Putin has already taken over the world.
And this is no joke.
He has taken over the world by controlling the narrative about himself.
The entire expert community, not to mention journalists and political commentators, seems unable to analyse the current situation, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, or this whole insane war without invoking Putin.
Putin is everywhere, always, in every assessment, every message, every narrative, whether the analysis is in Russian, English, or any other language.
The Putin narrative has become a universal explanation.
The presumption of Putin as the source of will, the absolute actor on this stage, is so strong that any doubt about Putin’s existence as a subject of agency is either ignored or, if anyone deigns to engage with such criticism at all, ridiculed.
Putin has completely taken over the expert community. Putin is everywhere, in everything. He is the embodiment of an irrational evil will that simply exists, and that is the end of the explanation.
There is another idea that makes “Putin” even heavier: the claim that “Putin” = “the Russian people.”
Needless to say, neither of these presumptions has much to do with analysing political or historical processes. And yet this is the reality of the rhetorical trends that shape both public opinion and government decisions.
In fact, it is a catastrophe.
A catastrophe of political and historical analysis.
A conscious refusal to deal with complexity, and an aggressive reductionism that fills almost the entire visible public space.
Remarkably, the presumption of “Putin” as the driving force behind the aggression and the source of “evil will” coincides almost completely with the narrative of Putin’s own propaganda. The only difference is the sign attached to “Putin”: here he is the negative hero, almost a god, while in the local Russian rhetoric the very same person is endowed with the qualities of a loving god, a god-demiurge.
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