You can download this essay as PDF.
The German version of the essay was published in “Krass und Konkret” Magazine.

Soon thirty years ago the Soviet Union, and most of state socialism in the world, ceased to exist. The liberalisation process leading to that had been started by Mikhail Gorbachev. The desperate die-hard communist putsch that briefly removed Gorbachev from power in August 1991 failed and precipitated the process Gorbachev had initiated.

Correcting that simplistic version of history one should start by saying that Gorbachev was resolutely and stubbornly fighting against the dissolution of the Soviet super-state until the very end. He also consistently defended its ideology. Having watched many hours of archive footage while making a documentary series for ARTE about the last years of socialism in Europe («Farewell, Comrades!»), including dozens of Gorbachev’s speeches and statements, I must report three essential points about the last Soviet leader’s worldview. Firstly, he was definitely against the break-up of the vast country which inherited most of the non-Russian provinces of the Russian empire, saying specifically that the Russian people had paid a high price for putting that empire together. Secondly, he was against the dissolution of the state socialist control of property, warning against privatisation. Thirdly, he was generally convinced that communism was Russia’s future, promising at the end of 1987, that in 2017 the USSR (and “all progressive people in the world”) would triumphantly celebrate the centenary of the Russian revolution. “We shall never deviate from this path!” (of communism) — he said to thunderous applause.

As it happened, on the cold and windy November day of that centenary the former imperial capital where the revolution had taken place (Leningrad at the time of Gorbachev’s presidency) was again called St Petersburg, by its arrogant (and foreign-sounding) tsarist name, a synonym of oppression for many a progressive Russian before the revolution. And there was zero evidence of any revolution ever happening there. The native of the city, Vladimir Putin was now presiding over a country with huge, truly capitalist income inequality. It was Putin, however, who famously, or infamously, depending on your politics, said that the fall of the Soviet Union had been the greatest catastrophe of the XX century. Well, the darling of the world’s liberals, Gorbachev most likely agrees with the liberals’ evil incarnate Putin on that important point.

There are many more similar paradoxes that are difficult to come to terms with unless one is prepared to suspend, at least for a time, certain political stereotypes, even if they seem to form the basis of the worldview of most well-meaning people, in the west, but also, in many ways, in Russia. The revolution that begot the communist super-state was, historically, just a revolution that had similarities with other revolutions in the western world. Like both the English and the French revolutions it killed the monarch, as well as many of its own “children”, and “fellow-travellers”. A civil war followed, or was, rather, a part of the revolutionary process. There were certain similarities in the figures, or the roles, of Cromwell, Napoleon and Stalin. All those revolutions had their restorations, even if the Russian one took a long time to come — 74 years, but all the features of a restoration it did (and still does) bear: the comeback of the prestige of aristocracy, the influence of the church, the denigration of the revolutionaries. But at the same time, there were very deep differences between the Russian revolution and the major western ones.

The last Russian emperor abdicated in early March of 1917 in favour of his brother and after the latter declined the offer, the country became a republic. That is in itself referred to as a revolution, but the world-famous Russian revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky had nothing to do with it (Lenin got the news of that revolution in Switzerland well after the event.) The manoeuvres within the imperial family were largely a formality, as most influential Russian politicians were hostile to monarchy, and so, in many ways, revolutionaries. Many changes the new republican government introduced seemed radical. Even the police were, to use today’s terminology “defunded” and “cancelled”. But in the Soviet historiography, that revolution was called “bourgeois”, and the new anti-monarchist government branded “ministers-capitalists”. Some of the “ministers-capitalists” had clearly a left-wing background, and so the stand-off between their Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks had parallels with the conflict between social-democrats and Spartakists/communists in Germany.

But in Russia communists (the Bolsheviks) did win. And even some seriously “far-left” non-Bolshevik factions, such as left socialist-revolutionaries (the left “SRs”), who had risked and sacrificed their lives assassinating the tsar’s officials, were crushed in the process of Lenin’s consolidating power. The goal of the Bolsheviks was to completely uproot the capitalist system. That uncompromising focus on economics, materialism, if one wishes to call it so, was the basis of all tactics and strategies of the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s leftist opponents could have earned a lot of credit for having fought the old political order, but that did not guarantee their ability, or desire, to destroy the bourgeoisie economically. To follow through on such a programme the Bolsheviks had to be not only an ideologically consistent, but also politically ruthless force. The Bolshevik leaders had plenty of precedents and theories to study, and plenty of time to do it. And so with the ferocity the likes of Hegel and Marx were only able to put into writing, the Bolsheviks set about putting into action perhaps the most radical change of a society the world had seen.

The communists were successful because it was natural for the Russian peasant population, who, unlike their landlord masters, had never heard of Hegel, to identify their hopes of freedom with that anti-bourgeois drive of the communist leaders (some of whom, including Lenin were personally very middle class; a pedantic professor, as professor Bertrand Russell, said on meeting him. Such a superficial paradox is nothing new, however. Most radical ideas come often to professors, memento Nietzsche). The ordinary Russians could, theoretically, have been seduced or coerced into agreeing to moderately exploitative employment in a capitalist system capable of some reform, but the Bolsheviks used all the disruptive factors of a country at war and without an effective authority of any kind, including moral, to exclude any compromise with the bourgeois societal and economic paradigm. Following the complete military victory five years after seizing power in the northern capital city the communist government did allow temporarily some private enterprise (NEP), but the ideology of radical independence from big capital, and, crucially, international capital, became the raison d’etat. Importantly, a broad cultural rebellion against the old order, the nobility and the church was not simply orchestrated by the new government, but fuelled by the deep resentment of the people many of whom were grandchildren of serfs.

And so the Russian revolution was a uniquely radical people’s revolution, and the Russian people’s revolution at that (not to undermine the role of ethnically non-Russian peoples). Now such a view is not shared by many in Russia today. Two groups, which are ideological enemies of each other’s on other fronts, would not agree with me: the liberals and the ultra-conservatives. Neither believes that the revolution was “democratic”, in the sense that the Bolsheviks were nothing more than a gang that seized power in a coup. For the liberals it was a gang of far-left fanatics (and criminals), for the conservatives it was a gang of Russophobes and traitors (and criminals) paid by the Germans, but serving the interests of the Brits, the international Jewry and so forth. The ultra-nationalist camp expounding the latter views is less influential (for now) and less important for the overall point I am trying to make here, so let us focus on the liberals.

As one part of the liberal intelligentsia rejects my thesis that the Russian revolution’s uniqueness, in contrast to bourgeois revolutions of the west, was in its expressing the will and the soul of the ordinary people, another part of the liberals is saying that the thesis might actually be correct, but that changes nothing in the fact that the revolution was evil and so the people, the uneducated populace, are responsible for it. But in August 1991, when it became obvious even to the populace what the communist experiment had led to, some die-hard communists attempted to reverse the course of history. That is the interpretation of the Russian liberals, but also, in essence, of the whole of the political mainstream of the west. And yet there is a barely, at first, perceptible difference. “Anti-communism” smacks of something slightly unpleasant to the western liberal taste, but not to the Russian. And it is more difficult for a western liberal to feel entitled to dismiss the Russian revolution as just a coup and not as a result of centuries of oppression and exploitation of the working majority by a parasitical clique of landowners and, later, capitalists.

I say “liberals” in full awareness that there is a multitude of shades of them, of which one may be my very own. But generally speaking, the Soviet Union represents a tragic historical and philosophical paradox. The successful communist revolution was a materialisation of the cherished idea of utopia, second in its influence only to Christianity, but it was a western idea, while Russia’s place in Europe, and Russia’s ability to understand the western cultural language, had always been under question. And so the hostility towards the Soviet Union had a hidden paradoxical aspect to it. The western socialists would resent Russia for screwing up their hard-wrought, beautiful idea, which was, for many, the most important intellectual project with the roots in ethics, philosophy, psychology and other sciences. That resentment, however, had to be half-suppressed as regarding the Russians as incapable of managing socialism came unpleasantly close to national socialism viewing them incapable of managing just about anything. Of course, there were intellectuals who would openly, or tacitly, or subconsciously, defend the USSR, but all in all the Soviet Union was a kind of Agamben’s Homo Sacer, an outcast, or even criminal, with sacred status. It was possible to try and kill it but not sacrifice it in a higher cultural context.

All changed with the serious cracks in the structure of the communist state’s edifice which was a result of the increased pressure from western conservative hawks and the growing liberal dissent from inside. One can of course mention economy, but I would not do it in some allegedly “objective” terms, applied to nations without considering their specific circumstances, culture and history. The cracks in the structure were to do with cultural and therefore creeping ideological, acceptance of capitalism inside the USSR. Stalin is supposed to have presided over the industrialisation of a backward agrarian country, but the most remarkable result of his rule was an unprecedented degree of a nation’s independence from international capitalism, something Lenin had of course in mind too. All that wining today about the injustice of capitalism while being inextricably stuck in its matrix, was not on while the USSR was there, even in the west, because the USSR was showing a real alternative. Big companies and banks are not omnipotent, no! We can have a proud full life, our own culture science, sports, we can have our own non-religious spirituality, without your sepulchral unbreakable hierarchies, brain-killing advertisement, your nauseous bourgeois hegemony in all spheres of life. And after the USSR’s defeating Nazi Germany, and then testing the atomic and hydrogen bomb, and then sending a man to space — there seemed to be an alternative on a truly global scale.

Paradoxically, it was the educated class, the intelligentsia, the liberals inside the USSR that were the least interested in that alternative to world capitalism. They were interested, on the contrary, in what capitalism had to offer, and in what would now be called the issues of human rights, traditional morality, religion. It was, for the most part, not a cynical combination, as is sometimes the case now. The spoils of capitalism were supposed to be the proof of its efficiency and even justice, compared to the unjust Soviet system, as egalitarianism was seen as an injustice, let alone the nomenklatura’s privileges. So morality and materialism (in a non-philosophical sense) were going hand in hand and became the basis for the unstoppable assault on and the victory over the Soviet state. But here we’re back to our question of the difference between the western and Soviet-Russian liberals. The latter were, quite simply, victims of capitalist propaganda, which sometimes was simply a result of negating the communist propaganda the Soviet citizens were exposed to. The Soviet liberals were convinced that they were materially entitled to the highest standards of living in the world. Why? Because the communist propaganda was showing abject poverty in, for example, non-socialist “third world”, and that was seen as a trick to divert the Soviet audience’s attention from the fact that the capitalist west was so rich. If the propaganda was doing that, it must have been lying to us on all counts, and we could have lived as upper-middle-class people do in the richest western countries. The Soviet propaganda emphasis on racial discrimination in the U.S. was also annoying for a Soviet liberal, as it did not, ultimately, concern us “us the whites”.

But the propaganda problem was of course not just homegrown. When British tourists in Leningrad would hand me, a teenager, a glossy magazine “about the life in England” in the Russian language, I would learn it by heart and share it with as many peers as I could until the well-bound thing fell apart, so that quite a few young Soviets would learn that the life in England was all about the rock-n-roll, hanging out in quaint pubs and driving convertible sports cars with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Despite the Soviet anti-western propaganda, I didn’t find out anything about another England, until I physically got there, where whole families were taking the same bath saving on heating and water bills (both were virtually free in the USSR), washing their children’s hair with a washing-up liquid and having canned spaghetti on toast for a special Sunday lunch after mass. What I also hadn’t heard about, before I got to England, was the notion of abuse, which often took place in those poor families. A father, for example, would sometimes treat his children harshly, and this was because he was somehow evil, and not because he was poorly educated and was actually working very hard physically to feed the family, not welfare scrounging, and was still poor. And even later I found out about the financial parasitism of the City, off-shore tax “minimisation” and preferential schemes used by the Queen and the Prince of Wales, and the whole rentier economy that we were so bored to hear about at school back home, but which in reality had become even greedier and more insidious since Marx’s times.

Call it dialectics, or irony, but the minimum of economic security socialism had given the majority, as well as a sense of equality, created a cultural and intellectual focus on the problem of evil devoid of any economic analysis (the mentality that persists in Russia until now). That problem was key to the worldview of those who fought and killed the USSR. The ultimate evil for the Soviet-Russian liberals was of course Stalin. His evil roots were of course in the evil revolution (another possible distinction from the western view, which can hold Stalin evil without condemning the revolution per se), but in Stalin, the evil had made a qualitative leap. All dialectical thinking was thereby out of the window. In reality, Stalin consolidated his power by the late 1920s, just over five years after the end of the brutal civil war in which the western armies fought on the anti-communist side. Fascists had been in power in Italy for roughly five years too. Less than five years later Hitler became chancellor. If the Soviets won in the civil war, when the western powers were just emerging from the devastating WW1 and themselves had revolutionary situations at home, so that western workers sometimes tried to prevent the troops from being sent to fight communist Russia, the odds changed for the USSR for the worse by the end of 1920s. Stalin is often ridiculed and condemned by the liberals for his thesis that the class struggle intensifies with the successes of socialism, but the international struggle and risks for the USSR certainly did intensify.

This is not a place to argue about the role of Stalin, which is a perpetual source of the clash of intra-Russian ideologies. Suffice to say that by the time Germany (together with half a dozen European nations) invaded the Soviet Union and reached the outskirts of Moscow by the end of November 1941, the USSR was an industrialised country, a result of just twelve years under Stalin. The nation wouldn’t have stood a chance against Wehrmacht if not for those economic programmes, quite apart from all the “subjective” factors of Soviet heroism. And despite the Anglo-Saxon claims of having defeated Germany without much help from the USSR, it is difficult for any sane person to imagine what the consequences of Hitler’s victory in Russia would have been.

Could there have been a more humane way of modernising Russia in just over a decade? It is easy, and “politically correct”, to say “yes”, but that may not be entirely honest. Perhaps, theoretically, one could have done it, in another way, in another country and another system — a highly developed capitalist one, for example. That would be the vision of the Russian liberals. Capitalist Russia would have then been even better at defending itself against an enemy, according to such logic. But if Russia had to be Stalinist, Stalin being much worse than Hitler, as many of our liberals seriously maintain, it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if Hitler defeated Stalin. The western powers would have then defeated or reformed national socialism but a victory over Stalin would have saved Russia (and Eastern Europe) forty-five years; that glorious moment of August 1991, when the communists were crushed after their last stand in Moscow, would have come so much earlier.

That might sound delirious, but it is not if you know the Russian intelligentsia well. Not only Stalin is worse than Hitler, according to some, but Putin is too. At least that’s what signs they carry in street rallies say. That may, or may not, be their legal right. They get sometimes detained for that, but not really imprisoned, as far as I know. What might seem even more surprising to my German readers, however, is that in October 1941 as the Red Army was desperately trying to hold the German advance towards Moscow, some members of the Russian intelligentsia in the city were expressing hope that Hitler would win. One artist wrote to a friend:

„I hear you‘re preparing to leave Moscow. Have you gone mad? I am sorry to be so rude, but who are running to and who are you running from? Do you really believe our despicable propaganda? In Kiev the Germans have set up a Social-Revolutionary government. They are supporting the arts! After all, they are the most cultured nation in Europe. (…) We will have free contact with Europe! I‘ve burnt my certificates, threw all compromising material out of my flat — Marxist classics, the portraits, and the rest of the Bolshevik trash. Good Lord, it seems like it‘s finally coming to an end!“
Labas, Juliy, Chornyi sneg na Kuznetskom, Rodina, №6, 1991, p. 36–37)

The artist did not get shot or imprisoned for authoring such a letter and died peacefully many years after the war. And today the Russian liberals consider one of their biggest mistakes, after they crushed communism in 1991, not to have eradicated the wretched „victory cult“ Russia inherited from the USSR.

The people had all the right to feel elated on 22 August 1991 when the communist state of emergency failed but already then some disturbing inferences could be drawn. The putschists had, actually, tried to do, what Gorbachev himself wanted: to save the Soviet Union and socialism. What the putschists did specifically was illegal, but so was the declaring the USSR dissolved by Yeltsin and two other heads of the Soviet Union republics in a Belorussian forest in early December that year. In an extraordinarily obsequious (if not treacherous) move, the first official Yeltsin’s people informed about what they had done to the USSR was the U.S. President Bush, who, based on this call from Russia, declared the American victory in the cold war. Yeltsin didn’t bother to tell Gorbachev before Bush about finishing off the country Gorbachev still formally headed.

Yeltsin was democratically elected (57%) president of Russia in June 1991, but she was still a part of the Soviet Union then, as a Soviet socialist republic. In a referendum in March that year the overwhelming majority of the Soviet citizens (the Baltic countries, Georgia and Moldova did not take part), including the republics (Ukraine and Belarus) whose leaders dissolved the USSR in a semi-secretive meeting with Yeltsin in the forest, voted for the preservation of the union of socialist republics. Yeltsin did not really have a mandate to cancel the state he did not head. In 1993 he infamously shelled the parliament of Russia, killing scores of people, in 1994 started a disastrous war in Chechnya, and at the beginning of the next election campaign in 1996 his approval ratings were the pitiful 6% (according to some sources, as low as 2%). He miraculously won, but even many liberals admit the electoral process was flawed and unfair.

In the 90s, under Yeltsin, before Putin that is, Russia was a democracy only in one peculiar sense, where the term essentially signified an anti-communist (liberal, “democratic”) ideology, and not at all representation of the people. Putin is both a product of that kind of “democracy” and is trying to overcome its schizophrenic disconnection from the people in a handful of ways available to him. Contrary to the capitalist-liberal minority, the majority of the Russian people did not approve of the destruction of their grand socialist project; it was not, unlike 1917, their revolution. The 1991 revolution threw away the enormous psychological reserve, the accrued capital, to use the term paradoxically, of a unique non-bourgeois civilisation (which, by the way, is much better suited to containing consumers’ greed in climate change, despite a poor Soviet record on the protection of the environment), turning Russia into an eclectic mediocre new province of world capitalism, and thus ceding a big part of her national sovereignty and identity which greatly overlapped with the socialist project. Trying to extricate herself out of capitalism now is like pulling oneself out of a mire by one’s hair, and so all there is left for Putin and the people to do is reconstructing sovereignty in one form or other.

The Russian pro-western oppositionists are often frustrated by the insufficient support people like Navalny get and blame it on the government’s restrictions and propaganda. Well, the restrictions are indeed being imposed on the organisations like that of Navalny (after many years of them operating in total freedom), but in today’s age of the Internet and with many popular Russian media firmly anti-Putin, no propaganda would be enough to stop the majority from supporting Navalny, if the people felt his Putin’s corruption narrative reflected their deepest grievance. And why doesn’t it? There was of course plenty of “corruption” under Yeltsin, except that it may be better-called daylight robbery, but even that is not the most important. The key is that condemning Putin while holding the west for the example to follow (as the liberal opposition does) is seen by the people as attacking attempts to undo at least some of the effects of the anti-communist revolution.

But that still changes nothing in the fact that the struggle for regaining sovereignty is a game on a foreign turf of world capitalism, and, the world’s political culture and media. The resulting frustration is chronic in Russia and soul searching for the reasons of a catastrophic historic defeat is cramming the nation’s collective psyche. Unconscious even to many Russians in their routine, this sounds irrelevant to anyone else, but, as Germans would appreciate, the hurt pride, humiliation, despair in some nations might not be potentially a purely internal affair.

Am I saying Russia reminds me of the Weimar republic? There are rough similarities. But this, at any rate, is not what the liberal opposition is saying. According to them, Russia is already governed by a Hitler. Those who call Putin’s regime fascist praise Yeltsin, the 90s and capitalism, while it is Yeltsin’s kind of capitalism which Russia was, undemocratically, thrown into and dragged through with the help of the west, that was the Russian people’s defeat preceding the Russian Weimar. And so those who call their political opponent Putin “Hitler” are in reality mistaking someone like Goerdeler for Hitler.

The ultimate irony, or simply dialectics, is that Navalny is, in the western ideological scale, to the right of Putin, and showed himself in multiple slurs to be the racist Putin is not. Theoretically, if Navalny ever comes to power he might surprise his western sponsors with an unpleasant post-putinist kind of nationalism, just like the sponsors of Afghan mujahideen resistance to the Soviets were confronted with anti-western Islamism in the post-communist world.

For us in Russia fascism is a purely moral notion, some extreme flaw of character, and some people are just supposed to develop it, if not born that way. But those western liberals who consistently deprive some news from Russia of the context of economics and history (and thereby make factual mistakes as well) should know better. That is a deeply conservative, if not reactionary, position, with a soupçon of Sartrean bad faith, hence so much confusion today about the political colours of the corporate media that were considered left-wing during the cold war, but often share that moralistic conservatism in their international reporting today (the Guardian, Le Monde etc).

Saying today’s Russia is a bit like the Weimar republic is a warning, not a prediction. We, the Russians, should not shift responsibility onto anyone, should be vigilant, and critical of ourselves. But that includes the liberals. Seeing pure evil, even if only in Putin, hails from a flawed logic which is also a basis for accusing others of moral inferiority, including some other peoples, and one’s own “populace”. That, unfortunately, is a Russian tradition too. Criticism of one’s own people can be healthy, but only as a part of dialectical critical thinking, which does not spare one’s own (bourgeois, mostly) class, nor the real power there is in the world, which today is not in the Kremlin. An undialectical accusation of the less powerful alone can only result in further inflaming the hurt pride. The less powerful won’t capitulate this time and their response may turn ugly but it will be the liberals’ self-fulfilling prophesy.

The reason why I have focused on the Russian liberals here is that their discourse is extremely pro-western (they are, as Dostoyevsky said, more western-liberal than the liberal west) and that seems to give the west a channel to insinuate its blueprint for a more amenable Russia. That seemed to have worked in the 90s. Counting on a new version of that revolution is the most dangerous course the west can take.

18 August 2021

You can download this essay as PDF.

In the waning days of the WW1 one brave lieutenant of the beleaguered Austro-Hungarian army named Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book designed to demonstrate that “what can be said at all, can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about must be passed over in silence”. It was obvious to the author, that the misuse of language he had analysed in the book, would not stop only because the analysis appeared convincing to practitioners and students of philosophy. If one compares, however, the political narratives of Wittgenstein’s lifetime to those of today, one is left in no doubt as to which are clearer, and by a large margin at that. Most political and ideological positions then were defined without the beating about the bush that is so widespread now. In their ideological battles, communists, fascists and capitalist liberals attacked each other according to some quasi-“objective” criteria based on the shared set of references and history of ideas. And each countered the attack by standing its ground instead of dismissing the very vocabulary of an opponent, as is customary today.

The dichotomy of liberal capitalism and egalitarian social justice, as that of fascism and parliamentarism, seemed so clear and played out so graphically, that we still live under their spell. When reality today refuses to submit to the old ideological mould we try to bend it with additional terms and subplots. The concept of “populists” has been introduced on both the left and the right, in contrast to the “classic” variants. “Cold war” has been resurrected, despite it signifying the extinct global stand-off between the equals on the ideological right and left. “The Evil Empire” is re-employed by implication as a notion, while Russia today is supposed to be even more evil than the communist original, which, compensating for its diminished strength, makes it at least as dangerous. China’s “communist-capitalist” super power, as well as the increased influence of Islam, are of course among the new realities impossible to capture in the romantic western terms, but it seems still possible for the “Judaeo-Christian” world to consider itself as the source of all key political and cultural references.

Now Wittgenstein’s philosophy avoided politics, and even what would be a good pathway to it — the problems of intentionality in meaning, something Bertrand Russell (in the introduction to the Tractatus) placed squarely within psychology (while phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, dealing with intentionality, would be dismissed by logicians as metaphysics). Truth and falsehood is, for the philosophy of language, an exclusively logical problem, while that philosophy’s achievement is supposed to be in the demonstration that philosophical problems arise from the misconception of the ways our language functions. Those problems include ethics (which Wittgenstein identifies with aesthetics), and continuing in this vein of reasoning such modern philosophers as Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard consider statements of ethics to be pseudo propositions that are neither true nor false. That does not make logic and the philosophy of language entirely irrelevant to the analysis of politics but it does limit the relevance of their probe of falsehood to the cases of honest mistakes. In a rare reference to lying (in «Philosophical Investigations»), Wittgenstein called it a language game, without any noticeable sense of opprobrium.

But then again, there isn’t anything like “Thou shalt not lie” among the Ten Commandments (just “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”). The question of pure truth and falsehood was perhaps too abstract for the Old Testament, but came to the fore in the New one (even if only in the fourth of the Gospels). Jesus is a witness to the Truth, while devil «is a liar and the father of lies» (John 8:44). Lying has been an important subject matter for thinkers throughout centuries, notably for Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas and Kant. «As words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind» — wrote Aquinas. Whether or not we agree with the XIII century theologian that lying is unnatural, we presumably agree that it is “undue”, and we would also probably accept this definition of lying. When you claim something that you know is not true, you lie. When you genuinely believe, however, that something is a fact, while it is not, you are only mistaken, that is not guilty of lying (even if you may be guilty of negligence, laziness, fanaticism or arrogance).

The problem is that in practice, and in politics in particular, it is often impossible to distinguish between an honest mistake and a lie. Dialectical method of Post-Enlightenment, at any rate, offers a more adequate, if intellectually more challenging take on the problem of untruthfulness. Hegelian “negativity”, “false consciousness” of Marx and Engels, Sartrean “bad faith” and existentialist “inauthenticity” — all may be more helpful in analysing the circumstances of and possible reasons for the contemporary politics lacking the relative straightforwardness of the political discourse that dominated the west from, roughly, the time of Locke (and the Glorious Revolution) until the notorious “End of History” of the 1990’s.

Dancing around the truth, and the lie.

Those in power have always been prone to lying, at least as much as anybody else (despite “honesty” being related to “honesteories”, the Roman aristocratic and political class), and it is the ways they do and people react to it, that have changed. Or did they? Take, for example, the way Boris Johnson and his Brexit acolytes came to power. They made a deal with the EU, that they were inevitably going to try and break. Johnson torpedoed his predecessor Theresa May who had tried to align the UK with the EU so that there would be no customs border between Britain and Northern Ireland. Johnson promised he would do a deal without alignment, and without the border. That is simply not possible and he just lied it was. When the time of reckoning came, he and his ministers simply said that the EU is “too legalistic”, instead of admitting they had come to power on a lie. Law as in the “rule of law”, that is the control of the masses, is one (good) thing, law in holding the powerful to account ain’t so good. Should that not also throw some light on such expressions as “democratically elected politicians”?

It is known that the Northern Ireland deal was not Brexit’s only lie, and Emmanuel Macron likes pointing out the multitude of them, calling them just that, lies — a bit of unusual straight-talking between allies in the polite society. Accusing Britain’s leadership of lies Macron does not forget to “qualify” the charge and say that the EU must reform, become more democratic, “closer to its citizens”.

How laudable, but does this language make EU fare better than the UK? Johnson’s strain of lying isn’t the only kind of falsehood there is. Dialectical negativity teaches us to recognise false consciousness and bad faith in those who say the right words, but omit facing up to the unlovely states of affairs, and maybe intentionally so. “To become more democratic” may seem meaningful as a part of a proposition, but is false as a propagandistic substitute for meaningful action. “We must…” is a mode of one of Wittgensteinian language-game. While “we must” do something, we can, with total impunity, fail or avoid doing it. And there are different kinds of “must”. The ordinary subjects of the state must pay taxes in one, unavoidable, way, while rich corporations (and individuals) “must” do it in another, theoretical, avoidable manner. A head of state, or the EU, also must, and should — do many things, but may — avoid doing them, e.g. legitimately redistributing some of the enormous wealth, by making rich corporations pay a fair amount of taxes. Or to refrain from hiring U.S. multi-trillion dollar hedge funds, such as BlackRock, to draw up social, environmental and ethical (sic!) guidelines for the European financial sector (the same Macron and the BlackRock chairman have cultivated each other, while the latter lobbied for the break-up of the French pension system).

“Negating” reality is certainly very useful in dealing with external challenges. HMS Defender recently sailed from the Ukrainian port of Odessa past the Crimea and reality was clear for all to see, as a BBC (not at all pro-Russian) journalist onboard and an uploaded video and audio corroborated the Russian version of the events: the Russian forces ordered the British ship to leave, sent jets and boats to force it to, and fired warning shots with that aim specifically. The UK government said all that was just Russian disinformation, while the artillery fire was a part of a Russian “gunnery exercise”. The UK official and very public statements were demonstratively and demonstrably false and the falsehood was to demonstrate the upper hand of those accusing others of falsehood. “Not only can I do what I like physically, — the message was — but I can also publicly, falsely, call you a liar, because I am stronger politically and own the mainstream discourse”.

Nietzsche’s description of parliamentarism in «The Gay Science» (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) has not lost its relevance and still describes the multi-party political system and society well: «Parliamentarism, that is to say, the public permission to choose between five main political opinions, insinuates itself into the favour of the numerous class who would feign appear independent and individual, and like to fight for their opinions. After all, however, it is a matter of indifference whether one opinion is imposed upon the herd, or five opinions are permitted to it.» After the experience with the Third Reich it was of course easy to dismiss this last proposition. Five opinions, or parties, even in an imperfect system, is better than one. And yet the conclusion of the aphorism is spot on: «He who diverges from the five main opinions and goes apart, has always the whole herd against him.»2 And, the “main opinions” (“Grundmeinungen”) today are not even very intelligible. In Nietzsche’s days, there was not something that is now called “catch-all” or “big tent” ideology. Today both the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic (CDU) are supposed to be “big tent”. And who is taking time to ponder what “Christian Democracy”, which gave name to the German ruling party, actually means? If you think of the issues politics is supposed and promise to solve today, “CDU” is, to borrow Wittgenstein’s favourite term, nonsensical, and so, probably, are “SPD” and “The Greens”.

Against the herd

Ideology would be today’s synonym for Nietzsche’s “main political opinion”. Surely, “neoliberalism”, and “neoconservatism” are ideologies of sorts. And they are supposed to have opponents in the contemporary left. But again, Macron is a former socialist (and an investment banker at Rothschild’s), but is now perceived by his people as clearly neo-liberal. And even if the permitted “main political opinions” are indistinct and contradictory these days, it is still the case that if you actively refuse to conform to one of them the whole herd will be after you.

This is, in a way, what happened to the famous American-Brazilian journalist Glenn Greenwald. A star of the intellectual left, he helped publish Snowden’s revelations, and exposed the lies and crimes of G.W. Bush, Obama and Bolsonaro. But he then fell out with the editors of the Intercept, which he had co-founded, when they tried to censor his investigation of Hunter Biden. The most recent challenge came from a young socialist author Nathan Robinson, who summed up the accusations against Greenwald levelled by the broad community of the left.

By constantly targeting the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the Wall Street and Silicon Valley Greenwald has been allegedly helping Trump and his supporters. «Democratic Party, for all its flaws, hypocrisies, and capitalist inclinations, is still preferable to the racist and extremely capitalist Republican Party» — Robinson maintains.

Now the Greenwald case is just one, if rather visible, example of the dissent against the liberal and left-wing establishment, among quite a few in the whole of the west in this century. In Europe, it has been particularly noticeable in Britain and France when former Labour and Communist/Socialist voters switched to the Tories/UKIP and the National Rally (formerly National Front) respectively (the latter phenomenon described powerfully by Didier Eribon in his «The Return to Reims»). The key problem for intellectuals like Greenwald at any rate seems to be the liberals’ adoption of authoritarian methods in what they perceive as a righteous struggle against the absolute evil of racism, male chauvinism, Christian fundamentalism etc. Wokeness, BLM, MeToo, “cancel culture” are the shades of an ideology to counter conservatism, that may, like the ideology of socialism, be developing a problem of straddling the growing hiatus between intention and practice.

There is no solution to this argument, it seems to me, on the political level, but philosophy might help. In broad political terms, Nathan Robinson is right saying the Republicans are generally more “capitalist” than the Democrats, while accurate analysis of modern capitalism remains the key to the understanding of the ways the vulnerable majority is oppressed. The problem with this left-wing argument, however, is that “more” or “less” (capitalist) is not what really matters. What matters is the principle. If someone seems to mean “less” capitalism but is still caught pushing for plenty of it, they should not be surprised by being singled out for particular scorn and resentment as a hypocrite, while those who extolled capitalism in the first place would not be seen guilty of lying. If a “left-leaning” U.S. President with all the experience and knowledge society and economists must have accumulated throughout the years of rampant deregulation and “sub-prime” lies, still, after the 2008–09 near-catastrophe, shields and promotes those responsible for it, something is so fundamentally wrong with the idea that the Democrats’ politics can draw on the progressive worldview, that Trump’s specific policies such as tax cuts look trivial. Add the foreign policy to it and it is Obama and Hillary Clinton that would look like perfect globalist capitalists-imperialists, not Trump. But, even more generally, the flaw of hypocrisy may simply trigger a more deeply rooted response than the sin of being “capitalist”.

Hypocrisy is often used to describe the Democratic camp even by some who consider it a lesser evil in comparison to the Republicans, but hypocrisy itself is somehow supposed to be a lesser evil in comparison to the insolent “straight-talking” of such dreadful characters as Donald Trump. This question of language should take us back to our “philosophical investigation”. In terms of my ideal post-wittgensteinian philosophy of language which would include the problem of intentionality of falsehood (and nonsense), hypocrisy is the ultimate form of lying. It has several extreme characteristics. It uses moralistic “language games” to create an ideological complex covering up lies and failures, and sometimes crimes. But it also blurs the borderlines between lies, mistakes, miscalculations, responsibility and the chain of command, human rights and the “collaterality” of damage, but also all that and the nationalistic emotions of the invaders’ sacrifice for their cause regardless of its injustice, which makes crimes undefinable, and therefore illusory. And as far as capitalism is concerned, hypocrisy means an elaborate prevention of illuminating (let alone reforming) the destructive parasitism of the modern financial sector.

To see the aggressive nature of lying in “peaceful” hypocrisy one needs to apply the negativity method and question: what is it that the hypocrite is not saying while avoiding direct lying by engaging in language-games? That omission, that glib absence, the glossing over, the “purpose-built” politeness and eloquence in moralistic pseudo-propositions, imperatives and modalities, in their totality, may be called positivity.

The Positivity of falsehood

‘Positivity’ is a complex of the self-assertion of (and as) a reality combining rationality and morality in the Kantian vein, which admits of a possibility of an honest mistake, and criticism thereof, but not of the lie and other deliberate wrongdoing (the “end justifies the means” mode would in this system fall under an honest mistake category, at worst, or, most likely, some kind of honest — and moral — zeal). Such positivity is a kind of anti-dialectic, which allows no questioning of the self-assertion. It controls the very distinction between an honest mistake and a lie. For example, even in such an extreme case as the reasons for the invasion of Iraq, the lie ultimately, “in the grand scheme of things”, qualified as — was processed into — an honest mistake, because the system’s basic self-assertion is incompatible with doubting its own morality (nor the category of morality).

‘Positivity’ is everywhere; turn on the radio and listen to a programme on an “important issue”, be it climate change or corporate social responsibility: you will have, for example, a successful banker, lecture you on both. You can count on him or her to say all the right things. Dialectical negativity, however, is about going beyond the correctness of a narrative. Negativity is asking, for example, why if the banker is so correct in his assessment, nothing really changes in accordance with his/her positive vision. For such “negative” question to be itself genuine (in contrast to the propositions of ‘positivity’) it has to have an element of struggle, and question, for example, the banker’s own role, and, maybe, even the role of the subject posing the question. Struggle implies personal risks and ability to self-sacrifice. But positivity ensures not only the un-dialectic correctness, but also the unassailability of its self-assertion. Those running the show will simply not allow any real struggle, any negativity.

‘Positivity’ exists, however, within the logical realities where you cannot ultimately suppress dialectics, and so it has to co-opt and sham it, by throwing in a kind of a logical, and emotional, red-herring. For example, accusing a geopolitical rival of human rights violations, and substantiating the accusations with the claims from interested parties with vested interests, western agents of positivity would “dialectically” criticise some, apparently, in their own camp, say, the western business community, for co-operating with the foreign human rights offenders in question. Such “self-criticism” is done not in addition to but instead of running a full due diligence on the initial accusatory claims, and seeing them in a dialectical context of history, “lost-in-translation” cultural and political semantics, geopolitics as well as the double standards sparing the west from genuine painful self-criticism that would have taken the moralising sting out of accusing others.

Hidden agendas

For each scandal where the suppression of truth by ‘positivity’ is at least partly visible, as in the Iraq war case, there are countless others in which that truth-control remains on the informational “dark side” of the Earth. Some cases, like whistleblowers accusing OPCW of manipulation and bias in the investigation of chemical attacks in Syria, could not be suppressed but were severely underreported or written off as a conspiracy theory. In other cases, the public is just told to believe something it has no possibility of verifying at all, not even by comparing different sources in the media. There are plots involving Russia, for example, where the guilt of its government has not been proven, but even Russia was not able to distribute an alternative version, as, despite the horror stories of its ability to spread fake news, today’s Russia is in reality reduced to using mainly the communications channels controlled by the west (and even by its ideological brethren in Russia itself).

A British-American hedge fund manager convicted in Russia of aggravated tax evasion can claim the conviction is politically motivated even if such motivation would not make sense as the manager was an outspoken supporter of the Russian president and government at the time the investigation into the tax evasion was undertaken. The European Court of Human Rights has also ruled that the Russian investigators had legitimate reasons to suspect the hedge fund manager’s accountant of the tax evasion in the very case the fund manager was convicted for. That would normally give credence to the conviction, but the fund manager responds by orchestrating a campaign accusing the Russian government of, essentially, targeting him for accusing the Russian government. The circularity of such an argument would be obvious if not for the political Russia factor. Politics trump logic, and the fund manager is considered a “critic of the Russian government” and not a convicted tax evader. To further solidify such politics-based false alibi, he supplies the media with an unsubstantiated, but a vaguely plausible story of money laundering; and as a result, others are accused, while he, the accuser, becomes a prominent money-laundering expert. The fact that the accused are subsequently acquitted changes nothing in the perceptions of the public, as the media are unable and unwilling to re-trace the story to its true causes. Importantly that is not a story of the financial sector fending off some critics of capitalism, but, on the contrary, it is about guilting the banks and bankers, and that, dialectically, is what makes for efficient defence and perpetuating the system. Is that perhaps in compliance with the American “pragmatic theory of truth” which teaches us to see the truth’s “cash-value” (William James)? Can such truth be verified? Yes, of course, according to James. «Truth for us — he writes — is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc. are names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue them.» Such theory would explain why verification of information in the “post-truth” era is in a state it is in, and also why it is not all Trump’s fault.

Who needs an ideology?

Some of us, like Glenn Greenwald, are faced with a choice: either to switch off dialectical thinking and submit to ‘positivity’ or suffer the painful awareness of a life in the world of lies. The debate with Greenwald’s socialist opponents, however, has still this to be said about: it is an argument on ideological terms, and in those terms, Greenwald is indeed inconsistent. In his response to Nathan Robinson’s criticism Greenwald rejects siding with the right, but argues that a cooperation between people of different creeds, including right-wing populists, may be welcome on an “issue by issue” basis. That seems to be a departure from ideological thinking, which may well be a good thing. But as an example of a progress to be made in the “issue by issue” mode Greenwald cites the societal acceptance of the LGBTIQ. Well, LGBTIQ is an ideological issue, and even if some right-wingers made truce with it at some point, there is never a guarantee they will not violate it anytime, or that the acceptance of LGBTIQ is not in itself one of the phenomena that is used to fortify the ideology of the right. As Murray Bookchin pointed out «society’s irrationality is deep seated, (…) its serious pathologies are not isolated problems that can be cured piecemeal but must be solved by sweeping changes in the often hidden sources of crisis and suffering.»

And what is it that would make a socialist, like Nathan Robinson, consistent? The answer, I am afraid, is: aiming for a revolution. No half-measures, no empty talk, no useless berating bankers for excessive greed selling subprime mortgages etc. — no, scrap private ownership of land, nationalise the natural resources, turn private companies into cooperatives etc. Theoretically, a government with such a programme can be elected democratically; or can it? Have there been precedents of that? Talking of the far left and far right sharing goals… Well, some on the far right were allowed to come to power in the west more or less peacefully in the past, but the real “far-left” — never. From a consistent socialist point of view, reform is illusion. Or a lie.

A question one should be entitled to pose to a socialist today is whether the aspired socialism in any specific country shall stop at its borders. A well-known American commentator Krystal Ball, who describes herself as a social-democrat and was involved in the above mentioned important debate between Greenwald and Robinson defines her project as forging a multiracial working class coalition. That includes trying to convince the white working class that immigrants from the South are not a threat. Does this amount to socialist internationalism? The protection of workers of one’s own country is something that can be aspired not only by a socialist, but also by a national-socialist. The exploitation of other countries would be then expected to benefit the workers of one’s own. That is not, of course, what Krystal Ball means. But by using terms developed in the past centuries, such as socialism or social democracy, we sometimes forget that what appeared consistent and logical a hundred years ago may be inapplicable now, in the world, which is, while still split into hugely unequal and disparate economic, political and cultural units, is “globalised” — a term that may have exploitation hard-wired into it. And perhaps the point where some of the left and the right overlap is precisely in trying to “unglobalise” the world. But, surely, the right and the left should mean different things by that. The right may want to repatriate industrial production, but would still keep whatever aspects of globalisation that benefit their nation’s economy. Would the left give them up?

Are revolutions born to ideologies?

Believing a theory, such as Marxism, to be continuously ad rem and instructive throughout history, ties in with attitudes of a religious kind. One of the exceptional qualities of Marxism seemed, at any rate, that, as a theory, it was “proven”, once at least, experimentally (mainly, by the Russian revolution), thus substantiating simultaneously its self-description as science. When the European socialist states failed one had an option to explain that as a bad application of the good theory. This option has not been very popular as the common perception is that none of the world’s socialist nations has ultimately been successful. That switches on the notion of probability and turns it against the socialist state. Yet the argument that the failure of socialist practice represents the complete failure of the theory cannot be considered as unassailably correct. The experiment with socialism was not lab-pure, it did not fail on its own, there were many outside factors, it was a struggle, while elements of socialism were adopted in the “capitalist camp”, including the U.S. Somewhat paradoxically, a far-right kind of argument (even if it is semi-consciously used by the disgruntled left) about the inferiority of some nations can be used to explain why socialism failed where it became a fully fledged state system.

The fall of Soviet-type socialism in Europe, and of the USSR specifically, soon thirty years ago, was a revolution too, a cascade of revolutions. It is only in terms of one ideological position that those events can be considered as a counter-revolution. If we’d agree that every revolution, including those Hegel had to consider (in America, France and Haiti), has a basic narrative, or ideology, we can take a view that the Marxist revolutionary ideology is just one of many, even if it purports to describe and explain them all.

The above-discussed ‘positivity’ drives those who feel humiliated by it, to fight it by any means available. That is what makes some on the left look for allies on the right, and vice versa. This might be roughly described as intellectual “tactical voting”, even if such processes may be unconscious. But it is the most powerful instinct of the spirit, as it were, the analogue of Nietzsche’s will to power (even if pejoratively it can be simultaneously seen as ressentiment).

It is the last resort in being confronted by the establishment’s stonewalling; it’s an accumulated energy of despair. If ‘positivity’ uses force to suppress a dialectical challenge, those deprived of their chance and right to argue would respond by switching the struggle from the level of logic to the level of force. They will join forces with any enemy of the enemy. So crushing an effect hypocrisy — ‘positivity’ — has on someone facing it. And it was probably the desperate rebellion against ‘positivity’, and not some nebulous Virtue, and cliched Love, that was the negative driving force in the story that culminated in the famous brief dialogue about the truth, Aletheia, between the rebel and an official, in Roman occupied Judaea two millennia ago.

Witness statements

Traditional philosophy takes it for granted that humans wish and try to understand as many things as possible, and put what they know into words. But there is another way of looking at why and how we learn and communicate. We are witnesses to facts and events, we try to understand what we witness and we communicate it to others. One of the things we might witness in our lifetime is a revolution. Different revolutions have elements in common, but also dissimilarities. Lenin’s “revolutionary situation” may have been a good analysis of the conditions favourable to a successful revolution he was to lead, but may have not been entirely applicable to the revolution that took place in Lenin’s country in 1991. What I can say of those events that I witnessed, is that they were first and foremost the culmination of a rebellion against lies and hypocrisy, against what I’ve here called ‘positivity’.

The later stages of state socialism were characterised by this awareness of the lie and the impossibility to challenge it. The physical impossibility is only a part of the overall block that prevents the challenge. When an ideology posits such values as justice, brotherhood and anti-fascism, some rebels will maintain that a certain amount of social injustice is a risk worth taking in fighting for freedom, and even, as some people did claim in the USSR, that Hitler had been preferable to Stalin, as a chance to destroy communism. (The western world would have then assimilated and reformed fascism, and included Russia in a post-fascist world order forever free of the communist evil.) But that was not a view the majority would support and so those who did not, did not feel they were deprived of good opportunities to challenge the communist regime with another ideology, but rather — of a chance to exercise dialectics which would reveal all contradictions of both social justice and freedom. The suppressed energy of dialectical negativity accumulated and eventually crushed the system’s positivity, or rather — helped crush it. Because, as I stated above, the despair of the understanding that you are up against a stone-walling super lie, drives you into an alliance with any force that opposes the system, even if that force is a narrative not interested in dialectics, but just in power, and is bound to posit a new ‘positivity’ after victory. And so in 1991 in Russia people capable of dialectical thinking and surmising what disaster capitalism would spell for the country, supported Yeltsin, a communist apparatchik who became anti-communist in order to grab power.

The philosophical anatomy of the revolutions of 1989–91 in Eastern Europe and the USSR is more relevant to the present than those who tend to think in a superficially political mode imagine. Of course, my propositions could be criticised as idealist. That, however, would be done on the assumption that a certain materialistic approach is intrinsically, “objectively” correct. But it is just another self-assertion, an alleged consensus and declared axiom. The “objectivity” of materialism is a tautological proposition and not something that can be proven. It is true, that materialism was more conducive to a radical critique of society; one can even imagine that it was developed with a view of that critique, challenging traditions and aiming for a revolutionary change. And it is equally true that Marxism was and still is a useful method of dissecting economic and financial power and exploitation. The reign of the “rentiers” is very much with us, and if it is correct to say that the structure of capitalism is different today, that also means it is much more pernicious and insidious — while being more polite. That in itself can be seen as both vindication and weakness of the predictions of Marx and Engels. Every prophet is just an inevitably subjective witness for the prosecution (or, less frequently, for the defence) in the perpetual court of history, and can’t be blamed for failing to report all hints and signs with equal engagement. Marx underestimated the psychological power of capitalism, its very positive looking “black magic”, as, perhaps, Max Weber misunderstood China. What one should be sceptical about today, however, is not so much the Marxist analysis, as its monopoly over the prognostication of revolutions.

A host of thinkers in the XX century, notably in the U.S. and France, worked on bridging philosophy and psychology, and we can say today, in some parallel to Wittgenstein’s statement that “ethics and aesthetics are one”, that philosophy and psychology are one. If they appear to be completely different, it means either or both are underdeveloped and unprepared for the challenges of today’s world. One should also mention that though the “pragmatic theory of truth” sees psychology as a key factor in what is considered true, it is hardly helpful for our present investigation, as most pragmatists and neopragmatists avoid critically dissecting their concept of utility in terms of power and economic interests. Still, the provocative definition of truth by Richard Rorty, as something philosophers’ peers let each other get away with, is, whether wilful or not, an admission of the establishment’s control of the truth, even in its theoretical (academic, logical) manifestation.

When language goes to prison

The well-known line that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” is true only in the case of a certain kind of philosophical problem. Wittgenstein’s bon mot is well appreciated but requires the clarification he demanded of others. Let’s just say that some problems are created by the language on holiday, some by those who had to stay on duty while language is on holiday. Other problems arise when language is elected President, Prime Minister, or Chancellor. But perhaps the most difficult to deal with arise when language is imprisoned.

Censorship, or dismissing an opinion as “conspiracy theory”, is a philosophical, logical, not just social or political problem. The truth-functional logic seems to imply that you can reason and argue with a view of establishing the truth, but in reality, you can only do it if an authority countenances and controls the arguing, “moderates” the debate. The control should not be thought of only in terms of direct suppression of alternative narratives. Censorship and self-censorship are indistinguishable. But so are, in practice, logic in the scientific sense of the word and its “common sense” variant.

The proposition “Assange is a criminal but George W. Bush is not” — may be true if the informational “input” relies on a certain definition of “criminal”, such as having been convicted by a court. But those who disagree with that proposition consider that the court which convicted Assange was part of a system that was targeting him for political reasons, while shielding such people as George W. Bush from prosecution for crimes. Can you object to that and still agree that a criminal is a person convicted in a court of law? Is the proposition that one is innocent until proven guilty, correct, truthful, if the system is shielding suspects from prosecution?

All that sounds like mixing questions of jurisprudence with those of logic, but is it not what happens in the real world of language where all kinds of things are inferred by journalists, politicians, commentators, fellows of think-tanks, influential bloggers and other educated members of the public? The contemporary democracy hardly means the power of the people, but its difference from the social system of, say, the age of Enlightenment, is in the fact that the intellectual authority today is not clearly defined or clearly limited to specific institutions. But highly limited it is nevertheless, in a far less transparent way. And so if Immanuel Kant, as a famous philosophy professor was developing an authoritative narrative in both logic and ethics (inter alia), including the topic of lying, those subjects seemed, whether or not we agree with Kant’s reasoning, correlated with a high degree of good-faith and responsibility, which was a key source of those narratives’ authority. The inferences and axioms carried overwhelming logical and axiological (which looks like a tautology, but is not, as “axiological” is only formally related to “axiom” here) weight. Today a fallacy can be cloaked in moralistic worthiness serving a politically, and even militarily, powerful party, with the implied reference to the “good old”, admittedly selfless Enlightenment authority. And there is no higher authority to appeal to. One cannot go to an “authority” in modern philosophy of language at some university and complain about logical nonsense in a “high brow” newspaper piece, or a think-tank analysis. A judgement in an “authoritative” political source is, in effect, final. Not only are philosophy and psychology one, but formal logical correctness and assertions of a certain stylistic quality from a politically dominant position appear identical.

If the government says that in its decision it is “guided by science”, the decision is sanctified as “objectively” necessary, not just stemming from the government’s wish to serve its people (to say nothing about self-serving manoeuvres). Logic will still be logic as it is used in, say, computer science, but a “practical” pseudo-logic with the implied reference to a moral authority of Logic uses mass communication and lends truth-status to political authority. That is not some lying, here and there. That is what I call ‘positivity’, uncritical thinking responsible for a multifaceted complex of interconnected and largely indistinguishable unintentional fallacies and intentional deception.

A matter of revolution

Needless to repeat, the “End of history” announced after the end of Soviet socialism thirty years ago was an unintended joke. And the history that did not end is a history of wars and revolutions. They are inevitable. Some might take a “civilised” form, as it seemed to happen in 1989–1991. Philosophy today is needed to state that neither determinism nor the complete free will of human actors is a safe principle to assess developments in this world. Our actions are likely to influence our lives, politics and culture, but we cannot know the exact extent of that influence. We can try and make inferences on the basis of what we have been witnesses to, which includes our own reactions and feelings. Inasmuch there may be a general principle that governs the obtaining of conditions for a revolutionary explosion, it is, in my view, the impossibility to challenge positivity, the macro- and micro-power of misrepresentation, with any other means. And contrary to appearances, it is the establishment, the “old order” which the revolution would aim to overthrow, that is driven by an ideology, not the revolutionaries. Force determines the outcome, but the articulated claim to righteousness is stronger on the part of the establishment. At first, that helps to defend the system against the “blind”, “irrational”, “undemocratic” insurgents. But then the system’s ideology will become a liability as all words will ring hollow, nothing will be believed, and negativity will be fully activated. With the need to appear morally superior through devalued language gone, the efficiency of hypocrisy destroyed, the truth will shed the vulnerability of “correctness” and prevail in a raw, intuitive, barely articulated form.

Saying that “what can be said at all, can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about must be passed over in silence” Wittgenstein expected the truth to be always clear, but did not anticipate the truth criteria, logic, to be “usurpable”. But it is, and so that statement of Wittgenstein’s was turned, tacitly, by stealth, as the Marxist one about workers of the world, into a propagandistic slogan. Clarity has been appropriated by ‘positivity’, what is not authorised by it branded as either unclear or untrue, and condemned to silence. With the truth criteria transferred from logic to ideology the truth becomes a matter of revolution.

July 2021

At the end of 2020, Liz Truss, a UK government minister, shocked some, and amused others, by mentioning the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault in a highly unusual speech. “While we were taught about racism and sexism, — the Tory minister said, — there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write. These ideas have their roots in postmodernist philosophy — pioneered by Foucault — that puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view — truth and morality are all relative.”

The speech appeared in full on the UK government website but less than 24 hours later those particular words were redacted. An opposition politician called it “rant” and “bonkers”. The government almost recanted, admitting that Truss’ attack on “the failed ideas of the left” could not be part of the government’s official message.

I find the speech extremely interesting and, by contemporary political standards, very honest. And that is not just a matter of style. The modern Ideology of Democracy is characterised precisely by leaving out what would be its fundamental message. It is implied, not declared. That is its main difference from the ideologies of the XX century. In a way, those were more honest, even if, some, more abhorrent. The modern ideology’s ultimate message might also be ineffable even to its proponents. This is a matrix kind of ideology that most people, politicians included, are too “within” to be able to define.

The government removed the speech not because it was not truthful, but precisely because it was.

Politicians sell policies and need to do some explaining to the extent they market them, but exposing the ideology in any thought-provoking way contradicts its purpose. People were mainly upset by the speech because Truss pitted anti-racism and anti-sexism against learning to read, write and do other things useful in the competition for the sweet prizes of the free market. From that standpoint, Foucault was an odd overkill. But Truss got carried away and, inadvertently, pointed to dialectics beyond ideology in a routine sense of the word.

Foucault investigated the meaning of power and control in the ways we think and interact. It is hardly news to anyone that populations are controlled not just by direct surveillance, physical force and various threats, but also by the appeals to conscience, religion and a system of incentives. Foucault’s analysis of social control and power relations was particularly consistent and radical and he considered virtually everything in our social, cultural and personal lives, even our frustration with ourselves, to be a result of control. True, he did not only blame governments for all that, but confronting his theory of power, the “Discipline” and “Punishment”, would be too much even for such a brave pre-Christmas mood Liz Truss must have been in delivering her speech.

What she said and what she did not say represent two levels of ideology. Conservative values have a counterpart in the left-wing ones and they fight it out on one level. But the other level of ideology sees those antagonistic positions as acceptable parts of democracy, as long as they are kept under control. From that level’s point of view the “culture wars” are a controlled process. This level of ideology has a controlling and unifying function. Its narrative is the superiority of democracy while attacking opponents outside of its sphere means control of the acceptable debate inside.

Revealing honestly one’s identity in the “culture wars”, is too juicy and intimate a position for a government member to be spotted in, as this undermines the higher level of the unifying Ideology of control. Trump was doing just that, big way, and so he was considered an enemy of democracy long before he tried to overturn the election results. The Ideology of Democracy needs to attack “non-democratic” narratives, and Trump failed to do that, on top of taking sides in “culture wars”. A UK government minister should never do it; if anyone may come close to articulating the narrative of the Ideology of control (or democracy), it is the foreign secretary specialising in attacking outsiders, the Russians, for example.

There are enough targets for the Ideology to attack: enemy propagandists, conspiracy theorists, trolls, hackers et al. Those uncanny Russians prone to interfere and infiltrate, poison and blow up; as Obama’s director of National Intelligence James Clapper put it, the Russians “are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique”. But there are dangerous natives too, the Westerners going too far in questioning their own governments, let alone exposing the war crimes. The Ideology of Democracy is, by definition, very flexible, but very robust at the same time. The Ideology will find just the right balance in separating what is already pointless to defend (e.g. some of the Iraq war lies) from what one can still use to smear an opponent: the stigma of freakishness, conspiracy theory peddling, or even treason. As one close associate of Assange’s put it: “Julian, you’ve gone too far!”

In “Beyond Good and Lying” I argued that a real power-of-the-people, unlike democracy in its current form, would be much more careful about the demarcation of the border between legitimate dissent and conspiracy theory. It is a painful subject, or rather, it has to be. It has to be dealt with despite the ungainliness of the problem.

Foucault maintained that the state wants individual unhappiness to appear as a purely personal psychological problem, which it isn’t. It is a result of social control by the powers that be.

(The same should be said about gun and police violence in the U.S, among countless other “issues” the Ideology wants to be compartmentalised and emotionalised). “Conspiracy theories” can be seen in similar light. Firstly, such phenomena are not exclusively the fault of those who get involved in it, but also of society as a whole. And secondly, the system uses the “conspiracy theory” stigma in its censorship operations.

While expressing such criticism of society I wonder how much it can change in practice. That question is as important as any theoretical one. And so I am to offer a practical approach to the conundrum.

In “Beyond Good and Lying” I suggested that if we have not been very successful in solving our problems by imposing a high moral standard on society, the default position of our worldview should be perhaps that humans are weak and not bound by the moral law the XVIII century Prussian philosopher Kant claimed to carry inside himself. The new premise being that all people (including governments and NGOs, but also the I, the author of a text, including this article) lie, we need to develop an equivalent of the falsifiability method Karl Popper offered for science. Or let’s put it like this. If the presumption of innocence (truthfulness) in the intellectual world (including journalism) has not worked well, let us presume guilt (untruthfulness) and let the author prove him-/herself right.

According to some, I am a peddler of a conspiracy theory. I investigated a criminal plot known as the Magnitsky case. The unusual part was that I had believed one version of the case to be true and found it to be false while working on a film about it. In the end, I made a film that told the story of my discovery, while describing the version I had initially believed, as well as the version I put together as a result of my investigation. The film was structured as a falsifiable case. By its very form and contents, it was open to being proven wrong. It was attacked and censored, but all my attempts to allow my opponents to prove me wrong failed. Instead it is said of me, as one official put it, that I am entitled to my opinion that the official Magnitsky case was a hoax, just as some people may believe that 9/11 was a false flag attack.

And yet, a decision of the European Court of Human Rights (§§202- 205) confirmed the key thesis of my version of the Magnitsky case, and Norwegian censorship report admitted that the censorship of the film had been one of the most prominent examples of a failure of the freedom of the press in Norway. And Norway is in better shape than most countries in terms of media freedom; in Germany, for example, the fact that the film was censored (by ZDF/ARTE) with the knowledge, if not on instructions, of politicians, was simply covered up. The point is that the published evidence that the official Magnitsky version is a hoax may coexist with the governments and the mainstream media turning the hoax into a prime political narrative. Such “coexistence” does not make sense, or does it? Logically it doesn’t. Ideologically it does. And that is by no means a peaceful coexistence, but an unequal fight. The Ideology suppresses logic and those trying to use it.

And yet, though Magnitsky was not the hero fighter against corruption the Ideology makes him out to be, he did die in a Russian jail. That is to be condemned, as even if he was ill, he probably could have been saved by better medical care. Now Alexei Navalny is said by his supporters to be ill in a prison camp, even if the authorities claim that this is just the way the opposition is whipping up the crowds. There is a certain ethical difficulty in transmitting the knowledge I have of the Navalny case in such circumstances. And yet it must be done, as that difficulty is itself a part of my subject matter.

Once in March of 2017 the Financial Times asked me to write an Op-Ed on a spike in the Russian opposition activities. I wrote, among other things, that though Navalny was seen in the West as the leader of the Russian opposition movement, he was a divisive figure even within the opposition. Why? Because he insulted foreign migrants and posted hate-speech videos. An FT editor asked me to provide evidence for my claims. After I did, he stopped responding to my emails, and my piece was never published. It wasn’t the first time I was writing for FT, but the first time they decided not to publish what I wrote, even if they had already approved the text apart from that reference to Navalny’s racist slurs.

I am afraid this is a vivid illustration of my ideology thesis, whereby two levels of ideology are not only distinct but clashing. The liberal, anti-racist ideology is trumped by the ideology of control. The latter sees the racist Navalny as an asset in the fight against Russia as the enemy of democracy. The values of humanity and racial equality sacred, admittedly, to a good citizen, are suddenly worthless as they are in the way of the Ideology of Democracy’s geopolitical ambitions.

Now, what I didn’t mention in the unpublished piece for FT was the fact that Navalny, being a popular blogger, was the main distributor of the Magnitsky hoax in Russia, and Bill Browder, the author of the hoax, praised Navalny for that to me personally at a meeting in Oslo. Browder said that Navalny should be Russia’s next president. If that happens, Browder would be able to return to Russia where he had lived for many years, before becoming “Putin’s enemy No 1”. That is his version of the events. The Russians convicted him for tax evasion.

The essence of the Magnitsky hoax is in dressing up a case of financial fraud (by a Western group) as a human rights crime (by the Russian government) and establishing a whole legal and political “Magnitsky process” to cement an alibi.

The case is the matrix of the West’s relations with and attitudes towards Russia. It is bad news for her if the man who wants to be the country’s next president embraces the Magnitsky fraudulent narrative.

There are other interesting and relevant facts: about a man known as Navalny’ chief ideologue, who is also the chief coordinator of pro-Navalny mass protests; and about the above mentioned UK Foreign Secretary. The latter, Dominic Raab, since his time as a back bencher MP was the closest ally of Bill Browder in the UK political elite, personally promoting the UK’s version of Browder’s U.S. “Magnitsky Act”. The chief of Navalny’s operations is the Lithuanian based Leonid Volkov who in 2019 made known his position on Julian Assange:

Leonid Volkov on Twitter: "День хороших новостей: и аль-Башир и Ассанж явно засиделись, и по аль-Баширу и по Ассанжу давно плачет суд, и аль-Башира и Ассанжа ни капли не жалко. / Twitter"

День хороших новостей: и аль-Башир и Ассанж явно засиделись, и по аль-Баширу и по Ассанжу давно плачет суд, и аль-Башира и Ассанжа ни капли не жалко.

“Both Assad and Assange badly need to be put on trial, I have zero pity for either of them.”

The Navalny case became more complex with his poisoning. It was a very strange affair, where many things made little sense. Navalny claimed that was not the first attempt by the Russian counter-intelligence to kill him, and the orders came directly from Putin. You cannot theoretically exclude that Russian secret services have grown so incompetent as to miss the target at least three times, but given such experience, be it unsuccessful, and the decision to kill him coming from Putin himself, Navalny surviving two days in a Russian hospital looks like an episode from a wrong script. The hospital situation would have been perfect for the killers to finish their business. Compounding the absurdity the Russians allow Navalny’s transfer to Germany, creating ideal conditions for being accused of murder in a global PR campaign, resulting in sanctions, calls to stop the North Stream pipeline project etc.

But perhaps even more difficult to fathom is Navalny’s return to Russia. Once at the peak of my own struggle with the Russian government, when it was announced that my film about Litvinenko was selected for the Cannes film festival, my house in Finland was broken into and gutted with a picture of dying Litvinenko placed on my bed. I had been planning to go to Russia for an urgent business, but I cancelled the trip. I subsequently made more “anti-Russian” films, was in a war zone and can claim that I am not a coward. But going to Russia after what appeared to be a clear warning did not feel like courage to me. It felt unnatural, irrational, counterproductive even, and so I didn’t go. One can always say Navalny is simply more courageous, and putting myself into the picture allows for a less theoretical judgement, bringing it closer to falsifiability described above. But giving yourself up to the people who had tried to kill you many times, pulled off coordinated operations across the vast country and put you through the experience of dying Navalny described in the Spiegel interview seems to me as unnatural as blowing yourself up for a cause.

Is this a subjective thing to say? Of course it is. And even if the comparison had something going for it, given Navalny’s cause is considered just and he wouldn’t be actually blowing up or hurting anyone else, there is no need to find fault in his return. But it is certainly unusual, even for a courageous politician. Is there something deeply shameful in a sceptical thought flashing through one’s mind here? Yet people are shamed, just for using common sense in this case. How dare you?! And yes, the shaming is another example of ideological control.

People start guessing when what they get by way of information is thin on detail and critical thinking and rich on pathos and ideology. We are so used to politicians, and some journalists, spouting tautologic banalities that we don’t register that their statements sometimes contain zero information, performing a purely ritualistic function. But sometimes the “information” has even a negative value, less than zero, so to speak. What do I mean by that?

The Chancellor Merkel announces that “Mr. Navalny was without any doubt poisoned by a chemical weapon of the so-called Novichok group.” Now, Russian politicians claim that Germany did not cooperate adequately with Russia on the question of the poison’s composition, and consider OPSW politically biased (there has been a controversy about OPSW’s Syria investigations), but it would be a stretch to claim that even the OPSW’s report completely supported the Chancellor’s categorical (“zweifelsfrei”) description of the poison as a chemical weapon of the Novichok-group. OPCW said that “the biomarkers of the cholinesterase inhibitor found in Mr Navalny’s blood and urine samples have similar structural characteristics as the toxic chemicals belonging to schedules 1.A.14 and 1.A.15… (“Novichok” A.N.). This cholinesterase inhibitor is not listed in the Annex on Chemicals to the Convention.” But it is worse than that. According to Marc-Michael Blum, a German expert in chemical weapons testing who used to work for the OPCW, it is not possible to determine the source of the poison through the biomedical tests performed on the samples from Navalny by the Bundeswehr Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

Did Merkel say that Russia was the source of the poison? No she did not. What she did say though, was that Navalny had been poisoned in order to be silenced and that there are questions that only (italics A.N.) the Russian government can and must answer. What are those questions that only the Russian government can answer? Why are we not told? Because she knows as well as her experts that the findings do not prove the Russian government had poisoned Navalny, which means, for example, that someone else could have done it, to frame Russia. That is possible logically, and talking about mysterious questions the Russian government should answer logically adds nothing to the equation. But ideologically it makes perfect sense.

Leaving out those “questions that only the Russian government can answer” creates a logical hole in Merkel’s reasoning; it deprives her case of falsifiability. It is neither true nor false. It is difficult to believe that she does that unintentionally. It is risk free. She is in the position she is in because she has learned and exercises, like an illusionist, the power of ideology. Instead of seeing that dodgy logic for what it is the public draws a conclusion their leader does not. Most people are convinced Putin had poisoned Navalny. It’s all in the language isn’t it? It takes on a life of its own and soon we read “The global chemical weapons watchdog said Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a previously undeclared (italics mine A.N.) variant of a Soviet-era nerve agent.” (NBC) “Undeclared variant” — by whom? The Russians? The Soviets? OPCW said they had added Novichok to their list, but never had the stuff found in Navalny’s body on it. NBC clearly takes liberties with definitions (by both “undeclared” and “variant of…”), as most other journalists in this case.

There are inconsistencies in the official German and Navalny’s versions of the events, including conflicting statements about poison found on or in a water bottle, the timing of the poisoning, the question of who travelled with him from Russia to Germany etc. Why asking such questions seems such an impossible task? Whose “national security” is thereby endangered? But there are some strange things about the Russian position as well. For me, the one serious question I have for the Russian government concerns the phone conversation Navalny had (and taped) with an alleged participant of the poisoning operation. It did sound like the person, an FSB chemistry expert, had been involved in a clean-up of Navalny’s clothes. I’ve listened carefully to the recording and found unexplained peculiarities in it. But the Russian government, on the other hand, provided no coherent explanation of that episode either.

One is clear, the case has been heavily weaponised for the purposes to attack those outside of the Ideology of Democracy’s “coverage”. Countering the version installed in the minds of the western public with the help of the Ideology would be dismissed as coming from outside of democracy, considered “alternative facts’’, or alien rather, with no democratic rights, such as the right to debate.

That rejection, from the standpoint of the majority of the Russians, has a dark aspect. People see the western ideological bias as a racialist anti-Russian presumption of guilt. As with the Magnitsky case, Russia is not given a fair trial. Outnumbered in the mainstream international media field by a huge factor, prosecuted in a language, both figuratively, and literally, it often doesn’t understand, it is expected to answer questions that presuppose blame. Cooperation means self-accusation. Invited to be defendant in ideological show-trials Russia responds by hastily building an ideology of its own. Apart from building more rockets, jets, tanks and submarines.

Navalny’s organisation, FBK is now threatened with being declared extremist, which entails a summary clampdown. I cannot support that. It is a dangerous precedent and seems to prove Navalny’s point. He exposes the corruption of the elites and they shut him up for that. But it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. For years Navalny was able to publish his accusations in total freedom, even if many were conjectural and crudely populist, while the West claimed that Russia was not only corrupt but also utterly illiberal and intolerant of the opposition. The latter was simply not true. But soon it might be.

If someone hopes that power will just slip from the current type of leadership into the hands of the West’s favourites’ under the West’s pressure, one is mistaken. Something like that was imaginable and did happen, in the Ukraine, and even there not peacefully, and not quite conclusively. But in Russia, a pro-western change is a project of truly historic civilisational proportions and can only be attempted through a major cataclysm. Whether or not it will succeed, it is likely to involve a violent civil conflict. Simply because the majority distrusts the West, and the western Ideology of Superiority can only perpetuate that mistrust, not alleviate it.

But on the global scale, the Ideology is still strong, so much so that it is still influential within Russia itself. And that is what the West counts on. But what are the real numbers? And the dynamics, the trends? They may not be in the West’s favour in the long run. There is something in the Russian psyche that ultimately doesn’t respond well to the pressure from outside. The ideology Russia is hastily developing for itself, in response to that pressure, is known as Eurasian. China will not do Russia any favours per se. But the two have one important thing in common. They are both on the receiving end of the harsh radiation the western Ideology exposes outsiders to. And that is a stronger case for building a common defence than the West might hope. Generally, the West still being the most powerful civilisation, the ideology, apart from the economy, is the key to its cohesion and influence, while economy and ideology overlap in practice. The ideological West is still larger than the physical one but is shrinking. A glance at the map gives an idea of what might happen when the ideology will be contained within the West’s geographical contours.

What is known there as “illiberalism” is not my choice, but I am reporting that “liberalism” pushes others, e.g. my compatriots, to make that choice not in the latter’s favour. Unsurprisingly, it is the very language that lends “liberalism” its superiority status that is thereby rejected. Unless we find a channel outside of the Ideology, the break-down of communication will develop into something far more dangerous than a conflict of narratives.

Man is not born free (sorry, Rousseau): we are not free to choose the circumstances of our birth and may be born into poverty, slavery or a country at war — and then, anyway, will spend our whole lives being lied to, and lying.

What if such maxim had been a default position in our worldview? Would humanity not stand a better chance of solving the philosophical and political problems it has tried and failed to solve for centuries?

Men have been afraid to postulate anything of the kind. The first one to do it would be accused of cynicism, spite and savagery. And so the development of western ethics reminds of the naked emperor’s procession. Everyone pretends that the emperor’s clothes, the regal vesture of human goodness is real. Everyone is afraid to say that’s a sham and start an inquiry into mankind with the assumption that we are all liars, cheats and impostors. Not even Schopenhauer and Nietzsche did it (Epimenides not qualifying).

Who wants to be rewarded for the hard work of thinking “without the guidance of another”, with hearing: “But he would say that, wouldn’t he? He is the liar, that’s why!”

I believe something most of us cherish, democracy, is going through a profound crisis, which is, to a large extent, a crisis of ideas. At this time of crisis, we need to try a radically new philosophical approach to a problem we all share to a greater degree than we think. The pessimistic assumption above may be the only way to avoid a total war of “optimisms”, antagonistic cultures claiming total moral superiority over each other; it would be a war to the death. Starting with ethical pessimism, and wending our dialectical path away from the complacent, self-righteous language of morality, we should arrive at genuine hope and genuine solidarity.

Humanity has never recoiled from admiring great thinkers just because they disapproved of democracy. A distaste for it is said to have produced history’s best-known villains and yet the reputation of such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche has hardly been dented by anti-democratic themes in their work. But they are all trumped, for all intents and purposes of our political existence, by one British Prime Minister famously quipping that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest that have been tried.

Without inviting anyone to revise that position, I suggest we ask ourselves what it is we mean by democracy today.

The End of Philosophy

The previous century was the time of unimaginable catastrophes, but also a climax in Western critical thinking, which had an enormous accumulation of intellectual experience and unprecedented contemporary challenges to traditional ethical systems to deal with. One crucial thing the tragic century contributed to human history was highlighting the unique role of language in the ways we make sense of the world. That led to radical scepticism about the role of philosophy itself. By questioning whether anything objective exists outside language at all, Wittgenstein, essentially, postulated the end of philosophy in the traditional sense.

But the end of philosophy, as the death of God, announced by Nietzsche, reminds me of the strange fate of a cat in a quantum mechanics thought experiment by Erwin Schrödinger. The poor thing is considered both dead and alive. Democracy looks today a bit like that too. All three, philosophy, religion (in Europe, at least), and democracy make a pretty living dead trio.

The end of traditional philosophy should mean that such vast metaphysical systems as that of Immanuel Kant are just works of philosophical fiction. It has its qualities, inner dramaturgy, it coins impressive terms, reflects humanity’s intellectual development and a particular cultural epoch, but it has resulted from posing pseudo-problems, using contradictory language and abusing logical processes. And yet there are aspects of that same philosophy that are supposed to speak directly to us all today. It is called ethics. (In fact, there seems to have been a revival in interest in it, and quite a few modern philosophers are said to be Kant’s followers in that domain).

Ethics

Kant’s ethics are well known. We are told that we have a duty to treat others as ends, not means to pursue our goals, that we should always act in accordance with maxims that are universal and obligatory for all, which is a guarantee that everyone else would act in the same moral way. Making an exception for oneself in seeking an advantage over others is immoral, and even impossible because if everyone had been making an exception, people would be aware of that…

And then what? — a cynic would ask. Then — everyone would be immoral, Kant would have had to answer; but for everyone to be immoral is not possible, because the moral law is a law.

That is of course an extremely raw recount of an elegant, and probably sincere, theory, but a circularity in the argument is obvious. Kant spends a lot of intellectual energy trying to persuade the reader that the moral world is a happy one. It is also rational, which is an excellent thing, because a rational being brings all possible arguments for acting morally together. Personal happiness, for example, is perfectly commendable, but truly possible only when one considers oneself to be worthy of it by complying with the duty and categorical imperative.

The problem with such starry-eyed idealism becomes especially acute when we are told that one should never ever lie. Kant has been much ridiculed and attacked from the point of view of, precisely, ethics, for his insistence that one cannot even lie to a murderer about the whereabouts of his potential victim. Some elaborate arguments were pronounced in defence of Kant’s total no-lie zone. But here’s what I believe to be directly relevant to the problem of democracy today.

The Ideology of Democracy

Kant’s reasoning is one massive definition of a moral world that is both ideal and realistic. It is a world that he, first of all, feels and believes in, and then works to define and justify. This is not the only way of intellectual exploration, but it is a model for a contemporary phenomenon: the Ideology of Democracy (IoD).

An active promoter of the IoD, be it a political writer, politician, or journalist, seems to be in the business of defining their feelings. That is of course a very broad and vague thing to say, but I need it to try and reset terminology in the area that is particularly contaminated with worthy-sounding technocratic jargon. The key is, at any rate, that politicians engage in an exciting process of formulating things as they should be. To a limited degree, this is a part of their job, but the electrifying sententiousness takes on a life of its own and defining a vision becomes, to borrow Kant’s term paradoxically, an end in itself, whereas it is supposed to be a means to achieving a practical goal of fulfilling the needs of ordinary citizens.

There is a big difference between the politicians’ flaws we chat about in our common mindset and an ideology that contains elements indicative of our “elected aristocracy”‘s intellectual corruption. There are political parties said to promote marginal ideologies, far-right, or far-left, but this is, like “Middle-Est” and “Far-East”, relative to the self-proclaimed centre, the norm. The “norm” has an ideology too, the IoD.

The very contents, — the rhetoric, programmes, roots — of some ideologies give away an ominous blueprint for society, in a way that it should be (or should have been) obvious what practical impact on society they would have. National Socialism is a prime example of that. It should have been clear that racialism and anti-semitism would determine concrete policies. But there is another kind of ideology. The contents of socialism and communism were about social justice, humanism, and, in fact, freedom. The problem with that was philosophical, and, as is often the case with philosophical problems, it was slow boiling. Freedom turning into its opposite that is.

So it was not the “values” which the ideology postulated but how it went about using them to cement its domination, that was malignant. How did it go about it? With dogmatism and a deontology, very similar, in fact, to that of Kant. And in that sense the IoD is, in its turn, very similar to soviet communism.

The Liars and the Honest

At first glance, IoD does not really demand anything as nearly as rigorous as Kant in his ethics. Does that mean that lying is permissible? Well, it does if we are to go by the way the powerful people and organisations that subscribe to the IoD behave. Lying is in fact so routine and taken for granted that it is the truth, factual specific significant truth (different from a wishy-washy avoidance of direct lying), that people are surprised by in public life today. It should be the other way around in a decent company, isn’t it. There are lies, which, even though they are, technically, routine, destroy people’s livelihoods, the peddling of “subprime” mortgages, for example, with more lying from the big bosses during the subsequent crash, generously rewarded in most cases too. But some lies are not at all “routine”, leading to dozens of thousands (at “best”) of innocent peoples’ violent deaths. And there are more lies to cover up lies.

While the powerful lie with impunity, the underdog is, essentially, taught Kant’s categorical imperative. The disadvantaged are left in the lurch politically and economically, but if alms are then given out to them, it is on the understanding that honesty is the highest virtue, and debts should always be paid back. Their pitiful debts, while the debts incurred by the millionaire liars and cheats are paid by the “democratic” state. (The rich being our aristocracy makes one re-visit Nietzsche’s distinction between the aristocratic and the plebeian kinds of morality. The Wall St beasts, at any rate, ain’t ready to make promises).

The system is designed for the powerful to be able to stash untaxed money away, with occasional mysteriously selective “leaks” produced as a lightning rod, or red herring, to keep the system of financial lies intact. In tsarist Russia, almost half of the population was kept in serfdom with the ideological help of the Church. Modern lies about efficiency, inevitability and even fairness of neoliberal economy and its serpentine financial system are propped up by the “education” the masses get, with no critical dissecting of modern capitalism allowed. If democracy had any meaning the people would be taught to understand, specifically, logically, mathematically, how the absolute minority is cheating them.

But is all that perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, just an awkward gap that a well-meaning Immanuel Kant did not take into account, in a complex reality he could not predict, while, nevertheless, providing us with a timeless beautiful ideal, that is still valid in a sense, or even in essence, and which we absolutely need to strive for a better world? Oh sure, you can say that. That’s the whole point. You can put it much more subtly than I do. And–important–put a full stop, in the right place. And turn off the mike, don’t forget. Go off zoom. The main thing is not what you say, actually, barring obvious gaffs, the main thing is to be in that position of power. A democratic power, of course. A power served by an ideology that justifies “the monopoly of legitimate physical coercion“ (Max Weber). The Ideology of Democracy.

It does not need to be logical, lying can still be portrayed as absolutely immoral, but some liars to be more equal than others; reality, like Hamlet’s time, is out of joint, this is the era of relativity… The Western world is still very much the beacon of humanism, for humanity, of human rights — for authoritarians, and of democracy, not to forget… And yes, it’s all just language. Ever heard of the philosophy of language? Everything is just language. That’s what it says.

The Price of the Truth

Well, actually, philosophy of language is concerned with logical truth, while the ideological truth does not depend on logic but the control of the media. And it is, of course, free media, because a democratic government will not call to tell you what to publish (correct?); but — the media does not need prompting to stand up for the values! Which are — the Ideology of Democracy. The circle is complete.

There is no prospect of Socratic philosopher-kings taking over from the corrupt democracy in the near future, but this is what they would tell the powers-that-be in the unlikely event that the latter engaged in a dialogue (even if to say they are doing what’s possible in an imperfect world — BS!): a huge step towards tyranny has already been taken by handing the media police the weapon of the “conspiracy theory” blame. The use of such thing should have been strictly regulated, excessive force severely punished. The most sincere and talented should be assigned to the task of creating a transparent and judicious mechanism of processing “citizens’ investigations”. Like in science, sophisticated criteria, for example, that of “falsifiability” should be applied.

The price of giving a fair trial to some “XYZ-gate” theory must be paid if we are to live in a real, not ideological, democracy. It is a duty of a democracy — a power, rule of the people– to be convincing, logically, not ideologically. That is part of accountability. People are irrational, unable to think logically? They are a reflection of the ideological modus of the Establishment in that respect. It’s the Establishment’s fault. That must be a default position. Even if in one particular case it is they who are wrong, they have been lied to on other occasions. But they are the weaker party, and that must be key. It’s the power that should find a way of paying them back, even if they signal distress with a “conspiracy theory”. And even if for every nine false “conspiracy theory” claims, or even ninety-nine, there will be one truth, it is worth testing them all. The price of killing one truth will not go away. Its negative value will grow exponentially, like a curse, bankrupting the system morally in the end.

Thought is Resistance

The elections, the question-times etc. some people will bring up to counter my scepticism, are becoming hollow rituals, under the pressure of the “bigger picture” of the Values that we are all supposed to know are intrinsically correct, elections or no elections. Exactly like in the USSR. The difference between the one-party system there then and the multiparty system here now is not negligible, but too small in comparison to the great righteousness of the ideology. It is the ideology that, stifling debate, labels opponents as conspiracy theorists, or propagandists for the enemy. And it uses state power to do that. That’s logical. If you refuse to debate, the refusal must be coordinated. It should disappear with the debate. Opponent airbrushed out of the picture.

So what are those deprived of a voice are going to do? That depends on the temperament. Some will join the next rally, or riot, they can get to. Some of those events would be provoked by a direct, demonstrable lie, like that of Brexit, in Northern Ireland. While Brexit, in turn, was largely a protest, against the lies of Brussels, and the native Champagne Socialists and Liberals. But wait, before you gloat over such contradictions, Establishment. The people are not to blame for them, you are. Those who won’t have a direct lie to counter will join any enemy of the enemy. For them, the enemy is not Democracy, but a D (that uses the IoD to crush opponents), and so they might join a Q that has already organised themselves to fight the D. Others will stay home for now. But not forget, and not forgive.

The problem is not that, bar detailed specific economic analysis, the facts of “democracy” cheating on the “demos” are not known; the problem is that they are known, and that changes nothing in essence. That is because ideology has so far trumped logic. But sooner or later, every such system implodes. The danger, of course, is that it may become even more repressive in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to protect itself. In the case of a system relying on ideology for self-preservation, there is nothing to stop it from edging towards fascism. Ideology is there to hamper genuine accountability of power, but it does it gradually, while classic fascism institutionalises unaccountability in a qualitative leap. But this one might not look classic. Probably won’t.

At any rate, it is a system where power does not need to prove anything, does not need to be “logical”. As long as it holds on to one unassailably “correct” proposition, that power is power, it is not bound by logic that brought philosophy to the point of Wittgenstein’s scepticism. The new authoritarian culture can go back, at will, to subjective idealism, or the objective one, justifying Hegelian state; it can resuscitate God, it can fall in love with Nietzsche again, or, the other way around, declare him a pseudo-philosophical anti-democratic misogynist hate speech monger. But it is Kantian ban on lying, after all, that would probably emerge as the main inspiration. It is a theory of course, an ideology, and life is always what it is, but the ideology is there to watch. And how lie differs from truth is, of course, for the competent authorities to decide.

Ideology is stronger for now, but logic is not dead. And it is for those who believe in democracy to choose between ideology and logic. One really great thing Kant famously transmitted was: “Dare to know”. Thought is resistance. Whether or not we were “born free”, we can’t be free in adult life unless we exercise that resistance daily. Everything is language, but these are not just words.

Один печально известный западный политик XX века сформулировал одну простую мысль: Запад сможет поддерживать свой высокий жизненный уровень только за счет остального мира, который должен жить на более низком уровне. Он, Адольф Гитлер, не проорал это толпе в качестве лозунга или гиперболы, а рационально изложил на встрече с немецкими промышленниками и предпринимателями. Уже после падения берлинской стены и распада СССР выдающийся драматург и интеллектуал Хайнер Мюллер сказал, что Гитлер, по сути, победил, потому что победила его идея, что в мире “на всех не хватит”.

Без малого тридцать лет спустя прилетевший из Германии, но тут же арестованный оппозиционный российский политик, по сути, призывает к восстанию. Многие из вышедших 23 января 2021 “за Навального” объяснили, что они, на самом деле, против системы, при которой у стариков нищенская пенсия, у многих нищенская зарплата и так далее, в то время как у кого-то, даже если, формально, не у Путина, но все равно, у них там, наверху, такие дворцы… Вопрос: когда мы узнали об этом неравенстве?
Неравенство началось не при Путине. “Система” возникла при приватизации 90х. О ее несправедливости и неизбежности (якобы) все сказано. Нажились на ней не только некоторые россияне, но и, в очень большой степени, Запад. Очень многие из таких россиян и иностранцев — теперь те самые либералы, призывающие к “изменению” (свержению) режима (regime change). Назовем их лагерем W.
А кто-то, действительно, “дружит с Путиным”, или просто политически нейтрально встроен в российскую экономику, скажем, лагерь R. Можно не верить, что Запад сделал “официальную” (государственную, тайную или явную) ставку на Навального, но то, что он “кандидат в президенты” от лагеря W — это очевидно. И вот простой юноша голосует ногами (а кто и кулаками) за этого кандидата.
В мире за пределами России экономические требования, предъявляемые “вышедшими за Навального” ассоциируются с левыми взглядами. У нас — нет. Простой юноша полагает, что пенсию бабушке, размером c ту, что платят, скажем, в соседней Финляндии обеспечит благосклонный и богатый лагерь W, забрав власть у лагеря R.

И вот в этом, дорогой друг, принципиальная ошибка. Хотя до этой самой Финляндии из того же Питера, ясное дело, рукой подать, рассматривать Россию лишь в контексте небольшой, богатой части мира, Запада, может либо несведущий обыватель, либо пропагандист из лагеря W. С точки зрения Запада, Россия — часть того другого, большого мира, на который богатства не хватит.

Нет никаких доказательств того, что лагерь W намерен обеспечить России те условия, которые на Западе были созданы в результате длительных процессов, включавших и эксплуатацию колоний и прочие явления не вполне честной, мягко говоря, конкуренции с остальным миром. И в самих странах Запада про честную конкуренцию, теперь, пожалуй, лишь вспоминают с ностальгией; финансовый капитал и разнообразные рантье давно извратили “светлые идеалы” классического капитализма. Но сейчас речь не о них, а о нас. Нет никаких свидетельств тому, что Запад преследует в своих отношениях с Россией что-либо, кроме своих жестких интересов. И это — интересы лагеря W. Он определился с кандидатом. И со стратегией.

Значит ли это, что надо смириться с бабушкиной пенсией? Конечно же нет. Но надо чуть-чуть поумнеть и повзрослеть, запастись минимумом знаний о мире, прежде чем сдавать страну на милость Западу. Легко кричать, что вор — один какой-то дядя, где-то далеко. Ну и еще какой-нибудь мужик, который что-то “вывез в Геленжик”. Труднее задуматься о природе коррупции. О том, что страна, в которой бабушка прожила жизнь, была вот такой, да, для кого-то презренной, “коммунистической”, но для кого-то (расспроси бабушку еще раз) той родиной, которая пронесла, несмотря на ненависть всего мира, свою уникальность, свой культурный суверенитет, пока новый президент — Ельцин, не Путин — её не растоптал и не проклял, присягая Западу в том самом злосчастном американском конгрессе. Труднее задуматься, что происходит с такой огромной, жившей по своим, совершенно особым, экономическим и психологическим, законам системой, что происходит с обманутым, униженным народом, когда всё в одночасье перекраивается по чужим лекалам, и практически официально отдаётся бандитам.

Мир может вздохнуть спокойно! Коммунистический идол, который сеял повсюду на Земле социальную рознь, вражду и беcпримерную жестокость, который наводил страх на человеческое сообщество, рухнул. (…)
Мы чувствуем колоссальную ответственность за успех наших преобразований не только перед российским народом, но и перед гражданами США, перед всем человечеством. Сегодня свобода Америки защищается в России. (…)
Мы приглашаем американский частный капитал на уникальный и малоосвоенный российский рынок и говорим: “Не опоздайте!”
“Господи, благослови Америку!” И добавлю к этому: и Россию.
Б.Н. Ельцин (17 июня 1992) — Выступление в Конгрессе США

Трагедия России в том, что она сегодня не может и не хочет думать, как завещал великий Кант, без посторонней помощи. С точки зрения многих европейских и американских сверстников наших молодых либералов, современный капитализм это, на самом деле, просто синоним коррупции. Если им там все-таки удаётся её, коррупцию, “держать в рамках” (не искореняя), то это только потому, что для них “борьба с коррупцией” — это анализ всей системы, в которую вовлечен каждый. Лагерь W не хочет, чтобы русские анализировали систему, потому что лагерь W не собирается её в России менять. Для менее развитых капитализм будет по полной брутальной программе. Лагерь W просто хочет сместить лагерь R, и поэтому коррупция определяется “дворцом Путина”.

В ситуации, когда у “России есть только два союзника — армия и флот”, для борьбы с коррупцией нельзя приглашать варягов. Российские коррупционеры — российское внутреннее дело. И дело это надо делать, господа! Но к нам заслан лжепророк. Чтобы, веря в него, волнуясь и надеясь, мы, по сути, ничего не смогли изменить. Но есть и более мрачная перспектива. Россия не Украина, и не Венесуэла. Лагерь W провоцирует лагерь R желая, чтобы сбылось то, что сейчас является лишь западной пропагандистской картинкой — жесткое нео-самодержавие. В России никогда не переведутся люди, за версту чующие интервента, и они не сдадутся. Ответственность и за радикализацию реакционных сил, и за, не дай Бог, жертвы гражданского противостояния понесёт Запад и его “кандидаты”.

Ten years ago, when I first thought of making a film about Sergei Magnitsky, hardly anyone in the West had heard of him. On November 18th 2020, at an online event organised by prominent MEPs, Magnitsky’s name reverberated with fame and glory; the glory of a martyr, in the tradition of Giordano Bruno, or Martin Luther King.

The event reached its political climax when Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, pronounced Magnitsky’s name as a symbol of Europe’s retaliation against corruption and violence going on outside of the EU. And there was another man the President called by his name: “Mr. Browder” — the only key speaker at the event that held no official position or title, but whom the moderator mysteriously introduced as the “host”.

In the process of making that film about Magnitsky I discovered that his story, as it had become known in the West, was a hoax. The author of the hoax was Bill Browder, an American-born manager of a Russian-based hedge fund. Magnitsky was employed as an accountant for (and, occasionally, a figurehead of) corporate investment tools under Browder’s control. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009, officially from heart failure (he had also hepatitis, diabetes and pancreatitis). Browder declared that Magnitsky had been murdered because he had uncovered a large swindle and accused police of being behind it. The police officers he had allegedly accused had him arrested and imprisoned. They tortured him, Browder claims, each of the 350 days of his imprisonment, trying to force him to withdraw his accusations. Magnitsky categorically refused to recant, and was beaten to death in an isolation cell as a result.

Believe it or not, that story sounded true to me. There is a long list of things I dislike about contemporary Russia, and so I was politically primed to believe Browder’s horror story. But I also liked it as a filmmaker. A martyr-accountant who dies for his principles is a kind of hero that might restore one’s faith in humanity in these cynical times, and make a good film.

I then found out that Browder and Magnitsky were both investigated in a brazen tax evasion case, after they faked employment of handicapped people because it helped cut taxes on Browder’s hedge fund’s windfall profits to about 5%. I didn’t pay much attention to that, as Browder was telling everybody that the case was politically motivated, as he was Putin’s critic. “The moment you dare criticise them, he said in a Channel 4 interview, they put a stamp on you: tax evasion!”.

The problem with that explanation, I soon realised, was that when the Russian tax authorities and police started investigating him in the early 2000s Browder was a vociferous supporter of Putin, not a critic.

Magnitsky is now known as a whistleblower who fought Putin’s kleptocracy but as people who had closely known him for years, and even his own mother, have told me, Sergei was an apolitical, utterly private person interested in serving his clients and earning money. My own serious doubts as to the veracity of Browder’s story started with a closer look at a Russian document Browder presented as the evidence of Magnitsky’s whistleblowing activity. The document was nothing of the sort. It was a transcript of police questioning Magnitsky, a rather reticent and defensive witness, while they were already investigating scams involving Browder’s shell companies. I later found out that some of the things Magnitsky told the investigator were misleading or untrue.

I soon realised that I was dealing with a perfect hoax, whose main character was a fictitious version of a deceased person. The fact that Magnitsky had been completely unknown and almost friendless had both advantages and disadvantages for the hoaxers. It was a bit strange that neither Magnitsky’s sensational whistleblowing revelations, nor his arrest, were noticed by the media at the time. But there were more advantages than disadvantages in Magnitsky’s anonymity. Browder could totally reinvent his accountant posthumously with virtually no risk of being caught lying.

And there was a very logical motive behind that. Magnitsky and Browder were investigated in the same criminal case, and making it out as a part of a callous Russian persecution of a hero was Browder’s perfect alibi. Let’s not forget that the Russians have been trying to get Browder extradited to face trial for aggravated tax evasion.

In The Magnitsky Act — Behind the Scenes I tell a story of swindles involving Browder’s shell companies, but also the tale of my own twisty journey from believing Browder to the realisation that he had lied to me, the media, governments and parliaments. The film was to be premiered at the European Parliament in April 2016, but the screening was stopped at the last moment, on the orders of Browder’s lawyers.

The centrepiece of Browder’s successful campaign to sanctify Magnitsky has been the so-called Magnitsky Act, initially proscribing sanctions against the “killers and torturers” of Magnitsky in the U.S. Now that Browder is pushing a Magnitsky Act through the European Parliament I considered it necessary to remind the EU establishment of my banned film, and of the facts and documents that show Magnitsky wasn’t the man Browder had made him out to be.

I wrote an open letter to Ursula von der Leyen who had vowed to implement the “European Magnitsky Act” in her State of the European Union address in September 2020. I then forwarded the letter to all members of the European Parliament. Eight weeks later, on November 17th, 2020, I received a short reply (dated November 13th), “on behalf of the President”, from the EU “Managing Directorate Russia, Eastern Partnership” etc. The Directorate “took note” of my “views”, the letter said.

I don’t know whether the fact that the reply came shortly before an event that called for the adoption of the EU Magnitsky Act, in which Von der Leyen appeared, was a coincidence. What I do know, is that she and the speakers at the event (MEPs, to whom I had forwarded the open letter) simply ignored all the facts and documents I had painstakingly laid out. Neither Von der Leyen nor the MEP speakers deviated one inch from Browder’s Magnitsky story I had refuted in my letter.

The MEPs, Messrs. Sikorski, Glucksmann and Auštrevičius, also ignored the questions I had sent them, invited to do so in the event’s introduction email. As it happened, the moderator did not find time for questions and answers.

In my letter and my posted questions I emphasised that since completing my film I had seen other serious media, including “Der Spiegel”, Danish papers “Finans” and “Børsen”, raising doubts over Browder’s narrative and motives. Nothing seemed to have impressed the MEPs or Von der Leyen. The Magnitsky event was described as a “Global debate”, but all participants happened to be fully synchronised in their support for the one and only official (Browder’s) narrative.

Why do I think people should pay attention to all this? I am not the first nor the last to complain that the powers that be ignore grievances of the ordinary mortals. And, as Churchill famously said, “Indeed (…) democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried…”

The problem, however, is that fewer and fewer people actually agree that we live in a democracy today. And a brief exchange I had with the EU leadership on such a relatively obscure issue as Magnitsky, can in fact tell us more about the state of democracy than grandiloquent ideological rants from the political right, left and centre.

Are measures against COVID too harsh or too lax? Have some countries got it wrong, while others did much better? People can argue about that forever. In international affairs it’s even worse. Russia has become more aggressive during Putin’s rule? Certainly, for some, but others ask, ironically, “Where to invade next”, and it’s not Russia they mean to be the invader. Again, you can argue forever about these things and are likely to end up preaching to the converted, within your political echo chamber. And each echo chamber will decry the post-truth era, meaning, of course, that others are responsible for it.

Objective criteria for truth do exist, but they are logical, not political, and, compared to emotional issues of human rights (in authoritarian countries), logic is, actually, boring.

The objective truth is correctness of inferences and it can be shown in syllogisms such as this:

“All humans are mortal. All Greeks are humans. Therefore: all Greeks are mortal.”

There are aspects of the Magnitsky case that seem too boring for politicians to consider, yet it is precisely those aspects that are able to yield something close to objective truth.

Let’s look at the case from the point of view of logic. Firstly, there are facts no one disputes. Magnitsky was arrested and imprisoned. The question is why? The official — Browder’s — version, Magnitsky’s hero fame, the “Magnitsky Acts” — are all based on the proposition that he was arrested and imprisoned by corrupt officials because he had exposed their corruption.

Having studied the documents, I realised that Magnitsky’s imprisonment was not a result of any fight against corruption. He was arrested for being complicit in economic crimes. But in my letter to Ursula von der Leyen I did not say I was right and Browder was wrong because I’d already shown it all in my film, and generally am an honest guy. That would be, in the context of the letter, circular logic, something called begging the question. And so I wrote, inter alia, that my findings had been confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights.

The Court concludes that the first applicant’s (Magnitsky’s — A.N.) arrest was not arbitrary, and that it was based on reasonable suspicion of his having committed a criminal offence. (Case of Magnitskiy and others v. Russia; Applications nos. 32631/09 and 53799/12; JUDGMENT, § 250, p. 40.)

The Magnitsky Acts are named after Sergei Magnitsky because he is said to have been wrongfully imprisoned and intentionally killed for fighting corruption. They are not named after Magnitsky because he died in a Russian prison because of poor conditions, lack of proper medical care or even criminal negligence, having been imprisoned for tax evasion. Yet it is the latter version that has basis in fact, while the former does not. There is no justification, therefore, for an “Act” named after Magnitsky.

I did look into Browder’s claims that Magnitsky was tortured during his imprisonment. Even here, Browder has been economical with the truth. For a period of time, Magnitsky was kept in a better equipped “VIP” prison block, and himself reported medical care in that facility to be adequate. Browder never talks about that. But at times the imprisonment conditions were very poor indeed. I deal with this in the film and in the letter to Ms von der Leyen. This changes nothing, however, in the fact that Magnitsky was in prison as a suspect in a legitimate criminal investigation and not as a fighter of corruption.

The question whether Magnitsky was murdered is of course an extremely serious one. Again, I’ve dealt with it extensively, only to be ignored by Ursula von der Leyen who in her Magnitsky speeches simply goes from one talking point of Browder’s to another. She takes his unsubstantiated claim that Magnitsky was murdered for granted, having allegedly “taken note” of my letter where I quote Andreas Gross, Council of Europe’s special rapporteur on Magnitsky and even Sergei’s own mother. Gross states that “they” (Russian authorities) did not have the intention to kill Magnitsky, it was not a murder but a case of negligence. Magnitsky’s mother blames the prison doctor for her son’s death.

The big question, of course, is whether in this, and other cases, politicians are just being ignorant, ill-advised and perhaps even a little witless, or they are deliberately obfuscating the truth for political or personal reasons. This is probably a subject for another article. What needs to be said for the purposes of this one is that even if the mistake some people make believing Browder over the arguments I adduce might seem innocent, the system that stubbornly prevents such mistakes from being corrected is anything but innocent.

The system is set to repeat ad nauseum that it is democratic (and superior to all others) while making sure it can stonewall all undesirable communication and rule out any debate in which it could conceivably lose. To prepare for the sacred ritual of “free election” there is the party system to keep all but the career conformists neatly locked out. (The non-conformists who do get in against all odds will have to fall in line or be locked out politically, for example as “anti-democrats”). The only thing that is still working half-decently, in my humble opinion, is judiciary, technically, with one big “If”. If you have money for the lawyers.

Even though Bill Browder was able to dupe lawmakers in such exemplary democracies as the USA, Canada and the UK, into adopting his “Magnitsky Acts”, he did not manage, not once, to secure a successful judgement for his Magnitsky hoax in a court of law. And he did try, very hard, as only a court, not the media, not symbolic votes of clueless parliamentarians for the name of his accountant on a “sanctions regime”, can guarantee that no authority in the West would ever believe the Russians that Browder cheated them out of many millions of dollars.

This is why Browder initiated dozens of civil and criminal procedures around the world against whoever he could accuse with some superficial circumstantial plausibility of benefitting from the Magnitsky case. He was happy to flatly accuse whole banks in most reputable countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, of laundering the Magnitsky case money. A whole raft of bizarre claims calling out suspected beneficiaries of the Magnitsky crime, ranging from Prince Charles to a quarry in Norway appeared in the press. No one has been convicted so far.

The most famous case in the slew of Browder’s legal raids was against a company called Prevezon, owned by a Russian, Denis Katsyv. The company stood accused in the US and Switzerland. After many years of highly advertised proceedings, described by Browder and the media as definitive clamping down on Russian corruption in the West, the US government had to sheepishly settle the case without trial, with no guilt admitted by Prevezon.

On November the 20th, having spent 10 years (!) on the Prevezon case initiated by Browder, the Swiss prosecutor general withdrew it, and ordered Katsyv’s frozen money to be returned to him. Rather ominously for Browder, the prosecutor’s office announced that it would probe Browder’s role in initiating the case.

How does such a decision by a European authority make the President of the European commission look when she calls for the freezing of the foreigners’ assets on a nebulous legal basis? Among those targeted by the first American Magnitsky Act were people who investigated Browder’s tax evasion schemes. A little later, under another “Magnitsky Act” a rival of Browder’s clients was stuck under sanctions.

So who will be deciding whose assets should be frozen under the European “Magnitsky Act”, if even experienced professionals, like those Swiss prosecutors, entrusted with weighing evidence before taking it to judges, can be stuck on a wrong track for years in just one case? Is the quality of such case, initiated by none other than William Browder, not something to go by while exploring asset freezing under Browder’s pet “Magnitsky Act” project?

Interestingly, addressing the Magnitsky event, Ms Von der Leyen proudly announced that the European Union had recently sanctioned Burmese generals, with much success. It clearly did so without any Magnitsky Acts. So — where’s the logic?

The essential arbitrariness, and therefore illegality of Magnitsky laws, (“acts”), is obvious to any unbiased observer, but there clearly is a competition between logic and law, on the one hand, and politics on the other and the latter has an unfair advantage. Politicians have invested heavily in Browder’s narrative (so useful in the epic battle against what’s left of the evil empire) and can’t afford to cut their losses and come clean about the Magnitsky disaster.

Bill Browder has made sure every mainstream news outlet, every major political party in the West has put its signature under a false accusation of the most ignominious kind. An accusation from the high moral ground of democracy and human rights, that has turned out to be a lie motivated by greed. Some mistakes do get admitted, but admitting this one is seen as a total capitulation with unpredictable consequences.

That gives one private citizen named Browder the confidence to bully entire countries, e.g. Cyprus, as he fast-tracks sanctions ultimatums through the European institutions, lest the police continue to do their job and investigate his dubious shell companies. Now it’s Switzerland’s turn.

Browder has just threatened Swiss citizens, should they act on the instructions of their country’s legal authorities, with “civil and criminal penalties in the United States”.

And so I dare predict that the Magnitsky case’s trajectory from an obscure financial crime to the biggest international cover-up in modern history will run its full course in all its absurdity, sliminess and geopolitical precariousness. Causing, in these uncertain times, an unforeseeable damage to the health of democracy, which has enough underlying conditions as it is.

Мы, русские, всегда чего-то ждали. Даже у самых циничных и прагматичных из нас, всегда было какое-то сокровенное ожидание, идеальное видение какого-то будущего, где-то не здесь, где-то там… Это было и в героях чеховских пьес, и в советской интеллигенции, и остаётся, несмотря на прозу капитализма, в русской душе до сих пор.

Есть мнение, что первородный грех, или врожденный дефект, новой (постсоветской) России в том, что общество пассивно получило радикальные изменения сверху, а не активно боролось за них снизу. Связано это было, пожалуй, именно с тем русским мечтательным ожиданием чего-то идеального, при том, что история никогда не стоит на месте, и кто-то всегда будет действовать, хоть и в отрыве от глубинных движений, или недвижимости, коллективной души.

Гуляя по пронизанному низким осенним солнцем лесу, я поставил себе и своим собратьям (и “со-сестрам”) по русскому разуму диагноз, который, для краткости, назову синдромом Бергмана. Мы боготворили шведского режиссера так, как не боготворил его никто, включая его соотечественников. То, что Достоевский писал о наших либералах, что они самые либеральные из всех либералов в мире, можно сказать и о наших ценителях прекрасного. Мы умеем ценить прекрасное как никто в мире, отдавая за него последнее, что у нас есть. Прекрасным в перестройку казалось демократическое будущее, и в 90х многие интеллигенты-бессеребренники говорили: пусть кто-то обогащается, это плата за нашу свободу, и она того стоит.

Ведь мы так долго ждали, ждали того, что у нас, в нашей жизни и в нашей стране, наступит… ах, что-то такое… такое-такое! Либералы, которые тогда назывались демократами, проектировали демократию и либерализм в уличных спорах и на площадных митингах, но мы, кроме — или больше —неведомой демократии, ждали наступления царства Бергмана. Чтобы все стало как в его фильмах: красиво, загадочно и без этой нашей совковой грязи и суеты. То есть, пусть даже будет смерть (ее много у Бергмана) — а куда от нее деться, — пусть будут все эти измены и ревность (красивых, элегантных мужчин и женщин), только бы не очереди за колбасой, запах тушеной капусты и ботинок в прихожей и эта безошибочно совковая материалистическая очумелость во взгляде.

О Западе мы, коллективно, несмотря на открытые до недавнего времени границы, до сих пор знаем по кино. Даже когда русский приезжает на Запад, он подсознательно сравнивает все с кино. То, что не так, как в кино, будет разочаровывать, игнорироваться и забываться по возвращении на родину. Образ западного изящества, до сих пор символизирующий отрицание нашей похабщины, не будет пересмотрен в свете фактов. Кино одолеет и подчинит себе любую аналитику, в том числе западную.

Новые поколения уже не слышали ни о каком Бергмане, и проводят время в инстаграме, ТикТоках и тп, но идеология либералов все еще в том, чтобы стать Западом, вернее его киноверсией. Старшее либеральное поколение все еще в авторитете и задает тон. Бергман незримо царит, несмотря на количество просмотров фильмов Навального. Этот последний поставляет ежедневный рацион оппозиции, является ее ведущим политиком, но российская оппозиция — не британская, в России оппозиция — это культура, идея, и ей, чтобы быть великой (а в России победить может только великая идея) нужны жрецы, а не просто блогеры и активисты. А жрецы у нас от Бергмана, в нем идея и культура, подсознание и душа оппозиции.

Душа тоскует по чему-то большему, чем “Россия без Путина”, или вкладывает в этот лозунг не только, или не столько, политику и экономику, сколько веру, надежду, любовь (предупреждение про-властной РПЦ), и, главное, красоту — ту самую, которая всех спасет. Даже если мозг согласен с теми, кто обещает, что демократия и либерализм восторжествует, как только будут раскулачены коррупционеры по указанию комитета по борьбе с коррупцией, душа мечтательно воображает, как эстетически будет отличаться Россия без Путина, от России с ним. Москва без Собянина, например, будет какая-то совсем особенная? Все пригороды будут как Рублевка? Питер — совсем как Париж? Вся Россия будет как Москва и Питер? Или как Швеция? Или как Америка, но без всех тех ужасных районов, где обитают все эти, как бы их корректнее назвать… мародеры? Исчезнет ли жилье, напоминающее нам о страшном совковом прошлом, или его как-то эстетизируют, как в восточной Германии?

Однако, если начать задумываться обо всем этом серьезно, становится скучно и грустно, ибо Россия даже не восточная Германия, а даже многие районы восточной Германии до сих пор не на уровне Бергмана. Чувствуется до сих пор не-изящность какая-то, не-западность, черт ее дери. Но задумываться не обязательно. Главное сильно чувствовать. Сильно любить и ненавидеть. Любить Бергмана, ненавидеть совок. Верить, что Россия будет свободной, то есть эстетичной и изящной. Исчезнет не только совковый вид, но и, конечно же, советский человек, который, как его ни травили в 90х, так и не вытравился (Путин виноват).

Не будем о грустном, напомним только, что коллега Навального, считающийся идеологом движения, Леонид Волков четко сказал в интервью “Новой газете”, что если умирающие русские малые города и поселки вымрут, туда им и дорога. Никто в прекрасной России будущего их спасать и не подумает. Волков, кажется, имеет дом в Люксембурге — красивый город, и еще один образец для России из кино.

На днях молодая женщина в Саратове попыталась себя зарезать и выбросила дочерей из окна. Ни она, ни муж, с которым она недавно развелась, не были алкоголиками или наркоманами. “Благополучная семья была” — сказала соседка. Вспомнилось слово Нелюбовь — название одного красивого российского фильма. Там тоже про страдания, вроде бы, наших российских людей, но при этом все очень похоже на Запад. Полет режиссерского воображения с транзитом в Ингмаре Бергмане.

Принадлежит ли Саратов к числу умирающих малых городов, по мнению идеолога российского неолиберализма? Малым его точно не назовешь, но многоквартирный дом, в котором произошла трагедия, выглядит вполне умирающим. А ведь он — совершенно типичный для страны. В таких живут, любят, ненавидят и сходят с ума от горя наши люди. А наши политики и наши художники удивительно едины в одном: их Россия не там, где (перефразируя Ахматову) их народ, к несчастью, находится. Их Россия все еще в кино Бергмана.

“Nothing is more free than the imagination of man, and though it cannot exceed the original stock furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating and dividing these ideas in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign the train of events with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent and paint them out to itself with every circumstance that belongs to any historical fact which it believes with the greatest certainty.”

To me, David Hume, who wrote those words, has always seemed an odd man out in the universe of Western philosophy. It’s not a philosophical system, a complete mental world each of the famous traditional philosophers created for themselves, that has haunted me ever since I read Hume, but just one thought. It was of course, like a musical theme, an integral part of his entire logical symphony, but in my humble mind it stuck just like this:
The cause-effect connections exist only in our imagination, based on experience and habit. There is no necessity in anything being caused by something else, apart from our perception and memory registering those things appear in a sequence over and over again.

Now, the reason I eventually found philosophy frustrating, while still adoring it, was the fact that it was simply impossible to explain something like Hume’s sceptical view of causality in a conversation with highly intelligent and creative friends of mine. We could all talk about poetry, art, theatre and film, and even science, with infinite wit and subtlety, and be understood, but logic was one thing too narrow and abstruse, much more so than even, say, biochemistry.

And in many ways it is. Yet the global COVID-19 crisis poses some basic philosophical questions whose relevance to human life, society, politics and culture, is normally ignored. Logic can sound extremely arcane, but it does have a human face and is capable of guiding us, ordinary citizens, out of some terrible predicaments — if we pull ourselves together and let it do it.

It is not difficult to understand what fallacy is. One of the most famous goes like this:

God definitely exists.
How can you know for sure?
The bible says so, and the bible is the truth, because it’s God’s word.

OK, but what has this fallacy got to do with the COVID?

Just a moment, let’s look at another syllogism:

This dish is the healthiest you can have.
Why?
Because it’s the only one on offer that consists of only natural ingredients.

This is also a fallacy. Logically speaking. But the fallacious quality in the latter case is not as obvious as in the fallacy about God. Logically, “only natural ingredients” is not a proof of the proposition that this dish is healthier than those with other kinds of ingredients. But in terms of convention, custom, belief, it may be considered as “proof”.

The reason that few would fail to spot the God fallacy, while the natural ingredients one is pretty certain to go unnoticed, is that God is not as popular today as natural ingredients are. At the same time, even if many of those who still believe in God are perfectly capable of seeing the God fallacy for what it is, their faith makes them somehow more forgiving of the formal weakness of the argument in favour of God. It is not terribly important, if the premise that God exists is correct. That is, if you believe in God.

The same goes for healthy eating and natural ingredients. Being able to consume natural food is so much more important than following formal logic, if you believe that natural ingredients are healthier than all others. And there’s nothing surprising or scandalous about it. The epoch conditioned custom is stronger than abstract logic, and a certain conflict between them remains invisible for most people at most times.

Let us look now at the infamous COVID. The most horrible thing we hear through the media about it is the “death toll”. Every single day headlines tell us of a daily count of those who died… — and already right here I wonder how to continue my sentence. Died — yes, but due to what? The answer seems obvious. But look at how this is expressed.

“Deaths from the virus”
“Death toll from the virus”
“Deaths of people with the virus”
“Coronavirus deaths”
“Coronavirus-related deaths”
“Deaths linked to coronavirus”.
“…People who have died after testing positive for coronavirus”.

“Deaths within 28 days of testing positive”.
“The city has added more than 3,700 people who were presumed to have died from coronavirus but had never tested positive.”

Causality is clearly implied in all of the expressions, though not clearly stated in some of them. One suspects also that by using “with”, “related” and “after testing positive” writers were consciously dodging a direct causal link of “from” (interestingly I haven’t seen “caused by” being used much). Which doesn’t make them more conscientious. On the contrary, if you feel there is a problem with that link, you should explore the problem, and not tune it out in the hope to have the cake and eat it: conveniently joining pack journalism of the day, without committing a formal logical fallacy.

For a fallacy of course it is. How can one say the deaths are from (caused by) the virus, if just a tiny percentage of the total number of the reported dead had no underlying condition?

Theoretically speaking, the virus can be a decisive factor in a lethal outcome, even if the underlying condition is serious enough. But is there firm evidence to support that in each case registered as a death “linked to” COVID? No there isn’t. Even the BBC, which has generally been in the vanguard of the uncritical reporting of “coronavirus death toll”, admitted there had to be a statistical “overlap” in the numbers of coronavirus deaths and those from other causes. BBC quoted the Imperial College scientist David Spiegelhalter: “Many people who die of Covid would have died anyway within a short period.”

Then again, how can one be certain those people died of — because of — the COVID and admit, in the same sentence, that they would have died anyway, without the virus that is, within a short period? I admit such frivolous assumption of causality (coming from a scientist) may not sound incongruous to an average reader, but would have certainly rattled a logician like David Hume.

It is well known that the trust in the media is generally decreasing, but the COVID may be a case apart. Fear and panic make it different, drastically reducing the levels of the audiences’ healthy scepticism. Still the media have to provide some evidence for their claims. It seems to be in the pictures of piles and rows of coffins in Bergamo and in the soundbites about mass graves that might have to be dug in public parks in New York. The fact that most media stories are “linked” to the virus seems to be in itself a proof of its exceptionally lethal nature. A moving story of grieving over a death (“linked” to COVID) would count as evidence of the virus’ mortal danger. And here I don’t claim to be any different from an average consumer of news. It impresses me just like most people. I am not claiming to have any insider or scientific (apart from maths and formal logic) knowledge. I am just asking simple questions I haven’t seen any logically satisfactory answers to.

The death rate among those infected from COVID is now reported to be about 5%. But 5% of what number exactly? It is the percentage of the identified, “confirmed” cases, that is of those who have been tested positive. But if at least three quarters of all infections are believed to pass without symptoms, and if not all those with symptoms have been tested, how can we say that 5% of those infected die?

The death rate of the 2017–18 flu epidemic in the US peaked at 10,8%. There can be the same problem with that statistic as with the above mentioned 5% COVID-related one. Yet these approximate comparisons of death rates today and two years ago are still interesting. Everything around us is screaming that the current crisis is unprecedented, yet numbers tell a slightly different story.

Let’s have a quick check of the Italian case, until recently the worst in the Western world. The flu-related death toll by the end of the winter 2017 in Italy was as high as today. The question then is why were there no news of Italian health care system collapsing three years ago?

Ilya Pestov has pointed out some relevant statistics. According to the WHO over 100 000 people became infected in Italy by the end of March, eleven thousand of them died. The number of hospital beds in Italy is over 200 000. The Chinese experience shows that under 14 % of the infected would require hospitalisation. If approximately 15 000 people, spread over a certain period, needed hospitalisation in Italy, how come the system disposing of more than 200 000 beds would become so badly overwhelmed this year, but not in 2016–17? The geographically uneven distribution of the infection could be a factor of course. But could it also have something to do with the criteria used as to whom, how and how many to test, treat and hospitalise? And a lot to do with the psychology and politics, and the media coverage, of today’s crisis?

But who are we to contradict the WHO in their conclusions (never mind some of their statistics)? At least as reported by Bloomberg those conclusions sound like a perfect paragon of fallacy:

“The World Health Organisation has cautioned against comparing Covid-19 to the flu.”

“This isn’t just a bad flu season,” Mike Ryan, head of health emergencies at the WHO, said in a March 20 briefing. “These are health systems that are collapsing under the pressure of too many cases. This is not normal.”

Why not just say, the infections rate now is unprecedentedly high, much higher than in all other recent outbreaks, and so is mortality. And give unambiguous numbers. No, he can’t say that, because it’s not true. Wiggling his way out of the question of evidence for the claims that the infections and deaths count is unusually high, the WHO official needs the crutches of logically unrelated, but emotionally effective, mention of the collapsing health systems. Begging the question, that’s what it’s called, sir. With a caveat that it isn’t innocent, as you are a responsible official of a trusted global health authority. Your fallacy is not just about logic, it is also about the political agenda of the ruling classes.

Here’s a brief story I found randomly perusing readers’ comments under an article on pandemics:

“My grandfather was 15 years old. His parents and his two siblings were very ill with the flu so he ran to get help. By the time he got back to the house they were all dead. I am lying in bed with the H1N1 right now. Probably the sickest I’ve ever been. I personally believe face masks should be mandatory and all public transportation. What a tragedy all the way around.”

The author starts by describing her grandfather’s experience during the 1918 pandemic. And what date would you put on her own experience she is describing? Today? No, she wrote this in March 2019.

I remember fainting in my cutting room in the autumn of 2009, and ending up in a hospital where two people I had briefly met died within five days I spent there. I was told it was the flu. I had it, and some of my colleagues did, and no one of course had heard of “social distancing” or “self-isolating”. Would it have been better if we all stayed at home? Probably. But it is equally important, today, to be telling the whole truth. If that epidemic back in 2009, when I almost died, and every other outbreak between then and now, were much lighter, and therefore the media and the governments are right in making this one out to be the plague of the century, we should be clearly told that with all the evidence being out there in black and white and colour. Why do we have to look for that evidence, or counter-evidence, a bit like people in the Soviet Union were reconstructing the truth out of rumours and titbits from jammed Western radio programmes? If some data is objectively not available or is incomplete, those who have power to bring our lives to a halt, must still explain what makes this case different from others as to warrant such drastic measures.

We are shocked and deeply moved by portraits and stories of NHS doctors and nurses who died in action, literally, as heroes. I am just wondering if there were cases like this last year, and in 2015, and in 2009? If yes, why did we not see their portraits on the front pages then?

The news of celebrities, mostly older ones, having died “after testing positive” are very visible as well. Were the news of the death of an old aristocrat, or a septuagenarian football manager who died “with” a flu a few years ago, as prominent as they are today?

Politicising fear of illness and death on this scale, by all parties, is a tremendously sad new phenomenon. But are those in the conservative camp so wrong when they talk of the dark side of the lockdown where death from other illnesses is lurking? The drastic, if not violent, overnight change of the way of life, ruined plans and projects, lost income, separated and endangered families — all that is not just a bother one can put up with if politely asked to by the well-meaning authorities (“sorry for the inconvenience”). It is an extremely tangible damage with direct and lasting health implications for many. And they shouldn’t be just made light of as “psychological”. We do not know what triggers — “causes” — many life-threatening or crippling conditions, and, again, even the BBC has admitted that fewer of the steeply increased number of deaths during the lockdown could be attributed to COVID than to other causes.

The infamous dilemma of “health or wealth”, opening up countries for business or keeping the lockdown, is artificial, misleading and hypocritical. If “wealth” were to mean just the interests of the rich, the choice should be obvious. But health care in Europe is, in one way or another, heavily subsidised and any major economic disaster, such as the one predicted for the nearest future, would overwhelm a service like the UK’s NHS which even in the best of times is under much pressure. “Health or wealth” is not a dilemma of the COVID crisis, it is a constant theme, or should have been, in a society that is clear about the ways modern parasitical capitalism is bleeding the real economy. Unfortunately, most people prefer to, or have no choice but, just keep muddling through the desolate status quo landscape.

The logic according to which NHS and lives are saved by keeping everybody, except “key workers”, inside is of course fallacious, even if it rings true emotionally. Instead of changing the system and redistributing wealth in favour of such services as the NHS, millions of ordinary people (are they all supposed to have those lovely British back gardens?) are told to sacrifice elementary comfort, income and eventually health and sanity. At the same time, emotional propaganda helps stifling rational and critical thinking. Facebook flags posts for simple questions like this: (Other) “viruses killed more people than coronavirus and yet they’ve never, ever shut anything down. So, what are the government not telling the public? Or, am I the only one confused by this?” The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to “combat false news and misinformation”. Whether or not the author of the post is right, it sounds pretty ordinary and inoffensive even by the standards of the hyper-sensitive election-meddling era, but we now seem to have moved to a higher level of paranoia still. The righteous struggle against “conspiracy theories” started of course well before this crisis, but today “misinformation” can incite people to disobey the government’s orders (aka “advise”), and it is the defence of everyone’s well-being that can now justify going after hard-won political freedoms.

Here’s my very dangerous “conspiracy theory”. The financial system has been slowly, or not so slowly caving in, but now everything can be explained by and blamed on the COVID. This of course doesn’t mean that some dark powers have spread the virus intentionally. But the reason why I actually tend not to believe conspiracy theories is that I don’t overestimate the intelligence of our rulers. You’d need to be something of a philosopher-king to plan things, good or bad, so much ahead. Instead, carpe potestatem — is the modus operandi of the modern political and financial “influencers”. Still, given that the old-guard establishment’s popularity is being resuscitated amid the COVID emergency (as is the case with the German ruling living-dead CDU party), opportunistic strategies and tactics are working just fine. And Frau Merkel can even get a standing ovation (from non-German media) for admittedly shaking the rust off her GDR education and talking basic equations the Guardian seems to be calling epidemiology.

Without wanting to belittle Angela Merkel personally, it has to be said that this halo of science authority sits perfectly within the begging the question propaganda. We are supposed to be impressed by Frau Merkel’s ability to count, without any chance of gleaning the factual basis for her assumptions. We’re ordered to believe, and offered a bit of free circenses starring the scientist chancellor, along the way.

David Hume would feast on this one: “She knows that for every effect there has to be a cause and maybe also ideal conditions,” — The Guardian quotes Lothar de Maiziére talking to the Merkel biographer Evelyn Roll. — “She knows the laws of formal logic and is therefore capable of building logical chains with speed and determination.” Guys, formal logic does not deal with causes and effects, it deals with inferences and fallacies.

As always, draconian measures only work when they can rely on the support of a sizeable majority. It is understandable when good people today talk up the threat of the far-right in a classic sense, yet it is not very plausible that today someone with a project of a total war can get a third of the vote in a multi-party democracy, which makes that a landslide win. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain famously said. Which words, which sounds will rhyme this time? Despite prejudices and racism certainly flourishing in some quarters, curfews would not have public support today if they were imposed on the people of a “wrong” religion, or on those with a particular shape of the nose. But some other types of curfews clearly do have support, and as this crisis seemed unexpected, unexpected but acceptable will be various “measures” that will be invented and implemented in the name of health and security. Enough, or may be not, has been said of the boost the COVID has given to surveillance technology, or rather its acceptance by the public. The existential threat many feel at the moment was the reason why people supported some personified “last hopes” in the XXth century. It was fear and despair, and not necessarily hatred and cruelty, that made most people welcome the destruction of freedom then, even if hatred and cruelty subsequently did manifest themselves on an incredible scale.

“Merkel tells Germans: Fighting virus demands war-time solidarity”. Great. “We are at war” — says Macron. “Not with another nation but…” Thank you for that.

One thing philosophy is good at is explaining how naive are those who think that modernity with its scientific and technological progress gives us total intellectual advantage over previous cultures and social systems. The “coolest” philosopher of modernity, Ludwig Wittgenstein, while lambasting traditional metaphysics, pointedly wrote:

“The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in the past.
And in fact both are right and both are wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”

Perhaps the little bit of extra free time that’s being forced onto us will give us the leisure to recognise the wisdom of those words. It is quite clear that our attitudes and reactions to life and what we perceive as scientific knowledge are, essentially, a superstition. At the time of crisis it becomes especially clear that we often wrap our instincts in a language which is arbitrary, if not absurd, yet reassuring. Logician’s scepticism is not aimed against practical science and scientists, even if some of their statements (especially statements to the press) don’t always follow formal logic. That doesn’t matter. Scientists are hard at work for us; theirs is the world of what Hume called “experience”, and “causality” is of course part of it. The way to reconcile formal logic and experience would be perhaps to use Wittgenstein’s view that some things can’t be formally discussed, as that would be neither right nor wrong, but nonsensical. But they can be shown. Physical causality is one of those things. And scientists do have a lot to show for their efforts. But those who operate language as their main professional tool, for living, journalists, politicians, the PR class, those who exploit the prestige of science and interpret its findings to promote their ideological agendas and material interests, those people must be held to account. That’s so difficult in practice, that most means are acceptable. Even philosophy.