In defense of treason

The recent G20 meeting in Osaka and its surrounding events provide a sad view of the emerging New World Order: Trump exchanging love messages with Kim Jong-un and inviting him to the White House, Putin jovially clapping hands with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and so on, with Merkel and Tusk, the two voices of old European reason, marginalized and mostly ignored.

This NWO is very tolerant: they all respect each other, no one is imposing on others imperialist Eurocentrist notions like women’s rights. This new spirit is best encapsulated by the interview Putin gave to the Financial Times on the eve of the Osaka summit, in which he, as expected, lambasted the ‘liberal idea’ claiming that it ‘outlived its purpose.’ Riding on the wave of the notion that the ‘public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism’ Putin’s evisceration of liberalism chimes with anti-establishment leaders from Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

‘Liberals cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades’ he said. Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a ‘cardinal mistake’. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico. ‘This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.’ He added: ‘Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.’

There is no surprise here, and the same holds for how Donald Tusk, the European Council president, reacted to Putin: ‘What I find really obsolete is authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs’ – a toothless assertion of empty principles which avoids the roots of the crisis. Liberal optimists desperately cling to encouraging signs here and there: the strong Leftist turn of the American younger generation; the fact that Trump got three million fewer votes than Clinton and that his victory was more the result of the manipulation of electoral districts; the re-emergence of the European liberal Left in countries like Slovakia. However, these isolated events are not strong enough to affect the global trend.

The only interesting feature of Putin’s interview, the point at which you can feel how he really speaks from his heart, occurs when he solemnly declares his total lack of tolerance for spies who betrayed their country: ‘Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it…but traitors must be punished.’ It is clear from this outburst that Putin has no personal sympathy for Snowden or Assange: he just helps them to annoy his enemies, and you can only imagine the fate of an eventual Russian Snowden or Assange. You can only wonder at some Western leftists who continue to claim that, in spite of his socially-conservative stance, Putin still nonetheless poses an obstacle to American world domination and should for this reason be viewed with sympathy.

Every authentic leftist should ferociously oppose the claim that treason (the betrayal of one’s own nation-state) is the gravest crime possible: no, there are circumstances when such treason is the greatest act of ethical fidelity. Today, such treason is personified by names like Assange, Manning, and Snowden. The reason is today’s global predicament with its three main apocalyptic threats (ecology, digital control, migrations).

The moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, a task rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and ethnic ‘heroic’ violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for one’s specific cause.

Reason thus compels us to commit treason here: to betray our cause, to refuse to participate in the ongoing war games. If we really care for the fate of the people who compose our nations, our motto should be: America last, China last, Russia last. Was Putin’s attack on liberalism a case of pathological hatred? Unfortunately no, it expressed a new normality. If by that we mean an unhealthy deviation which threatens our lives, the ‘X first’ policy is the only true pathology today.