I write about Russia, and by extension, Vladimir Putin, a reasonable amount. As a result, through various social media outlets, I am exposed to a wide range of views on the Russian president. I get some pro-Putin stuff from people inside of Russia, which doesn’t interest me all that much. Most of it is really crazy anyhow, like the idea floated to me the other day by a Russian chap around how Putin had been on board MH17 and that’s why the Ukrainians shot it down. How Vlad managed to get off the flight, assumedly parachuting to safety at the appropriate time, bare-chested I’m sure, wasn’t really explained.
It’s the western Putinistas that interest me, and I’m specifically referring in this instance to people born and bred in the West, people with no connection whatsoever to Russia and/or the former Soviet Union, who either love Putin or at least feel the need to defend him at every turn. Their core belief seems to be that the western media are involved in a conspiracy against him, and that every news story from the region reported in the West has a built-in anti-Putin bias.
I think I’ve begun to understand what informs this group’s ideology. It is partly lazy Yankophobia; the notion that because they loathe American foreign policy, and Putin is indentified as an aggressor by the US, that therefore Putin is automatically a good guy. Now I’m as ardent a critic of American foreign policy as you’re likely to find, but the thought pattern that goes “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” is truly sad in its stupidity. It was also, ironically enough, the stated ethos of the Putinistas most hated figure, George W Bush.
The same style of thinking had Chavez lionised amongst sections of western people who should have known a lot better. Just because someone doesn’t like America, and manages to get one up on them from time to time, does not mean that their motives aren’t as questionable, or dare I say it, a whole lot worse than, what US foreign policy is attempting to achieve.
Me personally, what I dislike about American foreign policy is the ineptitude of it more than anything else. They tend to engage when they should stay out of things, and then ignore situations where they could do a lot of good if they were in the right place. See Iraq in 2003 for an example of the former, and Syria 2013 for the latter. This idea of the Pentagon as a group of evildoers sat round tables, plotting the downfall of nations, has never rung true for me. Most of the State Department’s poor moves rebound on America in a bad way eventually.
In closing, the Putinista brigade scare me as much as they do simply because they represent the rise of some very lazy thinking on a part of the population, the reasonably politically engaged, who should be thinking deeper thoughts about these sorts of things – not just looking for some sort of icon of anti-US feeling. Particularly when being viciously xenophobic and homophobic, ruling via a lack of a proper mandate and operating a corrupt kleptocracy doesn’t seem to be enough to convince these people that perhaps Vlad is a bad apple after all.
A telling and apt turn of phrase “Putinistas” since many of the voices you are hearing from came of age in the 1980’s when the rallying cry of Sandinista! helped the Clash sell a few more copies of their latest album and kept Leftist politics on life support in the dark days of Reagan and Thatcher. It became a rallying cry among other rallying cries within the wake of the buffoonery of Iran-Contra, resonating within some corners of the youth culture of the time, cementing itself in these imaginations formed within a decade in which style supremely supplanting substance (and that included the realm of politics) replete with P.L.O. scarves and red Sandinista berets as fashion statements.
That youthful political naiveté is now hardened and amplified by the digital era. These voices are the same kids who avidly watched every episode of ‘The Young Ones’ but could never understand why there was a laugh track. These are people who saw that being on the tail end of the boomer generation made for diminished expectations in their economic and educational choices which in turn fed into a simmering resentment of the status quo most emblematic in the form of the success-selling triumphalism of the big bad old U.S.A.
I argue that these are largely personal convictions fed by personal disappointment in social/economic expectations even more than global political realizations and concerns. Indeed you can see that in the common thread of implicit LACK of ‘concern’ in their on-line complaints, as bereft as these statements seem for any feeling for their fellow man. More than attempts to articulate compassion in the wake of a tragedy like flight MH17, they are more concerned with being right (or at least appearing so) with rhetorical shout-downs and exercises in cognitive dissonance that renders mute any beseechment to follow a logical argument. Their views are impervious to being challenged as they are so firmly grounded in their personal convictions that their personal lives are the fault of anybody except them and what better straw-man that that symbol of self-satisfied success than the U.S.A.
Of course U.S. foreign policy feeds the beast, as inept as it is. But this seems always to have been so throughout the ‘American Century’. Their foreign policy has always been their domestic policy turned inside out. Indeed American foreign policy is so tightly synchronized with domestic election cycles that a state like Israel (and others) can play them like a fiddle on most occasions.
I am not a U.S.A. apologist by any means and if I appear to deflect criticism that deservedly comes their way it is only because I, taking pride in my critical thinking skills and not wishing to appear callous and intellectually lazy, have a habit of second guessing all my assumptions in a desire to see what is often obscured more by the frailties of human perception and less by the easy knee-jerk reactionary conspiracy thinking of both the right AND left.
obviously much like your web site but you have to check the spelling on several of your respective posts.
Many seem to be rife with spelling problems
and i also to find it very bothersome to know the truth however I’ll certainly
come again again.
It’s interesting to read this in our current times. The type of Putinista you describe seems a modern, post-Soviet variation on the tankie. There are also right-wing Putin-lovers who are not especially motivated my any US foreign policy opinions, but rather simply like Putin’s ideologies. Not sure there’s a better word for these people than “fascists.”