Black Earth(140)

None of these Chinese scenarios is inevitable. China’s preoccupations resemble those of interwar Germany, but Chinese leaders do not exhibit Hitler’s unusual opposition to scientific solutions. Whereas Hitler opposed the agricultural science that eventually resolved any sense of ecological panic in Germany, Chinese authorities fund the energy research that could slow climate change and thus lessen concern about food and water. Beijing has invested in solar, wind, fission, and fusion energy, and has committed itself to reaching voluntary targets for greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Because it imports rather than exports natural gas and oil, China has no powerful domestic constituencies that oppose alternative forms of energy. China is a contributor to climate change and might find itself involved in Africa and Russia as climate change continues. At the same time, Chinese engineers are also developing and implementing technical solutions that slow climate change, thereby reducing the risk of these and other possible future conflicts.

—

Russian governments of the early twenty-first century, by contrast, have based their budgets and staked their popular support on the export of hydrocarbons to Europe and China. Because Russian governments seek to maintain demand for natural gas and oil in these great neighboring markets, they have indirectly committed themselves to a future of carbon pollution and climate change. Perhaps relatedly, the sense of coming catastrophe has been more evident in Russian culture than in China or in the West. Gifted Russian thinkers, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have presented diverse and arresting images of human decadence and downfall. Like a century ago, when Russia was riven by revolution and counterrevolution, the Russian political class surpasses any of its neighbors in formulating and transmitting catastrophist ideology.

In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighboring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterizations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians (and Russians), Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans. In the Russian war against Ukraine that this rhetoric was meant to justify, the first gains were the natural gas fields in the Black Sea near the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. The fertile soil of mainland Ukraine, its black earth, makes it a very important exporter of food, which Russia is not.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia developed a foreign policy doctrine of ethnic war. This argument from language to invasion, whether pressed in Czechoslovakia by Hitler or in Ukraine by Putin, undoes the logics of sovereignty and rights and prepares the ground for the destruction of states. It transforms recognized polities into targets of willful aggression, and individuals into ethnic objects whose putative interests are determined from abroad. Putin also placed himself at the head of populist, fascist, and neo-Nazi forces in Europe. While supporting politicians who blame global Jews for planetary problems and applying techniques of state destruction, Moscow generated a new global scapegoat—the homosexuals. The new Russian idea of a “gay lobby” responsible for the decadence of the world makes no more sense than the old Nazi idea of a “Jewish lobby” responsible for the same, but such an ideology is now at large in the world.

As Russia demonstrated, the Second World War can shift quickly from being a cautionary tale to an instructive precedent. In 1939, Stalin made an alliance with Hitler, that is, with the European Far Right of the time, on the logic that doing so would cause Europe to destroy itself. Stalin imagined that Germany and its western neighbors would then clash and that their power would dissolve. Putin seems to have made a similar calculation. Just as the purpose of alliance with Hitler in 1939 was supposed to turn the most radical force in Europe against Europe itself, so Russian support of the European Far Right is meant to disrupt and disintegrate the most peaceful and prosperous order of the early twenty-first century—the European Union. In 2014 and 2015, Putin rehabilitated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that began the Second World War and created some of the preconditions for the Holocaust.

—

Africa demonstrates the risks of local shortages, China suggests the problems of global power and national anxiety, and Russia shows how practices of the 1930s can come to seem like positive examples. Thanks in large measure to Moscow, state destruction and the construction of planetary enemies have returned to vogue in Europe. In the Middle East, states tend to be weak, and Islamic fundamentalists have long presented Jews, Americans, and Europeans as planetary enemies. The Russian anti-gay campaign, which associates European and American power with the hidden hand of the gay international, was targeted to the Muslim world as well as to domestic constituencies.