Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 5 – The Stockholm
syndrome, the situation in which a captive begins to identify with his or her
captors, is widely recognized as a danger. But there is another related
phenomenon, Moscow commentator Igor Yakovenko argues, which he calls “the
Samantha syndrome,” that may be even more insidious and dangerous.
It occurs, he says, when Western
diplomats make such an effort to understand representatives of dictatorial and
especially totalitarian regimes that they forget the nature of those regimes
and thus give away the game before it is even half played, just as the
representatives of those regimes intend (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58BAED398BE31).
Such a pattern has a long and
infamous history extending back to the time of Stalin and Hitler, but it hasn’t
been given a name. Now, Yakovenko says, there is good reason to label it “the
Samantha syndrome,” given the article Samantha Powers wrote in the New York Times on the occasion of the
passing of Vitaly Churkin.
That article, he points out, “immediately
made [her] a star of the Russian media and above all of the Kremlin media
because of the positive things Powers, the former US permanent representative to
the United Nations, made about her Russian counterpart and his supposed
commitment to finding points of agreement between Moscow and Washington.
Powers certainly knows perhaps
better than anyone else that Churkin was “not a subject of foreign policy” but
simply the representative of his government. And the actions of his that matter
– vetoing resolutions on Ukraine, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Syria and so on. Indeed, Powers herself pointed asked him
shortly before his death: “Have you no conscience?”
Now, Churkin is dead and Powers
doesn’t represent the US at the UN any more. But her essay on Churkin is
informed by an attitude that makes Powers’ words far more instructive than
simply “the private reminiscences of one diplomat about another,” Yakovenko
continues.
And that problem is this: “the
consequences of interaction of people of the civilizations of the West with
representatives of dictatorships. Especially dangerous are representatives of
Putin’s Russia because they are not only externally indistinguishable but have
many apparent internal similarities with Western intellectuals.”
To put it bluntly, “Putin’s
representatives in the West talk like people, laugh like people, drink and eat
like people and therefore they are taken for people” just like everyone else.
But that is not only untrue but a tactic that dictators like Putin routinely
use to get their way with Western leaders.
Nietzsche warned that “if you look too long
into the abyss, the abyss will begin to look back at you.” Yakovenko adds: “the striving to understand
representatives of totalitarian regimes which seems so justified and necessary
for Western diplomats and intellectuals – we must agree and not allow a nuclear
war to break out! – has led and leads now to something like the Stockholm syndrome.”
Yakovenko says he proposes to call
this phenomenon “the Samantha syndrome” because Samantha Powers’ essay about
Churkin is a clear example of the nature of the problem and also why so many in
the West are taken in.
Of course, as Powers writes, Churkin
like every individual has a rich internal life. But as a representative of the
Putin regime, that is irrelevant. Instead, it is a trap that Western leaders
routinely fall for: George W. Bush in 2001 looked into Vladimir Putin’s soul,
Lion Feuchtwanger was struck by Stalin’s simplicity and modesty, and Bernard
Shaw by the Soviet dictator’s sense of humor.
“The problem of ‘the Samantha
syndrome’ isn’t that one should not understand one’s opponent at the negotiating
table. It isn’t that one shouldn’t develop relations with him, smile and visit.
Instead, the problem is that it is necessary to always understand that before
you is a cannibal because from a cannibal regime cannot be a normal representative
at the UN.”
Such people must be judged on their
actions: everything else is irrelevant. And the failure to understand that
distinction and to maintain it gives rise to monsters.
“’The deep understanding’ of Stalin
of the intellectual elite of the Wet played no small role that namely the West
permitted to grow and strengthen first one monster and then a second after
which these two twin brothers almost destroyed the planet,” Yakovenko says.
And “efforts of the contemporary
West to discover a soul where it by nature has never been, namely in the body
of a KGB lieutenant colonel, led the lieutenant colonel to be ever bolder” and
behave ever worse to his own people and to his country’s neighbors.
“Without dialogue and contacts, the
world today is impossible. But when you are dealing with someone ill with AIDS,
it is necessary to avoid certain forms of relations. When you go into a plague
barracks, there is good reason to observe minimal hygiene and keep one’s
distance.”
And “when one is dealing with a
terrorist, of course, it is necessary to know” what he is about and “not feed
oneself with illusions that you and he have common goals.”
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