Charles Elias Chartouni: The Dilemmas of Liberalization and the Ramblings of Dictatorship/ شارل الياس شرتوني: روسيا، معضلات التحرر شارل الياس شرتوني: روسيا ، معضلات التحرر وهذيان الديكتاتوريات
Russia, the Dilemmas of Liberalization and the Ramblings of Dictatorship Charles Elias Chartouni/April 22/2021 شارل الياس شرتوني: روسيا، معضلات التحرر شارل الياس شرتوني: روسيا، معضلات التحرر وهذيان الديكتاتوريات
The renewed rhetoric of the Cold War sounded in the latest state of the nation speech of Vladimir Putin, reflects the blatant contradictions of a liberalizing social order and the paranoid state of mind of a growing dictatorship. The simulated tensions with Western democracies are inversely proportionate to the acceleration of societal liberalization in Russia, the more the Russians engage the dynamics of a liberal society, the more the autocratic regime heightens the pressure on the inside, feeds the paranoia on the outside, and becomes more polarizing internationally. This tale spinning about a Western threat to Russian security is directly proportional to the increasing repression inside Russia, and the perpetuation of the State Murder legacy and its ostentatious display by Vladimir Putin, betray the very mood of a liberalizing civil society, growing weary and away from a wonted political stratagem based on State terror and official cynicism.
Nothing justifies the paranoid State narrative of Western conspiracy, but the inability of the autocratic regime to cope with the enhancing liberalization and its overall political and social incidence, it’s becoming more and more dysfunctional and doesn’t resonate with the new cultural and political values. Based on the anachronistic tropes and inconsistencies of a dysfunctional imperial narrative, this rhetoric does not cohere anymore with the political mood and proclivities of a liberalizing society, which has no qualms locating itself on a continuum between the democratic and liberal political values and their Western strategic anchors. The repeated assassination essays on Alexei Navalny’s life come at the heels of a time honored State Murder and political terror tradition, and deliberately fail to come to terms with the changing paradigms of a society that has no more tolerance for immemorial political servitude, State subservience and their accommodating political apathy.
Cashing on the imponderables of vast geopolitics and a waning imperial script, Putin is growing more and more deaf and walling himself behind the psychotic defenses of the Western conspiracy discourse, the current conflict dynamics and travails of Western democracies, and his insidious determination at derailing them. The so-called state of the nation speech mimicked political tradition reflects poorly its democratic inspiration and embedding, and strives at hijacking the right of the Russian people to speak for itself, define its values, reform its institutions, elaborate its consensuses and set its strategic anchors.
This figure of speech doesn’t reflect the organic unity of the czarist era, nor the demented semantics of Bolshevism, it reflects the paradoxes and delusions of an unhinged autocracy which has lost touch with reality and lives within its psychotic bounds. The delirious ramblings discharging in every direction, matching with internal blind repression, institutional mendacity and international warmongering are quite metonymic, they reflect the hazards of an erratic worldview and the fallacies of an expired totalitarianism.
