“The way to resist tyranny is to live in the truth,” wrote Vaclav Havel. Following the reasoning of the playwright who starred in the “Velvet Revolution” that ended totalitarianism in Czechoslovakialying is a trait of despots because the natural enemy of despotism is the truth.
In the same handful of days, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin they showed their despotic nature through blatant uses of lies to refer to true crimes. Between the New York tycoon and the former Russian spy there is not only a dark link. In addition to being under his control, Trump admires Putin.
Former British spy Christopher Steele investigated the conservative millionaire, discovering facts that explain why Putin helped him reach the White House: he has blackmail tools to keep him under control and use it to benefit his geopolitical interests. But Trump’s attitude towards the Kremlin chief is not just Stockholm Syndrome. Beyond knowing that she is in the hands of the Russian leader, she feels admiration for him. She identifies with his power system, which is a conservative autocracy in institutional Republican guise.
The difference is that Putin was able to seize power, while his American admirer lost the battle against the institutional system of the United States. The anti-legal bodies that repelled Trump’s assault on power now sit him in the dock for the crimes he committed in the attempt to seize the presidency through fraud and a coup against the Legislative Branch.
The despotic gene of both expressed itself through crimes and lies that occurred simultaneously. Both made hilarious displays of the fallacy. Trump created an iconic photo in the transfer photo call as a convict in the Fulton prison in Georgia, the US state that prosecutes him for the pressure he exerted on local officials to commit fraud. And when he was released on bail, he added to the dissemination of the photo the production of merchandising that includes key rings, mugs and t-shirts with his prisoner number: PO 1135809.
To the astonishment of many, a reactionary millionaire copied Eugene Debs’ campaign strategy, the leftist leader who gave the Socialist Party of America the best electoral result in its brief history, in 1920, while in prison and campaigning from his cell as “Prisoner No. 9653.” The difference is that the reason for his imprisonment could be presented as a merit: activism against the participation of the United States in the First World War. On the other hand, the victimization that Trump makes, alluding to a “witch hunt”, is visibly false, because the evidence of the crimes with which he is accused is visible to all.
There is no other way to interpret the phone call in which the then president pressured the Georgian Secretary of State, brad raffensperger, so that it finds the 11,780 votes that it lacks to win. Raffensperger is not a Democrat or a follower of the “woke agenda”, but a Republican from the Trumpist wing of the party. But he saw what that call was coming and took the precaution of recording it, so that he could do what he did (disseminate it publicly) when the president began to openly attack him, accusing him of what he had refused to commit: vote manipulation fraud.
Trump’s footprint at the crime scene is nothing less than his voice on the phone, and adds to the pressures made by Rudolph Giuliani, the conservative jihadist who immolated his prestige by doing dirty work for his boss. While Trump turned his passage through Fulton prison into mugs, T-shirts and key chains with his photo and prisoner number, Putin appeared on camera offering “heartfelt condolences” to Yevgeny Progozhin’s family.
Even if a meteorite had fallen on him while crossing Red Square or he had been struck by lightning in front of thousands of Muscovites, those same witnesses would think that the head of the Kremlin threw the star rock or the atmospheric discharge, like revenge against Prigozhin by the rebellion of the Wagner Group that occurred two months earlier. The long list of people poisoned, riddled with bullets, “suicided” by strangulation and thrown from buildings, puts the signature of the author at the scene of the crime: Vladimir Putin.
This is what happened with the mercenary who rose up against the military leadership, exposing the chaos at the summit of power in Russia. In the case of Prigozhin there was ostentation of authorship. In fact, if anyone was not supposed to die after the armed rebellion, he was the man who made an affront to Putin’s image of power. If something happened to him, only the president could be responsible.
By the way, Defense Minister Serguey Shoigu and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Valery Gerasimov will also have wanted to assassinate the war businessman who had been attacking them in public for months and marched with his private army towards Moscow, with the declared objective of crushing them. But no one would dare commit a crime like that without the President’s authorization, precisely because that death would befall him inexorably. The death of the head of the Wagner Group it is, in itself, an ostentation of criminality.
The precedents are many. In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, exiled in London after denouncing that he and other FSB agents had received orders to assassinate Boris Berezoski. After the death by poisoning of that intelligence agent, it was supposed that the oligarch who had clashed with Putin he would not be assassinated, precisely because it would be known who ordered his death. However Berezoski was hanged to death with a curtain in his London home, where he went into exile when Litvinenko revealed that he had been ordered to kill him.
Added to this background is that Putin could have made kidnap Prigozhin and load it onto a plane that is shot down in Ukrainian airspace. Instead, he died in his own plane, shot down north of Moscow, that is, far from Ukraine, which is south of the Russian capital.
If he had been captured and shot down in a plane over Ukraine, there would have been doubt as to authorship because the suspicion would extend to Ukraine’s anti-aircraft batteries and Mig fighter-bombers. But Putin did not want to share suspicions, but flaunt his last crime. More than caring about not giving the umpteenth proof that he is a serial killer, he cared about making it clear that no one survives to betray or defy him.
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