Dictatorship is obviously absurd – but that’s what makes it dangerous

The paradox of tyranny is that laughing at it both undermines and feeds its paranoia. But we are still right to do so

The documentary simply titled Navalny shown by the BBC last week contains what must be one of the most extraordinary scenes ever broadcast on television. Filmed in real time, the CNN/HBO production records the infamous telephone conversation in which Alexei Navalny, having identified (with the help of internet investigators Bellingcat) the FSB agents responsible for the attempt on his life, finds one who falls for what Navalny’s team call their prank call.

In an Oscar-worthy performance, Navalny himself impersonates the operative’s superior officer and demands to know what went wrong with the “operation” – why, in other words, the Kremlin failed in its attempt to assassinate him. The hapless FSB man, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, spills the details of the entire plot and explains why it failed: because the plane on which the poisoned Navalny was taken ill made an emergency landing. Given another 20 minutes, the novichok nerve agent would have accomplished its intended task.

The questions and answers go into absurd detail. Where was the novichok applied? To Navalny’s underpants. On what part of the underpants? The crotch area. What colour were the underpants? Blue. Kudryavtsev suspects nothing and provides a full account of this episode of attempted state murder while Navalny’s team listen with breathless incredulity. The scene is, in equal measure, appallingly terrifying and extremely funny. What it makes clear is a singular paradox: that modern tyrants are inherently ludicrous but, nonetheless, extraordinarily dangerous. Indeed, their dangerousness may be in direct proportion to our failure to comprehend their particular brand of irrationality.

In the modern era, democracy, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law are assumed to constitute normal political expectations. At least in developed countries, this assumption makes dictatorship a rather comic anomaly: a phenomenon that is out of touch with reality. At once, both wicked and unfathomable, the tyrant is, as every cartoonist knows, easy to lampoon because he appears, by our standards, not just cruel or unjust, as many ancient rulers were recognised to be, but crazy.

Could anyone actually believe what Putin is saying? That Ukraine must be taken under Russian control because it is over-run with fascists, when we know that its proportion of far-Right voters is infinitesimal – far lower than, say, Germany with whom the Kremlin is happy to do business? Could anyone believe, as Kudryavtsev appeared to do, that what he was doing – attempting to murder a political opponent – was perfectly legitimate? How to take with any degree of seriousness those blustering Kremlin henchmen constantly trying to shout down interviewers who confront them with empirical facts?

All of this surely is beyond parody and the temptation to laugh the tyrant into oblivion has a particularly strong attraction for the British, who tend to believe that wit is an effective military weapon. (It is, in terms of maintaining morale on your own side.)

But the danger here should be obvious. Once the world has decided that you are insane, that there is no point in confronting you with evidence or presenting an alternative position, you can pretty much do as you like. Dispensing with the need for reasoned argument or objective validity can be liberating. What the Russian leadership seems to be saying is quite unashamedly arational: it invokes a historic destiny based on religious mission. Its objectives lie far beyond the material world. They represent an entirely different view of what nationhood – and life itself – is about.

Not that they are immune to ridicule. I am quite sure that the Kremlin gang are infuriated by the refusal of the West to take their claims seriously – to dismiss them as silly lies or paranoid fantasies. That rage is probably coming very close to being incendiary. We might, if we are not careful, die laughing.

Here is the dilemma: the West clearly cannot accept the Kremlin line as reasonable, even in its own terms. Which means Russia’s actions must continue to be confronted with whatever degree of force is needed. But that policy plays into the Kremlin’s own mythology of eternal victimhood, and so enhances its sense of righteousness. How do you deal with a rapacious aggressor who sees any attempt to counter its attacks – or to dismiss its claims – as being more evidence that it is right? This is the riddle that must be solved, but there seems, at the moment, to be a lack of positive solutions. The leaders of what we must start calling, once again, the Free World are clearly having difficulties reaching agreement on the way forward – and this is not just because of European dependence on Russian fuel. The Kremlin’s behaviour has thrown up in the air most of the comfortable assumptions about the post-Cold War world on which Western democracy was counting.

It is not completely true that Putin has succeeded in revitalising Nato and restoring Western self-belief. The Western allies are making the right noises but there is only so much that rhetoric can achieve, and our side is not blessed with a brilliant generation of heads of government.

On the night of the French elections, I was engaged in a depressing WhatsApp chat with a friend in Paris. At a particularly low moment, I wrote: “With Biden in the US and Macron in France, this might be the last 20 minutes of the West.” But in truth, I do not believe that. Ultimately, I think, the West has cracked it: the combination of free market economics and liberal democratic government provides the optimum solution in human social organisation. It promotes almost everything that improves the quality of life and makes progress possible: initiative, self-determination, resourcefulness, talent and individual moral responsibility. The vices that it permits are the price of liberty and we have learnt to live with that. Perhaps most important, it relies on reason without which all manner of evil can triumph. In the end, it must be unbeatable as, at least so far, it has been. There may be cause for anxiety but probably not despair.

The tyrant is easy to lampoon because he appears not just cruel or unjust but crazy