- Location
- Carmarthenshire, West Wales
taken from an article in yesterdays Telegraph, so Russia is more than just Putin, the general population are to some degree or other complicit too.I know what you mean about the general population not being Putin... but the Czech experience with Russians didn't leave them thinking that there are any good ones (live ones anyway)
Once again, however, the invasion of Ukraine is being personalised as “Putin’s War” or the adventurism of “Mad Vlad”, thereby divorcing the event from its context by making it entirely a projection of one man’s derangement. The same has happened with the Second World War, which is invariably associated almost entirely with Hitler, and rarely with the German people.
Yet if such men are to pursue their own version of reality, others around them – including much of the general populace – must buy into the narrative.
These can be people who stand to benefit from keeping the individual in power, like the oligarchs who have enriched themselves during Putin’s reign. Or they can be ideological bedfellows like Hitler’s Nazi followers.
Putin has tapped into a strain of Russian nationalism that lies deep in the psyche and long predates him. So many are ready to believe that Russia is beleaguered by the West because that is a worldview they have always held.
They are also open to the justification given on state-controlled media that Russian troops are merely engaged in a humanitarian operation in eastern Ukraine to protect their ethnic brethren from fascist death squads and genocide. Putin said recently that without helping the insurgents in the Donbas there would be “another Srebrenica”. The fact this is preposterous is irrelevant if it is believed in Russia.
A similar story of victimhood was used by the Nazis to stoke resentment in 1930s Germany. They had plenty of material to work with, not least the perceived injustices of the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations imposed on Germany, together with its territorial losses.
The German high command had never been reconciled to the idea that they had lost the Great War and were willing to back a politician, even an Austrian corporal, who wanted to restore their country’s “rightful” place in the world. Hitler could not have staged a war without the Wehrmacht or suppressed dissent without the Gestapo and the rest of his state apparatus.
