 |
| Navalny |
The death of Alexei Navalny at the hands, and perhaps the orders, of Russian President Vladimir Putin was, according to a Hobbesian view of power, either necessary or not necessary.
It is true that Navalny was a vigorous opponent of Putin’s
attempt to turn Russia’s strategic orientation from West to East. Likewise,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a vigorous opponent of Saint Stalin, an eastern
oriental potentate who little understood that Russia belongs to the West, not
the East. The Putin restoration of a debased Stalinism is perhaps his most
fatal mistake.
The rejection of Western perceptions cuts against the
Russian grain from Peter the Great to Chekov, who wrote some of his most
memorable plays in Ukraine.
Necessity, Thomas Hobbes tells us, is a cruel master – life
in a Hobbesian universe, one without ordered liberty, is “nasty, brutal and
short” -- but a master none-the-less. Once ethics and morality are removed from
politics, power and force alone reign supreme. In a police state, where all the
powers of the state serve modern tyrants such as Putin, power is at the service
of a ruling unitary party.
Navalny was decidedly not a member in good standing of
Putin’s fascist state. Yes – fascist state.
It was Mussolini who provided to the West a working
definition of fascism: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state,
nothing above the state.” That, it turns out, is also the Stalinist vision of a
unitary world-government. With deadly blows , fascism eliminates what G.K.
Chesterton and others, notably Edmund
Burke, used to call “the little platoons of democracy.”
In “A speech during the debate on
the defeat of Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga” in 1777, Burke addressed the
mistakes of Great Britain’s military and political ministry. Had the British
House applied to him at the beginning of the war of American Independence,
Burke said, he could have told them – and did in fact tell them – of the many
wants under which the Americans labored. “But,” Lloyd’s Evening Post reported at the time, “he could also have
informed them that men fighting for liberty were not influenced by such
particulars” as recounted by Burke – “as being without salt, without shoes,
without a rag on their backs -- that these affect only the body, but that the
souls of the Americans were unreduced.” The passage above is taken from Edmund
Burke, On the American Revolution, Selected Speeches and letters, edited by
Elliot R. Barkan.
Running for re-election to office
in 1780, Burke told his constituents – many of them, like himself committed
Royalists – that references to Americans as “our subjects in America, our
colonies, our dependents [emphasis
original]” was little more than a “way of proscribing
the citizens by denominations and general descriptions [emphasis original]…
nothing better at bottom than the miserable invention of an ungenerous ambition
which would fain hold the sacred trust of power, without any of the virtues or
any of the energy that give title to it, a receipt of policy made up of a
detestable compound of malice, cowardice and sloth.”
This description perfectly
portrays power hungry tyrants who use synthetic divisions to reduce the
liberties of the people, proclaiming all the while that the font of liberty
lies in the generosity of the state and not in the natural moral propensities
of humankind.
Burke knew he would lose his
election at Guildhall, Bristol. Never-the-less, he did not temper his speech in
support of essential liberties: “…arbitrarily, to class men under general
descriptions, in order to proscribe and punish them in the lump for a presumed
delinquency of which perhaps but a part, perhaps none at all are guilty, is
indeed a compendious method an saves a world of trouble about proof. But such a
method, instead of being law, is an act of unnatural rebellion against the
legal dominion of reason and justice; and this vice, in any constitution that
entertains it, at one time or other will certainly bring its ruin.”
Putin is playing with fire. He
and tyrants everywhere are the ruin of states that rest upon the essential
liberties of its people. Liberty is not a product of statecraft, though a
realist and honorable state will do its best to preserve the “little platoons
of democracy” without which the liberty of the people cannot survive.
You can kill a man with a bullet,
or a shot of nerve agent poison, or an extended stay at The IK-3
prison camp, nicknamed the Polar Wolf, located in the Yamalo-Nenets region well
above the Arctic Circle. But the idea of ordered liberty under law, a quick
review of the history of Rome to “The Second Rome,” the pre-Soviet Russian
Empire, shows us that the idea of liberty under law is more durable and fully capable
over time of withstanding the indignities of random force.
Comments