We said this about Mao back in January, and it now seems we must say it about Putin:
He’s bad!
There’s a long list of things that have given us this impression of the man, probably beginning with those apartment bombings back in 1999 that justified the Second Chechen War. We aren’t going to go through it in full, but to mention a few excerpts, the list includes mention of nerve agents, kickbacks, support for oppression abroad, even dogs. As of last night, it now includes three invasions of neighboring countries, with the latest, at long last, a full-scale attempt at empire expansion.
It’s a first-half-of-the-20th-century move, invading a foreign country because you want to control it. We haven’t seen the play in a while. Double-wishbone football, silent movies, rotary telephones, and rolling tanks across your border to try to take over a little bit more of the world. You know they’re out there, but they’re rarely on the big screen like this, rarely in the spotlight, rarely getting the primetime hits.
Of course, conquest is the classic motivation for war. It’s the thing you do in board games. Thankfully, though, in real life it’s gone out of vogue. The human race, especially in the developed world, has gotten to a point where sacrificing thousands of innocent lives isn’t how we generally attempt to find fulfillment. Generally. There are exceptions. Specifically, there is Vladimir Putin.
Much as it was with Mao, it’s disappointing to find any need to clarify this impression we have of the man. But while adulation of Putin is arguably less prominent than that of Mao, it’s there. It doesn’t come from starry-eyed college communists or spray-paint wielding wannabe rebels (who’d rebel in a heartbeat, would someone be kind enough to send them a rebellion event invite on Facebook). It comes from people who’d like to get their kicks the way Putin gets his—by making people play by their rules, and by using force to do it. Yes, there’s an annoying fight going on in the American milieu that basically boils down to two sizable portions of the populace wishing to impose their preferred way of living on the other, but the “using force” part is important here. That’s not how everyone thinks. Yes again, it’s how many involved say their opponents think, but it’s not how everyone thinks, and many of those who really are willing to resort to coercion would likely not recognize their capability of such an evil. The consciousness of it is important here. Yes a third time, openness to coercion and to force and to all of those sorts of things over often quite petty differences, differences capable of being washed away or swept under the rug when brought to the personal level, are wrong. But there’s a unique wrongness to the Putin fanboys in the room, to that faction of one of the two culture-warring portions that really does admire the man launching a three-pronged invasion of Ukraine right now. It’s this:
It’s not that this faction simply wants others to play by its rules. It’s not that this faction wants to have won the culture war, to have it over and done with, neatly tied with a bow. It’s that this faction wants the thrill of winning. It doesn’t want its opponent defeated. It wants to do the defeating. Should its opponent see the light and rally jubilantly to its flag, admitting all prior wrongs, this faction would not have the satisfaction a victory of force would supply. It doesn’t want harmony. It wants conquest. And conquest requires a battlefield.
So no wonder, then, that this faction looks at Putin “finding an excuse” (those are scare quotes) to invade Ukraine and calls it “genius” (those are real quotes). It’s their fantasy, played out for them through stunning high-definition cameras. Lives, lives upon lives, lives upon lives which hold no value to them as lives, extinguished by fire and metal in pursuit of the satisfaction of a moderately short, increasingly bald man holed up in cushy offices five hundred miles to the northeast. Oh, to be that man. What could be more glorious? What could be more glorious than to defeat one’s enemies by force?
There’s a piece here that’s a primitive part of humanity, one would guess. In the caveman days, it may have been evolutionarily advantageous to hold some internal urge to crush one’s foes, thereby ensuring one’s safety should said foes try themselves to do the crushing. I think I hold this urge myself. But at my best, I don’t channel it in adoration of a man whose entire life’s purpose has been the malicious subjugation of others. When I feel a need to revel in the physical imposition of my will over that of another, I don’t look at a warlord with envy.
Instead, I just watch sports.
Burnley beat Tottenham yesterday.
Aaron Rodgers might be coming back to the Packers.
