In Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, he shows the influence of little known fascist named Ivan Ilyin on Putin and Trump. We see that Ilyin is the inversion of Christianity and democracy, a narcissistic fascist with no will to build society, uphold law, or encourage the freedoms of individuals.
Snyder writes:
"The weakness of state policy is then recast as the mystical connection of a leader with his people. Rather than governing, the leader produces crisis and spectacle."
Most of Trump's efforts are creating "crisis and spectacle" on Twitter and at his cultish rallies.
Snyder continues:
"Law ceases to signify neutral norms that allow social advance, and comes to mean subordination to the status quo: the right to watch, the duty to be entertained."
How nicely this fits a president who made his career as a "reality TV star."
Our president is also lawless. Snyder continues:
"Ilyin used the word 'law,' but he did not endorse the rule of law. By 'law' he meant the relationship between the caprice of the redeemer and the obedience of everyone else."
Notice Trump fires anyone who challenges and hires sycophants.
Such sycophants are slaves to the sociopath. As Snyder writes:
"The loving duty of the Russian masses was to translate the redeemer's every whim into a sense of legal obligation on their part. The obligation, of course, was not reciprocal. Russians had a 'special arrangement of the soul' that allowed them to suppress their own reason and accept 'the law in our hearts.' By this Ilyin understood the suppression of individual reason in favor of national submission. With the redeemer in command of such a system, Russia would exhibit 'the metaphysical identity of all people of the same nation.'"
As more and more sycophants tow the line, totalitarianism can be reached based on a fiction. As Snyder writes the country becomes "a creature rendered divine by its submission an arbitrary leader who emerged from fiction. The redeemer would take upon himself the burden of dissolving all facts and passions, thereby rendering senseless any aspiration of any individual Russian to see or feel or change the world. . . . Christian fascist totalitarianism is an invitation to God to return to the world and help Russia bring an end to history everywhere."
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