Putin’s Op-Ed in Thursday’s Times is a small, sly masterpiece of the genre. It goes without saying, obviously, that Soviet-style rhetorical tells are entirely absent. Nothing here about running dogs of imperialism, dustbins of history, or rapacious capitalism. But the essay is equally free of the tropes of the New Russia, the Russia whose embrace of rapacious capitalism is about as close as the Putin regime gets to a ruling ideology. For readers of the Times, no belligerent nationalism, no crude populism, no insecure defensiveness.
Instead, Putin and his ghostwriters maintain a consistent tone of calm reasonableness, of big-brotherly concern for a colleague in danger of going astray. The essay is almost entirely free of blatant factual finagling, with one big exception:
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack—this time against Israel—cannot be ignored.
It is simply false that “there is every reason to believe” that the poison-gas attack was conducted by opposition forces and not by Assad’s Army. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe the exact opposite. (Please note, in passing, the pious cleverness of that last sentence, in which Putin gift wraps his whopper in a beribboned package of worried concern for the well-being of Israel.)
Putin’s mendacity is mainly an exercise in hypocrisy. His method is as much a matter of what he leaves out as what he puts in, as a line-by-line analysis by the Washington Post’s Max Fisher suggests. What Putin puts in, for the most part, is a succession of elegantly restated points that are identical with those made in good faith by American and Europe opponents of air strikes or the threat of air strikes.
What we have here, in short, is the prop without the agit. If Putin’s office didn’t get help with this from some K Street “communications shop” or “strategic consultant” (and of course he did), then Moscow’s venerable Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada is a lot more on the ball than it was in the days of Leonid Brezhnev and Georgi Arbatov.
The Op-Ed’s concluding paragraph is especially choice:
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
The three sentences that open the paragraph combine a patronizing pat on the head for Obama with an implication that the President of the United States and the President of the Russian Federation are equals. The three that close it boil down to two messages: first, a seductive suggestion that Putin’s own regime, far from being an authoritarian kleptocracy, is merely one of many nice countries “finding their way to democracy”; and, second, I’m the kind of all-American pol who likes to sign off with a prayerful reference to God and and a ringing allusion to the Declaration of Independence.
Remarkable stuff. To me, though, the most interesting lines are the ones I’ve italicized. Sounding like a professor addressing a faculty colleague over sherry in the common room, Putin says he “would rather disagree“ with him on a particular notion. (You can almost hear him pronouncing it ”rah-ther.”)
“American exceptionalism” has a tangled history. It sometimes means merely that the uniqueness of America’s geography, origins, natural resources, and patterns of political, social, and economic development distinguish us from other countries—which, while true, is true of many countries, Russia included. As deployed at home by Christianist nationalists and some neoconservatives, it means that the United States is God’s special favorite, with (pardon my French) a God-given mission civilisatrice. Or it can simply mean “We’re No. 1”—which, presumably, is why even politicians as urbane as President Obama feel obliged to bow to it.
But there’s a nice wrinkle. Back in 1927, Jay Lovestone, then a bigwig in the Communist Party U.S.A. (and later the guru of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s anti-Communist activities abroad), tried to explain to the Comrades in the Kremlin that there were reasons why America was stony ground for Bolshevism. You know, things like the safety valve of the frontier, the siren song of America’s egalitarian civic religion, the relative prosperity of American workers, and the vitality of U.S. capitalism. Lovestone argued that it might be better to try building opportunistic coalitions with “bourgeois” reformers than to go directly to violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Comintern was not pleased. On Stalin’s orders, Lovestone was expelled from the C.P.U.S.A. for what was termed, as translated from the Russian, “the heresy of American exceptionalism.” This was the phrase’s coinage, its first known use.
“American exceptionalism” was Moscow’s idea. So quit complaining, Vladimir.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Hendrik Hertzberg
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