Red/Brown

 I was listening to a podcast on a road trip this weekend that broadly aligns with the "alt-left"/"dirtbag left" school of thought.  There has never been a great single all-encompassing name for these people (John Ganz has called them the "anti-alarmist" left, since they tend to reject comparisons of MAGA to fascism), but you know the type I mean. 

Many of them emerged out of the great crusade against Bush-era neoconservatism (in which they were on the right side), but sometime around 2014 or so, they seem to have concluded that because they were against America's abuses of power, they must be for Putin's and the PRC's. 

I think it's not unfair to describe this podcast as broadly engaged in Putin and Xi apologetics. But they were doing it in a sophisticated enough way to merit some analysis and response.

Their primary rhetorical strategies are familiar enough by now. There's heavy use of the tu quoque. "Well, people always complain about Putin assassinating people, but did you know that Boris Yeltsin did it too, hmm?" 

Then there's the classic straw man technique. You set up an obviously hyperbolic version of the Putin critic's position, so that you can appear to belong to the reasonable middle. You say something like: "All these people in the Western Establishment talk about Putin like he's a sorcerer or a demon. And look, I'm not saying he's Gandhi either, but..."

—and then you just sort of trail off, without specifying just how bad you are actually willing to admit Putin is, if you agree that he is not a Gandhian saint or pacifist. 

And suddenly the listener is left thinking to themselves, "well, I agree that Putin isn't a demon with evil magical powers, so this alternative perspective they are presenting is starting to sound moderate and reasonable..."

I have to pull back for a minute and remind myself of what I actually believe. Because I of course agree with them that Putin is not a demon or a sorcerer. 

On the other hand—I do think he is probably one of the worst human beings currently alive on the planet (our own president being of course also high on the list). 

If you disagree with that—what exactly is your standard of what makes a bad person? It seems to me that Putin has done everything bad that human beings are capable of doing. He has murdered and poisoned and tortured people and blown them up. He has started a cataclysmic war of aggression that has sent thousands of his own people to their deaths. 

Every time someone has set a red line that the apologists said was impossible, Putin has crossed it. They said: "oh, he'll never actually assassinate Navalny or Prigozhin." Then guess which two people die under mysterious circumstances. 

They said: "Oh, he's not massing troops on the border to stage a Ukraine invasion; that's just Western propaganda." Then guess what happened. 

If Putin is not a bad guy, what possible standards of morality could we be applying? 

And this is where people like our podcast hosts will admit that maybe he is a bad guy of some sort—but then they revert back to the Tu quoque. They say: "but your precious Boris Yeltsin was a lot worse and less sympathetic than you think. And Navalny was a lot more of an unsavory character than you realize..."

To which I can only say—okay, but what is that supposed to prove? If Navalny was an unsavory nationalist with xenophobic views—are we meant to conclude from this that it's just fine that he was poisoned, most likely on Putin's orders? 

If Yeltsin was also a quasi-dictator who waged brutal wars and was possibly linked to assassinations, does that make it better when Putin does these things? 

People like my podcast hosts appear to be reliving a very specific argument that they had with people like David Remnick in the '90s, and for all I know they may be on the right side of that one. 

They point out that Yeltsin's economic reforms were a ruthless neoliberal disaster. Knowing nothing to the contrary, I believe them. 

They argue that Yeltsin's 1993 attack on parliament was a coup, and that he seized autocratic powers in its wake. Again, knowing nothing else about it, I believe them again. 

People in the Clinton-era State Department may have a dog in this fight, but I do not. I'm perfectly willing to believe that Yeltsin was an awful guy who strangled Russia's emerging post-Soviet democracy in its cradle.

Indeed, the podcast hosts at one point even suggested that Yeltsin was bad precisely because he expanded executive powers in a way that made Putin's later authoritarian abuses possible. 

Here again, I believe them. But this argument seems to depend on us agreeing that Putin is indeed a ruthless dictator. So what exactly are we arguing about here? 

Again, all of this debate makes sense if we're talking to people who are invested in defending U.S. policies toward Russia in the '90s. And for all I know, there may still be such people around. 

But I am not one of them. I'm someone who's trying to understand what to make of the Russian government today. 

Perhaps the most charitable reading of the podcast's point is that Russians actually have good reason to be angry at American policies; that the experience of the 1990s was actually a national humiliation for them; and that Putin has managed to channel these legitimate grievances to advance his own power. All of that I am prepared to believe. 

The podcast hosts also say things like: "so much of this anti-Putin hysteria is just Russophobia" and "Americans don't even pretend to care about Russian lives." And to the extent that's true, that's terrible. I hope I've always spoken out against every instance of Russophobia I've encountered—and I certainly have seen some of it. 

But who has shown more contempt for Russian lives in the last few years than Putin? 

It's the very fact that I value Russian lives that makes me think it's an unforgivable thing when Putin sends thousands of young Russian men to die in a needless war and assassinates his own citizens...

What's odd about all these lefty apologetics for Putin is that they appear so strangely unmotivated. 

Like, in the old days of Stalinism, I could at least understand why fellow-traveling leftists felt the need to make excuses for the Soviet government. The Stalinists in some way represented the global left, and so Western leftists felt implicated in some way in their actions. 

But Putin does not have an identifiably "left" agenda at all; and in fact, he has become a darling of the global far-right, who see him (however improbably) as an avatar of white nationalism and some sort of crusading avenger for Western Christian civilization. 

So the fact that a certain stream of the left still feels obliged to make excuses and deploy mealy-mouthed rhetorical strategies to minimize his crimes seems like a totally unforced self-own. 

The great thing about having Russia ruled by a right-wing authoritarian whom our own country's fascists love is that we on the left no longer have to feel in any way associated with his crimes. We should be living it up! Now is our moment when all the bad people are mercifully aligned on only one side of the political spectrum—and for once none of them are on the Left!

I guess old habits die hard. Who would have thought that the fellow travelers would last longer than the Soviet Union? Who would have thought that leftists would still be defending a Stalinist authoritarian when he doesn't even pretend to be on the Left? 

This is where we face the possibility that this is not the paradox it seems—and perhaps that some of these nominally "left" Putin apologists are actually a little more ideologically proximate to the right than we like to believe. 

In which case, we're dealing with the specter of a "Red/Brown," socialist-fascist alliance on certain parts of the Left. 

The podcast hosts frequently use this term, in fact—but only to dismiss it as a Western smear. They view it as a bogeyman that Establishment liberals have used to delegitimize any critique of their foreign policy consensus. 

But people with as much knowledge of history as these podcast hosts possess ought to be well aware than the threat of a "Red/Brown" alliance is not an idle or purely hypothetical one. 

I was fortunate enough to come across Arthur Koestler's political writings at a young age. And his contribution to The God That Failed persuaded me early and for all time that there really is a "Red/Brown" historical pathway to worry about. 

He writes about how the German Communist Party in the '30s repeatedly labeled the Social Democrats as a bigger threat than the Nazis (smearing the SDP as "social fascists") and thereby torpedoed any hope of a united front that might have kept Hitler out of power.

He writes about how the short-lived Popular Front was betrayed when Stalin inked a deal with Hitler in 1939. 

If that's not a "Red/Brown" alliance I don't know what is. Our podcast hosts may sneer at the idea that such a thing could occur. But look—Stalin and Hitler literally joined a military pact with each other!

Koestler wrote that his long process of falling out with the Communist Party reached its definitive phase when Hitler and Stalin signed that agreement. "[F]rom then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary," he observed.

And I'm tempted to say the same to the whole "alt-left" Putin apologist brigade. I really should not care if Putin's friends and propagandists call me anything. 

But I spend so much time responding to this particular podcast because it was such a sophisticated op. They are skilled in the tactics of admitting just a hint or a nibble here and there of criticism of Putin, so that you can't accuse them of being unvarnished apologists. 

Then, they sprinkle in enough real and valid critiques of Western policy that you eventually start to see Putin's crimes as minimal or merely relative. 

In short, they deftly wield the power of the "kernel of truth," even as the overall portrait they are building up is a complete lie. 

The same thing happens with the war in Ukraine. They point out the unsavory chapters of Ukrainian history (parts of which came up in the news just yesterday, in a discussion of Ukraine's relationship with Poland). 

They say: "Ukrainian nationalism is an ugly thing." They say: "That Ukrainian slogan everyone's chanting has fascist roots." They say: "Ukrainian nationalists fought on the side of the Nazis against the Soviets." "How about that Azov battalion, eh? Still think Putin was just making it up when he called the Ukrainian government Nazi-infested?" 

All of this may be true. Indeed, I remember when the American white nationalists were all heading to eastern Europe to fight for Ukraine—and saw them as the avatars of white Christian civilization—before the far-right switched sides and all started to adore Putin. 

But this is the art of the "kernel of truth" again. And what are we supposed to take from it? That Ukraine therefore deserved to be invaded in the worst and bloodiest land war in twenty-first century European history? 

Back during the era of the Hitler-Stalin pact again, Koestler recalls encountering one left-wing fellow traveler who defends the Communists' position of neutrality vis-a-vis Hitler's invasion of Poland. The Polish government, after all, "was the first to introduce yellow ghetto benches in its schools, and to beat Socialists slowly to death," he told Koestler. 

To which Koestler can only reply: "repeatedly in history men have had to fight a merely defensive battle, to preserve a state of affairs which was bad against a menace which was worse." 

And indeed, Ukraine doesn't have to be perfect for us to recognize that Putin is worse, and that his invasion of a neighboring country is indefensible. 

As Koestler put it elsewhere: "we are fighting a total lie in the name of a half-truth"—and the same could be said of Ukraine's fight today. Ukrainian democracy is at best a "half-truth." But Putin's regime is a "total lie." 

"[T]o defend our system against a deadly threat does not imply acceptance of everything in this system, does not imply giving up the long-term fight to improve it," Koestler added. And indeed, I'm all for good-faith efforts to vote Ukrainian right-wingers out of office and purge the symbols of Nazi partisanship from its public life. 

But Putin's war is not a legitimate means to these ends; nor is there the least indication that Putin is actually motivated by any of these concerns. 

I have never been a believer in the claims of Ukrainian nationalism. Early in the war, I was even among those leftists who said things like: "sure, let Putin have the Russian-speaking eastern provinces, and see if that's all he wants." 

(That was before we got a glimpse of just what it means in practice, even for Russian speakers, to live under Putin's occupation.)

But since that time, we've had a chance to put all those theories to the test. Trump's government has repeatedly given Putin the option to agree to a deal that would hive off parts of eastern Ukraine that have a majority Russian-speaking population. He has shown no interest whatsoever in agreeing to such a compromise, and has continued to press his attack. 

Everything that the Putin apologists told us has been disproven in the event. Meanwhile, everything the "Western Establishment" warned us against has seemingly come to fruition. Putin did invade Ukraine; he did refuse to cut a compromise peace deal. 

The theory that he was just provoked into the attack by the threat of Ukraine joining NATO can't be true, if Putin now does not seem willing to trade even a ban on future NATO membership for ending his invasion. (And besides, did not Putin's invasion itself show that Ukraine's longing for the collective security of NATO was justified?)

The "alt-left" defenders of Putin are beginning to sound, at this point, a great deal like the alt-right defenders of Trump—with whom indeed they often align (there's that Red/Brown threat again—not so hypothetical as it seemed!)

In both cases, one is left with the same question: what exactly would this guy have to do to get you to stop making excuses for him? How bad do his crimes have to get for you to stop minimizing them? 

I'm running out at this point of things Putin and Trump haven't done—of basic moral laws they haven't yet transgressed. 

As I've said all along, this doesn't mean that the old-school self-righteous "Western Establishment liberal consensus" is so great either. 

But it does occupy the position of that "half-truth" Koestler was talking about, which is at least to be preferred to the "total lie" of Putin and Trump—or of the Red/Brown propagandists who engage in apologetics on their behalf. 

This does not mean we have to just accept the old neoliberal order, merely because it was better than the new order the Red/Brown neo-fascist alliance is building. Again: "[T]o defend our system against a deadly threat does not imply acceptance of everything in this system, does not imply giving up the long-term fight to improve it." 

What we have to do, instead, is a constant two-step dance of trying to both defend and improve; save and reform. Which is not easy. But who ever promised us it would be? 

And for all its complications, it actually seems simpler than whatever bizarre tango the "Red/Browns" are trying to perform. We at least have the advantage of this much clarity: when Trump and Putin haul off and invade countries, that's bad! End of story!