Why a book on Putin? A new world paradigm is coming for which we must be prepared and aware. Putin is part of this paradigm and is its main architect. So far in Italy journalistic books on Putin have been published that focus on the anecdotal, on his biography or on geopolitics. Most speak only negatively of it, rehashing old analyses from the early 2000s and cheap journalistic articles. Only in France has a book on Putin’s Philosophy been published, called “Inside Putin’s head”, a misleading text and in any case not translated into Italian. In Italy my book is one of a kind. As a gift for my readers, below is the preface of the book  Enjoy the reading

PREFACE

The great director Alfred Hitchcock loved to repeat that “the more successful the villain, the more successful the film”

And since the cinema shows better than any other contemporary art-form the way in which we represent our desires and fantasies, here is the need to identify a villain on whom to blame everything. But this technique has passed from Hollywood studios into the real world, while maintaining the spectacular guise of fiction. The Western political choice of assigning the role of the villain to the Russian President has taken on increasingly false and irrational tones over the years, to the point of bordering on ridiculousness.

For the Americans and Europeans, here is the narrative:

Putin “attacked” Ukraine, annexed Crimea “by force,”

and shot down a Malaysian Boeing (MH117] full of people.

Not only that….. For our media, Putin killed Alexander Litvinenko with polonium, murdered the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and eliminated Boris Nemtsov. Even though the “Pussy Riot” singers can give lectures and concerts all over the “Free World,” for Western public opinion a Vladimir Putin would have imprisoned those poor girls and thrown away the keys. For international public opinion, while committing all these crimes, the new James Bond — 007 as President — Putin was preparing to attack poor Syria and the frightened little Baltic countries.

Those who follow the Socratic motto that “a life without reflection is not worth living” cannot accept such a level of lies without trying to understand the real reasons for an attitude that clearly borders on psychosis.

What led me to write a book on Putin, however, was the belief – at first only an impression – that in the original speeches and deeds of Vladimir Putin there were typical analyses and reflections of philosophy, not only of the Russian sort inspired by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky,

….but also of the Ancient Greeks, of German classical idealism and of oriental Zen thought.

The deeper I investigated the question, the more I found confirmation of this feeling.

Putin in 2006 with Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, giving him the highest medal a civilian can receive in Russia. This trip and award came AFTER — I repeat, AFTER Solzhenitsyn’s antisemitic, two-volume book Two Hundred Years Together came out.200-years-together-solzhenitsyn

And, since philosophy has been my profession for many years, I reconstructed Putin’s complex philosophical profile in the awareness that by observing the labyrinth of that path, we Europeans can also find a piece of our own way….. an instruction leaflet for dealing with the difficulties of life…. perhaps even refinding our lost chances.

In Hollywood films where Russians appear, it never surprised me that the enemy to be defeated is an automaton with icy eyes and without a smile, because this is part of the classic representation of the villain that every director spontaneously reproduces: a cold killer, inhuman, serious, glassy eyed.

“From Russia with Love”

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However, in Western films about Russia, everythinge is stereotyped and negative, not just the bad, and that down to the smallest detail. In European and American film productions the image of that slice of the world called Russia is transmitted where everyone is drunk, prone to fights, and devoid of any empathy towards others. The good Russians, those few, are often dull traitors who speak ill of their country; women are all sexually uninhibited and easily conquered prey.

In Russia, for Hollywood, the weather is always bad. Although the country is divided into 9 time zones and in southern Siberia, at certain times of the year, it exceeds 35 degrees [Celsius — 105 Fahrenheit], in Russia it always snows and the inhabitants flounder in their furs in the cold and gusty wind.

It matters little that St. Petersburg was designed by Italian architects who knew the rules of perspective; for the Hollywooders, the residents of the Russian cities are all poor and the buildings sad old barracks. The few rich, however, are always Mafia who never laugh and, if they do, stretch their lips to show all their teeth, like the Joker in “Batman.” If it were a color, Russia would be gray.

This way of representing our “neighbors” is in itself emblematic of our refusal to engage in any dialogue or confrontation, and of the level of lies to which our neighbors have been relegated by us. However, analyzing the Putin phenomenon, this is not even the most interesting aspect to consider. While no man of the world no longer believes that Indians were cruel just because Hollywood portrayed them like this, no disenchanted reflection is made when it comes to Vladimir Putin.

Because? Why do intellectuals in the West also accept a fake Putin described in the most demented and unrealistic forms? The fact is that the West wants to believe in the deception of the propaganda narrative, it wants to see Russia and Putin as a mythological other than itself.

To stay within cinematic metaphors, it is as if we were trying to get to know Russia by swallowing the blue pill of the Matrix, the one that does not allow us to know the truth, but obliges us to remain immersed in our illusions and pathological lies.

During the Cold War two ideologies clashed, capitalism and communism. After 1989, a single ideology remained standing, which however, on the occasion of its victorious affirmation, was profoundly transformed. Current ultracapitalism is not comparable to twentieth-century capitalism: while classical capitalism kept education, politics and ethics distinct from economics, ultracapitalism reduces all reality to economic exchange and is summed up in the unlimited consumption of goods, services and relationships.

*** Name the jew!

Many Westerners who during the Cold War had exercised their critical spirit against the hyper-capitalist model, after 1989 ended up adhering completely to that model. The only political claim that has been maintained in the West concerns individual freedoms, but it is freedom so to speak, since no freedom is possible without economic emancipation first.

*** JdN: Sure, you can speak out — and then your career is over and you and your wife and kids are on the street!

The left in the West is sending out a message of this type: we can fight for anything and claim everything (equality, enlargement of suffrage, inclusion of migrants, gay rights), but we want to keep the essentials, that is the unhindered functioning of the free. global market and therefore, the demand for radical economic reforms takes a back seat.

This new ideology has the main characteristic of not manifesting itself openly, of remaining hidden. In its brutality, the Western ideology in power has made itself unrecognizable. With the coming to power of Vladimir Putin came an alternative to this way of thinking and acting which is, instead, immediately recognizable, while not repeating the formula of communism as we have known it.

What happens if someone arrives whose leadership is so structured that it questions the only model that exists? What happens if the Western model no longer remains the only possible one, but finds new alternative and impeding formulas?

[…] In evaluating Putin’s political advent, the psychological mechanism has to do with our unconscious. Putin’s Russia is the unconscious of the West, with the aggravating circumstance that, compared to the individual unconscious studied in psychoanalysis, it emerges in all its strength from the surface of history and throws its contradictions in the face of the West. This is unacceptable and must be covered up with lies and denigration.

In other words, in the West we only want to consume: objects, relationships, and feelings. Everything is a bargaining chip.

*** JdN: In my 18 years in Jewashington DC, this is exactly how it felt — money, power, sex, fame…. ice-cold calculations… EVERYONE SIZING YOU UP AS TO YOUR USEFULNESS TO THEM.

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We are strongly led towards this path and we convince ourselves that our whole life consists of this, but somehow, in the dark depth of our consciousness, at such an underground level that we do not even notice it, we believe that there is something in this that does not work. We perceive, without understanding it, that this way of understanding the relationship between us and others never makes us truly happy. 

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