Last words
Putin and I By Thomas S. Harrington
I
was talking with someone the other day and they said: “Your analyses of things are good, but I am less enamoured of Putin than you are.” So let’s get a few things clear. I am not enamoured of Putin. He is a cold calculating geo-political strategist who, I am fairly sure, has resorted to strategic murder at times to carry out some of this goals. Since I am not particularly drawn to either cold calculators or murderers it is hard to say how I would be “enamoured” of Putin. Nowadays it seems, however, that murder and statesmanship seem to go hand-in-hand. By his own admission, Obama calculatingly murders foreign opponents people every Tuesday. Obama has murdered his own citizens by his own admission. Indeed he has drones flying over people in several countries poised to commit murder at any time on his say so. But in addition to – like Putin – ordering strategic murders (albeit in demonstrably much larger numbers than his Russian counterpart), Obama (and his immediate predecessor as president) have arrogated to themselves and their office several prerogatives that the Russian president could never dream of carrying out and has made no demonstration of wanting to carry out. 1) Destroying entire countries on false pretexts (Iran, Libya and Syria) and leaving their people to rot in the ruined remains. 2) Sponsoring coups on the doorsteps of his major geo-political rivals (Georgia, Ukraine). Last time I checked, neither Canada nor Mexico had been taken over by Putin-sponsored coups. Indeed, the very thought of it is preposterous. But the exact equivalence of this is exactly what the US has done. And we call Putin the aggressor! 3) Organising the world’s second- or third-biggest economic bloc, the puppet-laden EU to adopt sanction designed to cripple the Russian economy, even though Russia, despite what you might have read, has neither invaded no one nor threatened no one with invasions. Though you may find it hard to believe through he
fog of propaganda, the people of the Crimea overwhelmingly wanted to be reunited with Russia and expressed this idea in a clear vote to that effect. No guns were fired. No smart bombs used. Rather, people voted to rejoin the people whose language they overwhelmingly speak as their first language, whose culture they overwhelmingly consider their own, and whose salaries and government pensions are roughly the double of what they got as citizens of the Ukraine. What silly irrational people. Must have been all those guns pointed at their heads that made them do it. 4) Arrogating the right to spy on every device-using citizen in the word, down to knowing the most intimate details of their personal lives. Last time I checked Putin was not doing this. 5) Unilaterally abrogating the START 2 nuclear arms treaty (accomplished by Bush in 2003) so the US could seize what it considered its “unipolar moment” to establish unassailable nuclear superiority over Russia once and for all. Imagine if the Russians had done this. We’d all be up in arms (pardon the pun) I could go on. And I will if asked. So, am I enamoured of Putin? No Putin is a man given to the occasional strategic violence and murder. But his record of using murder and strategic violence, as well as his record of coercive threats to other countries and invasions of other countries pales in comparison to the record of the US. Indeed, beside the US, he looks rather good, which is not a statement of my love for him but rather how inured all of us have become to the insouciantly murderous and aggressive ways of our government. CT Thomas S. Harrington is a professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and the author of Public Intellectuals and Nation Building in the Iberian Peninsula, 1900–1925: The Alchemy of Identity, published in 2014 by Bucknell University Press. www.coldtype.net | January 21076 | ColdType 51