Exactly what sort
of adversary is Vladimir Putin in Ukraine? At one basic level,
it’s not a difficult question. Plainly and irremediably,
the Russian president is a barbarous human being. Further,
as head of state with the world’s largest nuclear weapons
inventory, these traits could suggest unprecedented “hangings”
among his conquered peoples.
Not discernible
here are any expressions of personal reformation or redemption.
More specific queries should also arise. To begin, it’s
reasonable to ask, is Putin “normal?” In candour,
this brutally stark query offers no prospect of eliciting
tangible analytic insights. Any meaningful definitions of
normalcy would be deeply subjective and nearly impossible
to operationalize. A better question, therefore, would inquire
about the Russian dictator’s “rationality.”
A rational leader,
in the academically disciplined study of world politics, is
one who values his country’s national survival more
highly than any other preference or combination of preferences.
Does such a primal
preference ordering accurately describe Vladimir Putin? Or
would he more plausibly prove willing to tolerate grave security
risks to Russia in exchange for presumptively enhanced personal
power and prestige? In essence, US President Joe Biden, and
America’s NATO allies will need to understand that even
a rational Vladimir Putin could pose existential threats to
certain nation-states. In a variety of cases – because
of increasingly probable decisional miscalculations that could
occur during episodes of intense crisis – a seemingly
rational Putin could pose greater perils to world legal order
than an irrational Russian president.
Credo quia
absurdum, warned the ancient philosopher Tertullian.
“I believe because it is absurd.” In all such
complex matters, it will be critically important for pertinent
national decision-makers to differentiate between a Putin
who is “merely evil” from a Putin who is potentially
irrational or subject to literal madness: “Do you know
what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman,”
inquires Luigi Pirandello in Act II of Henry IV,
“with one who shakes the foundations of all you have
built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your
constructions?”
But the Russian
war against Ukrainian noncombatants is not “just”
about evil or madness. After World War II and the Holocaust,
American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed Nazi (SS)
doctors. Perplexed as a physician, that such monstrous Nazi
crimes could ever have been justified as “hygiene,”
Lifton was determined to answer some basic questions. Most
elementary of these was the following: How could the Nazi
doctors have managed to conform large-scale medicalized killing
of innocent and defenseless human beings with otherwise normal
private lives?
In similar fashion,
US and other world leaders ought now to inquire about Vladimir
Putin and his all-too-many Russian underlings, enablers, and
otherwise witting allies: How can these people witness the
daily aggression and genocide now being inflicted in Ukraine
by thousands of Russian soldiers, and continue “per
normal” with their own day-to-day lives? In present
day academic parlance, this would be called a “bystander”
issue.
There is more.
It was not unusual for Nazi doctors to remain, good fathers
and husbands, while systematically murdering “sub-human”
children. These defiling physicians (doctors sworn by Hippocratic
oath to “do no harm”) were capable of supervising
genocidal mass murders six days a week (on Sundays they “normally”
went to church). Now, we must inquire along very similar lines
of questioning: Are Russian soldier-murderers in Ukraine also
able to remain good fathers and husbands? If so, what would
this mean for the future of “Cold War II” between
Washington, Moscow, and assorted other nation states? Should
the nations now more urgently expect a “hot” war?
To the physician,
the Oath of Hippocrates pledges that “I will keep pure
and holy both my life and my art.” When asked about
this unwavering duty, most interviewed SS doctors felt no
contradiction. In Nazi pseudo-biology, “The Jew”
was “a source of infection.” Ridding society of
Jews, it followed, was a properly “anti-infective”
medical goal. All such murderous “excisions” were
conceptualized as recognizable obligations of “healing,”
“compassion” and “racial hygiene.”
The duality of
good and evil within each individual person is a very old
idea in western thought, most notably in German literature,
from Johan Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche to
Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. Always, in studying this literature,
humans may learn that the critical boundaries of caring and
compassion exist most genuinely within each individual person.
As Putin-ordered Nuremberg-category crimes continue to escalate,
it is finally time to acknowledge that the walls of human
normalcy, abnormality and rationality are conspicuously porous;
they can allow even a single individual to navigate easily
between polar extremes.
After attending
the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, political philosopher
Hannah Arendt advanced the sobering hypothesis that extreme
evil can be ordinary or “banal.” Looking ahead,
as violence-stoking hatreds are further channeled by Russian
President Vladimir Putin into crudely belligerent passions
of “Mother Russia,” banality could precipitate
not “only” additional genocides, but also more
catastrophic international wars. Prima facie, the
worst case here would be represented by a nuclear war.
Ultimately, in
all matters of Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine,
truth will prove exculpatory.
This cryptic observation
by Rainer Maria Rilke, the Dionysian poet (one associated
with dense philosophical issues of “being”) laments
the lies of despots like Putin. Though the virulent particulars
of such lies are ever-changing around the world, their universality
of meaning remains constant and significant.
Why does the familiar
colloquy from Samuel Beckett’s most famous play resonate
tellingly across our fragmenting global landscape? The answer:
In general, endangered human beings are still hoping against
hope for existential rescue from “Godot.” Ironically,
of course, such hopes for salvation from outside always lead
not to freedom from death, but to further mass killings (in
Beckett’s terminology, “hangings”) on a
much larger scale.
Looking ahead,
there will be no deus ex machina, no rescuing “God
from the machine.” Once again, salvation will have to
come from the inside, from the willingness and capacity of
individual human beings to harmonize normalcy with empathy
and compassion. There is no other sensible “wait.”
