Sergey Mitroshin
Recently, a discussion has been updated on the topic of whether there are frequent examples of how the "king", that is, the main person in the social system, suddenly begins to destroy, in fact, the system itself. So much so that the System is not able to resist him. Are such examples frequent in History, or rare, or even unique?
Oddly enough, examples are not immediately found. Of course, Hitler immediately comes to mind, who brought Germany to defeat and division in a fairly short time. But did he destroy Germany? Hardly. Firstly, the high speed of the process affected, because of which the final degeneration of the Germans into malleable idiots did not occur, and then they managed to quickly return to normality. Secondly, not everything with him was "destruction". The same Hafner, who never belonged to Hitler's sympathizers, wrote in the book “A Certain Hitler”: “...But from 1930 to 1941, to the surprise of the whole world, Hitler succeeded in everything that he started in the internal, external and military politics". And the political scientist and “stargazer in power” Andronik Migranyan once shocked everyone with such a passage in Izvestia:
“We need to distinguish between Hitler before 1939 and Hitler after 1939 and separate the flies from the cutlets. The fact is that Hitler was engaged in collecting lands, and ... without a single drop of blood united Germany with Austria, the Sudetenland with Germany, Memel with Germany, in fact completing what Bismarck failed to do ... If Hitler had stopped there, he would have remained in history his country as a politician of the highest class".
It is unlikely that I will agree with the anti-fascist Hafner this time. Still, "luck" in this context is very relative. And it is unlikely that Hafner meant "luck" as real human luck. Undoubtedly, Hitler's "successes" during this period were bricks in his subsequent catastrophic failure. Since it is obvious that the regime, implicated in the assault squads and the ideology of racial hatred, could not stop "before 1939". He naturally went further - to disaster.
On the other hand, Migranyan, with his ridiculous statement, which began the decline of his handshake in liberal circles, on the contrary, seems to me a prophet today. Over the years, it turned out that Migranyan felt and could not resist writing about it in 2014, that the time had come when the medieval concept of “collecting lands” would become dominant and welcomed in certain societies, and, like, if a political scientist wants to survive, then one should not, as it were, go under his caterpillars.
(By the way, about Tiananmen, Migranyan put it this way in 2020: “It is no coincidence that in 1989 I supported Deng Xiaoping and his massacre of demonstrators, because then I believed (and now too) that the fate of 1.5 billion people is more important than 2–3 thousand…”). “Two or three thousand, Karl, what nonsense…”
One way or another, but it is impossible to make Hitler (for all the volume of his innumerable crimes) the destroyer of his country No. 1.
Although the former prosecutor and former Duma deputy Natalya Poklonskaya, for example, walked with a portrait of Nicholas II in the action of the Immortal Regiment.
Nevertheless, the reign of Nicholas II really ended in a complete catastrophe of the great empire, which would certainly not have happened if the tsar had not rushed to mobilize and got involved in a world war, as if defending the nationalist underground of incomprehensible Serbs. And the world war itself, perhaps, would not even have happened, or it would have gone in a completely different direction. However, his fidelity to his obligations towards the Western allies - England and France - personally inspires rather respect for me. Another thing is that these obligations can be followed in different ways. Not at the front, but, say, lend-lease, material assistance to the allies.
It turned out bad. If the Western Front has not moved forward in four years, grinding millions of people for virtually nothing (which is reflected in the book and several films of the same name “All Quiet on the Western Front”), then the Eastern Front was in a fever. First, the Russians rushed into the German-controlled territories and got stuck there, and then the front capsized back into the empire, when demoralized, mobilized, hungry soldiers flowed back with weapons. As a result, the Empire ordered a long life, giving rise to decades of Soviet "under-state". But Nicholas II clearly did not want and did not plan this. The general underdevelopment of Russia's political thought worked.
It would be good if we believed that he heroically seized power. The heroic was later invented by Eisenstein in the film "October", filmed ten years after the coup, in 1927. Power simply fell into Lenin's hands, which gave him the opportunity, during just "one presidential term", to engage in previously only speculative phantasmagoric experiments - with the complete abolition of money and the construction of corporate capitalism, called for some reason socialism for everyone.
To Lenin's credit, when he saw the dead end, he had not yet completely lost the ability to retreat and correct, but, unfortunately, he became seriously ill with the brain, leaving the less talented successor and followers to get out.
The greater temptation for me personally to see illustrative parallels in the highly developed empires of the Aztecs and Maya, which definitely and irreversibly perished due to the intentions of the ruling group. And if in the USSR, as far as I remember, they sometimes believed that they fell in the anti-colonial struggle against Western invaders, then in my opinion, most likely the American people were killed by self-disgust because of the absolutely incredible ritual “fascist” atrocities that stained the steps of temples with black . Again, there was an opinion that these atrocities occurred due to some consensus that there was some benefit in this dialogue with the gods. Type an erroneous opinion, nothing more, the cost of antiquity. However, those who themselves have lived under an ideological dictatorship understand perfectly well that not everyone, even in ancient times, experienced religious joy from sacrificing oneself for some far-fetched benefit - “so that the sun continues to move across the sky.” And the perversity of their rulers was shrewdly perceived precisely as perversity.
This was clearly shown by Mel Gibson in one of his best films "Apocalypse", 2006.
1517. Yucatan Peninsula. The more or less sane Jaguar Paw is trying to escape from the Mayan thugs, and it seems that they completely squeezed him. But, "fortunately", the conquistadors of Hernandez de Cordoba appear on their ships. This is also "evil", but not as crazy as cannibalistic "Mayanism". Jaguar Paw hides with his family in the jungle to build a "new life", but the empire will soon come to an end.
One of those who directly raised the question and gave a direct answer to it is Maurice Druon in his cycle "Cursed Kings". His last book is called When the King Ruins France. Maurice Druon, who honestly and bluntly blames the mediocrity of the First Person, to whom the country has left to decide:
“How could it happen that forty years later this same France was defeated on the battlefield by a country whose population was five times smaller; that her nobility was divided into warring parties; that the townspeople rebelled; that her people languished under the unbearable burden of taxes; that the provinces fell away one by one; that bands of mercenaries were giving the country over to flood and plunder; that the authorities were openly laughed at; that money was worthless, commerce was paralyzed, and poverty reigned everywhere; no one knew what tomorrow would bring him. Why did this state collapse? What turned her fate so abruptly?
Mediocre! The mediocrity of its kings, their stupid vanity, their frivolity in the affairs of state, their inability to surround themselves with the right people, their carelessness, their arrogance, their inability to hatch great plans, or even follow those that were borne before them.
I'm going to re-read everything... Casting continues.