The discreet charm of Putinism

One way to know when we are facing real fascism is that people like Yanis Varoufakis, Noam Chomsky and Pablo Iglesias will recommend agreeing with it.

This is what they have done in a manifesto entitled "Ukraine: Peace Now!", in which they manage not to name Putin, the man who started the war.

The list of signatories includes Federico Mayor Zaragoza, who recently said that Ukraine's neutrality was the origin of "all this fuss" and used the resource of "now there is much talk about X, but we forget what happens in Y" , one of the oldest tricks in the manual of immorality.

Chomsky recommended realism: he is a defender of the weak, as long as the weak are opposed to something that can be associated with the West.

The most grotesque thing is that among the signatories was Minister Ione Belarra.

A defect of the professional critics of the West is their provincial vision.

Sin of orientalism.

It seems that the West is the only one that has agency, the others react and the victims of the enemies of the West hardly exist or have been sought.

The essayist Pratap Bhanu Mehta has written that Putin may lose, but Putinism is growing, and warns that some of its principles are shared by leaders of other countries.

The first is anti-Westernism, where the West is a stand-in for "liberalism": it's a misnomer, because the West has been intermittently liberal.

“The strongest arguments in favor of liberalism do not originate in Western cultural experience, but in the demands of human freedom and dignity.

Identifying the West and liberalism allows anti-liberals to put on the guise of anti-colonialism and anti-Westernism,” says Mehta.

Furthermore, they share a similar attitude towards history.

Pretend to undo the past;

historical fantasy justifies control and purification.

These movements are comfortable with violence.

“Putinism is rising as an ideology, now aligning itself with white supremacism, French chauvinism, the Israeli right, Ottoman dreams, Chinese aggression, or Hindu aggression,” he writes.

(Our Putinists, the independence movement and Vox, appeal to values, while trying to deprive other citizens of their rights).

When they talk about defeating the West, what they mean is to overthrow liberalism.

Sometimes that is also what they are looking for when they talk about defending their values.

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