Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 11 – Just like his
communist predecessors, Vladimir Putin is committed to spreading the features
of the system he has imposed on Russia to as much of the rest of the world as
possible, a drive that requires the world to view what he is about not as a
domestic problem for Russia but as an existential problem for the world, Igor
Yakovenko says.
Soviet rulers defined themselves and
their task as opposing the capitalist system wherever possible so as to bring
it down and supplant it with their version of socialism. Putin today represents
if anything a broader challenge: he opposes the ideas of liberalism and human
rights wherever they exist (detaly.co.il/pochemu-putinizm-ne-yavlyaetsya-vnutrennim-delom-rossii/).
Having worked with unfortunate
success to undermine or eliminate those values within the borders of the
Russian Federation, the Kremlin leader seeks to do the same thing abroad via
all the means at his disposal, military action where possible, subversion and
propaganda everywhere else, Yakovenko continues.
In doing so, Putin has adopted a
clever strategy. Because the only systemic ideological alternative to
liberalism is one or another form of fascism, Putin has not offered any model
of the future for all to compete with it.” Instead, he has attacked liberalism
as such but insisted on “the right of each people to choose its own particular path
to the future.”
That idea is viewed with sympathy,
the Russian commentator says, “in various corners of the planet especially where
dictatorial and authoritarian regimes exist, regimes which Putin’s Russia as a
rule supports.” And with the rise of
Trump in the US, the chief defender of human rights around the world, has retreated
from that responsibility.
Tragically, “the defense of human
rights has been reduced to the private affair of human rights defenders,”
Yakovenko says.
Supporters of the notion that each
people should have the right to choose its own form of government even if it is
authoritarian often point to Singapore where the population has backed an
authoritarian regime for decades in exchange for a rising standard of living and
where that regime does not aspire to extending its kind of governance to
others.
But Russia is different in two
respects. On the one hand, the Russian people “in exchange for freedom have
received a mafia state, legal arbitrariness, corruption as the basis of the
economy, and poverty. And on the other, the Putin regime has the power and desire
to spread its system to other countries.
Not interfering in the internal
affairs of other countries may be inhumane but it is in a certain sense
rational, Yakovenko says, because it is “difficult to demand from Swedes, the Dutch
or the English that they take up the budgets for the citizens of Turkmenistan
or Somalia, especially if neither understands themselves to be like Europeans.”
But when an authoritarian and
dictatorial regime like Russia seeks to spread its system to others, the
situation is very different. Putin wants
to see his anti-liberal approach spread across the world, and his government
has the resources to promote that notion.
As a result, Putinism represents a “mortal” danger to the world.
“The only possible strategy in
regard to such a regime must be its isolation, delegitimization, and ultimate destruction,”
the analyst argues. And because it is
going to be so difficult to separate Putinism from Russia even after his passing,
there is an extremely great probability that at that time, “the Russian Federation
won’t exist in its current borders.”
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