G 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 6, 2022 8 tweets 8 min read Read on X
A small thread on the mind of #Putin. 🧵

To understand Putin you must understand Ivan Ilyin. This well-recognised fascist intellectual was around more or less a century ago. See the link below to get a better idea of his frightening totalitarian vision..

nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/…
What I find even more compelling is the response to Ilyin and his 1925 work "On The Use of Violence to Resist Evil" (fun title!) and the outright concern about where this sort of path can lead *even then* - pre-Hitler, pre nuclear weapons, pre Cold War, pre terrorism etc etc
Another leading thinker N. A Berdyaev produced a polemic on Ilyin called, "The Nightmare of Evil Good."

The full text is here: berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_…
Ilyin in a nutshell felt the Russian state was God, that individuality was evil, that Russia required a Ceasar-like "redeemer" and that for Russia to achieve true Godliness and "good" the destruction of "enemies" was perfectly acceptable.

Ringing any bells..?
What struck me even more profoundly were the warning bells being sounded by Berdyaev...

See below for what he thinks of Ilyin's idea that "state is the Church of God" and see how this might also be being interpreted by Putin..
See here for how Berdyaev accuses Ilyin of both deifying the state & allowing it to be the arbiter of justice and the "conquerer of 'evil..'"

We see how, in the minds of totalitarian fascists - such as Putin - that Godly permission is granted for the removal of "evil" by force
Finally, in this most chilling of conclusions, we find Berdyaev at pains to warn humanity about how religion can quite easily be misappropriated and how this "Godly" misappropriation in the hands of the wrong people can lead to appalling events, as we are witnessing in Ukraine.

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