30
Conservative Chronicle
VLADIMIR PUTIN: September 15, 2016
Vladimir Putin’s post-factual politics “In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. ... Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building. ... For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.” — George Orwell, 1984
DOCUMENTS inconvenient to the regime went into the Ministry of Truth’s slits and down to “enormous furnaces.” Modern tyrannies depend on state control of national memories — retroactive truths established by government fiat. Which is why Russia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of a blogger for violating Article 354.1 of Russia’s criminal code. This May 2014 provision criminalizes the “Rehabilitation of Nazism.” The blogger’s crime was to write: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War.” The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have gone down one of Vladimir Putin’s memory holes. The pact was signed Aug. 23, 1939. On Sept. 1, Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Poland was carved up in accordance with the secret protocols, and about six months later Soviet occupiers were conducting the Katyn Forest Massacre of 25,700 Polish military officers, officials, priests and intellectuals. Although in 2009 Putin denounced the pact as “collusion to solve one’s problems at others’ expense,” in 2015 he defended it as Stalin’s means of buying time to prepare for the Nazi onslaught. This fable is refuted by, among other facts, this: Stalin did not prepare. When Germany’s ambassador in Moscow informed Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that their nations were now at war, a stunned Molotov asked, “What have we done to deserve this?” The Russian Supreme Court’s Orwellian ruling was that the blogger denied facts established by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. It convicted leading Nazis of waging aggressive war against, among others, Poland, but, in an act of victors’ justice, made no judgment against the Soviet regime, representatives of which sat on the tribunal. This accommodation to postwar political reality was necessary to enable the tribunal to function, which was necessary for civilizing vengeance. The tribunal ignored, but did not deny, the patent fact of Soviet aggression. The Russian court’s ruling is a window into the sinister continuity of Putin’s Russia and the Soviet system that incubated him. So, if the former secretary of state who aspires to the American presidency has time to read a book
before Jan. 20, she should make it The 1836 to celebrate a soldier’s death in New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladi- the war against Poland and rewritten mir Putin by Steven Lee Myers of the in Soviet times ... to remove the homNew York Times. It is a study of the vol- age to the tsar. For Putin, the choir sang atile nostalgia of a man seething with the Soviet verses.” There was the 2006 resentments acquired as a KGB opera- assassination in Moscow, on Putin’s tive — a “devoted officer of a dying 54th birthday, of the troublesome jourAnna Politkovskaya. empire” — during the Soviet Union’s n a l i s t (Asked about the final years. It is a frequent deaths of pointillist portrait anti-Putin journalpainted with tellists, Donald Trump ing details that breezily said, “I should cause so(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group think our country briety to supplant dreams of happy policy “resets” with does plenty of killing.”) And the 2006 poisoning in London of Putin’s antagoRussia: nist Alexander Litvinenko using radioAS A SENIOR security official in active polonium-210. Domestically, Putin’s “managed depost-Soviet Russia, Putin kept on his desk a bronze statue of “Iron Felix” Dz- mocracy” is Stalinism leavened by kleperzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret tomania, as in the looting of the energy police and terror apparatus. At Putin’s giant Yukos. In foreign policy, Putin’s May 7, 2000, presidential inauguration, Russia is unambiguously and unapoloa choir sang a composition “written in getically revanchist. The Soviet Union
George
Will
was likened to a burglar creeping down a hotel corridor until he finds an unlocked door. Putin, who found Crimea unlocked (when he honeymooned there in 1983, it seemed “a magical, sacred place to him,” writes Myers), is pushing on the door of what remains of Ukraine. The Democratic presidential nominee fundamentally misread Putin’s thugocracy, and her opponent admires the thug because “at least he’s a leader.” As the Russian blogger’s fate demonstrates, Putin practices what Orwell wrote: “’Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” BACK IN THE day, some analysts prophesied a “convergence” between the Soviet Union and the United States, two industrial societies becoming more alike. In our day, there is indeed a growing similarity: In both places, post-factual politics are normal.
2016 ELECTION: September 15, 2016
A big, beautiful black swan
I
f you aren’t seriously contemplating the biggest black swan event in American electoral history, you aren’t paying attention. Fifteen months ago, Donald Trump was a reality-TV star with a spotty business record and a weird penchant for proclaiming that he was on the verge of running for president. Now, he’s perhaps a few big breaks and a couple of sterling debate performances away from being elected 45th president of the United States. TRUMP HAS no experience in elected office and, unlike past nonpoliticians elected president, hasn’t won a major war. He barely has a national campaign. He perhaps knows less about public affairs than the average congressman. He has repeatedly advertised his thin-skinned vindictiveness and is trampling on basic political norms. No major political party has ever nominated anyone like this. If Trump were to prevail, it would make Barack Obama’s unlikely rise from unknown state senator to first African-American president of the United States in about four years look like a boringly conventional political trajectory. Trump now has a legitimate shot at winning the general election because he got the lucky draw of at least the second-worst presidential nominee in recent memory and, pending how she fares over the next two months, perhaps the worst. All it took for Trump to wipe away most of Hillary Clinton’s lead was act-
ing like a somewhat normal presidential candidate. Have a meeting with a foreign leader. Give some policy speeches. Read from a teleprompter at rallies. Use his NPR voice when appropriate. NONE OF this required strategic genius, only a decision not to throw away the election with repeated episodes of self-indulgent stupidity. Democrats should be feeling a creeping sense of panic: — They are trying to win with a candidate who is loathed and distrusted and has few redeem-
Rich
Lowry (c) 2016, King Features Syndicate
ing qualities. As Yuval Levin, editor of the journal National Affairs, points out, corrupt and dishonest politicians are often entertaining, and dull politicians are usually earnest and honest. Hillary manages to be both boring and corrupt. If she decided to sit out the rest of the campaign and rely on surrogates to hit the trail, she might do no worse and perhaps better. — No one can be certain that her health is what the campaign says it is. If Hillary did have a more serious condition than allergies and walking pneumonia, does anyone believe the Clintons would be forthright about it? Even if nothing else ails her, if Clinton has another episode in public like the one on Sept. 11, the bottom might fall out.
— President Obama probably can’t close Hillary’s enthusiasm gap. For entirely understandable reasons (dull, inauthentic and old), the Obama coalition isn’t excited by Clinton. Obama is an adept campaigner, but there is no evidence Obama ever successfully transferred enthusiasm for himself to another candidate. — If the kitchen sink hasn’t killed off Trump, what else is there? The Clinton campaign has already used his greatest hits of most offensive statements in countless TV ads. If none of this has sunk Trump, what’s left that is going to have a new and different shock value? — A compelling Trump debate performance could change perceptions of his suitability to be commander in chief. Hillary is trouncing Trump on this attribute by a 2-to-1 margin. If Trump shows up and seems plausible during the biggest moment of the campaign, he could vastly improve his standing on this basic question of readiness. All this said, Hillary probably still has an advantage. Presumably, she won’t be as snakebit the rest of the campaign as she has been the past two weeks. She has a campaign and Trump doesn’t, and that must count for something. Demographics favor her. But if Trump can hoist himself over the bar of acceptability, he might give the voting public enough permission to make this the change election it is naturally inclined to be. A TRUMP victory may not be likely, but it isn’t far-fetched. And no, stranger things haven’t happened.