You'd never guess it from listening to his admirers and pro bono propagandists on the MAGA Right and the Greenwald Left, but Putin most likely killed 300 of his own citizens once upon a time, in order to tighten his grip on power. Remember the 1999 apartment bombings? The episode is decades-old at this point, but it perhaps still sheds some relevant light on the psychology of the man who invaded Ukraine. People who are still intent on finding a sympathetic explanation for Putin's actions, or who—on IR "realist" grounds—can only believe that states act for fundamentally rational reasons—should take heed of this incident. Maybe the take that Putin is just a power-hungry creep deserves more of a hearing?
As detailed in Masha Gessen's account and those of other journalists, a number of eerie circumstances around the 1999 apartment bombings suggest that Putin's friends in the Russian state played a role in the attack. For one thing, there were the FSB agents surprised in the apparent act of planting more bombs (later dismissed by the FSB itself as a training exercise). Then, there was the fact that one politician announced and began condemning the attack in the Duma—before it had actually occurred. Then there's the fact that a defector who escaped to Britain and wrote a book accusing Putin of involvement in the plot to blow up the apartment buildings was assassinated in 2006—most likely on Putin's orders.
Can anyone prove Putin ordered the attacks? No. Did he benefit from them politically? Yes, he certainly exploited them to terrific advantage; though the old cui bono analysis only goes so far, and indeed is over-used to explain terrorist attacks. In the wake of every massive tragedy, conspiracy theories abound, and the arguments linking Putin to the 1999 bombings bear enough of a superficial resemblance to other more groundless speculations that we may be tempted to dismiss them out of hand. Yet, imagine if the "9/11 truthers" had the same degree of circumstantial evidence, and one of them had been assassinated in a manner pointing to U.S. state involvement. Wouldn't we then take their theories more seriously?
Perhaps, in the end, we'll never actually know the extent of Putin's role, or whether the entire thing was really staged at all. As unsatisfying as such an outcome might be, it is not without historical precedent. The mystery surrounding the 1999 apartment bombings resembles in many ways the uncertainty that still clouds our understanding of the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Italy. Attributed at first to left-wing terrorists (much as the apartment bombings were blamed on Chechen militants to justify the Second Chechen War) the bombing later came to be attributed to far-right neo-fascists who had staged the attack as part of a strategy to defame the left. Were more powerful people in Italian politics also involved?
Dario Fo's classic political farce, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, reviews the evidence surrounding this attack and ends with a mass of circumstantial evidence roughly as damning as that connecting Putin to the 1999 bombings. In his survey of the 1969 bombing case, Fo points to similar evidence of police and military involvement, as well as mysterious discrepancies in timing (why was an ambulance called before the anarchist in question—the one on whom police blamed the attack—supposedly leapt to his death from a window?). There are definite echoes here of the mysteries surrounding the 1999 bombings, such as the FSB agents caught with a bomb and the Duma member announcing the attacks before they occurred.
But in the end, we can no more certainly link the 1969 bombings to anyone in the Italian establishment or the CIA than we can connect Putin to the 1999 bombings. There remains a fog of uncertainty in which competing narratives and disinformation can flourish.
Writing of the Italian bombing, postmodern intellectual Jean Baudrillard went so far as to say these incidents have entered a domain of relativity in which one version of events is as true as another: "Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scène to discredit all extreme terrorists [...] or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation." (Glaser trans. throughout) Could not the same very well be said of the 1999 apartment bombings at this point?
I am no postmodern relativist, of course, and I am skeptical of most of Baudrillard's analysis as applied to the Western democracies. However little the majority of his book rings true as applied to Baudrillard's own era and milieu, however, the book does seem to capture something fundamental about the spirit of Vladimir Putin's autocracy. After all, one of the founding figures of Putin's regime is a public relations guru named Vladislav Surkov, and—at least in Peter Pomerantsev's telling—he helped to create in Putin's Russia the world's first postmodern dictatorship. In many ways, it is like he set about designing a post-historical dystopia with a copy of Baudrillard's famous Simulacra and Simulation in hand.
I have in mind the relativity and opacity of truth in a regime where disinformation is omnipresent, but this is only one of the ways in which Putin's Russia seems to partake of the spirit of Baudrillard's book. Another is its approach to the opposition. In former times—the Soviet era, say—autocracies sought to ensure loyalty and shore up their power by punishing all forms of dissent and subordinating all values to a single, totalizing ideology. In a postmodern dictatorship, however, of the Putin/Surkov variety, a whole galaxy of pseudo-opposition and puppet-dissent is actually created and fostered by the central government (though real criticism—of the sort that actually threatens the regime—is still persecuted and suppressed).
The Putin/Surkov approach to the opposition is one in which a variety of ideological streams are cultivated and set against one another in mock-battles, all of which are designed ultimately to reinforce the power of the central regime, which itself transcends ideology (notice that Putin himself simultaneously embraces and towers above any one ideological system, toying with extreme right nationalism, fascism, old Bolshevik nostalgia, postmodern relativism, etc.) Such an approach seems ripped from the pages of Baudrillard, who speaks of a hegemonic system whose "strategy" is less to suppress than it is "to maximize speech": a system "whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction [...] of speech."
And if we think we are protected from living in such a postmodern dictatorship in the democratic West, guess again. Ours is the Surkovian age. Not only do we have major party candidates like Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy seeding Kremlin propaganda in their public statements; we also live in an era of omnipresent disinformation on social media. And as the techniques for creating alternative versions of events become ever-more sophisticated, thanks to the availability of AI deepfakes, then increasingly, in the words of a recent Wall Street Journal article, we will not be able to believe anything we see or hear online. As one observer quoted in the article puts it: "This is how authoritarianism arises."
The article makes the further point that the damage caused by fake videos and audio goes beyond the specific disinformation they convey. For even as AI deepfakes manage to seed false beliefs, they also in turn lead us to question the veracity of the real. This too is very Baudrillard. When AI is able to construct an alternative reality as convincing as the genuine article—to create a simulation or, to use Baudrillard's image (which he draws from Borges), an artificial map that is coextensive with the real territory is surveys—we will have truly entered the age of what Baudrillard calls "the hyperreal." As he puts it: "when the map covers the territory, something like the principle of reality disappears."
A world where people can dismiss real video evidence of real terrorist attacks as deepfakes, and promote staged videos of fake violence as real, is one that is fast approaching the Baudrillardian asymptote. We are indeed at risk of losing the "principle of reality." ("Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore," the WSJ headline reads.) And the analyst quoted in the article is right to link this to the rise of authoritarianism. If we are wondering what it would be like to live in a postmodern dystopia where all truths have been rendered relative in this way, we need not look far. It is already on display in Putin's regime—and some of our own nation's very-online politicians are actively seeking to take us there.
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