1/ Russia's top war propagandists on Trump's decision to waive the Graham sanctions. They're celebrating. Here's what they're saying 🧵

4/ Alexander Kots, war blogger (470K+ subscribers on Telegram): "Senator Lindsey Graham nursed the law we dubbed 'hellish sanctions' for more than a year. He didn't live to see it passed. The president turned a posthumous monument to the Senate's chief hawk into an effigy."

Insights from Books #2: "The Anatomy of Fascism" by Robert O. Paxton "Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." Paxton gives this definition on the last pages of his book. I've moved it to the front, because 80 years after a war that killed tens of millions and revealed to the world unprecedented forms of violence, fascism is back, and it is striding confidently across every continent. To understand why, and to sharpen my own tools for recognising fascism at its earlier stages and in its less obvious forms, I've started reading the historians and sociologists who studied different fascist regimes. Today: Paxton, one of the most respected researchers of the subject. What follows are his words, with a few condensations of mine. WHERE DOES FASCISM COME FROM? 1. "It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan's founders, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe." 2. "Fascism has historically been a phenomenon of weak or failed liberal states and belated or damaged capitalist systems. The frequent assertion that fascism stems from a crisis of liberalism might well be amended to specify crises in weak or failed liberalisms." 3. "The fascisms we have known have come into power with the help of frightened ex-liberals and opportunist technocrats and ex-conservatives, and governed in more or less awkward tandem with them." 4. "Fascism was created for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples." 5. "The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph." HOW DOES FASCISM EMERGES? 6. "Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites—heads of state, party leaders, high government officials." 7. "The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment: police officials, army officers, businessmen. To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil or averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging in the short term, even acceptable piecemeal, but which cumulatively added up to monstrous end results." 8. "Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers, but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy. Even though in Germany the foreign, the unclean, the contagious, and the subversive often mingled in a single diabolized image of the Jew, Gypsies and Slavs were also targeted. American fascists diabolized blacks and sometimes Catholics as well as Jews." 9. "Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle. The themes that appeal to fascists in one cultural tradition may seem simply silly to another." 10. "At bottom is a passionate nationalism." WHAT IS THE FASCIST "DUAL STATE"? 11. Fascisms tend to create "dual states", where the "normative state", composed of the legally constituted authorities, coexists with a "prerogative state" formed by the leader's party and cronies. The normative segment of a fascist regime continues to apply the law according to due process. In the prerogative sector, by contrast, "no rules apply except the whim of the ruler, the gratification of party militants, and the supposed 'destiny' of the 'chosen people.'" 12. In Nazi Germany, for instance, the career diplomat Konstantin von Neurath was removed as foreign minister in 1938, "and German diplomats had the humiliation of seeing their proud corporation pass under the control of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a man whose main international experience before 1933 had been selling German fake champagne in Britain. Under Ribbentrop, old SA men tended to fill diplomatic posts abroad." WHY DO PEOPLE ACCEPT THE VIOLENCE? 13. "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism." 14. "Neither fascist regime was conceivable without terror. Nazi violence was omnipresent and highly visible after 1933. The concentration camps were not hidden, and executions of dissidents were meant to be known. The publicity of Nazi violence does not mean that support for the regime was coerced, however. Since the violence was directed at Jews, Marxists, and “asocial" outsiders (homosexuals, Gypsies, pacifists, the congenitally insane or crippled, and habitual criminals—groups that many Germans were often happy to see the last of), Germans often felt more gratified than threatened by it. The rest soon learned to keep silent.
" WHY DO FASCIST REGIMES ALMOST INEVITABLY COLLAPSE? 15. Charisma helps us understand several curious features of fascist leadership. On the one hand, a charismatic leader is immune from the grumbling against his administration. At the same time, charismatic leadership is brittle. It promises to the people as Adrian Lyttelton once noted, “a privileged relation with history." Having raised expectations so high, a fascist leader unable to deliver the promised triumphs risks losing his magic very fast. 
 16. The entropy of fascist regimes grows faster and sharper than in systems balanced by a division of power. At the later stages, fascists stop behaving according to the ordinary logic of political self-interest. Instead of using ideology as an instrument to acquire power, they begin using their power to fulfil the most radical implications of their ideology, even when doing so damages their own interests or threatens their survival. "At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience." 17. "Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism's heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat." WHAT WOULD A MODERN FASCISM LOOK LIKE? 18. "A fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols. Some future movement that would 'give up free institutions' in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous. For example, while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and eastern Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile, and anti-Western." 19. "The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy" Paxton published The Anatomy of Fascism in 2004. Twenty-two years ago. It is not too late to read it.

11/ How fascisms end: “At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience.”

1/ I spent 15+ years investigating Russian secret services and organized crime, and I know people who did business with Putin in 1990s St. Petersburg. Here's how they would describe the "diesel deal." You need two words of gangster slang: baryga and lokh. 🧵

5/ So Putin wins either way. If the deal keeps his lokh in power — great. If Trump loses, the deal has already done its job: inflamed US politics and tied Trump to Putin's crimes so he can't walk away. The goal is chaos, not peace. Full argument here 👇