Standing athwart history, yelling stop-and-go-back

What did Putin think he was doing when he invaded Ukraine?

The steady improvement in the human condition over the last few centuries has been frustrating for authoritarians.  Kings watched their hoary "divine right" evaporate; religious institutions saw increasingly-educated populations stop groveling before the superstitious nonsense in which their power was rooted; "supreme leaders" of every stripe fumed as their pompous slogans and puffed-up charisma met with suspicion or outright mockery.  In particular, the period since 1945 has been marked by a new kind of history, with international borders frozen in place, wars (except in the least-developed regions) far fewer and less bloody than they were before, and democracy and secularism becoming global norms to such an extent that even most tyrannies pay hypocritical homage with words like "democratic" and "republic" in their official names.

Dictators, would-be dictators and toadies, and in general that dying breed of clench-asshole who thrills to the vision of some pompous jut-jawed Glorious Leader basking in glory and adulation after gloriously vanquishing some demonized foreign nation or group, hate this kind of thing.  They can't stand the thought of the ordinary millions just living out their own lives their own way in peace and quiet instead of being conscripted into some great (and glorious) common project, finding their heroes in the arts and sciences instead of in ranting demagogues demanding crackdowns on the Jews or homosexuals or whatever.  They want mass mobilizations and herd conformity and chanted slogans and hysteria and collectivism and the Two Minutes Hate.  Individualism and freedom and irreverence and pluralism are boring to them.

This post at the Daily Kos (found via Green Eagle, who has had some excellent posts on the Ukraine crisis recently) argues that Putin -- who obviously falls on the authoritarian glorious etc side of the above divide -- has been deeply troubled by this change in the nature of history, and launched the futile invasion of Ukraine in a nihilistic effort to reverse it and drag the world, or at least eastern Europe, back into the blood-stained pre-1945 way of being.  That he realized that after he was gone, Russia too would drift closer to the new consensus of how things are supposed to be, and he could not endure that.  So he decided to go with a Samson-pulling-down-the-temple option, wrecking the new to let the old rise again in the ruins.

I wouldn't concur that this is the full explanation.  I don't agree that he knew in advance that the invasion would fail; it seems clear that, like most dictators, he was not getting accurate intelligence information and believed his military to be far more effective than it turned out to be, while grossly underestimating the Ukrainians' national feeling and will to resist, as well as the West's determination to meet the threat.  He really believed he could bring Ukraine under his rule quickly and at an acceptable cost, and is now winging it in frustration after getting smacked in the face by reality.

But there is probably some truth to the Daily Kos post.  Putin definitely yearns to unfreeze the map, repudiate individual freedom as an ideal, and return to the pre-1945 order.  And there are others like him.  Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un come to mind.  One could, with much more reservation, cite Erdoğan or Orbán or perhaps even Modi.  No, not the hopelessly phony Donald Trump, who is far more Gilderoy Lockhart than Adolf Hitler, and is too shallow to engage in philosophical thought even on a nihilistic level.  Most American far-right politicians (Boebert, Cawthorn, Palin, etc) are clowns, not thinkers.  But someone like Bannon or Miller might be a plausible American Putin if circumstances brought them to power (fortunately, that seems very unlikely).  And some more serious figures such as Mike Lee have expressed disdain for "rank democracy".

Like mold or dry rot, the pre-1945 mentality keeps cropping up in odd nooks and crannies long after being mostly eradicated.  We will need to be vigilant for some time yet.  The response to Putin's Ukraine atrocity, at least, offers reassurance that democracy and freedom are vigorous and aware.

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Related links:

Now that Putin stands revealed as both more evil and weaker than we thought, the US hopes to diminish the threat he poses.

References to Ukraine are being censored out of Russia's school textbooks.

The liberated Kyiv suburbs are yielding more evidence of Russian atrocities, including mass rape.

Exhaustive analysis here of the whole Russia-Ukraine situation (found via Earth-Bound Misfit), including the risk that Western resolve may erode if the war lasts into the winter.

The Azovstal steelworks, where Ukrainian forces in Mariupol still hold out, is a vast underground fortress of tunnels.

Like old Nazi and Soviet propaganda, Putin's propaganda today uses dehumanizing language to legitimize the mass murder of its victims.  Ironically, today one of the most effective ways to dehumanize a target group is to smear them as Nazis.

Dissidents in Belarus have been working to sabotage Putin's war effort (found via Hackwhackers).

Finns are preparing to fight, just in case.

Person-in-the-street interviews in Moscow suggest that most Russians accept the prospect of Finland joining NATO.

The war has brought a new word to the Ukrainian language.

Green Eagle dissects another vomitous pro-appeasement MSM article.