Would Putin’s Death Solve It All?
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out” — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), March 3, 2022.
“People are watching these images, alright, they’re seeing what’s happening there, and people being murdered and suffering, and it makes you angry, and you want something to happen. And you reach the conclusion, ‘oh wouldn’t it be great if someone internally just took this guy and eliminated it?’” — Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), March 6, 2022.
It always happens in war. Where truth and facts are always at a premium — and they always are — sentiment and propaganda rush in to fill the vacuum. They are most effective when they are delivered in combination, especially when they are spiked with a strong dose of passion.
Sen. Graham is the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Sen. Rubio is a senior Republican on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. One cannot easily dismiss the grave portent of their statements. Indeed, in the three weeks since, reports have proliferated with implications indicating that Mr. Putin faces serious threats on the home front.
“Heads begin to roll in Russia,” reports a Capitol Hill go-to source. So far, the rolling heads do not include that of Putin, but he’s undoubtedly as aware of the danger as he is of history.
And history is grim. Russian Prince Felix Yusupov proudly admitted that he had killed Grigory Rasputin in 1916 (it wasn’t easy: it took poison, several bullets, and drowning to kill him). And Mao Tse-Tung, who killed hundreds of millions, supposedly tried to kill Josef Stalin by sending an assassin to Moscow to serve as a “chef” in a Chinese restaurant there (Stalin’s longtime spy chief Lavrenty Beria got to him first, with an axe in the head — reminiscent of Lenin’s contract murder of Trotsky in Mexico City’s Colonia Polanco. Of course, within months of Stalin’s death in 1953, Beria was executed as well).
So the record shows that there are successful assassins — who can forget Gavrilo Princip’s murder of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie that lit the fuse of the Great War?
And there are also unsuccessful assassins.
I have one here.
On Keeping Your Enemies Close
Forty years ago this October, I met with Professor Clemens August Andreae, who was Rektor Magnifizenz [President] of the University of Innsbruck in Austria. I had gotten to know him while I was his student at the university in the 1960s.
Professor Andreae was a prominent economist who had been instrumental in the rebuilding of the economies of Germany and Austria after World War II. In fact, Franz Josef Strauss, who had served as both Minister of Defense and of Finance for the Federal Republic of Germany, was so impressed with Andreae that he came to Innsbruck to study with him.
During our 1982 visit, Professor Andreae related to me the curious story of an invitation he had received earlier that year. Apparently, Enver Hoxha, the Communist dictator of Albania, had invited him to visit the isolated country as a personal guest of the head of state.
Professor Andreae was quite stunned to receive the invitation. After all, Albania was notorious for its impenetrable and totalitarian character. So Andreae responded bluntly: “Look, Mr. Hoxha, you’re a Communist, why are you inviting me? I’m a conservative who hates Communism.”
Hoxha responded, “So you think the world would believe some leftist who sings the praises of a leftist dictator? No, they won’t. They’ll believe you. I’m opening up Albania to the world. I assure you that you’ll have full freedom to see anything and everyone and go anywhere you want. I want good relations with the West.”
That was a tall order. Mr. Hoxha was notorious for his murderous campaign to “modernize” Albania. Even Khrushchev had called Hoxha a “brutal monster.” When he took power in 1944, it was a primarily rural and poor country. Until the twentieth century, its tribal society had been a remote province of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.
A Marxist-Leninist who had studied in France, Hoxha took over the People’s Republic of Albania’s during World War II. He named himself Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Minister of Defense, and Commander-In-Chief of the People’s Republic of Albania’s army.
By the time he met with Professor Andreae in 1982, Hoxha had sent tens of thousands of his countrymen to forced labor camps sent and executed some 25,000 (over one percent of the population — a comparable figure for the U.S. would be some three to four million).
In his conversations with Andreae, Hoxha was chillingly candid. “I had to modernize the country,” he said. “I killed all the whores and all the priests.”
Needless to say, the ruthless Hoxha was a hunted man, and that fact haunted him. “People are trying to kill me all the time,” he told Andreae. And he had killed hundreds of them.
Protecting Hoxha’s life was the job of Mehmet Shehu, his right hand man since 1948. In classic fashion, Shehu had acquired his position by strangling his predecessor, Koci Xoxe, Hoxha’s first head of the secret police.
In 1954, Hoxha named Shehu premier of Albania, a position he held until 1981. His Prime Mandate: protect Enver Hoxha.
In late 1981, Hoxha learned through his massive security apparatus of another death threat. “I tried all the usual channels, but I couldn’t track it down. I finally realized that it was my own Chief of Security. He was a vicious man. Everybody feared him.
“I knew no one else would kill him, so I shot him myself, at lunch” (“Ich hab’ ihn selbst erschossen, am Mittagstisch.”)
And who was that Chief of Security? Mehmet Shehu.
Curiously, several biographies and other public accounts of Hoxha’s life, many of them quite recent, report that the exact circumstances of Shehu’s sudden death are still a mystery.
And meanwhile, Enver Hoxha died in his bed in 1985.
Will Vladimir Putin?
Finding The Truth In A Troubled Time
Today agitprop, rumors, truth, fiction, and more than a share of outright lies pour in like “water from a fire hose,” as Herman Pirchner, one of Washington’s foremost Russia scholars, tells The Wanderer. One unverified report from the “Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine” tells of “growing opposition to Vladimir Putin among political and business circles advocating for his urgent removal from power and restoration of economic and diplomatic ties with the West.”
These days, Ronald Reagan’s “doveryai no proveryai” (“trust but verify”) is passé. The fire hose doesn’t have a truth filter. But who does?
Nancy Pelosi doesn’t care. “Forget history; we’re talking about future,” she recently told a fawning George Stephanopoulos.
Here Madame Speaker is channeling Karl Marx, who wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Marx was “talking about future,” of course.
And the past? The truth? Anything else that stands in the way of the Revolution?
Destroy it.
Then whom should we trust to sort out the flood from the fire hose?
In Perpetual Peace (1795), Immanuel Kant distinguished philosophers from the mere mortals who busied themselves with power and other profane matters.
“This class of men,” he wrote, “by their very nature, are incapable of instigating rebellion or forming unions for purposes of political agitation, they should not be suspected of propagandism.”
As we put the fire hose to our ear, we should be aware that every “journalist” we hear insists that he “not be suspected of propagandism.” He’s above all that.
Well, verify anyway.
