Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 19 – The failed
Turkish coup and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to it have “done for Putin the
very same thing the annexation of Crimea did for Lukashenka,” causing ever more
people in the West to view the Kremlin leader as “of course evil and a dictator
but [only] number two” -- and thus being more willing to work with him, Arkady
Babchenko says.
This is part of a more general
pattern, the Russian commentator suggests, in which “over the course of a
single day a new chief universal evil appears on the world stage” and are distracted
from remembering and acting on their conclusion about the earlier “number one
evil”
That is not to say that Putin has
been transformed into some kind of good and effective leader, Babchenko
continues, but only that in this business of comparative evil, many in the West
now view him as a lesser threat just as they two years ago came to view
Lukashenka as that given that Erdogan “now is the fuehrer” of the day.
Such
mood swings – and that seems a better term than analytic judgments – are
becoming ever more common given the rush of events, the shortening of news
cycles and attention spans, and the absence of either a widely accepted
paradigm into which what is going on can be fitted or a strategy designed to cope
with it.
Indeed, when anything horrific
happens, almost the first question posed is not why did it happen and what
should be done but rather where will a similar even occur next be it violence
in American cities, coups and coup attempts in various countries, or
fragmentation of international groupings or individual countries.
That is perhaps a natural response
to what seems to be a kaleidoscopically changing world that is out of control,
but Babchenko’s insight is a timely reminder that it has consequences and that
because it has those consequences it may very well be in the interests of some
to promote such swings through the orchestration of such events.
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