Tuesday, December 02, 2014

On Putin as a "Thug"

For some time now, but perhaps particularly after the events that took place in Ukraine this year, it has become nearly impossible to read any account of Vladimir Putin without finding him described as a "thug."  Though the adjective is liberally applied to other personae non gratae both current and historical, it is mandatory in writing about President Putin.  In what dark recesses of the American propaganda ministries these terms originate it is hard to say, but the creation and then obsessive repetition of such "truths" is a hallmark of how this country treats its perceived foes.  It is difficult to determine by what moral standard Putin earns such treatment while Americans who the rest of the world views as virtual war criminals, men like George Bush and Dick Cheney who gave us illegal wars, torture and preventive detention, just to head up the list, escape similar treatment.  One way of enhancing an indictment of thugishness is to impute ties to a local mafia.  Here, too, the lack of "clean hands" when it comes to those who indict others seems easily brushed aside.  Where Cheney and the Bush family are concerned, matters like the Enron or savings and loan scandals, to cite just two examples, are supposedly atomized in the general public amnesia.  We likewise reserve terms such as oligarch and plutocrat ( or its variant, kleptocrat) purely for our enemies, the reality of living in a glass house essentially owned lock, stock and barrel by a tenth of one percent of our population not serving as a deterrent against throwing stones ourselves.
        The American right wing, particularly the University of Chicago zealots with whose tactics we have become more painfully familiar with each passing year since the onset of the Reagan/Thatcher era, is fighting nothing less than a holy war.  Its enemies are demonized in a fashion highly reminiscent of the Muslim fatwa, a construct made infamous some years back when it was applied as a virtual death sentence to author Salman Rushdie for his having "blasphemed Islam" in one of his novels.  In this respect, as has often occurred in history, the two sides have come to resemble one another.  What is remarkable is the extent to which a "party line" seems to be so easily established in a land where there is a supposedly free press, freedom of expression and a free flow of ideas.  In this, too, the resemblance between what is done here in the U.S. and our caricatures of how the other side operates become almost indistinguishable.
     
      

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