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The Demonization of Vladimir Putin
by JOHN
WIGHT
29
January, 2016
Vladimir
Putin is probably the most popular Russian leader there has ever
been, polling up around a phenomenal 80% as recently as November 2015
in a study carried out by a team of American researchers. This makes
him inarguably the most popular world leader today, though you would
think the opposite given the way he’s routinely depicted and
demonized in the West.
Paradoxically,
the main reason for Putin’s popularity in Russia is the same reason
he’s so reviled in the US and Western Europe. It comes down to the
simple but salient fact that when it comes to leadership and
political nous Vladimir Putin is playing chess while his counterparts
in London, Washington, and Paris are playing chequers.
This
is not to ascribe to the Russian leader the moral virtues of Nelson
Mandela or the humanitarian instincts of Mahatma Gandhi. But neither
is he the caricature regularly and vehemently described in the UK and
US media. Putin is not a villain straight from a Bond movie, sitting
in a spooky castle somewhere in deepest Russia planning and plotting
world domination. For that kind of ‘Masters of the Universe’
malarkey you need to take yourself to the White House in Washington,
or maybe CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. No, the Russian
President is a man who knows his enemy better than they know
themselves, and who understands and has imbibed the truth of former
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s statement that, “If you live
among wolves you have to act like a wolf.”
What
those Western ideologues and members of the liberal commentariat
who’ve been lining up to attack him in their newspaper columns fail
to appreciate, not to mention the army of the authors who’ve been
churning out books painting Putin as a latter day Genghis Khan, is
the deep scars left on the Russian psyche by the country’s exposure
to freedom and democracy Western-style upon the collapse of the
Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Canadian
journalist and author Naomi Klein lays it out in forensic detail in
her peerless work, The
Shock Doctrine (Penguin,
2007). The impact of free market shock therapy on Russia under Boris
Yeltsin’s presidency, Klein describes thus: “In the absence of
major famine, plague or battle, never have so many lost so much in so
short a time. By 1998 more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone
bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed,
creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy,
2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on
less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered
their ‘bitter medicine’ in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians
were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.”
Klein
also reveals that by 1994 the Russian suicide rate had doubled and
violent crime increased fourfold.
Given
the devastation wrought on the Russian economy and society by Western
free market gurus and their Russian disciples during that awful
period, the country’s recovery to the point where it is now able to
contest and resist Washington-led unipolarity where before it existed
unchecked, has to count as a staggering achievement.
Putin
rose to power in Russia on the back of his role in violently
suppressing the Chechen uprising, which began amid the chaos of the
Soviet Union’s dissolution. It was a brutal and bloody conflict in
which atrocities were undoubtedly committed, as they are in every
conflict, until the uprising was finally crushed and Moscow’s writ
restored. The former KGB officer was thrust into the spotlight as a
key member of Boris Yeltsin’s team thereafter, viewed as a safe
pair of hands, which propelled him onto the political stage and his
first stint as president in 2000, when he elected to office upon
Yeltsin’s death.
Since
then Putin has worked to restore the Russian economy along with its
sense of national pride and prestige on the world stage. The loss of
that prestige as a result of the demise of the Soviet era had a
cataclysmic effect on social cohesion in a country that had long
prided itself on its achievements, especially its role in defeating
the Nazis in the Second World War.
The
new Russian president is credited with returning the country to its
former status as a respected power that can’t and won’t be
bullied by the West. The attempt to use Georgia as a cat’s paw in
2008 was swiftly dealt with, and so has the attempt to do likewise
with Ukraine in 2014. All this baloney about Putin having
expansionist aims is an attempt to throw a smokescreen over the
West’s own expansionist agenda in Eastern Europe with the goal of
throwing acordon
sanitaire around
Russia in pursuit of a cold war agenda.
Russia’s
current game changing role in the Middle East, along with China’s
ferocious economic growth and growing influence, is proof that the
days of unipolarity and uncontested Western hegemony are drawing to a
close. This more than any other factor lies at the root of the
irrational Russophobia being peddled so passionately in the West.
The
most populous country in Europe is not and never will be a Western
colony or semi colony. For those Western ideologues that cannot
conceive of any relationship with Russia other than as a deadly or
defeated foe, accepting this reality is a non-negotiable condition of
achieving a semblance of stability and peace in the world.
While
Vladimir Putin and his government are not beyond criticism – in
fact, far from it – their misdeeds pale in comparison to the record
of Western governments in destroying one country after the other in
the Middle East, presiding over a global economy that has sown
nothing but misery and despair for millions at home and abroad,
leading in the last analysis to the normalization of crisis and
chaos.
Their
deeds, as the man said, would shame all the devils in hell.
This
article first appeared at American Herald Tribune.
The Game of Demonizing Putin
Official Washington influences the opinions of the American people about world affairs by demonizing certain foreign leaders, making them objects of both revulsion and ridicule, thus justifying “regime change” strategies, a particularly dangerous game when played against nuclear-armed Russia, as John Ivens explains
24
January, 2015
On
the morning of Jan. 16 at Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters
in Clinton, Iowa, I met Madeleine Albright. She looked different than
I remembered her as the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of
State during Bill Clinton’s second term. She looked less imposing
than before, more like a little barn owl seeking refuge from a
bitterly cold Iowa winter.
Secretary
Albright was acting as a surrogate for Hillary’s campaign. That
Saturday, she was motivating volunteers to canvas and make phone
calls for Hillary. I sensed that Secretary Albright came to Clinton,
Iowa, to energize older folks on the same weekend Chelsea Clinton was
in Davenport appealing to voters of younger generations.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin
But
I thought Secretary Albright might be a good source of insight into
Hillary’s perspectives on foreign policy. In Clinton’s 2014
memoir, Hard
Choices,
Hillary identified Albright as her “longtime friend and partner in
promoting rights and opportunities for women.”
I
asked Secretary Albright how she would advise Hillary Clinton when
negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She replied that
we should keep talking to Putin, but we should be wary that he
expands Russian influence at every opportunity. Secretary Albright
said we should “draw the line” when “little green men” invade
other countries (a reference to events in Crimea in 2014, I presume).
Secretary
Albright told about when she accompanied Bill Clinton to a summit in
June 2000 with Putin. She wore a button showing three monkeys, “Hear
no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” Putin asked why she was
wearing this button: “We always watch what pins Secretary Albright
wears. Why are you wearing those monkeys?”
And
Albright said, “because of your evil Chechnya policy.” Putin was
not amused. He protested, “You shouldn’t be dealing with the
Chechens.” President Bill Clinton gave Albright this look like “Are
you out of your mind? You have just screwed up the summit.”
In
retrospect, the monkey pin incident might be thought of as a humorous
aside, but perhaps Secretary Albright besmirched both nonhuman
primates and Russians, a dubious example of tact and diplomacy in one
of Bill Clinton’s first summits with the new Russian President.
The
fighting on both sides of the Chechnyan conflict deserves a great
deal of scrutiny by a war crime tribunal; nonetheless, Putin was
fighting an insurgency of violent Islamic jihadists in league with
Osama bin Laden. This is why Putin was among the first national
leaders to express support and sympathy for the United States after
9/11. That is the sad irony of Madeleine Albright’s monkey button.
At
a $1,500/plate fundraiser in March 2014 during the early phase of the
crisis in Ukraine (after a U.S.-backed putsch had overthrown elected
President Viktor Yanukovych and as ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s
south and east were under attack from the new regime and seeking
protection from Russia), Hillary was quoted in regards to Putin’s
response: “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back
in the 30s. … All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the
Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and
Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being
treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s
gotten everybody so nervous.”
In
2014, Bill Clinton was quoted, “Putin wants to re-establish Russian
greatness, not in Cold War terms — in Nineteenth Century -empire
terms.”
In Hard
Choices,
Hillary devotes an entire chapter titled “Russia, Reset and
Regression,” dealing with her issues with Putin. She narrates her
awkward experiences negotiating with Putin, and she seems frustrated
about her working relationship with Putin as a negotiating partner.
But oddly enough, she makes no such comparisons of Putin to Hitler
anywhere in this chapter. Instead, she recommends a “pause”
button instead of a “reset” button, adding:
“But
we should hit the pause button on new efforts. Don’t appear too
eager to work together. Don’t flatter Putin with high level
attention. … And make it clear that Russian intransigence wouldn’t
stop us from pursuing our interests and policies regarding Europe,
Central Asia, Syria and other hotspots. Strength and resolve were the
only language that Putin would understand.”
I
thought, “Enough Already! Enough dark arts of demonizing leaders of
other countries! Enough references to ‘He who’s name must not be
spoken, the dark lord Vladimir.’“
Former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, despite his notoriety, is an
accomplished negotiator. He has recently advised that such
demonization reveals a failure in foreign policy.
As
Americans, we don’t get to vote for a Russian president. That
particular right to vote belongs to Russians who live in the largest
nation on the planet, spanning ten time zones and possessing an
arsenal of nuclear weapons comparable in numbers to ours.
Russian
national history begins four centuries before American natives had
their first encounter with Columbus. Russians are as well educated
and typically speak more languages than Americans. There are three
nations that need to join together in agreements to address urgent
climate change problems in the Arctic: the United States, Canada and
Russia.
What
Americans can do, is to vote for a president who can make peace with
Russian leaders. More questions about peacemaking and diplomacy need
to be asked and answered in the 2016 election cycle.
John
Ivens is a retired psychology professor and now peace activist,
living in DeWitt, Iowa. As a member of Veterans for Peace, he
recently helped to organize a speaking tour, “Barnstorming in Iowa”
– Sept. 24-30, 2015, by Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley. During the
Vietnam War John was an Air Force pilot, flying C-141 jet transports
on global airlift missions.
Lavrov demands explanation for Obama administration's support of Szubin's "Personification of corruption" line
http://fortruss.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/lavrov-demands-explanation-for-obama.html
Южный федералниый, January 30, 2016
Translated from Russian by Tom Winter
The Kremlin has replied to Washington's unprecedented attack directed at the president of the Russian Federation, demanding a clarification from Washington. Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the Russian president, called it offensive that White House spokesman Josh Ernest said the Obama administration supports the position of Adam Szubin,* who called Vladimir Putin "the personification of corruption."
According to Peskov, at the Kremlin they consider this "an unprecedented statement" of the White House aimed at the Russian leader, timed for the presidential elections of 2018. Moscow demands that Washington provide an explanation for this accusation against the Russian head of state.
"We insist on further statements (from the US -- edd) because a statement like this is absolutely without precedent," said the press secretary.
In the Foreign Ministry they characterized the allegations against the Russian head of state as "frivolous and shameless." The Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov expressed his outrage about it in a phone conversation with his US counterpart John Kerry. According to the TV channel REN TV, the State Department initiated the call. In the Russian Foreign Ministry they laid full blame on Washington for deliberately stirring up tensions between Russia and the US.
*(Szubin is Acting Under Secretary of the US Department of the Treasury)
Translator note:
In the wake of the British probably-probably-probably Putin fingerpointing in the ten-year-old Litvinenko affair January 21, the BBC followed up with a half-hour show January 25 quoting people, principally Adam Szubin, supposing that Putin was secretly fabulously rich, through corruption. Actually the White House spokesman, when he revealed January 28 that Szubin was "reflecting the administration's view," just connects the dots for us.
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