On the occasion of the release of the 100th issue of Desk Russie‘s newsletter, set up four years ago, the author explains the essence of our fight against Putin, Trump, and all those who will not see: “The freedom we defend is a flame that never goes out.”
Thinking about this 100th issue of Desk Russie, I was reminded of these lines by the very peaceful Belgian poet and singer Julos Beaucarne, written in 1975, exactly 50 years ago:
“There are hundreds of silences that kill
for centuries and centuries.
Our ears are there to keep us awake.
There are alarm clocks that ring like bugles.
There are few that sing lullabies.“
In my memory, it was even: ”There are alarm clocks that ring like machine guns.”
In the LP he released that year, entitled Chandeleur septante-cinq (“Candlemas 75”), Beaucarne placed the poem at the beginning of his Letter to Kissinger, which recounted the death of another singer-songwriter, Victor Jara, who was murdered by automatic gunfire in the national stadium in Santiago, Chile, after his fingers were cut off his left hand (he played the guitar).
In Ukraine, poets and others are also dying under bullets and bombs. And Desk Russie was set up, before the start of the so-called “special military operation,” not only to break the silence, but to be one of those ears that try to keep us awake.
There are none so deaf as those who will not hear. And there are many.
They were already deaf and blind in the 2000s, during the Second Chechen War, which was tirelessly condemned by the philosopher André Glucksmann, who had clearly identified both the threat to the world posed by Boris Yeltsin’s successor and the cowardice of the West, which preferred to turn a blind eye to the horrors of what was considered a purely internal Russian affair, in which it was therefore deemed unnecessary to interfere.
These people had obviously not understood, or rather did not want to understand, the signal sent by Putin when he sacrificed the crew of the Kursk, the submarine that sank in the Baltic Sea. They barely batted an eyelid when Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist with Novaya Gazeta whose books had exposed the true nature of the new Russian regime, was murdered in the stairwell of her apartment building in Moscow on October 7, 2006, the very day of “Vladimir Vladimirovich’s” birthday, as if it were a gift to him.
At a NATO summit in April 2008, they rejected the idea of Ukraine and Georgia joining the Atlantic Alliance. In doing so, they deprived Ukrainians of any guarantee of security, even though, fourteen years earlier, in the Budapest Memorandum, Ukrainians had agreed to renounce the nuclear weapons that would have protected them. Yet in 2007, at the 43rd Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech whose aggressiveness surprised everyone. He explicitly announced his desire to overturn the international order. But those who were deaf and blind heard nothing. They even claimed to have imposed peace in Georgia, which had been invaded by Moscow’s troops in 2008, effectively enshrining the Russian doctrine of a close foreign neighbor destined for submission. The August invasion was nothing more than the Kremlin’s way of acknowledging the results of the summit held in Bucharest in April.
On the contrary, they continued, without hesitation, to place themselves under Russia’s energy dependence, even though the Kremlin had repeatedly proven that turning off the gas and oil taps was a means of pressure it was not averse to using to achieve its ends. They did not lift a finger in 2014 during the invasion and subsequent annexation of Crimea. They barely protested against the charade of a rebellion in Donbas so as not to have to condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
I could go on listing the lies and failures of those who refused to see and hear what was coming from Russia, whose KGB heirs had finally regained control after a few years of letting things slide. But this was only to better prepare their return, and much more besides.
Indeed, Putin’s plan was not simply to regain power in Russia and stick to, in Stalin’s words in 1924, “socialism in one country.” In this case, it would be more accurate to say “reaction in one country,” because in many ways, “Putinism” is deeply reactionary. While denouncing the “Nazism” of those who oppose his views, he is the promoter of a “conservative revolution” that is undeniably reminiscent of fascism.
The ambition is in reality much greater than “conservative revolution in one country,” because Putin and his allies have taken full account of financial, technological, and mafia globalization. As I wrote back in 2016, Putin is changing the world. He has changed it by reinstating the primacy of brute force. In this sense, the law of the world for him is the same as the law of the Gulag camps ruled by the violence of the gang leaders. And it is with the vocabulary of camp bosses that he and his clique express themselves.
Indeed, the world has changed profoundly with Putin. Not with him alone, of course. But he has paved the way and made the extension of force his main tool. We see the effects of this every day on the international stage, far beyond the militarization of Russia alone.
What the blind and deaf still fail to understand is that law and freedom cannot be defended against force with fine words, beautiful reasoning, and wishful thinking. Political philosophy and history tell us that democracy and freedom do not come out of the blue but must be won and defended, and that this requires paying a price. There is no protector who can spare us from paying this price and from whom we should faithfully await salvation. In this respect, the so-called “dividends of peace” have been more than a mirage: they have been a way for European nations to enjoy their wealth while turning a blind eye to anything that might “spoil the party” and, in particular, disturb the business world.
This is clearly evident today, now that the American protector is no longer there. Democracy and freedom are not his core values: what matters to him is money. And for money, for the prospect of concluding “wonderful deals,” the 47th president of the United States can get along with anyone. Especially autocrats and dictators, since they make it easier to plunder the world. That is why Donald Trump defends neither Ukraine nor the Iranian people. On the contrary, he is saving Putin and Khamenei, the oligarchs and the Pasdaran. Uncle Donald has no problem with the fact that peace in business is also peace in cemeteries and for torturers.
I am not going back to 1975, but to 1973, when a literary bombshell exploded: The Gulag Archipelago, written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and published in Russian in Paris by YMCA-Press. One of the voices of Soviet dissent broke the silence, and whatever one may say about Solzhenitsyn’s Russian nationalism, this rupture also changed the world. Dissidents were very much alone, fighting with their bare hands, always on the brink of despair. But their stubbornness, their loyalty to the truth, and their awareness that the fundamental dignity of a person lies in shared and responsible freedom, and in particular in freedom of expression and conscience, was rewarded: the regime they fought collapsed, not through their efforts alone, of course, but their attitude is an essential testimony to what freedom is at its core and how it is built. I could say the same about dissidents around the world—whether they are Chinese, Iranian, Turkish, etc..
No doubt we should already be talking about American dissidents, since the undisguised populist project of Trump and his vice president Vance is to do away with the unnecessary complications of the constitutional balance of the United States, the checks and balances, in order to give the power of the “monarch,” elected by the MAGA people, precedence over law and justice. What is emerging is a world of “alternative truths,” that is, of the falsification of facts and language whose reality surpasses Orwellian fiction. A world that feeds on the blind and deaf it creates on a large scale.
In this world, it must be said, Ukraine can only count on itself. Western aid is certainly important, but it is always late and insufficient. Above all, it fails to grasp the danger posed to democracies by Russia and, behind it, China, which is methodically pursuing its project of global hegemony. But the blind and deaf persist in believing that Moscow is only seeking to seize the four oblasts that its troops occupy more or less partially in eastern Ukraine, in addition to Crimea, in order to restore the borders of Catherine II’s imperial Russia. They have not heard Putin repeat time and again that Russia has no borders.
The struggle being waged by Ukrainians is therefore much more than a struggle for themselves. Ukraine is now a dissident nation. Because it has historically been built outside or against the autocracy that has been established in Muscovy since the advent of Ivan III and the proclamation that Moscow was “the third Rome,” on land where extreme political violence was institutionalized by his grandson Ivan IV the Terrible, Ukraine is a nation that does not want to live in submission or under falsehoods.
Ukrainians are resisting almost alone—certainly almost alone on the military front—in a world that increasingly resembles a widespread, hybrid war zone. In a world where, through images and screens, through the terrible mechanics of continuous news coverage, war is de-realized into a video game that can be watched every evening from the comfort of one’s living room, sitting comfortably on the sofa. A kind of global snuff movie where human beings are pulverized on a loop.
This spectacle, a global anthropological phenomenon of unimaginable proportions before the technological revolution of smartphones and social media, is perhaps the most perverse aspect of Putin’s choice. Not only is war the means of survival for his regime, incapable as it is of offering Russia and the peoples who live there peace, democracy, and prosperity, but it has become a means of savagely brutalizing the world, to such an extent that war is now the new condition of our shared world. And we are getting used to it, and our minds and those of our children and grandchildren are becoming imbued with it. War is not only the tool that allows Russia to expand its borders, but also the mechanism that allows the world and human nature to be reshaped in such a way as to conform to the idea that life, all life, only has meaning when it is ordered by force and those who wield it—with the wealth that “naturally” accompanies it.
Yes, as Julos Beaucarne said, there are hundreds of silences that kill.
Hundreds of silences that drown the world in violence. It is because we do not accept this that Desk Russie exists. On a global scale, it is completely insignificant, but no more so than the desperate actions of Pliouchtch, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Bukovsky, and many others, many of whom remained invisible and yet were present without us ever knowing their names. Like them, we will always be right against the deaf and the blind, because the freedom we defend is a flame that never goes out.
Desk Russie exists, modestly but faithfully, for this reason. My thanks go to Galia Ackerman, who not only took the initiative to set it up, but has also devoted all her energy, along with a handful of friends, to bringing it to life.
Slava Ukraïni! And long live freedom!
Jean-François Bouthors is a journalist and essayist, contributing to the magazine Esprit and serving as an editorialist for Ouest-France. He is the author of several books, including Comment Poutine change le monde published by Editions Nouvelles François Bourin in 2016.