OhOn August 19, 1991, when Soviet citizens woke up, they heard news that the Communist Party’s General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned due to illness. This news is a lie, as many citizens expect from their media.The tank drove through Moscow and told true story: The coup launched by the hardliners of the Politburo determined to end Gorbachev’s democratization experiment. They failed. The coup died down in two days. Five months later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
No one in the West saw it coming, but the shock of this unpredictable event convinced people that it was inevitable. The implosion of a superpower built to fulfill Marxist prophecies should have served as a warning to all who claim to understand the rules of history and determine their destination. but not. The prevailing view in Western policy holds that liberal democracy is the end of ideology.
Thirty years of hindsight has not improved this judgment.The spirit of democracy was unveiled in 1991, but Not irreversible. Vladimir Putin re-bottled it. He described the disintegration of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.” Even in Russia, which won the title in the Great World War, this should be absurd, but this sentence aroused identification and national pride among people who merged with the Soviet Union. Vibes. Geography and organization.
In the light of failure, The best account so far Western liberalism transplantation failed In the East, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes distinguish between Communist dictatorship and the Soviet Union as the homeland of the nation. Most Russians despise the former. The disintegration of the latter brought them chaos, poverty and heartbreak.
The conflation of the two makes it difficult for outside observers to understand the effectiveness of Soviet nostalgia, and this nostalgia is Putin’s most effective tool to denigrate democracy and consolidate power. This also makes it meaningless to classify the current Russian regime in ideological terms left over from different eras. Putinism is not obsessed with the racial purity of the typical fascist style. Nor is it a class-based missionary doctrine like Leninism. It does not present itself as a coherent competitor to democracy, unless it somehow portrays itself as a more realistic power game in which all politics can be reduced to this game in a cynical analysis.
The only doctrinal infection from post-Soviet Russia is caustic anti-idealism-a kind of nihilism, Trolling It treats arguments about universal rights and the moral superiority of democratic institutions as sadly naive or shameful hypocrisy. With reference to the nasty regime supported by the Pentagon, corruption scandals, and Washington’s arrogant military intervention, this case can be easily combined.
Elected in the form of Donald Trump in power in the performing arts industry has almost no wise function to promote American democracy. His successor, Joe Biden, has asserted the resilience of the Constitution, but so far, his presidency looks more like a respite from disease than its remedy. In many European countries, moderate conservatives and social democratic parties have been challenged or even replaced by xenophobes and nationalists. They followed Putin’s method and responded to his analysis that the European Union was destroyed by mass immigration and degraded social liberalism. Lost myself.
Today, when the Taliban regained Kabul 20 years after being expelled from Kabul, it is difficult to provide evangelical cases for Western forces.This kind of humiliation for those who remember Catastrophic Soviet war In Afghanistan and the ragged withdrawal scenes, the country’s self-esteem as a superpower has been shaken.
This is not a prediction of the decline of the United States. History has never been so neat and symmetrical. The Soviet system was not destined to collapse like it is now, but it obviously cannot be repaired. Some Russian analysts see the enduring power of the Chinese Communist Party as a model for the victory of Moscow’s hardliners in 1991. Putting aside the ethics (the Red Square massacre that matches Tiananmen Square), the counterfactuals are too complicated. China is different from Russia in many ways. I don’t know if it is feasible.
In many respects, the true successor to the Soviet Union is Belarus. Belarus insists on state economic control, while Russia uses oligarchs to “reform” its economy.This week is also the first anniversary Mass demonstration Oppose Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Minsk. But he is still in power, oppressing, kidnapping, torturing and murdering his critics. There are many aspects to the tragedy in Belarus, but one is contingency in time, seeing that the desperate pursuit of political freedom coincides with the defensive reflection phase of mature democracies that may be more strongly supported before.
It is true that the West over-expanded and discredited itself in various post-Cold War adventures, trying to export the government system to the harsh climate. To be sure, these mistakes have not weakened the desire of people who actually live under the opposite conditions for freedom and prosperity, the historical dividend of democracy. Even Putin fears that this appetite will one day exceed his ability to control it through propaganda, fear and bribery.
Enraged protesters in Belarus and terrified Afghans Kabul Airport Runway They have a good understanding of what they lack, even if too many bored Westerners agree with the Kremlin’s view that in a world ruled by real politics, human rights are an insignificant liberalism.
Considering the prospects of Afghan refugees or Belarusian dissidents, it is hard not to feel the terrible moral weakness; the fear of returning to the original point is full of anger over the profligate decades of squandering the Cold War victory march that was misjudged by the West And sadness.
These issues may not be the biggest concerns of many British voters, but they are part of the malaise that plagues our politics. This is not a crisis of democratic practice. There were no tanks on the streets of London, and no stolen elections. This is a crisis of democratic self-esteem, and it has become self-realization. If we do not believe that our system is a cherished system, we will be more vulnerable to false and corrosive claims. This view is tempting because it seems to explain various disappointing situations, and numbingly, because it hinders creative thinking about reforms and hinders participation. This is also wrong. Compared with the plight of those who do not have the luxury of taking democracy for granted, our disappointment is relative and can be made up for.
