Monday, November 12, 2018

Soviets Used Language of Radical Humanism; Putin, Language of Radical Right, Ikhlov Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 12 – Vladimir Putin is restoring so many Soviet institutions that many fail to see that he remains radically different from his Soviet predecessors in ways that make him even worse and more of a threat to the West than they were, according to Russian commentator Yevgeny Ikhlov.

            “Soviet communist ideology used the phraseology of the tradition of radical humanism,” he says; but in contrast, “Putinism uses the phraseology of ‘radical right supremacy,’” a set of ideas that animated many who ended their days at the end of a rope in Nuremberg after World War II (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5BE92488D3896).

            The Soviet Union, he writes, “was a quasi-messianic center” and thus always sought to present what it was doing in terms that would guarantee it the support of “’progressive Western writers and scholars,’ ‘important public activists speaking for …’ and other newly elected” elites. That mattered to Moscow and helped explain its propaganda if not its actions.

            “Almost all” of those the Soviets enlisted and cited were “completely respectable and “it was possible to refer them without making reference to their pro-Soviet statements,” Ikhlov says.

            The situation with regard to Putinism is “entirely different.”  It doesn’t produce a picture of the world that captures the imagination of those who have any independent intellectual standing. And as a result, Putinism unlike Sovietism does not have any “respectable supporters” given that “all the truisms of Putinism already were heard and read about in the 1920s-1940s.”

            And those who mouthed them at that time ended their days at the Nuremburg tribunal.

            Those Western pro-Putinists reveal themselves in the following way: they respond to any criticism of what Putin is doing or has done by suggesting that the West is doing or has done something as bad or worse. They have no other arguments, and they thus convict themselves, Ikhlov concludes.

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