Bernard -Henri Lévy, Poutinism is a fascism - the rule of game - Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Arts

J’ai choisi, cher Léon Wieseltier, chers amis, d’intituler cette communication « The resistable ascent of Arturo Putin ».I am referring there, of course, to the masterpiece of Bertold Brecht, written in 1941, and entitled "The Resistible Ascension of Arturo Ui" - which Arturo, in Brecht, was both Adolf Hitler and a shabby banditChicago, master of the gang of flowers, as ridiculous as terrifying, as terrifying as ridiculous.I intend, in other words, to brush a portrait of Vladimir Putin.And I have the intention, to do this, to assume, via Brecht, this ad hitlerum reductio (sorry for Latinism; but Constantine Sigov reminded me, at the moment, that Latin was spoken, in this university, until a very recent date-so let's go for this reductio!) Against which Leo Strauss has, as you know, solemnly warned but which have risked, in recent months, both Gary Kasparo andFormer Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwartzenberg or Hillary Clinton - and I think they were right.I understand the warning, of course.I am the first to think and to say that Nazism was a unique, unique, unprecedented or successful phenomenon and that there is always a risk to "reduce" anything else.Keep.Provided to do the share of things, provided you do not mix everything and keep in mind what, therefore, absolutely unique Hitlerism, it is still true that therehas not so many political models as it is available and there is, between this and this, between the character of Putin and that of Hitler, between the strategy of the first and that of his predecessor, real common points and thatIt would be absurd to ignore.As for the "Arturo side", it's quite obvious.Hitler was a bandit - Brecht demonstrated it for every.But Putin is just as much - and that would be easily demonstrable.Take the case of Anna Politovskaïa, as well as that of her five colleagues from the Novaia Gazeta, the only real opposition newspaper in Russia, murdered as her in troubled conditions.Take the case of Serguei Magniski, this courageous lawyer who had put himself at the head to denounce the corruption of the training system under the first Putin and who was arrested, thrown in prison and tortured to death, in 2009, in fullMoscow - Really tortured to death, tortured until dead follows, tortured because it was the only way to bring him into his throat the secrets he was discovering.Take the oligarchs eliminated one by one, sometimes banished, sometimes murdered, Polonium or not Polonium, night of the long hidden and long -term knives, spread over years - take the Goussinski, Berezovski, Khodorkovski: all that, too, stinks of its gangsterism, his arturo uism full nose!Take Pavel Yourov This artist of which we are without news, undoubtedly kidnapped, or to the secret, and whose name appears on the small brandies brandished, here, at the back of the room, by young people from the university.Take Ianoukovitch, the former Ukrainian president on the run who had a mafia past, who reigned with mafia methods and who saved as the mafia when they are unmasked.Or take again the way thugs infiltrate, without identity, the masked face, in the cities of the east of the country to bang it, to beat, to sow terror and, they hope, to prevent people from voting.Is it not, each time, pure hooliganism?Are we not closer to Chicago and its lowlands customs than methods in use in normal policy, normal international relations?Even this idea of a "civil war" in Ukraine, I reject it: the gang of the cabbage flowers, it is not the civil war!Plants to assault polling stations, that has nothing to do with a civil war !!There is no need for a Brecht to make it, this time, the demonstration: the evidence is obvious;The great banditry dimension of poutinism jumps to the eyes and ears of anyone has eyes to even ears to hear;This is the first part of the demonstration;the first part of the portrait;the easiest ;I pass.I now turn to the external action strategy implemented by the former Kagébiste who has become head of state and of which Ukraine is today the theater, alas, privileged.The sequence, in truth, began a little before Ukraine in 2008 in Georgia, with the occupation of southern Ossetia on the grounds that an alleged offensive of the Saakachvilimetted army in danger of the populations of the province.But you then had Crimea with the same type of argument, slightly refined or, it comes to the same, disproportionately grown since the Russian intervention was supposed to prevent a "massacre", not to say a "genocide", orchestrated by "The kyiv junta".And then you now have these cities in the east of the country where again, coming to the aid of Russian -speaking minorities threatened by the abominable assassins Fasis in power over the Maidan.Let's go on the fact that the threat, in Ossetia, was perfectly imaginary.Let us also pass on the scandal that there is, on the part of Putin and his henchmen, to compare what they did in Crimea with what Westerners did in Kosovo: the Kosovars were indeed victims of'Ethnic purification;There was, in Kosovo, among "Albanian" Muslims in Kosovo, dead every day;I do not know that the government of Mr. Iatseniuk, this democratic government which ensures the transition since the ignominious flight of Ianoukovitch, has ever threatened anyone!What interests me is that this sequence obviously recalls another: the one that goes from the remilitarization of Rhineland to the Anschluss and then to the Southtes and the annexation of Klaïpeda, in western Lithuania.Same discourse on the threat which, therefore, would weigh on the German -speaking nationals, Russian -speaking here.Even diversion, there of the right of peoples to dispose of themselves, here of the right to rescue civilians, duty and the responsibility to protect-soon Putin, who has all the pants, will speak to us downrightInterference!Same referendums bogus endorsement and offering Arturo Putin the same North Korean scores as the 99% according to the Anschluss.Same way, after each of these coups, to swear, hand on the heart: “It's good;It was the last;the der of the ders if one can say; I am satisfied;peaceful;I don't want Ukraine;I don't want anything anymore;I now only want peace, still peace, always peace ”.And the same way in Westerners to swallow the bobard with a eagerness of a comic or freezing choice - do you remember the "Hitler is a gentleman" of Chamberlain?Well, the unrealrable phrase of Steinmaier, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Merkel, exclaiming without laughing, in full crime crime, while Putin advances her pawns with an casualness, insolence, violence, which violence.Long say about the impunity which he thinks he can enjoy: "Let's not let Putin become an opponent".He said: to become our opponent ... The man from the coup de force in Crimea, then to Donetsk and Odessa, is not yet our opponent, but risks becoming it ....People always say that Putin is a great chess player.She is even, this story of a "great chess player", the main clutter that some people about it.And I even heard false scholars, visibly knowing nothing or in chess or in Putin, gargling the talent with which he would implement the principles of "Alekhine defense" - this strategy, well known to the real players offailures, where we sacrifice a room to attract the opposing camp to its land and, once its defenses are in turn, take it back and reduce it.Well this shot is an insult, and at the game of chess in general, and to Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alekhine in particular.I don't know what you know of Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alekhine.But he's a huge character.This man who disappears roughly when Brecht writes his arturo ui, is a kind of vitaly klitschko, super champion, chess.And chess enthusiasts know the historic part he played, and won, against this formidable player that was also Leon Trotsky.Good.This insult in Alekhine, this way of drowning fish by comparing this bad strategist that is Putin to the great and legendary Alekhine, this ridiculous fascination, obviously only one goal: to conceal the disturbing analogy between the two triads.The Rhenish-Anschluss-Sudètes triad.And the Ossétie-Crimée-Donbass triad.Let us now turn to ideology.Or, more precisely, towards this set of reflexes, postures or attitudes which, in policies, constitutes a kind of ideology.I watched before coming to come the ridiculous photos of the master of the Kremlin exhibiting his muscles, his chest, his virility, in all possible and imaginable situations.I looked at these images of Popeye Bodybuilded, sometimes in charge of a water bomber, sometimes on horseback, shirtless, in taiga or sometimes concentrated on a tatami of judo.I looked at these pretty comic images that make you think irresistibly the photos of Mussolini in its great time.I was thinking of his worship of the force erected as a golden rule in international relations - "I do what I can;I go to the end of this power;As long as no one tells me stop, I am a force that goes, and I advance ".I also listened to, at the very end of his television interview on April 17, this bizarre, very bizarre confession, which could have come out of the mouth of a Nazi suicide bomber or, today, a jihadist: "Is death horrible?But no, it can be beautiful;Death for his friends, his people or his homeland can be beautiful "" - Yes!Beautiful, death!Viva la muerte!It only struck anyone the "rational" poutine, the hyper calculator Putin, the so-called emulating of Alekhine, speaks like a herald of "martyrdom" in politics and, I repeat, as a heir to traditionfascist.And then these anti gay laws, spent last year in Russia, and which I am not sure that we have taken the full measure.Because, basically, he doesn't care about gays.What matters to him and what he thinks when he attacks them is the feminization of the society of which they are supposed to be the agents, his decadence - it is this collapse of the virile values that the West would have givenThe example and of which Russia would be, by contamination, victim - what he thinks is this renunciation of traditional values and the principles conveyed by great religions, it is this rejection of "moral principles" and of all "Traditional identity, whether national, cultural, religious or sexual ", it is this" on an equal footing "of" large families "and" homoparental families "," faith in God "andThe "faith in Satan" which he evoked, in September 2013, in Valdaï, near Novgorod, in the north of Russia, before an areopage of 250 pseudo intellectuals who came to debate "how to strengthen the unity of society,'State and the nation ”;And, that too, it was pure fascism.Just as the will to root the people's found soul in an imaginary holiness, itself dependent on a soil, blood and a memory: it is the very definition of the German Volkisch;This is the old German question of what is Volkisch and what is not;It is the old obsession of the soul of the Volk coming to regenerate a corrupt human and national community, degenerate, undermined by the dark, feminine forces, which are in power.Putin does not say "Volk".But he says Saint Russia.He speaks of the Russian soul which is characterized by "the highest moral distinction".But it’s obviously the same thing.To say, not to say worse, the main themes of a past conservative revolution from the German language to the Russian language ... All this seems basic?Vulgar?Stupid ?Maybe.But a policy does not have to be intelligent or elegant to walk.And this one works, for the moment, quite well-despite, or perhaps because of, its inelegance and its stupidity.Besides, I am wrong to talk about "reflexes".I would be wrong, more exactly, to stick to this story of "reflexes" recalling the arturo ui era.Because there is a Putinian ideology.A real.A structured.She is not fully formulated.Or, when she is, she is not always fully assumed.But it exists.It inspires a number of advisers from the Russian president.And this ideology is the Eurarisme.I remind you, in a few words, what Eurasism is.It was Timothy Snyder who drew our attention or, at the very least, mine to this story of Eurasism and to the case of this professor Alexandre Douguine who is the inspiration of it.It all starts with the creation, in 1993, of a PNB.Not the PNB of economists, no.PNB as this Bolshevik National Party created, therefore, in 1993 by a disaster character that you know well and that we also know quite well because a good French author has made it a Roman character - Edouard Limonov.A few years later, Professor Douguine, ally and friend of Limonov, broke with him in picturesque texts where he writes that "it is necessary to dissolve the National-Bolshevik Party because his leader is a vampire" or that the chief in questionbeen spotted washing with "virgin blood" where he believes he has found the secret of eternal youth.And, in the early 2000s, he refounded this Nationalbolchévique Party on more serious bases which are those of today and which are themselves based on two books which he will publish in a blow and which will soon give the program of the'company.The first is called "The second, published the following year, is entitled:" The call of Eurasia ".And the idea is, roughly, to oppose the constitutive geopolitical whole of the European Union a Eurasian geopolitical whole bringing together, around Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and perhaps, one day, more.Do you know the famous Putin sentence at the end of the USSR conceived as "the largest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century?Well Douguine, this is the answer to that.This is the repair of the disaster.It is the ideological instrument of a revenge taken on this Europe which carries, with America, the responsibility of the dissolution of the USSR.Putin has not always been anti European.At the beginning, when he succeeds Yeltsine, he is even rather supported by a rapprochement with the European Union and with NATO.Today, Douguine has been there.Poutinism has become a Douguinism.And I think that the ultimate goal of poutinism is the shepherd's response to the shepherdess, that is to say the destabilization, even the dissolution, of this European Union which he is largely responsible for the dissolution of the'USSR.The first threatened are the Poles.Then the Balts.But, after them, do not doubt it, it is the European project as such which is in the sights of this Douguino poutinism which, to Europeanism, therefore opposes the eurasism.I read, a few weeks ago, a text by Douguine justifying the coup in Crimea by evoking, like that, by the way, the case of a "Walloon minority" threatened by hypothesis of "deportation" and "genocide ”by the Flemings and then forcing Europe to rescue its rescue.He could have evoked the French Catalans ... The Transylvans of Romania ... Switzerland with its three "peoples" who, too, could find cantors advocating their attachment, which to France, who to Germany, who in Italy… He could have-perhaps he did it elsewhere-cite all these minorities, very numerous, straddling two or three constitutive countries of the union ... The model is there.The scenario is written.And also the threat, barely veiled ... I exaggerate the importance of this devuinism?I do not believe.Because I looked at these two books closely.And, alas, they are not zero.Not at all.I even believe that they are unintelligible if we do not read them as a significant intervention, and of good performance, in the great debate which has structured, for twenty years, the intellectual discussion in the United States and which is the debate between Fukuyama (History is over; there is no longer going to be decisive there; the clashes that we observe are only surface effects, lures, barely disturbing the fundamental consensus which is the mark ofMarket savings and democratic regimes) and Huntington (error! History never stops! New events, real ones, arise before our eyes even if we have trouble recognizing the novelty! And it is even inTrain, there, underwater, with, in particular, the appearance and development of radical Islamism, to know a new start, a revival! ”).Professor Douguine registers, yes, to the joint of the two.He too thinks that Fukuyama is wrong and that history is an endless trial.But he thinks that Huntington is just as wrong when he identifies radical Islamism as the new alternative to liberal capitalism.And his idea is that there is another alternative, a real, a solid, which is his alternative to him and which is called Eurasism.Is this a third Rome?A third empire?Just a third or fourth "formula"?What is certain is that it is another hypothesis of civilization and, therefore, something very very serious that comes to register for false democracy and its claim to spread overmost of the inhabited lands.You have in Douguine a reflection on the languages which borrow from these great linguists that are the people of the Circle of Prague.You have a meditation on this first people who are supposed to be the holy Russian people.You have a whole body of oppositions of the organicism versus democracy, or naturalism versus liberalism, which are perfectly articulated and draw a real philosophical configuration.Well that's it, the base of poutinism.There is nostalgia for Leninism, of course.Nostalgia for Stalinism.There is this famous grandfather Spiridon, his favorite grandfather, who was the bodyguard of the first and the scoundrel of the second, and to whom he has several times said his attachment.There is the fact, therefore, that he knows the Soviet soup since his grandfather tasted him and transmitted his taste for him.There is, again, its nostalgia for tsarism - and be careful!Not just any tsarism!I remind you that, in his office, above his head, there is a portrait of a tsar, only one, Nicolas Premier, massacreur of the disappointments, despot unscrupulous and abominable-Russia has had lots of tsarssuitable;She had philosophers' tsars;She had corresponding tsars ACEC Voltaire, Diderot, the Enlightenment;But no !The tsar that Putin has chosen, the one he put in the portrait above his head is the most stupid of all, the most brutal, the most anti-intellectual, is like that ....In short, there is all this in poutinism.There are all these bad lumps in the poutinist soup.But there is also, there is above all, Douguine, Alexandre Douguine, who structures all this and gives this disorder of references his big reinforcements.Poutinism is Douguinism.And so it's a fascism.Stricto sensu a fascism.I don't do controversy by saying that.It is neither a formula nor a slogan.It’s the history of ideas.In the strict, and cold order of the history of ideas, poutinism is Douguinism, that is to say a fascism.Besides, there is a sign that does not deceive.These two books of Douguine that I have just quoted, I did not read them in Russian but, obviously, in French.Now I will tell you something that may surprise you.The first, the most theoretical, the one that contains the whole of the world's vision of Douguinism, therefore, of Poutinism, Douguine chose to preface the French edition a man who is called Alain Soral, whose name does notSaid probably and fortunately nothing but that we know, we, French, very good since it is the Nazi ideologist par excellence of France today.And, as for the other, the second book, in a most circumstantial sense but, in reality, the most politically interesting, it turns out that it is a book of interviews;But who with the interviews with?Who to relaunch Douguine, send him back the ball and enhance it?Another Frenchman who is called Alain de Benoist whose name Navy says, I imagine, not much either but who has been one of the most articulated ideologues on the French extreme right either, for thirty years..So.Putin's inspirer has chosen two French fascists for sponsors.He did not do it, moreover, only for France since the interview with de Benoist is "all editions".And to those that it would surprise me I just want to recommend watching the visible political scene now, that of the great alliances and correspondence between parties.The only political character of importance who, in France, supports Putin and does not lose any opportunity to say his admiration for him is called Marine Le Pen.In Hungary, the same thing with the leaders of the neonazi and anti -Semitic jobbik and, to a lesser extent, with the ultra nationalist Viktor Orban.In Bulgaria, it is the Ataka which wants to be the relay of poutinism.In France again, you have a Putinian propaganda television, Pro Russia TV, whose editor -in -chief is a former regional National Front regional official and whose technical means are provided by "agency2presse" which is the television of the identity block.And, conversely, when we ask Putin, in the television interview already quoted, what he thinks of these joyful characters who spend their time shaking him wreaths, he says he can see in their power the sign of a"Resumption of values in European countries".In other words, he returns the compliment to them and pays them tribute to them.And if you look at who were the 135 so-called observers, "from 23 countries" and "including international lawyers and human rights activists" to whom he asked-Putin always-to ensure the smooth running of theReferendum of Crimea, you find again, and Pielle mixes, relatives of the French FN or the Austrian FPö;A Marine Le Pen advisor for international issues;people from the Jobbik;Others, attached to a very doubtful Belgian NGO which is called OEDE (European Observatory for Democracy and the Elections) and which is chaired by a former French neonazi;In short, a whole nebula of identity, ultra nationalist and neo fascists who is cold in the back.There is a book by a former Pravda correspondent, Vladimir Bolshakov, Marine Le Pen, why does Putin need it?whose reading I recommend.He details, on the French case, what I am telling you.He describes these "new clothes" of fascism that, to speak like Paul Berman, Etches Vladimir Putin.There is an international Putinian and she is a fascist international!When I think these bastards dare, like Serguei Lavrov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, compare the Maidan to a brown revolution!The truth-but that, you know it better than me ... —It is that it is Arturo ui le petit, that is to say Ianoukovitch, who brought Svoboda to rise.And it was he who, at the height of the Maidan, when he asked his riot police to load, said that the maydan was in the hands of the Jews and that that was why it was necessary to clean the Maidan ...So I say at the same time, like Brecht, that this ascent is resistible.Not irresistible, resistable.And that for two reasons.The first is that Putin is weak.And the second is that the West is strong.Putin weak?His demography is declining.His economy is chancer.He has been witnessing a capital flight for three months that is starting to worry the observers who are most favorable to him.His army herself is much less efficient than tell us about the Douguino Western Poutinists: we do not redo an army like that!We do not remedy a snap of the fingers to a scale of the magnitude that was Sovietism!And, experts for experts, most military experts believe that it is only 17% of the Russian army which is today in full control of its offensive capacities!17%....There is nothing to whip a cat - or, even less, terrorize NATO's strategists ... There is nothing to do with us again, irresistible and relentless player offailures ... no.Putin is weak, really.And it is, moreover, as are always all fascists.Remember the portrait of Himmler in the Kaput de Malaparte.Himmler is in the sauna.He's naked.And Malaparte, observing it, suddenly understands one thing, a very small thing, but which overturns and delights it: Himmler is afraid;Himmler is weak;Himmler is so nasty because he is afraid and he is weak!Well, so, all things considered, Vladimir Putin.And Vladimir Putin, like all the dictators who have this bottom of weakness in them, like Napoleon and Hitler in Russia, like Argentinian generals with Falklands, like so many others, will end up delivering the war too much and fail - you will see….We are strong ? eh yes.If Putin is weaker than he believes, we are much stronger than we think.An example.Our arms contracts and, in particular, those relating to the two French Mistrals: why not put them in suspense?Why not use this weapon that we have and which is a strong weapon?Another.The 2018 Football World Cup to which Putin, be sure, is less than at the Olympic Games in Sochi this year: Let's go, again, if nothing moves in Ukraine and that he persists in hisProject to integrate it into its Eurasian and fascist ensemble, lend us this masquerade?And why not let it hover, already, the threat of a possible boycott?Another still.Our famous energy dependence on Moscow.Imagine that we also unite our strengths.We, that is to say Europeans consumers of Russian gas.Imagine, therefore, that we agree to group our supplies, to constitute a negotiation consortium, to diversify our sources and, incidentally, to engage all together a diversification program which, even if it only takes effect in the years, will have at least thedeserves to send a clear signal to the new master of the gang of flower cabbage, that is to say to the master singer who claims to take us hostages.Another example.Mario Draghi. Imaginez queMario Draghi retrouve le quart, que dis-je le dixième, et même moins encore, de l’imagination dont il a fait preuve quand il a fallu trouver 800 milliards d’euros pour sauver le système bancaire européen.It was good to save the European banking system.It was obviously an absolute, indisputable emergency.But no less indisputable is the need to help Ukraine loosen the embrace of the Douguino-Poutinism and to destabilize, in passing, the destabilization plan of Europe whose attack on Ukraine is onlyfirst stage.However, we are telling us, 20 or 25 billion.That is to say a few for hundred of the rescue plan for our financial system.Do you really believe that it is above our strengths?Do you really believe that Europe does not have the means to oppose Putin to defend these values of law, democracy and freedom of which the Ukrainians are today the sentries?Nope.We have these means.We are as strong as Putin is weak.And this is the full meaning of this meeting, of this great conference, to come and call it back.Thank you, Léon Wieseltier and Timothy Snyder, thank you dear Constantin Sigov, for taking this initiative: this is only the beginning - the fight continues.