generalspeaking

Saturday, June 29, 2019

Frankly, Mr. Putin

"The liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected. What rights are these?
"Every crime must have its punishment."
"So, the liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population."
Russian President Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin: '[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades' © Alamy

This is a man who speaks freely, confident of his views and disinterested in how they will be received. He has no need for rose-coloured glasses; he sees the world as it is and as he would have it. He is canny, he is autocratic and he is aggressive, but he is not stupid, nor is he anything but frank. Liberalism like all ideologies has become unbalanced; it has lost its way, forgotten that to be useful it must also be reasonably balanced.

Liberalism has become progressively liberated, more conscientiously socialized in its intemperate acceptance of all values being of equal worth than is tolerable for reasonable people to accept. In many ways the lengths to which liberalism has genuflected toward regarding all ways of life and values in life as worthy of respect reflecting social constructs and cultures infusing them all with equal human rights entitlements must be both a puzzle and a source of amusement to a traditionalist like Vladimir Putin.

He is a conservative socialist, a not-quite-rigid communitarian, a practical-minded man for whom 'rules of engagement' are flexible. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has always had time for her Russian counterpart. She seems to regard him as a basically reasonable individual whom cogent arguments could sway. In turn he had the patience to listen to her, but he has never felt obliged to agree with any course of action unattractive to his sense of preservation of Russia, its priorities and his place within its future.

While he sees Russia as a competitor to the United States in forging alliances useful to his nation, establishing and re-establishing footholds in the near-abroad and further afield, he feels entitled to regard former USSR satellites as being obligated to Russia and is comfortable playing the heavy there irrespective of international rules of territorial integrity. In the Middle East, he has ingratiated himself with Syria, seeing no problem in aiding Bashar al-Assad in further subjugating and tormenting his Sunni population.

Would he permit intruding migrants from the Middle East, with their everlasting propensity to tribal violence, sectarian hostility and threats to stability and law and order wherever they congregate further complicate Russia's already fraught relations with its Muslim neighbours? The upsurge in violence and the diminishing of European culture and values through a vast influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa through the assent of the European Union's liberalism is a lesson Mr. Putin takes seriously.

His friend Angela Merkel's decisive acceptance of a million 'refugees' and asylum seekers to augment the millions Germany had already absorbed has changed that country just as it has Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and other hapless European nations, wreaking havoc in their social welfare in their public arena, in their cultures and in law and order. And he will have none of it. Attributing it to the weak-minded effect of liberalism.

And he's perfectly right.