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Chapter 122: The Question of Humiliation and Destiny

The air in the Bürgerbräukeller, a cavernous Munich beer hall on a damp November evening in 1923, is thick with the smells of stale beer, cheap tobacco, ersatz coffee, and a simmering, collective rage that feels more potent than the alcohol. The crowd is a sea of resentful faces: embittered war veterans in threadbare field jackets, their Iron Crosses pinned to their chests, unemployed young men with hungry eyes, shopkeepers whose life savings have been vaporized by hyperinflation. They are a nation adrift, defeated and humiliated. On the hastily built wooden stage, a small man with a comical mustache and eyes blazing with a terrifying, hypnotic fervor, is screaming into the haze. It is Adolf Hitler.

His voice, raw and grating, rises from a guttural growl to a shrieking, almost hysterical crescendo as he hammers his fist on the podium. He speaks of the Diktat von Versailles, the dictated peace, a document of shame signed by the "November Criminals." He paints a vivid, paranoid picture of a great German army, undefeated in the field, stabbed in the back (Dolchstoss) by a conspiracy of craven politicians, Marxists, and Jews on the home front. He speaks of the humiliation of a proud and ancient people, the Volk, dismembered by the treaty's arbitrary lines, their industrial heartland occupied, their brothers in Austria and the Sudetenland cut off from the Reich, their colonies stolen.

But this humiliation, he thunders, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that draws the crowd in, is not an end. It is a beginning. It is the sacred fire, the crucible in which a new, pure, and unbreakable national will is being forged. It is a holy rage that will burn away the decadence and division of the Weimar Republic. He speaks of a single, immutable destiny: to cast off the shackles of the treaty, to purge the nation of its internal enemies, and to reunite every German-speaking person in Europe into one great Reich, a new empire that will rise from the ashes and last for a thousand years. The crowd, which had been a collection of individuals nursing their private grievances, is now a single, unified organism, a mob roaring its approval. Their own resentments, their own feelings of powerlessness, have found a single, powerful, and apocalyptic voice.

Eighty-four years later, in the same city, the setting is a world away but the psychic energy is eerily similar. We are in the gleaming, modern, and antiseptically clean conference hall of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof for the 2007 Munich Security Conference. The audience is a polite, somber collection of the world's foreign policy elite—ministers, generals, and diplomats in tailored suits, listening through translation headsets. On the stage is a cold, quiet man, his face an impassive, almost reptilian mask, his movements stiff and controlled. It is the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.

He steps to the podium and begins to speak, his voice not a frantic shriek, but a low, menacing monotone that is somehow more chilling. He speaks of the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event most in the room had celebrated as a liberation. He calls it, with cold deliberation, the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." He rails against a unipolar world order dominated by the United States, an order he portrays as arrogant, hypocritical, and illegitimate. He speaks, with a quiet venom, of the humiliation of the 1990s, of a great and proud nuclear power brought to its knees by economic chaos, forced to go begging to the West for aid. He speaks of NATO expansion not as the free choice of sovereign nations, but as a deliberate, cynical act of betrayal, a violation of a sacred promise to encircle and weaken a recovering Russia.

And then, he unfurls his own doctrine of destiny. He speaks of the "Russian World," the Russkiy Mir, a vast, divided civilization of Russian-speaking peoples left stranded by the fall of the empire, a people whose rights, he claims, are being trampled in the newly independent states. A people, he implies, whose security is indivisible from that of Moscow's, a people who must, by the inexorable logic of history, be protected and eventually reunited under the Kremlin's wing. The Western diplomats in the audience shift uncomfortably, hearing what they will later dismiss in the hallways as the bluster of a resentful autocrat playing to a domestic audience. They do not yet understand that they are listening to a formal declaration of war on the entire post-Cold War order, a vision of the future rooted in a poisoned, weaponized vision of the past. The two speeches, separated by a lifetime and a world of style, are fraternal twins, born of the same toxic parents: a profound and politically cultivated sense of national humiliation, and a messianic belief in a violent, revanchist destiny.

The Discourse 122: The Politics of Resentment

This chapter introduces the foundational ideological parallels between Nazism and the modern revanchist ideology of Putinism. It argues that while the two are not identical, they draw their political and emotional power from the same wellspring: a potent, politically weaponized narrative of national humiliation that, when fused with a myth of historical destiny, creates a justification for wars of conquest.

The Foundational Myths of Humiliation serve as the moral pretext. For Hitler and the Nazis, the central myths were the "Stab-in-the-back" legend (Dolchstosslegende)—the lie that the German army was not defeated in 1918 but betrayed by civilians—and the manifest injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. This narrative skillfully blended legitimate grievances over the treaty's harsh terms with paranoid fictions about a conspiracy of Jews and Marxists, creating a politically potent story of a noble victim. For Putin, the central myths are the "Humiliation of the 1990s" and the "betrayal" of supposed Western promises against NATO expansion. This narrative, too, blends legitimate grievances—the chaotic and often painful transition from communism and a Western triumphalism that was often deaf to Russian security concerns—with the paranoid fiction of a deliberate, decades-long Western plot to encircle and dismember Russia. In both cases, the myth of humiliation serves a vital political function: it absolves the nation of any past fault, externalizes all blame onto foreign and domestic enemies, and reframes future aggression not as a choice, but as a righteous and necessary response to past injustices.

The Irredentist Drive for Reunification is the ideological engine that transforms resentment into a military objective. The Nazi concept of Lebensraum ("Living Space") was a dual theory, calling for both the colonial conquest of Slavic lands and, more immediately, the "return" of ethnic Germans to the Reich. The drive for Anschluss (union) with Austria and the seizure of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia were justified not as invasions, but as acts of liberation, of reuniting a dismembered German people. This is a direct parallel to the modern Kremlin concept of the Russkiy Mir, or "Russian World." This neo-imperial doctrine explicitly rejects the legitimacy of the sovereignty of its neighbors, particularly Ukraine and Belarus, viewing them instead as artificial "creations of Lenin," lost historical territories populated by a common people who have been brainwashed by the West. The invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, and the full-scale war that followed, are framed in this ideology not as a war of choice or conquest, but as a sacred, historical mission to protect and ultimately re-absorb these lost lands and peoples into their rightful place under Moscow's authority. In both cases, irredentism provides a messianic, pseudo-historical justification for violating the most fundamental principle of international law: the sovereignty of nations.