شارل الياس شرتوني: اوكرانيا وديناميات التوتاليتارية المتجددة Ukraine and the Dynamics of a Resurgent Totalitarianism Charles Elias Chartouni/March 11/2022
The miscalculations of the Russian criminal autocrat manifested the real designs of neo-imperial Russia and its Chinese ally united in a common undertaking: destroy the post-Cold War equilibriums, the liberal narrative and democratic institutions, and the post WWII international order. The wanton destruction of Ukraine is the entry gate and the platform around which this new dynamic organizes and operates. When we listen to the post factual tale spinning of the Russian dictator: forcing Ukraine into joining NATO, fighting against Nazism, Labs preparing for chemical and biological warfare, ethnic cleansing targeting Russians in Crimea, Donbas, Louhsank, NATO’s threats to Russia and the attempt at Russia’s moral and territorial integrity, we are bound to deconstruct a wholesale culture of lies inherited from the Soviet times and their ideological fallacies.
A simple examination of facts is enough to undermine the implausibility of these fabrications to justify the bloodshed , the destruction of Ukraine, and the questioning of the post-Cold War geopolitics, under the spurious threats targeting Russia. Thirty two years after the implosion of Communism and its ideological imperium, we witnessed the recovery of self determination of countries subjugated to the “Prison of Peoples, Prison des Peuples” (Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839 published in 1843, recycled by Lenine in 1914) which applies to the imperial Russia, its Soviet successor and Putin’s legacy. Putin’s worldview is based on an inherent fallacy which impugns historical facts, predicates of international law (the right to self determination and its derivatives), and role of international institutions in arbitraging conflicts, achieving working political arrangements and setting the foundations of a lasting peace.
According to Putin, these nations have no right to decide for themselves, negotiate their geopolitics and engage the international life as independent moral and national actors, as plainly illustrated in the late failed negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, whereby Ukrainians were denied national and political stature and assigned to unconditional capitulation. The late falsehoods related to biological warfare labs were fibs to justify and conceal the appalling brutality of war conduct and its cohort of crimes (carpet bombing of civilians, economic, medical, educational and civilian infrastructures, nuclear sites, airports, political assassinations ….) and its ultimate objective: transform Ukraine into a dysfunctional State governed by criminal subordinates appointed by the autocrat, and expand the list of “frozen conflicts” which aptly describe Putin’s strategy along different geopolitical spectrums (Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, Lybia, Mali …).
The staunch and heroic resistance displayed by the Ukrainians validated their entitlements as an independent nation, revived the unhealed wounds of the past (the Famine of the 1930’s which killed 3.900.000 Ukrainians, known under the label of Holodomor, 1932-1933), and the united stance of the splintered Orthodox Churches of Ukraine and their opposition to the endorsement of Putin’s war by the Moscow Patriarchate, and his failure to break the national opposition, account for the ferocity of the war course and the deplorable references to nuclear armaments, while combats reveal the mediocrity of the Russian army, its underperformance and pervasive corruption.
Undoubtedly, Putin’s blunders and Xi’s duplicity revealed their subversive intentions, and accounted for the unanimous stand of Western democracies which perceived the underlying connotations of this war and its ultimate objective: the destruction of the Western liberal democracy and its geo-political embedding, this conflict ushers a new era reminiscent of erstwhile times and conditions. The resurgence of NATO, the restoration of strategic demarcation lines, and the standoff between “open societies and their enemies” is once again, at the forefront of international politics and its renewed challenges.
