The theology of total war in Putin’s imperialistic prayers
“Putin is Hitler.” That simple equation, by Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger, whose rants I often discount, struck a nerve. I had already found myself uncomfortably “getting” Sen. Lindsey Graham intemperately calling to “take out” Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rash as Graham’s statement was, it called to mind for many the 1944 homegrown plot against Adolf Hitler.
Conflating Putin with Hitler, let alone fantasies of another Claus von Stauffenberg motivated by soldiers in body bags and the ruble’s collapse, doesn’t get us anywhere. Of real concern is Putin’s religious zealotry. In the empirical picture of Putin the Conqueror, his Orthodox passion rules. It is easy to overlook this when scoping through the lens of a century of titular communism, which we associate with atheism and state over church.
With Putin, a secular point of view is misleading at best. We have seen not a “withering away of the state,” as predicted by Friedrich Engels, but of the entire Marxist philosophy born on the world stage in 1917 and dead at the feet of plutocrats trampling on the last vestiges of communism in favor of self-dealing cronyism. It doesn’t fit our reductionist view of Putin as KGB amoral iceman to recalibrate our understanding to include the aluminum cross he has worn from his neck since a visit to Israel nearly 30 years ago. His mother, Maria, gave it to him, and it is closer to his heart, literally and figuratively, than simple nostalgia for the USSR.
On one level, this latter-day Hitlerite is seeking to restore a Eurasian empire to give Russia in quantity of soil what it lacks in quality of life. Yet at the heart of this revanchist dream lurks a religious visionary. Not for nothing did Putin quote scripture upon the launch of his invasion, while decrying “gender freedom” and other supposed ills of the West that sound uncannily like those of QAnon. There are crazies on both continents. Religion can create a blind for idle minds to hide behind. Marx called it the “opiate of the masses.” Maybe he got one thing right. It can also serve as opiate for monsters or, in the case of Putin, his ecstasy.
In a Western world dominated by secular governance, fighting for freedom not only of worship — NATO not nativity — we are shocked when religion persists into everything from the Taliban to Texans who see abortion through their biblical lens. We salute “In God We Trust,” conflating it with Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” and practice retail therapy as we let our fingers do the walking through a virtual mall. Our new dogma is genuflection to the five geek-not-Greek gods of the metaverse pantheon: Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. We’re going to hail.
There is a distinction with a difference if Putin is waging holy war, not only playing RISK on a board abandoned Dec. 25, 1991, when the Soviet flag was lowered. That linkage may be key to Putin’s puzzle. It was as if the cross came down on Christmas Day of 1991. If righteous zealotry is aflame in Putin, then the controlled pragmatism we expect of a KGBer is overruled by Maria Ivanovna Shelomova’s orthodoxy and son Vladimir’s belief that Mother Russia is an Eden and the West represents the Satanic serpent that has caused us to leave the Garden.
Among the profound downsides of crusaders is ignoring norms of civilized behavior. Whether one’s weapons are hewn from metal brandished by horseback knights in chainmail or detonated by airborne death from above, Putin doesn’t draw the bright lines we would hope to see.
When I was tracking down biochemical mycotoxins in Southeast Asia, they likely were stirred in industrial bathtubs of Soviet origin. In Afghanistan and Syria, nerve agents were routine tools of the Russian arsenal. Whether used on opposition leaders like Navalny or defectors in England, Putin has no compunction deploying deadly poisons. When he warns off the West with nuclear saber-rattling, he isn’t just whistling Dixie. He colors outside the lines. After all, America’s first use of nuclear weapons fore-shortened World War II, so a warning nuke strike is, in his mind, an acceptable move in a playbook based on our own nuclear football.
In a quasi-religious worldview, whatever it takes to get the job done is fair trade for a restoration of historic and biblical glory. Destruction cleanses. Biden and NATO warn of some undefined escalation should Putin resort to nukes or chemicals. This is in some ways a false narrative. One can level cities just as well with conventional weapons. In Biden-speak, here’s the deal: if you’re afraid to poke the bear, the bear will eat you. It’s his nature and belief system. Ukraine is the end of the beginning.
