt ilyen célja Snydernek, ha nem – korrigálja is azok hiányosságait, tévedéseit.) Klasszikus szöveg – ezt ki merem jelenteni már most –, ami egészen elképesztő érzelmi bevonódást okoz az olvasóban. Következésképpen gyenge idegzetűek inkább apróbb kortyokban fogyasszák – de fogyasszák ők is, mert cudarabb lesz, ha váratlanul érik őket a dolgok. Olyan mellette a többi hasonló tárgyú könyv zöme, mint pincsikutya a dán dog mellett. Karcsú szó rá a „zseniális”.

* Nyilván csak nagy országok tudnak igazán zavart kelteni náluk sikeresebb rendszerekben, de azért a piszlicsáré államok vezetői is képesek lebutított formában alkalmazni ezt a módszert. Elég ehhez saját médiánkban azt szajkózni, hogy Bécsben, Kölnben, Londonban (stb) úton-útfélen nőket erőszakolnak a bevándorlók, meg minden tele van no go zónákkal – szegény nyugdíjas mamó úgysem megy el oda, hogy ellenőrizze. Csak imádkozik Jézuskához, hogy a mi fess miniszterelnökünket nehogy valami baj érje, mert különben mi is iszlám kalifátus leszünk. (Az már nagyobb baj, hogy a fenn említett mamó inkább hisz a médiának, mint a saját unokájának, aki Bécsből, Kölnből, Londonból hazatérve egészen más képet közvetít neki. És a fenn említett mamó igazán elgondolkodhatna, hogy miért van ez így.)
** „Ez a fasizmus új válfaja, amelyet nevezhetnénk skizofasizmusnak: valódi fasiszták az ellenfeleiket nevezik fasisztának, a holokausztért a zsidókat okolják, és a második világháborút érvnek tekintik a még több erőszak mellett.” (192. oldal)
*** „Trumpot sokan populistának nevezik. Egy populista azonban olyasvalaki, aki szakpolitikai intézkedéseket javasol a tömegek lehetőségeinek bővítésére, nem az, aki a gazdasági elitnek kedvez. Trump valami más: szadopopulista, akinek az intézkedései arra irányulnak, hogy saját választói legsérülékenyebb tagjainak ártson.” (356. oldal)
**** Vessünk egy pillantást például (ha nincs még hányingerünk tőle) az úton-útfélen hemzsegő kormányplakátokra. Mit látunk rajtuk? Hogy támogassuk OV programját. Ebben máris tetten érhetjük a vezérkultusz megnyilvánulását, hisz nem a kormány, nem a párt programját kell támogatnunk, hanem egyetlen személyét, egyetlen erőskezű vezérét, aki bölcs, egymaga mindent tud és mindig igaza van, hovatovább szakpolitikusokra sincs szüksége. (Ahogy tényekre sem.) Maga a program pedig micsoda? Hogy állítsuk meg a bevándorlást. Ennyi. Egyetlen jövőbeli, ellenőrizhetetlen katasztrófa fenyegetése. De hogy mi lenne, ha ez a veszély egyszerűen elmúlna, mit csinálna akkor a kormány (illetve maga OV), arról egy büdös szót se ejtenek. Nem véletlenül: mert ez a veszély örökké fog tartani. Ha pedig elmúlik, hát tesznek róla, hogy ne tudjunk az elmúlásáról. Mert ez a veszély az egyetlen, ami legitimálja egy korrupt rezsim létezését. ( )

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 created a reading problem. Nothing seemed relevant or as important as current events. I picked up and put down many books in favor of Reddit feeds. Then I found this book. It turned out to be perfect. It explains how Russia (or, Putin and his circle) see the world and why the invasion of Ukraine was easy to foretell. There will be many books about the war, this is easily the best place to start. It's a book-length "Introduction" of how things got here, why, and where they are going.

In suffering contrasts, in deprivation we truly recognize what is responsible freedom, when we lose love, we know what was love, when we lose liberty and fairness, svoboda of choice, chance and Will, then we recognize the iron grip of unfreedom. A new battleground for hearts and minds, unity, trust and cooperation. And as Sufis once called jihad the "inner battle of heart for goodness" so neoplatonics seen Gigantomachy of the soul in inner warfare of people. Dont let them sell the remnants of beautiful ideas to the thieves of Reality, words, symbols in an ongoing substitution of the humane for the corrupt and ugly. ( )

The temptation is to skip to the part about this Russia thing with Trump and Russia. Snyder does a good job using public sources to knit together a narrative on Russian influence and disinformation ("fake news") in the 2016 election. Oligarchs grant favors and name their price later, Snyder suggests, and their dealings with the Trump Organization follow such a pattern. Not everyone will find this argument persuasive, despite the extensive endnotes.

Start at the beginning, though, and take in Snyder's main argument, which sets optimism vs. cynicism in Putin's Russia. The American perspective holds that that equality, cooperation, information and innovation create win-win results. The Russian approach is a power play. Life is hard, so don't let anyone else get the edge. Winning means everyone else loses--or everyone loses, but especially the other guy. If you accept that this is the playbook for fascism, then the U.S.--where oligarchy has other names--is heading quickly down this road.

This book makes the case that many or most of the declines in openness and freedom over the last three decades in Western Europe and in the United States can be traced by a consistent effort by Vladimir Putin's Russia to spread strife to other nations which are seen as perpetual enemies. The author goes back to the first half of the twentieth century where a man I'd never heard of before, Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin, put together the right-wing counterpart of the Russian Communist philosophies. Ilyin died in the 1950s but was brought back in the 1990s as someone who explained the misfortunes experienced by that country as a kind of contagion by the decadent and evil west which was determined to frustrate the realization of a united Eurasian empire inspired by the kingdom of Kievan Rus in the early Middle Ages centered. The rise of the class of oligarchs found themes in this philosophy which suited the kinds of things they were doing to enhance their personal wealth, much of it revolving around a narrative of endless struggle with outside nations which parallels the class struggle emphasized by the left.

The author then focuses on the years between 2010 and 2016 when Putin had consolidated his power as lifetime ruler and has gathered other oligarchical families in Russia and outside. The invasion of Ukraine is part military operation, part cyberwar, and a good deal psyops to the population of Russia. The presentation is not scholarly and there are no guides to primary sources here, so the careful reader would have to do a good deal of fact-checking on their own to verify the dozens or hundreds of incidents covered. There are a few names which recur over and over as fellow travelers with fascistic tendencies hoping to emulate the successes in their own governments. Towards the end of this section come the more or less direct attacks against the political systems of Poland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I got the impression that they must have been pleased with the amount of success they have had beyond their wildest dreams in foisting a kleptocratic structure modeled on the Russian oligarchy on America as punishment for our attempts to meddle in their affairs over the past century.

It is a horror story for a person who believes in the old myths about liberal democracy and about its inevitable spread among all nations. It made me angry and outraged that this whole scheme played out so perfectly to Putin's advantage and still somehow left him as something other than an utter pariah in public opinion. Of course the other world leaders do not have the freedom to shun such a dangerous character, and of course there are thousands of Ukrainians who know how the actions on the ground and the embrace of alternative facts came so close to dismembering their entire country, and yet it doesn't seem like there's an enormous reservoir of loathing among Western European and North American citizens at what he has orchestrated over all this time. There have been dangerous strongmen in the past which weren't greeted with a collective shrug. There have been sanctions, but beyond that, it seems like there has been no way to register the kind of revulsion these kinds of authoritarian moves cause in people who still believe in Enlightenment ideals.

I listened to the audiobook version of this and found it maybe even more gripping than it would have been in print. This is a case where the voice of the author add something to the experience of the work; it makes it easier to hear the alarm bells he's ringing, in my opinion. I found it an absorbing work that scared me out of my wits that I would recommend to anyone who would want to be shaken in the same way. ( )

Snyder makes a compelling and well-supported case that the US, as a country of increasing inequality, has made itself ripe for oligarchy and vulnerable to foreign influence toward the destabilization of our democracy, as seen by the ongoing cyberattacks by Russia and the complicity and complacency of US elected officials who stand to gain from such attacks. This book puts into context the history we're living right now and provides a general roadmap towards recovering our democracy.

Hopefully this perspective will help inoculate me against misinformation and obfuscation, especially in the realm of memes, trolls, and bots, and give me the courage to point out such attempts at manipulation when I see them. The courage to connect with others and to not lose hope in democracy would also be welcome. ( )

In suffering contrasts, in deprivation we truly recognize what is responsible freedom, when we lose love, we know what was love, when we lose liberty and fairness, svoboda of choice, chance and Will, then we recognize the iron grip of unfreedom. A new battleground for hearts and minds, unity, trust and cooperation. And as Sufis once called jihad the "inner battle of heart for goodness" so neoplatonics seen Gigantomachy of the soul in inner warfare of people. Dont let them sell the remnants of beautiful ideas to the thieves of Reality, words, symbols in an ongoing substitution of the humane for the corrupt and ugly. ( )

In suffering contrasts, in deprivation we truly recognize what is responsible freedom, when we lose love, we know what was love, when we lose liberty and fairness, svoboda of choice, chance and Will, then we recognize the iron grip of unfreedom. A new battleground for hearts and minds, unity, trust and cooperation. And as Sufis once called jihad the "inner battle of heart for goodness" so neoplatonics seen Gigantomachy of the soul in inner warfare of people. Dont let them sell the remnants of beautiful ideas to the thieves of Reality, words, symbols in an ongoing substitution of the humane for the corrupt and ugly. ( )

This is a very focused investigation centered solely on Russia's more recent history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's becoming a pure Oligarchy, or rather: a Kleptocracy. What's more, we get some rather startling and almost unbelievable details into the nature of Putin's aim.

Let me be more clear: end aim is very clear. He's stated it about a million times. He's so confident in his power and methods that I can't see any truly viable method to stop him. And so he is open and honest about just how many lies he can get away with.

What's unbelievable is how he's been able to revise history on such a massive scale as to make Stalin a hero, rewrite his involvement in WW2 drastically, or taking a relatively obscure philosopher who was a contemporary of Lenin and elegize him to the point of near godhood, projecting his text as the grand narrative of Putin's Russia. Literally. He's had the book printed everywhere, talked about everywhere, and it all boils down to some CRAZY S**t.

Like the unfettered belief that the leader is the soul of the nation, and that nations are always innocent. Harm can be done to Russia, but it will always remain innocent. There can be no double standards if there are no standards. Facts are for other people. Use facts as weapons against those who rely on them, but never be fettered by them.

Trust the leader who will always steer you right.

People in Russia may not believe this s**t, but remember, every media source will be spouting it. Anyone who has ties to America or Europe are immediately branded enemy collaborators. All the western countries are ruled by the Homosexual Agenda and Russia must never fall before them.

This is just a taste of the reality under Putin. He is a master at reality control. After the devastation of the 90's when practically all otherwise well off USSR populace was cashed in and the full reserves of the government power and wealth was transferred to a handful of men, it was absurdly easy to lock down everything. Putin has an amazing amount of combatant hackers at his disposal. Full media control. Banking. And of course the military.

Remember when the Ukraine was urged to give up over a thousand nuclear missiles in 2010? And then Putin invaded them, annexed them, and completely rewrote history about 5 times in order to justify everything about it in 2012? You know, like things saying there is no such thing as Ukraine. Or there is no Ukraine language. It has always been Russia.

This book has an amazing wealth of information in it. Don't take my word for it. It'll shock you.

Let me steal this from another review of this book (and btw, thank you!):
Methods of control:

{--Constant reference to a past era of greatness
--Hyperfocus on enemies who are enemies because of who they are and not what they do
--A profound belief in a zero-sum (or a negative-sum) world
--Willingness to hurt oneself if, in doing so, you can hurt someone else more
--The manufacture of crises and conflicts where none exist in order to control the news cycle
--Constant labeling of information sources as “fake” in an effort to delegitimize any source of truth
--Repetition of blatant, easily verifiable lies with no evidence to back them up other than the fact of the assertion}

His stated goal is to always keep Europe and America as eternal enemies, a-la Eurasia in Orwell's 1984. That means always being on an antagonistic footing, flooding his population with propaganda, and just plain telling any kind of lies he likes, so long as he gets the results he wants. There is no need for any kind of verifiability. He is an Eternal Leader who is Always Innocent and he does NOT need Facts. He just needs to control every narrative. And he does.

The next part of this book is just plain scary.

We've heard all about Russia's supposed involvement with Trump. We've heard both sides make a lot of noise and get nowhere because the signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely atrocious here.

When investigative journalism ACTUALLY does its job, however, a lot of truly damming facts come to light. You know, those pesky little things that Putin cares crap over?

Russian hackers, fully bankrolled by Putin's media empire, is attacking America. This statement isn't just some silly conflation. He's on record of saying it and there are MANY records proving it. Millions of fake facebook accounts with targeted marketing to tight demographics, pandering to prejudices and conspiracy theories, fake movements all across the internet, including millions of tweets by bots trying to influence the political debates. (Successfully, I might add.) Many attempts were also made on the voting machines.

Note the direction almost every convenient "leak" came from during the election cycles. The republican party knew about Trump's many economic connections to Putin, including a Trump Tower with MANY rooms bought by placeholder corporations whose paperwork all led back to Russia, many new real estate deals. The official line was to hush it up. Fire officials that tried to investigate it. And all the while, overwhelming hacker support flowed toward Trump. Let's not forget Trump and Putin's long-standing friendship. They're both fictional characters, after all, telling many interesting narratives, (read lies) that don't need any factual basis. They just need to be plausible for the moment until the power base can be firmed up.

Please refer to the list of power-grabbing methods. Does anyone else see a similarity between Russia and America?

It's almost like all the super-rich looters are playing by the exact same handbook. The goal is to get rich at everyone else's expense. If you don't make the 1% bracket, you're nothing. Just watch for the new grabs.

Look. I said it was nearly unbelievable. But I, unlike radical revisionist leaders, actually LIKE facts.

If this book tells me anything at all, it's to look beyond the noise. We can all be so involved in our little crazy lives so much that we fail to see the big picture. That goes for politics, too. What happens when we realize that a MASSIVE concerted effort to game America's political system actually SUCCEEDS?

Oh, nothing. We're still bickering between blues and reds. Of course, since we do most of that online, it's actually absurdly easy to focus all of one's resources on this choke point. Russia has a veritable army of hackers fanning the flames of all lefts and all rights, stirring up racial prejudices, sexist prejudices, and any other conflict they can dream up. And we buy it. Hell, most of all these "events" might be pure fabrication, but none of us seem to be doing ANYTHING to confirm or deny them. Certainly not our media. They're too busy running ideological platforms, themselves.

See how easy it is to sow SO MUCH confusion and chaos on your enemy...? And the best thing is, WE LAP IT UP, use it all as proof we are right, yet again.

Where are our antibodies? Where is the strong Press that digs up all this crap and shows it for what it is?

Oh, wait... that's what this book is trying to be!
( )

Russian politics has been rotten at the top for as long as anyone can remember. This book is a report on the efforts of the Russian leadership to spread that rot to other countries through war, lies and social media. Reading it was exhausting. So much racism, misogynism, anti-semitism, homophobia and stupidity suffuse its pages that all hope for humanity seems to be lost. I'm sure this was the author's intention, and it certainly brings home the essence of Vladimir Putin's legacy to the world. The billions he has made from Russian oil seem to have been put to very cost-efficient use in the employment of hackers and trolls that create strife and influence elections in Europe and America.

This book thereby gives a wakeup call to anyone who has underestimated the nature and extent of Russian misinformation, but I think it's perspective is a bit too one-sided and overly repetitive. For example, when discussing the invasion of Ukraine, the author quotes at length what Russian motorcycle gangs and other minions had to say about it, as if that actually mattered. It's certainly interesting to know that Putin and his immediate lieutenants feed bizarre Jewish-gay-black-conspiracy narratives to the Russian people, but parroting gang leaders are surely not accurate representatives of the reception that propaganda receives among the people. It couldn't have been that hard to find Russians who are critical of the leading junta - even I can name a few off the top of my head. I would have included one or two voices of reason in this book just to show that the rot stops somewhere.

The last chapters of the book deal with the election of Trump - on the one hand, how incredibly much help he received from Russia, and on the other how wide the fault lines of American society already were before Putin got involved. The picture it paints of American politics is akin to Fukuyama's analysis in Political Order and Political Decay: the plutocratic two-party system is not responsive to the needs of disadvantaged citizens and seems to be broken beyond repair. If Putin's dream is to generate disunity, political paralysis and disintegration in America, his biggest success story might still lie in the future.

The Road To Unfreedom
by Tim Snyder
2018
Tim Duggan Books
5 / 5

If your wondering just how deep-how involved- Donald Trump is with Russia, this book will make you sweat. His ties with Putin have a long history and is much deeper and longer. Putinś ´Politics of Inevitablity´ , his stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the ¨fake news¨ are some ways Putin used to spread confusion, distrust and discredit journalists, beginning 20 or more years ago. How he rose to power and drove out opponents, by attacking the individual vs. totalitarianism. Russia still claims no responsibility for the war with the Ukraine.
This book shows how Putin helped Trump, a failed real estate developer, into a recipient of capitol. To portray that failed real estate developer as a wealthy American businessman on TV and to finally intervene and support this person in the 2016 election. No surprise he called Putin first to be congratulated.
Putins buying of Trump began before the 1990ś. He taught Trump one lesson: strategic relativism.
*Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others appear weak, as weal as Russia.
*Putin can´t change his own reputation, so he must change how others view his opponents.
p. 267: ¨Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism.¨
¨He referred to them as the ´enemy of the American people´ and claimed what they produced was ¨fake news¨. Trump was proud of these formulations, although both were Russian.¨
It was more important to try to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the USA. Putin waited to find an easy and vulnerable candidate. He has groomed Trump for years, training him to do his dirty work. Trump still does not get it.
This is a chilling and detailed history of the Soviet Union and EU- the Ukraine and Russia. The history of the countries and their political histories are detailed. And how it affects the USA-how deeply Putin has been able to begin to turn us from a democratic country to a much more vulnerable and easily controlled state of authoritarian rule. He commandeered Trump to be his pony...his boy......to make confusion, rhetoric and fake news become the norm.
Because you can´t change Russia.
But you can try to change the way the rest of the world views your biggest opponent. With Trump in the White House it is that much easier to convince the rest of the world that Russia is not much different than the USA. So Putin is just like us......Russia is innocent. Russia is pure. Its the USA that we should fear.......
Put down ´Fear´ and read this. It actually is a more true and real account of what kind of monster Trump is. ( )

Tracks Russia’s propaganda (and at times physical) assault on Ukraine, Europe, and the US. Snyder argues that Russia has fallen under the spell of “eternal time”—in which people believe that nothing can change for the better, and so all that can bring relief/pleasure is a mythic past nationhood that must always be asserted against enemies. Europe and the US were complacent, believing that there was no alternative to modern capitalism—but autocracy was waiting, and has succeeded in placing its representative in the US Presidency. Very distressing look at the theorists, if you can call them that, behind Russia’s export of autocracy, as well as at how Russia invaded Ukraine but got the world to ignore that fact. ( )

This persuasive book looks at Putin’s favorite Russian political philosopher and the template he set for fake news

Even presidents who don’t believe in history need a historian to rely on. When asked, in 2014, by a delegation of students and history teachers for his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past, Vladimir Putin came up with a single name: Ivan Ilyin.
Ilyin is a figure who might have been easily lost to history were it not for the posthumous patronage of Russia’s leader. Putin first drew attention to him – Ilyin was a philosopher, not a historian, a Russian who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954 – when he organised the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains for reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers, held in a library in Michigan, were also brought “home” at the president’s request. New editions of Ilyin’s dense books of political philosophy became popular in Kremlin circles – and all of Russia’s civil servants reportedly received a collection of his essays in 2014. And when Putin explained Russia’s need to combat the expansion of the European Union, and laid out the argument to invade Ukraine, it was Ilyin’s arguments on which the president relied.
Timothy Snyder begins his pattern-making deconstruction of recent Russian history – which by design, he argues, is indistinguishable from recent British and American history – with a comprehensive account of Putin’s reverence for the work of Ilyin. Like much of Snyder’s analysis in this unignorable book, the framing offers both a disturbing and persuasive insight.
Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism, had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favorably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. As a thread through his nationalist rhetoric, he proposed a lost “Russian spirit”, which in its essence reflected a Christian God’s original creation before the fall and drew on a strongly masculine “pure” sexual energy (he had been psychoanalyzed by Freud). A new Russian nation should be established, Ilyin argued, to defend and promote that ineffable spirit against all external threats – not only communism but also individualism. To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a “simulacrum” of democracy in which the Russian people would speak “naturally” with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as “redeemer” for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be “rituals” designed to endorse that power, periodically “uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation”.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin
To establish that dystopian state, Snyder argues, Putin’s regime has deliberately pursued two of Ilyin’s central concepts. The first demanded the identification and destruction of the enemies of that Russian spirit to establish unity; alien influences – Muslim or Jewish, fundamentalist or cosmopolitan – were intent on “sodomizing” Russian virtue (sexual imagery is never far away in the Kremlin’s lurid calls to arms). If those enemies did not exist they would have to be invented or exaggerated. After the terror attacks on Russian institutions – the Moscow theater siege and the Beslan school massacre – Chechen separatism was used as a reason to bring first television and then regional governorship under state control. Those policies were led, Snyder documents, by Vladislav Surkov, the former postmodernist theater director who was Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and then Putin’s lead strategist. Surkov directs a policy, borrowed from Ilyin, which he calls “centralization, personification, idealization”. With Surkov’s management, “Putin was to offer masculinity as an argument against democracy”, Snyder suggests; he was to associate, specifically, for example, gay rights and equal marriage with an attack on the Russian spirit.

In this culture war, disinformation was critical. Russian TV and social media would create a climate in which news became entertainment, and nothing would quite seem factual. This surreal shift is well documented, but Snyder’s forensic examination of, for example, the news cycle that followed the shooting down of flight MH17 makes essential reading. On the first day official propaganda suggested that the Russian missile attack on the Malaysian plane had in fact been a bodged attempt by Ukrainian forces to assassinate Putin himself; by day two, Russian TV was promoting the idea that the CIA had sent a ghost plane filled with corpses overhead to provoke Russian forces.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin. Putin made, Snyder argues, his direct assault on “western” factuality a source of national pride. Snyder calls this policy “implausible deniability”; you hear it in the tone of the current “debate” around the Salisbury attack: Russian power is displayed in a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.
The second half of Snyder’s book explores how Russia has sought to export this policy to those who threaten it, primarily through a mass disinformation war, a 2.0 update of Sun Tzu’s “confusion to our enemy” principle, with the aim of dividing and polarising pluralist democracies – in particular the EU and the US – against themselves.

Wreckage of flight MH17: official propaganda suggested the attack on the Malaysian plane had been a bodged attempt to assassinate Putin. Photograph: Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters
Snyder is very astute at joining the dots in how Russian propagandists, human or digital, sought to spread fake news to undermine faith in the democratic process, at the same time giving overt support to European separatists and Russia TV regulars such as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. He details how, for example, Russian “news” sources spread the idea that the Scottish independence vote had been “rigged” by “establishment forces” with the aim of undermining faith in democratic institutions in Britain before the EU referendum. We are still awaiting, of course, the full disentangling of Donald Trump’s complex relations with Putin’s government, and the many links between his campaign organization and Russian operatives. As with Luke Harding’s book Collusion, however, there is more than enough here to keep Robert Mueller busy for a long while yet.
One unavoidable conclusion of this depressing tale lies in the acknowledgment that Putin’s strategy has been so successful in shaking faith in the sanctity of fact and expert knowledge. A measure of that assault comes when you examine your reaction to this meticulously researched and footnoted book as you read it. Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale. His book Bloodlands, about the fallout of second world war atrocities on the eastern front, won the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize and was described by the late, great Tony Judt as “the most important book to appear on this subject in decades”. And yet as he unfolds this contemporary sequel, you might well hear, as I did from time to time, those sneery voices now lodged in your head that whisper of “liberal elitism” and “fake news” and “MSM” and “tempting conspiracies”, and which refuse ever, quite, to be quieted. How did we get here? Snyder has a good idea.