John Chuckman
COMMENT WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE IN ALJAZEERA (A PUBLICATION WHICH PERMITS NO POSTINGS)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/putin-derides-liberalism-obsolete-g20-summit-190628052108100.html
‘Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced liberalism as "obsolete" in the run-up to the annual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) nations in Osaka’
‘In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times published late on Thursday, Putin trumpeted the rise of populist movements in Europe and the United States and said Russia's Western partners had "admitted that some elements of the liberal idea, such as multiculturalism, are no longer tenable"’
‘”The so-called liberal idea ... has outlived its purpose," Putin said. "It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population"’
Putin’s statements on the subject of liberalism mark the first time I seriously disagree with him. Since he almost always avoids the ideological in his words, that perhaps is not surprising.
My disagreement may be about semantics and even translation because I’m not sure that Putin means the same thing in speaking of “liberalism” that I understand by the word, but to my mind the word “liberal” is far too precious to permit it being treated lightly or criticized, and in recent years, it has been treated lightly by people whose intentions are anything but good, people like Trump or Bolton or Netanyahu.
However, I try always remembering that we live in a world where the meaning of language, and particularly political language, has been deeply and deliberately corrupted.
People and states are constantly telling us that they are doing things other than what they are actually doing, striving to put a pleasant face on unpleasant acts. They have corrupted our political vocabulary beyond even what the piercing observations of George Orwell gave us to understand.
Saudi Arabia works for reform, Israel works for peace, America works for democracy, plus many others are the empty political merchandising litanies of our time.
I have seen a lot of material in recent years declaiming against liberalism, and if you analyze it, not all of it is even about the same subject.
In America, which on the whole is much more conservative than many people living abroad understand, the Right Wing has long worked industriously to make the word “liberal” into a kind of epithet or dirty word, something to be sneered at, and they have succeeded in large parts of that country.
Perhaps, that does not represent a very significant achievement in a society which is characterized by almost continuous war and rather brutal imperialism.
In Israel, the word has always been widely disliked for the simple reason that true liberals are concerned with human rights and the rule of law. It is easy to see why many in Israel might regard that negatively.
I judge these views and efforts by their apparent intent. In America, it has a lot to do with old isolationist, Fortress America, thinking, something that remains so plentiful that Trump has staked his political career on it.
I resent the expression, ”liberal intervention,” but then I tend to object to all forms of dishonesty and manipulation, and that term is completely dishonest. It has nothing to do being liberal and everything to do with imperialism, imperialism being given a twenty-first century make-over so that it may be passed off as something modern and based in principle.
It is not. Imperialism is imperialism, and any genuine liberal opposes it just as naturally he or she would oppose slavery or the subjugation of women or human trafficking. Anyone who does not oppose it is simply not a liberal, despite pretensions about social programs and politically-correct speech.
To say anything else is a bit like saying that a priest who does a nice job with his prayers and rituals and homilies, but who secretly buggers children, is a good man. That’s an extreme figure of speech, but it contains hard truth.
Washington’s power establishment, supported by its various dependent governments in Europe, has been instrumental in popularizing this utterly false marriage of concepts. If ever there was a case of “lipstick on a pig,” this is it. But that fact shouldn’t influence anyone’s discussion of liberalism.
There is something similar and related in the wide-spread criticism of migration and refugees in today’s world, something Putin touches on in his Osaka remarks. Something that is an obsession for Donald Trump or people like Britain’s Nigel Farage.
Putin called Angela Merkel’s decision to admit one million refugees a “cardinal mistake,” and I actually can agree with him in that specific case while at the same time saying it had relatively little to do with principles of liberalism. Merkel was behaving out of human compassion for a vast human tragedy, one I feel she likely felt considerable private guilt over.
The vast numbers of refugees from the Mideast and North Africa, all over a short time frame, were the result of American bombing in its Neocon Wars. Germany, as a member of NATO, just like Britain and France, had accepted this terrifying and destructive American policy, which killed at least two million people and rendered millions more homeless, and it has not criticized it at all.
Taking in too great a number of new and different people over any brief period is extremely disturbing to any society. Humane people want to help, but they also do not want to hurt the society they know and love. So, when numbers are so vast as those resulting from America’s bombs, it is necessary to come up with other arrangements.
Europe did that also, in massively subsidizing the huge camps of refugees in Turkey, something like three million people receiving billions in assistance. Turkey’s Erdogan views it as his Islamic duty to shelter these unfortunate people, and I can only praise him for taking the responsibility.
The United States assisted no one with the miserable human problems it created. That’s what I mean about the conservative (and often shockingly selfish) nature of American society, something not fully appreciated abroad by people who sentimentalize over old American films and do recall some worthy, long-ago American initiatives, such as the Marshall Plan for war-devastated Europe.
What America did in Vietnam – killing millions horribly and dumping the most godawful load of everything from millions of pounds of Agent Orange to countless landmines, taking no responsibility for any of it while whining about its own relatively small losses - set the grand pattern for all later horrors.
And remember, the current hideous set of American wars, the Neocon Wars, was started by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice – people as far removed from being liberals as you can find.
But the Wars were carried right on, and greatly expanded, by Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, both people with false reputations as liberals, but nevertheless influential Democrats.
They have been taken further still by Donald Trump, despite his earlier campaign blubbering about pointless wars. He keeps troops illegally in Syria. He keeps troops in Iraq, whose government does not want them there. He keeps troops in the most pointless war of all time, Afghanistan.
Now, he threatens to start what would unavoidably become the biggest war of all, with Iran, backed by a loud cheering section of Bolton, Pompeo, and Netanyahu. He says he doesn’t want war, but his actions are far more eloquent than his clumsy rhetoric. Besides, when you put yourself in such a dangerous position, things can so easily get out of hand.
Do we see a pattern in that brief review of American actions in the Middle East?
The policies of destruction and killing in the Mideast are supported by all American politicians of national stature, all of them - Republican or Democrat or indeed a bizarre maverick like Trump. It does not matter who is elected as President, the policies continue.
There is nothing “liberal” about any of it, unless you are in the habit of viewing some of the conquests of Imperial Rome as somehow being liberal. Or even the conquests of modern Germany during its century-long rise and effort to dominate Europe – from the Franco-Prussian War to WWI and to WWII.
The Neocon Wars represent the perfect example of so-called “liberal intervention,” killing about two million people in the name of re-making the face of the Middle East, taking it supposedly from a set of non-democratic states and kingdoms to a vision of Ozzie and Harriet’s happy American suburban neighborhood in the 1950s American television series. With democracy and liberty and justice for all.
It has all been false, mere window dressing, covering an entirely different purpose, one America would not want to brag about in public. What the Neocon Wars have done is destroy, or attempt to destroy in a case like Syria, those societies whose governments did not toe the line of American imperial policy.
A parallel objective has been to entrench and protect those in the Middle East who very much do adhere to American policy, who toe the line and benefit from doing so, people like Saudi Arabia’s criminal Crown Prince, Egypt’s ruthless Generalissimo-President, and Israel’s criminal Prime Minister.
None of it has anything to do with liberal principles, unless you credit the language of Pentagon and CIA press releases as honest and informative. The stuff about “liberal intervention” and “democracy” is about as big a fraud as we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
So, attacking liberalism or liberal principles owing to the use of such language is entirely inappropriate.
In Israel, many of whose views also reflect parts of American society since it is in essence an American colony in the Middle East, one imbued with a lot of emotional religious mumbo-jumbo having no business in national or international affairs.
After all, many in the West turn around from condemning some of the world’s theocracies and state-enforced religions, to then praise Israel, which represents only a more complex and subtle form of the very same thing, its rather odd form of democracy used both as an enforcement and public relations mechanism for so much that is plainly unfair and not democratic and anything but representing liberal principles.
The true meaning of the word “liberal” relates to the very foundations of Western society, ideals about human and democratic rights, the long march through many difficulties since the Enlightenment towards an enduring set of values in human affairs. Even if we don’t always live up to them, their survival remains important. They can no more become obsolete than decency and fairness.
NOTE: In a much fuller statement seen later in another source, I believe the remarks to which I have reacted certainly do not represent the complexity of what Putin tried to communicate. It’s a very good example of how press reporting can misrepresent, even in an above-average source like Aljazeera.
But I also very much believe Putin failed himself in offering some attention-getting quotes that led away from what he was trying to say overall. Some ideas or concepts can’t be reduced to aphorisms without distorting their meaning.
He was in part talking about the liberal view being only one of many that can exist and compete in the world. With that, I completely agree. I don’t believe in a true religion of any kind, especially ones that work to suppress others. Indeed, the essential point of view of genuine liberalism simply excludes doing that. Liberalism is not oppressive.
While much of what America has been doing in recent decades may be interpreted in the way Putin is suggesting, and thereby rejected, I do believe my statements about imperialism being the real American drive are completely valid. All the stuff about liberalism and democracy from Washington are props and stage make-up.
Putin was making the very valid point that people in some places have no history or experience with traditional European liberal values, and demands should not be put on them. Again, I agree, but again, I don’t think that’s what real liberals do. Washington’s efforts are not liberal, ever, and the liberal blubbering is just a recitation of scripture while making war.
He was also talking about taking all talk of values or ideology out of our international relations, which should be based only on pragmatic relations. That is the purest Putin, a very pragmatic man, and while I am less a pragmatist than he, I can accept that as a working principle in international affairs. It makes for a whole lot fewer sources of conflict.
There’s more to it, and I’ll have to get to the long, full text at some point.
Nevertheless, he did say the particular things to which I reacted, and I wouldn’t retract a word.
