Putin’s Victory
That a week is a long time in politics is confirmed by three significant events of the past seven days which will make life more difficult for the proponents of American “engagement” abroad. One was Bashar al-Assad’s victory in Homs, accompanied by the embarrassing discovery of French military “advisors” with the rebel troops. Assad’s success, while still far from decisive, makes creeping Western escalation in Syria unlikely. Another was Barack Obama’s refusal to accept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s timetable for action against Iran and his increasingly evident distaste for that particular proposed adventure. But topping them all was Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory at Russia’s presidential election on March 4.
Putin’s win was far more convincing than his Western detractors had expected. Even his domestic foes, who dispute the official figure of 64 percent and accuse the government of various irregularities, do not deny that he has scored a simple majority. “This is a major achievement for the second Putin presidential regime,” The Washington Post’s commentator grudgingly conceded. “It implies that a lot of Russians still believe, at some level, that participation matters, even if the outcome is known well in advance.”
Not at “some” level but at the only one that matters—the street—the protest movement is already fizzling out. Its leaders will be hard-pressed to maintain the momentum of recent weeks and months. That the wind is out of their sails was confirmed a day after the election, when fewer than 20,000 anti-Putin protesters gathered at Moscow’s Lubyanka Square—far lower figure than the organizers had expected. “Where is everyone?” one of the activists complained to a Time correspondent behind the stage on Pushkin Square. “We’re screwed if this is all we got”:
The movement's unofficial leader, blogger Alexei Navalny, tried hard to ready the crowd for a fresh standoff in the coming days and weeks… But his boasts from December that the protests were big enough "to take the Kremlin now" had disappeared. And when several of the leaders, including Navalny, tried to test their chances of occupying the square, things got ugly fast. For one thing, the crowd went home, leaving only a couple of hundred protesters. The biggest group was from the Left Front movement, which is to say, a group of rowdy Che Guevara wannabes… There was a brief attempt to pitch a tent, but it didn't get further than a tarp attached to a tree before it was abandoned.
In brief, it was an anticlimax. Nevertheless, many Western media analysts find it hard to come to grips with the outcome which is at such odds with their ideological preferences. Some continue to bewail “Putin’s flawed victory” and lambast Russia’s “managed democracy,” reflecting the same disdain for Russia’s peasant masses that they feel for the Heartland hicks at home. Others still cherish the dream of a “Russian Spring” yet to come. For all of them “Vladimir Putin” has long ceased to be a political figure, having morphed into a dark metaphysical concept. Whatever the president-elect does or says in the days to come will continue to be processed through a dark lens by the media pack whose hounds see him as the embodiment of what they loath: a patriotic leader who believes in—and upholds!—the right of sovereign nations to be in charge of their affairs within their borders.
In the alternative reality of MSM pundits, when Russia vetoes a Security Council resolution that could be manipulated to justify a NATO attack against Syria—just as the one on Libya was manipulated a year ago—it is because Putin is in cohorts with a blood-stained dictator. But when the United States vetoed dozens of resolutions over the decades, it was business as usual. That same hypocrisy is on display when Putin’s “KGB roots” are routinely invoked to “explain” his views and intentions, even though he was but a middle-ranking agency bureaucrat in East Germany. However, two decades ago President George H.W. Bush’s earlier job as the head of the CIA was deemed irrelevant in explaining his motives for invading Panama, launching the First Gulf War, or intervening in Somalia. Anti-Putin protesters continue to be lionized, even though Moscow’s Bohemian Bourgeoisie itself has grown tired of the show. On the other hand, brutal clampdowns on grassroots movements and peaceful protesters are ignored or belittled if they involve pliant clients such as Bahrain, or below-the-radar-screen “backwaters” like Senegal.
It is futile to look for consistency, logic, or mere honesty in the ongoing anti-Putin-fest. The core problem with him, for those who keep attacking him with such monotonous predictability, is that he does not accept that a “democratic” Russia can be only the one subservient domestically and externally to the demands and ideological concepts of the Western elite class. For that reason, the presidential election was deemed “undemocratic” and “fraudulent” by definition, long in advance and regardless of its outcome.
The magnitude of Putin’s victory reflects the Obama Administration’s serious error in sending Michael McFaul as the new U.S. Ambassador to Russia. An enthusiastic supporter of the protest movement, he received its leaders a day after presenting his credentials in January and boasted to The New York Times a week later that he would make his “pro-democracy” mark in Moscow “in a very, very aggressive way.” Some months earlier, he declared that “even while working closely with Putin on matters of mutual interest, Western leaders must recommit to the objective of creating the conditions for a democratic leader to emerge in the long term.” This was a regime-change agenda expressed with breathtaking bluntness. McFaul’s foul now entails eating some humble pie at Foggy Bottom and accepting that his “very, very aggressive” theater is bad diplomacy and even worse politics.
A viable rival to Putin may emerge “in the long term,” but he is more likely to be a hard-core nationalist—perhaps tinged with neo-communist nostalgia—than a Western-style liberal democrat. Now and for years to come, Putin is a safer, more stable and more predictable partner. He feels somewhat irritated by McFaulisms, but at the same time he believes that there are no divergent core interests between Russia and the United States. The stalled “Reset” needs to be reset in the interest of both.
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The anti-Putin demonstrators are a complex group.
Some of them are Russian nationalists who feel that Russia does not have a strong enough army and is too conceding in not recovering lands of Greater Russia.
Some of them are Soviet nostalgists eager for the days of Stalin.
Some are Western style moderates.
The United Russia regime, however, carries all these faces in different times, and yet is also none of them much of the time. I guess that's why they won? They are the least worst political enemies of their opposition.
Here's the good news for some, the very bad news for others?
Dostoyevsky predicted the Russian soul [of peasants first and foremost i.e. 'the people'] would never accept Western mechanistic materialism and the West's atheistic aggrandizement of the so-called 'individual' "as if" he/she existed alone outside the context of their religious-political-ethnic group.
This after he himself ventured into the sophisticated Western "reform" movements of his day and experienced firsthand their inevitably hollow duplicitousness in attempting to achieve what doesn't exist in reality i.e. the impossible...and so the futility in the long run involved with the chase after such a chimera, or illusion.
He went on to say they would overturn the pseudo culture because it naturally would also dissolve on its own too, like dew before the morning sun revealing again what does last and remain the rock of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy, the Russian soil and its people, reality.
Russia was the last to fall into the West's self-defeating sophisticated pseudo 'cultural' trap and apparently will be the first to extricate itself from it.
The West's elites despise reality for the very good 'reason'--(and lets remember reason too has its limits)--they've created a separate 'reality' of, by and for-themselves.
So in Fact on the one hand they're in favor of the universal or 'global' but on the other hand their universality isn't actual, it doesn't for example like Orthodox Christianity include the real sensibilities of 'the people', their soil, their soul, i.e. reality. Thus even the grossly privileged Western elitist place or position "as is" is a temporal chimera chasing in effect its own tail presently, not reality, and is evaporating as the sun also rises.
Life as we know it, or more accurately don't.
Mr. Yurick,
Put another way, the West has lost its story, a story which is actually two melded stories: the classical story beginning with the Iliad which spawned new stories and subsumed other stories in the course of the classical Western era, and the story of the Gospel, the Christian story, as its meme entered and nourished the live and the soul of the West, a melding articulated in Dante's "Divine Comedy" when Beatrice takes over as guide from Virgil. All "lesser" narratives have their meaning in this great Story. Modernity has lost the story, and post-modernity languishes in nihilism.
Yet another way, is that culture - being the principles, traditions, customs, habits and institutions which limit the whims, desires and compulsion of the person, so that the person is therefrom emancipated so that he can fulfill the responsibilities, obligations and duties which he has to God, to family, to Church and to community - is dead, and has been replaced by the anti-culture which deconstructs the principles, traditions, customs, habits and institutions of mitigating culture so that the persons can pursue his whims, desires and lusts without restraint. Culture has as its goal character, which is the acquisition, the internalizing and the living out of the great virtues: cardinal, capital and Christian. The anti-culture "nurtures" the cult of personality and lifts up the Rousseau's autonomous individual outfitted with the abstract rights of Locke. This Promethean self which would shake his fist in the face of all gods is in reality, however, an estranged, alienated and shriveled self, bereft like Cain and Grendel of fellowship. Culture stresses communion: the intimate communion of husband and wife in the marriage bed; the intimate communion of the family at the supper table; the intimate communion of the Body of Christ at the Eucharist. The best that the anti-culture can do is to create the counterfeit of the collective, compelled not by the in-working of the Creator within His creation but by that abstract corporation with a monopoly on coercion and with the ability to define the limits of its own power: the Hobbesian state.
It seems that despite seventy years of communism and despite the negative influence of the West that the Story and the culture which it has helped engender have not completely disappeared from Russia. The Story and the culture which it has engendered is still around in this country: in strongholds, in nooks, in crannies and in bottoms and on ridges. One such place is Chronicles. That is why we are drawn to it.
By the way, poor show of leadership from Putin on one count.
After victory, did he have any words for his opponents? Did he note their differences and promise a plan that would include some of their propose reforms if possible? Did he swear to work for all Russians, including the ones who did not see eye to eye with him?
No, he said that he shall destroy the source of political provocation against him. Nothing else about the opponents or those who didn't vote United Russia.
So I believe Dr. Trifkovic's assessment of him as a man of national interests may be misplaced. Putin, if anything, celebrated a victory OVER people of his country and not WITH them. He is not playing for all of Russia, but only the part of Russia that he likes. The rest are political provocation.
Mr. Sanjay,
Your analysis of Mr. Putin might well be correct; however, from my understanding of things political it would have been refreshing for Bush to have said that he was the President of bankers, stock jobbers, paper aristocracy and neo-cons and to hell with the rest of us; or for Obama to have said that he was the President of bankers, stock jobbers, paper aristocracy and Jacobin Marxist and to hell with the rest of us. Instead they lied and claimed to be the President of "all the people," and far too many of us fools believed and continue to believe them. Perhaps Putin is merely more honest; perhaps the Russian people are not as stupid as we are.
Your response certainly took me back. I accept your explanation to some significant degree.
Sophocles felt that religion and thus tradition for the most part ought to stay as is. However tradition too mandates its own adjustment, when what is legitimately next arrives as long as it is built upon tradition and does not instead with its "reform" seek to either circumvent or trash tradition. ... I don't 'know' this what I'm about to say but it occurs to me sufficiently to say that in building upon tradition, it might be elevated up to consciousness that the christian achilles heel could be insufficient awareness that evil in the world is the positive force, positive meaning the knee-jerk reaction, how the crow flies-shortest distance between two points easiest attained power, instant gratification etc., and thus not necessarily making when imbalanced in that direction for what's best, higher and so more suitable in the long run to a working civilization-via that which therefore is the negative force of good, the weaker but vital, mitigating and counter-balancing force. (It's what Christ meant, as reported in the story of the new testament: 'When I am weak, yeah then I am strong.' Referring also to the civilization he was helping to build.) As in everything they are two sides--(the positive and negative forces of evil and good)--One coin. If we christians knew this, we would be expecting and prepared for the stronger or easier positive force of evil and in better stead with our negative or more difficult position of counter-balance; rather than overly focusing on the good that we would see 'as if ' it alone were all, and usually "stupidly" surprised in our subsequent disposition of being evil's easy tools. -?- Perhaps I'm a bit of an anomaly in that I know this; though often wish it were more widely known. Unless of course, as a Sophocles might fear, the knowledge could do more damage to the tradition generally than improve or strengthen it? That's really something only Tradition knows in its ongoing real experience in Time...in terms of when what is legitimately next and built upon tradition, shall be added. But wasn't Christ, the metaphysical construct of Christ-via its vessel the man Jesus in this regard also saying 'NOW is the acceptable time! -?- !' Of course the now is eternal covering a lot of ground, and so as we pilgrims continue in time on our trek more is revealed to us and subsequently only then can in Fact be incorporated into the Tradition in a better understanding also of the story.
Read please Pravda Moskva: Opinion
Open Letter to David Cameron
Enjoy it.
Joviha
Dr. Trifkovic, I ditto your sharp observation of the American administration total miscalculation by appointing Michael McFaul to the ambassador post to Russia. A wise ambassador does not start his term by issuing bold statements undermining Russian democracy and getting involved in the “Change”.
I do believe that if not sooner, than definitely later this year, he will be packing his bags back home.
So nicely said m. peters in a such nice Story.
Thank you 55joviha for sharing the excellent article written by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/07-03-2012/120715-david_cameron-0/.
Well, I doubt that the author will be given any response back, particularly after questioning and addressing the issues with such informative background.
I'm fairly certain that when Putin promised to 'destroy the source of the provocation against him', it wasn't Russians he was referring to.