Hermeneutic construction of Putin and Trump’s character, positions and relation:

Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 28 December 2017 05:38.

Correction: I spoke too soon about Timothy Snyder being an anti-nationalist, and I did that in light of his estimation that Britain and France were not really nations while they were empires, that their “nationhoods” were creations of post hoc political convenience. Nevertheless, to say that he is against nationalism would not be correct, since in fact he sees the weak state and the destruction of the state as that which abets genocide.

Snyder’s characterology of how Putin’s and Trump’s positions have emerged in fairly conjoint construction is uncanny…

As such he does make of himself a useful idiot in that he exposes one side of the YKW equation - the specific origin and characters of their right wing cohorts, Putin and Trump.

Youtube, “A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Masha Gessen Talks Autocracy with Timothy Snyder”, 12 July 2017:

As his fellow Trump/Putin critic, (((Masha Gessen))) would suggest, we would miss the truth of these characters, more like mafia dons than statesmen, if we were to maintain a policy of sheer fact checking. Because essentially, they don’t care. They both have a cynical world view and it is about power - logical consistency is for the naive. By contrast to that, one must have the courage and confidence to tell the true story -

Youtube, “Chatham House Primer: Modern Authoritarianism”, 30 Oct 2017:

This guy, (Ivan) Ilyin, I think was a very interesting philosopher; he is kind of the grandfather of the current Russian “fascism.” Current Russian “fascists” like Alexander Dugin are a little jealous of him and say that he just serves a technical function in the Kremlin and he’s not that interesting. I think he’s interesting. One of his ideas is that for Russia to have a leader, that person has to be free of history, which is a high demand.

He (Ilyin) was a right-wing Hegelian ...his whole idea was that god created the world and that was a mistake. It’s an interesting view, those of you who know anything about Orthodox theology know that there are references… god created the world, it was a mistake, the factuality of the world is itself sinful, history is itself sinful, contingency, to use the technical term, contingency is sinful, all these facts and passions we have, they’re inherently sinful.

So, in order for Russia to be rescued it has to be rescued by someone who is somehow clean of history.

It has to be a redeemer who comes from beyond history.

What I find so interesting is that this actually happened in a way.

The place that is not history is fiction.

When Mr. Putin came to power, Surkov and the others in the Kremlin literally had a kind of game and then a public opinion poll where they tried to figure out which Russian fictional character would be most attractive to Russians. They came up with this character (Max Otto von) Stierlitz, who was a double agent and a person in a novel, and in a film, in the 70’s, who was a Russian spy who spoke German. That’s why they chose Mr. Putin. So, he literally .. this true people! This is the world we live in. So he literally came from fiction.

Then you connect Mr. Putin to Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is Not a successful real estate developer! That never happened. Mr. Trump bankrupted six companies. He owed billions of dollars to, I think, seventy banks. Until, low and behold, some nice Russians came and said, ‘hey, why don’t you just put your name on some buildings and we’ll give you money for that, and we will build the buildings - which then became his business plan. Which is a great (((business plan))) if you can get it.

Rob Goldstone relaxing, chatting with Trump
The Miss Universe pageant. How did he run (((the Miss Universe pageant)))? The Russians gave him twenty million dollars and he showed up. Which is a great business plan if you can do it.

So, a fictional Russian character comes to power and then creates a fictional American character called Mr. Trump. This happened!

Once the Russians had bailed him out, he then appeared on American television, on celebrity apprentice, playing a successful real estate developer - which he never was.

But as a character, he was great, he could say, “you’re fired!” in a really convincing way.

So, one fictional character then creates another fictional character. And that fictional character also comes to power. ..with the help of all kinds of fictional devices, mostly delivered through the internet. So there really is an interesting problem of (((genre))) going on in our life.

Comments:

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 28 Dec 2017 01:23 | #

I spoke too soon about Snyder being an anti-nationalist, and I did that in light of his estimation that Britain and France were not really nations while they were empires, that their “nationhoods” were creations for post hoc political convenience.

Nevertheless, to say that he is against nationalism would not be correct, since in fact he sees the weak state and the destruction of the state as that which abets genocide.

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 17:14 | #

Here (Where I’ve bolded) Snyder is using technicalities of language in a disingenuous way regarding nationhood:

“Racism, Antisemitism and the Radical Right” - Keynote, Timothy Snyder, 28 Sep 2017:

The whole idea of Brexit contains two categories which are not nearly as solid as they seem to be. This is all just another way of trying to make the same point that I was trying to make before: the soft spot, the one that modern populists, contemporary populists, exploit in domestic politics, is the common belief that there was a nation state in the past - when there wasn’t.

And then the Russians, in supporting these populists, are just fixing onto a soft spot just like they fix onto a soft spot in the United States: the domestic politics of eternity in the West; and then there’s a country, “Russia, which just happens to be further along in the politics of eternity.” ...is much more comfortable in it, and has the technical means to export it.

The Russian Federation is influencing:

In Britain, UKIP.

In Spain, Podemos

In France, Front Nationale

In Germany, “The Left Party” and Alternative for Germany

In Italy, The Northern League and 5 Star Movement

In Greece, Golden Dawn and Syriza

In the US, The Russian Federation has gotten behind Trump, the Alt-Lite and The Alternative Right.

Posted by colonial war. on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 17:58 | #

Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture 2017: Timothy Snyder -

If you learn from the second world war that war is a bad thing, then we would expect that Israel, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, would be four of the most peace-loving nations in the world (because they lost the greatest numbers and percentages of people in the war). We don’t need to debate the individual qualities of these nations to say that these are not the four most peace loving nations in the world. So that immediately calls into question the assumption that Europeans learned from the suffering of war, that war was a bad thing.

From what did Europeans actually learn? Europeans learned from something else. Oh, by the way, why is the idea of learning from the second world war so attractive? - because it sets you off from Americans. You can say, “we had a second world war and we learned that war was a bad thing. But those silly Americans, they didn’t learn, they keep fighting these colonial wars.”

What did Europeans actually learn from? Europeans did not learn from the second world war that war was a bad thing. Europeans learned from losing colonial wars all around the world that war was a bad thing. This begins with the Federal Republic of Germany.

The second world war, from the point of view of Germany, was a colonial war. Having exhausted the rest of the world, European powers turned to colonizing Europe itself.

The second world war was, before all-else, above all things, a colonial war for control of Ukraine and Eastern Europe, between Germany and The Soviet Union.

Germany lost the second world war, but what is important, is that Germany lost a colonial war, an imperial war. It was the first major European power to lose decisively, to lose completely, categorically, a colonial war.

Posted by We knew these things on Wed, 17 Jan 2018 09:13 | #

We knew these things about Trump/Russian Fed connections.

Posted by Cybercolonization on Sun, 04 Mar 2018 02:35 | #