It is tempting to compare Hitler and Putin on the basis of a series of similarities, argues Huub Mous. Still, he says, the differences are probably greater.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February last year has been compared in some commentaries to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1938, a turning point in the run-up to World War II. Many people have since asked the question: is Putin a new Hitler?
Above all, Putin comes across as a narrow-minded and vindictive man, whose thoughts are not based on an ideology or anything that passes for it, but are focused solely on power and its accumulation.
Conspiracy theorists?
His nature seems mainly to be an empty shell. In her biography with the revealing title The man without a face, the power of Vladimir Putin , Masha Gessen put it this way: ‘The Russian regime has no ideology, no party, no politics – it is only the power of one man.’ For Hitler too, ‘the will to power’ determined all his thoughts, but his delusional world was more complex in nature and also had a pseudo-religious dimension.
“Russia embraces the Russian tradition of paranoia, an inferiority complex in which Moscow is both the savior of other nations and the victim of grand conspiracies,” Tom Nichols wrote in last year. The Atlantic , a statement that was subsequently quoted in many media. This seemed to close a circle that connects the delusional world of Adolf Hitler – via the Illuminati, Trump and QAnon – with today’s sufferers of virus delusion, with Putin’s paranoid conspiracy thinking as the capstone.
Is Putin then a dangerous conspiracy theorist, as Hitler once was? The fact that Putin’s delusional world was partly caused by a mental disorder was previously revealed in a Pentagon report from 2008. This draws a parallel with the report drawn up in 1943 by the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) about the possible insanity of Hitler.
‘Across the border’
It is tempting to extend the comparison between Hitler and Putin into a series of similarities, but the differences are probably greater. Which is not to say that the danger of Putin’s conspiracy thinking is less.
Yet there is a striking similarity. Putin seemed like Hitler – with his urgent need Lebensraum – to be completely stuck before he literally and figuratively went ‘over the border’. A sense of entrapment is often at the root of the delusion.
In the first phase of a delusion there is usually a strong narrowing of the experiential world. Everything then seems to be compressed and there is a nagging sense of excitement and anxious anticipation, somewhat comparable to what an actor experiences in his stage fright. After that, an irreversible phase of erroneous interpretations of the outside world begins.
Transition in the language
This is accompanied by a transition in language from the metaphorical to the literal. Putin started using another language a year ago. He spoke of ‘a military operation’ instead of ‘war’. In retrospect, a similar change occurred in Hitler as well. Imagery was immediately converted into truth for him. Jews literally became “disease-causing germs,” a change in language that eventually took on psychotic features.
Hitler saw himself not only as a savior, but also literally as the embodiment of history. Whether these kinds of phenomena can also present themselves in contemporary forms of conspiracy thinking is a question that comes up again in this time of wavering world leaders with sometimes brooding delusions. It is not only Putin’s state of mind that calls for further analysis in this respect. The language used by the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, could also provide a case study to further investigate this hypothesis.
Fictional reality
It now seems certain that Putin has created a fictional reality for himself, with its own truth and its own fatal logic. Putin’s biographer Masha Gessen claims that Putin suffers from pleonexia: a disorder manifested in the insatiable desire to want what is due to others.
When it comes to examples from World War II, there is a historical date that Putin can use as a trigger for all-out war. Today it is exactly eighty years ago that the battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) was won in favor of the Red Army. That battle is regarded as the turning point in the Second World War, which was decisive not only for Stalin’s victory rush, but also for Hitler’s mental collapse, which was hardly ever seen in public afterwards.
At the same time, this defeat marked the final breakthrough of Joseph Goebbels, who subsequently gained more and more power and subsequently proclaimed ‘total war’ in a speech that has become famous. When it comes to manipulating delusions, Putin may learn even more from Goebbels than from Hitler.
Huub Mous is an art historian and publicist. At the end of February his book ‘ The algorithm of delusion. Post-war history through the eyes of a baby boomer’ .