JRL NEWSWATCH: “Maria Stepanova: The war of Putin’s imagination” – Financial Times

Map of Ukraine, Including Crimea, and Neighbors, Including Russia

“… The aggressor in this unjust war in a foreign territory, with its war crimes and its victims … operates as if he’s making a piece of art, a book or a film, in which the events are controlled by their creator. But this particular book has a bad author. Bad in all senses, as a person and as a writer with scant interest in his own characters. He doesn’t care if they survive or die; he doesn’t care what their needs or desires are; and he’s definitely not interested in recognising their freedoms. The only thing that he cares about is his own authorship, the affirmation of his will, and his control of the text and events. This is what is occupying Putin at this moment …. But now the results of his handiwork are clear …. You could say that this is the essence of every dictatorship and the logic of every dictator — the need to assert his own solipsism, a sense of the living populated world as a still-life painting, a nature morte, in which the meek china plates on the table won’t scream out if you smash them. But to my mind this is a special case … a genuine fear of the existence of an Other, a desperate desire to crush this Other, to reform it, ingest it, draw it in, gulp it down, swallow it. …”

Click here for: “The war of Putin’s imagination” – Financial Times/ Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale


 

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