The Cult of Putin

I never intended this blog to be a political blog, but I feel like I don’t have much of a choice but to get political.  Politics are a natural part of human life, and their nature in guiding the forceful actions of governments require that they be addressed from time to time.  If there was ever a time for an exception to aversion around politics, it has come.  We’ve seen the Cult of Trump and the Cult of QAnon poison American politics, but it started much longer ago with the Cult of Putin.  In fact, I’ve come to believe strongly that the Cult of Trump and the Cult of QAnon owe their existence to the Cult of Putin.

What do I mean by that?  For the last 20 years, I’ve been watching a lot of grown American men obnoxiously admiring Putin.  Unfortunately, not just men.  A decade ago, Putin invaded Georgia and murdered countless Georgians on a set of pretexts that spookily mirror the pretexts he used to justify the invasion of Ukraine. And I personally witnessed privileged Americans respond with memes of Putin riding dinosaurs and wrestling bears.

Memes aren’t the worst that can happen, but they do reflect where people are in their thinking.  And in any case, it hasn’t been only in memes, which are just the tip of the iceberg, but in actual conversations from people who have real opinions of Putin as hero, including many who really should know better.  It’s undeniable when you’ve seen and heard it with your own ears for two decades.  They have admired him for his toxic masculinity.  They have admired him for being a bully.  They have thought his seizures of power were brave.

When I was younger and would read about how a significant number of Americans admired Hitler and admired Stalin prior to World War II, even celebrities, politicians, and industrialists, I would wonder how in the world that was possible!  Couldn’t they see who these people were?  For a good many of these people, the answer is that they weren't really looking at who these people were.  They were looking at the dire situation of post-World War I Germany, or they were looking at the heroic efforts of Russians and other Soviet Union provinces in fighting back against an invading Germany.  So there was some misdirection, just as there is now.  We tend to get a bottlenecked view in times of crisis. Edward G. Robinson comes to mind — he was a fierce supporter of Stalin during the efforts of the Soviets to repel invasion of Germany in World War II, and later was upset to find he had overlooked a world leader who was arguably worse than Hitler and an empire that also had its sights on domination, both of its own part of the world and the rest of the world eventually.  Not only did he realize he had overlooked these things in his efforts to support them against Nazis, but he had realized that he had been used by them in ways he had never imagined.

However, I remain unconvinced that the vast majority of the people who idolized these dictators had failed to recognize evil because of crisis, but instead openly embraced pompous figures out of their own sense of privilege.  At one time I would have given more charity to this, because I assumed they didn’t see who these dictators masquerading as leaders were.  I assumed that they had simply misjudged their character.  But now that I’ve experienced this in my own time, I can firmly say that yes — they could see who these people were.  That was, in fact, why they admired them.  They saw them for who they were, and they liked it — they shared a sense of megalomania and enjoyed living vicariously in the shirt pockets of dictators.  And they would have continued in this indefinitely.  They only broke from this cycle when they had to bear some of the consequences themselves, particularly the public shame of their support.  Then they cried foul and recognized the monster.  That's the nature of privilege.

A great many of these delusional people who admired Putin are vocal Trump supporters and QAnon cultists.  I don't say that to stir the pot.  I don't say it to insult anyone reading this.  I say it with quite a bit of sadness, frankly.  It should surprise no one at this point why Putin wanted Trump to win so badly that he orchestrated interference in our elections.  Like Hitler, and like Lenin and Stalin, Putin clearly has ambitions of establishing an empire.  But countries that he sees as naturally under subservience to Russia are out of his grasp because of their membership in NATO.  Trump had promised to remove the United States from NATO membership, which would have been the defacto end of NATO.  That would have opened the door for Putin to march on Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Estonia. Now that Trump lost his re-election bid, and NATO is here to stay for the time being, Putin now just has to gamble.  Nations that want to join NATO, like Georgia in the last decade, and Ukraine in the present, have to be seized on before they can seal the deal. 

Putin, like Hitler, wants his little wars of conquest with zero Western resistance.  And again, like Hitler, he doesn't want a large war beyond that.  If this ends in World War III, I'm sure that is a situation in which he'd prefer not to be.  Yet, his goals are not really negotiable given his almost religious devotion to the concept of a new Russian Empire.  This has to be the case at this point, otherwise, given the response of the Western world, there would be a moment of clarity on his part, and that moment of clarity just isn't there.

This follows Hitler's own patterns so well.  Hitler, for his part, could not believe that countries like England and France were going to see their promises of defending their allies through.  He had fully expected them to stay out of it, or even give him the green light, as they had with his conquest of Czechoslovakia.  He attributed the sudden renewed Western vigor of resistance to "warmongers" like Winston Churchill.  But while it was not in his plan nor was it ever a desire of his to fight a World War, his goals were uncompromising.  Hitler was willing to gamble with stakes as high as World War.  I think Putin was and is willing to gamble World War, just as Hitler was.

So Putin's absence of an epiphany is at least understood by his desire for a Russian Empire.  But for many of Putin's supporters and apologists in America and Europe, speaking as they are from a bubble of privilege and an atmosphere of only knowing peace at home, there is not yet a massive moment of clarity.  I say this knowing that a few have experienced it, and for many more there will be such a realization, just as there was for those folks in the past when they finally saw what a threat Hitler and Stalin were as they arrived at their own intellectual or even literal doorsteps.  But the reality is that a lot of these people won’t have that epiphany, even in this worst case scenario.

That's the danger of cultic thinking, of joining a cult around a personality.  Those of us who know YHWH should know how to avoid joining a cult of personality, and should keep our prayers ascending for the violated people of Ukraine, who are now pitted in a life or death struggle to avoid being forced to join the Cult of Putin.  Likewise, we should be praying for Russians and subjects of governments run by Putin's puppets.  They need freedom from this Cult.  They don't have the privilege of rescinding their membership.