generalspeaking

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Perspectives Unjoined

We have a propensity to reinvent ourselves. Not everyone of course, but many of us. To transform ourselves into other than what we originally represented. These alternations of personality, choices and subjective values can satisfy internal conceits, to see ourselves as we would like to be, even when we behave otherwise. To portray ourselves through our words taken seriously, as other than through our actions, taken seriously enough, but re-shaped by the successful manipulation of words of denial.

Take, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is not a stupid man, but his intelligence is marred by the hypocrisy that is so useful to him in aiding him to corrupt the vision that is held of his behaviour. He is canny and cunning, a true survivor, and he knows how readily gullible people are. His personal impression, aided by egotism, that he is immune to close scrutiny because he can manipulate those impressions in a manner that will excuse him from his power-wielding decisions.

He has become, suddenly, a champion of peace. Civil relations with others -- he chides those upon whose recently-stated intentions are inconvenient to his own plans he has turned his attention -- always trump the truculence of anger and the uselessness of belligerence. This message he delivers to readers of the New York Times is not taken directly from his own bedtime notes more concerned with how to reestablish dominance over former Soviet client states.

His forays into Chechnya and Georgia and the company he keeps in nuclearizing Iran and sarin-gassing Syria rather describe him as a ferociously-devoted adherent of Mars. He has chosen to align his country's military apparatus with that of Iran, supplying it with its nuclear infrastructure needs -- with Syria, supplying it with technically advanced weapons and the Security Council guarantees it needs to forestall sanctions against state-imposed atrocities, and by extension with the terrorist group Hezbollah.

He has used Russia's veto powers to continually block "at least three statements expressing humanitarian concern and calling for humanitarian access to besieged cities in Syria. And in the past two months, Russia has blocked two resolutions condemning the generic use of chemical weapons and two press statements expressing concern about their use", according to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power.

President Putin graduated with a law degree from Leningrad State University before he joined the ranks of the KGB. Not a requisite for aspiring politicians, but one that appears to have served him well in his career trajectory, taking him to the Kremlin, and by way of former President Yeltsin's patronage, to the presidency itself. Where he intends to remain, to guide his country, through his autocratic willpower.

He found it unacceptable, sad, disappointing, he wrote in his statement to the American people, that their chosen leader appeared to be following in the footsteps of George W. Bush, a president with whom Mr. Putin in fact had warm relations, because Mr. Bush recognized him as a man in whose eyes dwelt the promise of "someone with whom he could do business". Lamenting the former's "cobbling coalitions together under the slogan 'you're either with us or against us'"; a sentiment not unknown in practise to Mr. Putin.

"We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement", he wrote ever so movingly, as one who finds it quite acceptable to stand placidly by as a government wreaks vicious war upon its own people. Mr. Putin finds nothing particularly offensive in 120,000 deaths in Syria, nor that one-third of its entire population now represent refugees. The figure was in the millions for Joseph Stalin, a man Mr. Putin admires yet.

The use of force by the U.S. would serve to violate "current international law", unless authorized by the United Nations Security Council. And of course that authorization will not any time soon be forthcoming as long as Vladimir Putin has a veto in the Security Council chamber, and can, without too much of an effort, persuade China to vote accordingly.

Persuasive threats of dreadful events that could be allowed to unfold should Mr. Putin's Syrian client's progress in fully restraining the opposition from achieving their goal, speak of an end result that would "unleash a new wave of terrorism". Syria's state terrorism is to remain untouched, unchallenged, immune to interference or persuasive attempts at amelioration -- otherwise Iran will unleash its own capability to spread the disease throughout the Middle East as Hezbollah terrorists do their part, further abroad.

Former Soviet satellites need feel no fear of their former masters coming calling, inviting them to a new alliance they may not wish to revisit. Ukraine is already half onside, Poland not too enthralled, Latvia and Georgia in controlled panic and Kyrgyzstan, who knows. All former Soviets and all then, as now, perfect equals in the mind of the former KGB agent turned president-for-life.

He is, after all, the perfect compendium of what a human being is capable of aspiring to and achieving. The culture and conscious appeal of communism in action and purposeful dominating equality spawned "a harmonic combination" leading to a superior human, fit and healthy, a proletarian with reason for pride, loyal to a splendid ideology that reached its goal at a time when the world was not quite prepared for its entry and domination.