German chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly told Barack Obama that after talking to Vladimir Putin she was unsure whether the Russian president was “in touch with reality”. . .
The New York Times reports that in a phone call with the US president, Merkel said that Putin was living “in another world”.
Merkel sounds quite surprised here but I don’t know why she should be. Putin and absolutely everybody else holding political and economic power in Russia today is a remnant of the Soviet era. He has been listening to, absorbing, and finally producing and again absorbing an endless stream of propaganda that offers a certain worldview. He had no reason to question this worldview ever in his life because it gave him a more than comfortable existence and surrounded him with a bunch of terrified sycophants. And now the sycophants are repeating the same old Soviet-style propaganda to him.
How many times did I say on this blog that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a sham, a pretense? There was no transfer of power, be it political or economic, after 1991. The same people remained in power. They practiced the same approaches and uttered the same words.
How many times did I say that it is meaningless to speak about the end of the Cold War if, for one of the sides in this war, it hasn’t ended? I force myself to watch the Russian newscasts on a regular basis, and I’m telling you, the rhetoric of the Cold War is as strong as ever. I was lucky to grow up in the late 1980s and 1990s when there was a brief respite in the FSU media from the constant US-bashing and the saccharine odes to the ultra-patriarchal and deeply nationalistic values of the “mysterious Russian soul.” Even then, when I moved to Canada, I brought some of this exceptionalist, anti-Western worldview with me.
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