I occasionally still get likes for this post, so I wanted to follow up and say that I haven’t casually seen this narrative around for a while. Not saying it’s not out there, but my impression is that it isn’t generally the “hot take” anymore.
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that’s a silly thing to say about an autocrat.
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From a BBC article on how to spot fake news about the war.
Here’s a hint: Steven Seagal is the Mr. Bean of fighting.
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I do not consider Snyder a worthwhile source on this particular topic. He has been the go-to academic pundit for a liberal mainstream that has been fixedly anti-Russia for more than a decade. He is one of the architects (a principal one, possibly) of the positioning of Putin as some kind of modern-day Hitler and as Russia more generally as a globally anti-Democratic force, manipulating everything from Brexit, to the rise of Trump, to police brutality against Black people with masterful shadow puppetry. So I do not trust him on this topic.
Specifically, his habit of focusing on the efforts and motivations of individual leaders as though they existed in a vacuum has been a source of critique.
Here’s a critique of his work from The Nation.
Re: his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which (incorrectly, IMO) relates the deadly regimes of Hitler and Stalin:
The conflation of Stalinist and Nazi crimes seemed morally righteous to some but grossly reductive to others. The somewhat arbitrary temporal and geographical framework omitted important episodes of political violence in the region; by conflating Nazi and Soviet tactics, Snyder elided important differences between them—most notably that the Nazis explicitly planned to exterminate certain ethnic groups, while Soviet violence was more complex in its aims and methods, and more varied in its results. Snyder was also criticized for focusing on the intentions and actions of a select group of political leaders while giving short shrift to the many other historical forces at play, such as the actions of local governments and populations.
Since then, he’s doubled-down on rhetoric that has fomented a post-2000 Red Scare, wherein Russia is the existential threat of our time; THE sole source of resistance against the inevitability of all world governments embracing liberal democracy, secretly responsible for the modern rise of the far-Right in many areas of the globe.
On this topic specifically, for instance, it’s weird that he hand-waves any geopolitical motivations on the basis that the actions make Russia more susceptible to China, as though the West is a benign and neutral force vis a vis Russia and it’s natural resources.
Fixed that for you.
How dare Snyder, given Putin’s well-known reputation for eschewing the tactics of fascism in his rise to power and his championing of liberal democracy throughout the world. /s
Indeed, Putin’s regime has never interfered in UK or US votes over the past decade. /s
Apparently by people who haven’t read his books or interviews closely.
BS. The thing he’s trying to warn about is the threat posed by right-wing sado-populists to liberal democracy. The Putin regime happens to be one of the biggest promoters of that unfortunate trend. This has nothing to do with “Red scares” or “McCarthyism” or whatever lazy false equivalencies the Useful Idiots and tankies are trying to draw.
He doesn’t hand-wave them away. He acknowledges that the geopolitical and ultra-nationalist motivations of Putin exist but that they’re so wrong-headed and misguided on their own terms (as distinct from the terms of the neoliberal “realist” West, which finds them strange) that they’re going to place Russia in the position of a vassal state and resource extraction site and Western-facing catspaw for China.
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Wow, what a crazy conspiracy theory! As if that would happen without leaving tons and tons of evidence.
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“Will someone think of the brutal dictator who started a war of aggression??!!!??”
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Didn’t you hear? This is all actually NATO’s doing. They forced the poor guy into invading Ukraine.
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Same people in 1939, “Those French and British made me invade Poland. After they had so graciously given me Czechoslovakia!”
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Typical “mostly false” statement. Whereas evidence is clear about Putin’s role in Brexit and Trump, the police brutality part is pure bullshit that came out of nowhere and was tacked on.
A common tactic of people making bad faith arguments.
Threatening to unleash nuclear weapons tends to do that. Especially as a way to have a free hand in a war of aggression against a democratic nation.
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Pretty sure Putin did and does not need any help in that area. He is doing a bang-up job himself, with no assistance whatsoever. Between his intervention in Brexit, 2016 and 2020 elections in the US, Hungary with Orban, to call him “anti-democratic” is pretty weak tea, honestly.
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So you’re saying Putin causes police brutality? What are the tons of evidence?
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Oh, hey, the well-poisoning one you threw in. Unfortunately people were already ahead of you there:
So sorry, that’s disingenous and not going to work here.
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I didn’t “tack it on”; it was in the critique that I referenced to begin with as something Snyder himself advanced, along with many other poorly-evidenced claims about Russia’s global campaign to undermine democracy put forth in his writing. Have you read lots of Timothy Snyder’s work or critiques of that work?
Sure. They (and by they I mean Putin) never once supported anti-Democratic regimes or flooded social media in support of anti-democratic candidates or initiatives in the west… that was all in our heads… /s
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Yes, frequently.
Putin didn’t invent police brutality but he’s definitely a big fan of it.
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That wasn’t the claim that I made nor was it the relevant point of contention. It is one thing to acknowledge Russian meddling in such affairs without attributing to Russia both the calculus and scope of abilities to manifest those outcomes to the extent that Mr. Snyder does – usually with poor evidentiary support, as acknowledged by some of his own peers.
This was my stated reason for taking Snyder’s statements vis a vis Putin and Russia with a grain of salt – his willingness to focus on “great men” at the expense of many other relevant circumstances leading to historical outcomes seems to be a consistent blind spot for him.
Let’s look at what they actually wrote, rather than your recension of it, eh?
Snyder’s latest book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, marks the next phase in his transformation from academic historian to political commentator; it is also the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump’s wake.
Ok. Bold claim.
The book’s cover comes complete with helpful directional indicators: “Russia > Europe > America”—the road to unfreedom is a one-way street. For Snyder, Russia is to blame for the growth of the “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama,
Ah, so it wasn’t Russian Trøll Farms pushing it on Twitter until the Right Wing noticed?
stoking the Scottish independence referendum,
Brexit,
the rise of the far right in various European countries,
Entirely to blame? No. But definitely involved in supporting them.
and the Syrian refugee crisis.
You know, in that whole “taking advantage of crushing a popular revolution and making Bashar al-Assad his wholly owned client and having turned Syria into a training-ground and source of shock troops like he already had done with Chechnya” thing.
Russia is also in cahoots with the National Rifle Association
and has been sowing dissension in the United States by encouraging hostility between the police and African Americans.
AHAH! There it is. Not quite what you say it says, though. To be fair, it doesn’t take much to encourage that hostility: the existing power structures do that very well on their own.
Still. That sounds ridiculous. There can’t possibly be any evidence of that sort of operation, can there?
Oh.
Putin’s “grandest campaign” of all, though, was his “cyberwar to destroy the United States of America” by “escorting” Trump to the American presidency.
Well, I’m glad that never happened. Can you imagine?
Turns out even the poison pill is actually accurate. Are you still paranoid when it’s demonstrable that they really are out to get you?
[citation needed]
I’m looking around for where the goalposts are now. They seem to keep moving.
[citation needed] How many is “some”? Do those “some” possibly have bugbears of their own to consider?
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