For years, subscribers to reactionary patriotism have been fascinated by Putin. Like him, they pride themselves on wanting to ensure the protection of “traditional and moral” values, without shaking up social hierarchies, especially not the most affluent.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Al-Assad, Zemmour, Le Pen and many by-products of these professors of hate curtsied a lot for Putin. Paradoxically, it now seems easier to oppose the latter than these clones secreted by our societies. Just as it now seems permissible to sanction a few Russian oligarchs while all the Bezos, Musk and company continue, for their own benefit, to erode our democracies.
Putin is a school for these people. He reminds us that all power, before being draped in the illusion of its legality, is determined by the exercise of a brutal balance of power. Note that Machiavelli was already teaching this to Caesar Borgia, his bloodthirsty sponsor. A man of power is always nourished by the words of those eternal advisers Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Even a minor politician such as Jean Charest once claimed to hold The art of War, by Sun Tzu, for one of his favorite books. To see him launch his campaign on behalf of Alberta oil, we can see that the fire he burns consumes us.
The Kremlin strongman is not crazy. Neither do his emulators. It would be a weakness to believe otherwise. These people, lifted by the intoxication of their narrow vision of power, know how to cook history in the juice of their ambitions in order to stuff their hearts with it. In Ukraine, Putin is convinced that time will end up proving right the positions he imposes by force. By dint of being born in chains, individuals sooner or later end up taking the sad state of their birth for natural, recalled La Boétie. However, Putin forgets that each death can nourish, for years, the underground lava of a resistance.
Still, Putin is moving forward. He conquers. While waiting for his next coup, everyone is asking questions about him. Doesn’t the cynicism and cruelty he shows horrify him? Does he ever go down to the depths of his own consciousness, to inhale the smells of the depths? Is he hovering around an iron-lined heart he can’t penetrate? These kinds of questions, repeated in these days of war, do not lead us very far.
Putin’s fangs must be considered objectively for what they are: open conflict, for him as for his emulators, is indeed the pursuit of a policy by other means. How can we believe for a single moment, as a few learned white beards tell us, that the man of the Kremlin trembles before States which are content to brandish before him, as if it were an all-powerful talisman, the good feelings of democracies?
Near my house, a dog never failed to yelp its opposition to any automobile movement. Despite the uselessness of his action, he continued to yelp even more. The dog had principles. The dog was an idealist. He thought the automobile was some kind of devil. And he affirmed it with conviction. This did not prevent the cars from passing. One day the dog was run over. Its action, essentially sound, had no scope.
It seems that the West now embodies the role of a somewhat fat colossus, planted in the middle of a fairground. The talkative giant rolls his muscles to show it around, while affirming that he must be restrained so that he does not cause harm to those who make fun of him. But everyone knows very well that he keeps himself alone, attached to the only necessities of his show.
With more pugnacity than judgment, our warmongers, always ready to fuel toxic nationalism, recommend rushing Moscow. They seem above all excited to hear the sound of their voice in the echo chamber offered to them by the media. In reality, no one is seriously considering saving Ukraine. In our economy of virtue, in the midst of the fiction of a great progressive odyssey, the illusions of our holiness are enough for us. On social networks, small Ukrainian flags are blooming. Russian cats are banned from competition, as are disabled athletes of the same nationality. Who will cry at the idea of waiting four years to find out if our disabled people are better than theirs? Russian artists are reduced to silence, with heartbreaking pettiness, in the name of the greatness of our institutions. Russian vodka disappears as the urgent need to say Kyiv, according to the usages of the Ukrainian language, rather than Kiev, in the Russian way, is proclaimed. And all this with what result for Ukraine?
I exaggerate. It is true that a range of far more serious economic sanctions operate in parallel. Still, nothing really stands in the way of the fact that Kiev is shattered, just like when Washington crushed Baghdad under its iron heel. In both cases, moreover, populations find themselves trampled on in the name of allegations that are as false as they are misleading.
Many documentaries present the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as a storm of fire that appeared out of nowhere in the sky of international politics. Japan had nevertheless signified to the world that it considered the economic sanctions intended to block its policy of expansion to be an aggression. As the war in Ukraine continues, Putin, too, is implying that such sanctions are considered acts of war, not to mention transfers of military equipment. What to expect? We pretend to continue as before, while the nuclear threat is revived and our eyes scan the inflation that illustrates the price of fuel. What will happen? How far will the dogs of war take us, beyond the foreseeable?