Modern tyrannical regimes tend to proceed from an ideological premise, which makes them both stronger and weaker.
Stronger, because an ideology naturally lends itself to slogans behind which it’s easier to rally the masses. For example, Lenin’s slogan ‘rob the robbers’, usually mistranslated as ‘expropriate the expropriators’, instantly appeals to envy, described as a cardinal sin precisely because it’s so widespread.
Hoist it up the flagpole and it’ll work like a charm. And what could conservatives run up their mast in response? ‘Secure property is an essential cornerstone of a civilised settlement, while its absence paves the way to tyranny’? All true, but try to inscribe this on your banners and see how many will follow.
Yet an ideology also carries a germ of weakness. For, before it’s reduced to slogans, it has to be put down on paper as some kind of pseudo-philosophical doctrine, a sort of statement of intent.
That means a careful reader doesn’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what a tyrant, current or potential, plans to do. And if the careful reader represents a side wishing to thwart the tyrant’s plans, he’ll have a head start.
That’s how it should work in theory. In practice, however, normal people usually find it hard to believe that there are others out there who aren’t at all like them.
Hence good Westerners often assume that, say, Russian politicians are like our own, rudderless ships drifting from one election to the next. If our politicians are incapable of strategic thought, then so are everyone else’s.
We know that our lot will say whatever is politically expedient at the moment, even if it’s at odds with what they said five minutes ago. So we tend to assume that, mutatis mutandis, evil tyrants are the same: they just say things without meaning them.
That’s why the good people both in Russia and in the West glanced at Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done and dismissed it as schizophrenic drivel. In fact it was the blueprint for a Bolshevik coup, which duly arrived 15 years later.
Three months before it arrived, Lenin published another pamphlet, The State and Revolution, in which he explained, none too cryptically, that mass murder was on the cards: “the State is a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class.” Actually, he meant ‘all classes’, but let’s not quibble about details.
Nobody took any notice, which shows that lack of focus while reading can be punished quite cruelly. Ignore evil at your peril.
The same thing happened with Hitler’s equally frank book Mein Kampf, published eight years before he came to power. The future führer honestly said what he was going to do – yet it all sounded so crazy no one took him at his word. The book was ignored because nobody read it properly.
Such pandemics of functional illiteracy haven’t gone out of fashion. Rewind back to 1992, a year after the Soviet Union ‘collapsed’.
That event caused such an outburst of triumphalism that the West, licking its chops in anticipation of getting fat on the ‘peace dividend’, simply refused to read accounts of what the perestroika chieftains were actually saying.
That’s a pity, for had Westerners been more attentive in 1992, they wouldn’t be surprised now, watching in stunned stupor Col. Putin’s aggressive drive to rebuild the Soviet Union in 2014.
Speaking at a 1992 OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) conference, Russia’s Foreign Minister Alexei Kozyrev issued the following statement:
“I must introduce some corrections to the concept of Russia’s foreign policy… The space of the former Soviet Union cannot be viewed as a zone in which OSCE norms can be applied in their fullness. It is in effect a post-imperial space in which Russia will uphold her interests by all available means, including military and economic. We shall firmly insist that all former Soviet republics immediately enter a new federation or confederation, and there will be some tough discussion of this…”
The ‘tough discussion’ was longer in coming than Kozyrev suggested, but at least it’s now going full speed ahead, much to the surprise of Western officials with reading difficulties.
It’s useful to note that personalities don’t really come into this. In fact, Kozyrev eventually lost his job for being too soft on the West, to the point of having ‘surrendered’ to it. And at the time he issued this clarification of Russia’s long-term policy, Col. Putin held merely the second-highest job in Russia’s second-largest city.
“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”