The persistence of pro-Kremlin sentiments on either pole of the American political spectrum, even after more than two years of non-stop atrocities perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine, is one of the more perplexing phenomena of our increasingly unsettled age. We encounter it in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene can be found citing the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russian state-sponsored propaganda outlet, or offering nonsensical amendments demanding an American withdrawal from NATO or the Ukrainian closure of “all bio-laboratories.” And while the backbencher from Georgia remains an embarrassing outlier in Congress, similar views have become widespread in the information space, where figures like former United Nations Special Commission weapons inspector and convicted sex offender Scott Ritter, self-styled “MAGA communist” social media influencer Jackson Hinkle, and a host of other clout-chasing misfits spend their days projectile vomiting pro-Russian (as well as pro-Hamas, pro-Assad, pro-Houthi, and pro-Iranian) agitprop. Even Tucker Carlson has gotten in on the act, doing his best Walter Duranty impersonation by conducting a softball interview with Vladimir Putin and then claiming to have been “radicalized,” in his words, at a Moscow branch of the French grocery retailer Auchan, where he encountered the technological marvel of a shopping cart coin deposit system and became positively giddy at the prospect of spending a mere ₽9,481.37 ($103.32) on a trolley full of provisions.

 

George Orwell, in his Sept. 1, 1944, article of the “As I Please” Tribune series, cautioned his fellow journalists and intellectuals against imagining “that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.” Today, as Russian missiles, bombs, and drones rain down on peaceful Ukrainian cities, and as mass graves and torture chambers proliferate in Russian-occupied regions, there are those — thankfully still a minority — who seem to revel in the sort of mental indecency so eloquently condemned by Orwell.

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The communist will eventually wear out his welcome in Russia, because Putin is not a communist. The religious zealot will do likewise, since Putin is not a religious zealot. The same goes for the nationalist, the Eurasianist, and so on. What these ideologues fail to realize is that their respective worldviews imply a future system that somehow improves upon the vast open-air gas station/mafia syndicate/insane asylum that is contemporary Russia, which cannot be allowed.