Putin ensures that the audience understands the gravity of the situation. This is exactly what I’ve been doing with my posts on the collapse of the nation-state. Sadly, the only American politician that I have seen touch this subject, however lightly, was Bill Clinton in a recent interview. Putin says:
First of all, changes in the world order – and what we are seeing today are events on this scale – have usually been accompanied by if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts.
Now, let’s not assume that Western leaders don’t know this. Of course, they do. But they don’t share this knowledge with us because nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. As I have discovered on this blog, people tend to identify the person telling them about the end of the nation-state almost with being the cause of the nation-state’s demise. But since Putin doesn’t exist within a democracy, he doesn’t have to fear antagonizing the electorate. So he isn’t afraid of sharing the bad news.
This is the point in Putin’s speech where the intelligent part ends. The rest of the speech is a descent into insanity that offers few insights into the future of the planet but tells us a lot about what is happening in Russia:
Yes, many of the mechanisms we have for ensuring the world order were created quite a long time ago now, including and above all in the period immediately following World War II. Let me stress that the solidity of the system created back then rested not only on the balance of power and the rights of the victor countries, but on the fact that this system’s ‘founding fathers’ had respect for each other, did not try to put the squeeze on others, but attempted to reach agreements.
This is, of course, a very self-serving and dishonest retelling of what the Cold War like. The “respect” of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt (later Truman) for each other can only be discussed in the context of a joke. The entire experience of Cold War was precisely about the warring factions trying to put a squeeze on each other. This fanciful rewriting of the 1945-91 era is Putin’s way of reiterating his favorite talking point about the demise of the USSR being the greatest tragedy of the XXth century. There are few things this cynical insect believes but the greatness of the USSR seems to be a sincere belief of his.
Clarissa's Blog 