Putin and the Neoconservatives
By William
Pfaff
Comment by Julio Severo: This article was kindly sent and recommended to me by a Pentecostal minister
in the U.S. Its author, William Pfaff, said, “The resemblance of President
Putin’s ambitions for his Russia to those of the neoconservatives in the
contemporary United States bear a striking formal resemblance in the wish of
both to recall a romanticized past.” For pro-family Christians, the important
point is whether a president supports a pro-family agenda or anti-family
agenda. We supported George W. Bush because of his generally pro-life stances,
even though his neocon decision of invading Iraq, not Saudi Arabia (where the
9/11 terrorists came from), resulted in complete disaster for Christians.
Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were over 2 million Christians. Today
they number less than 300,000. Could not Bush have been concerned about the
Christian fate over his invasion? Could not he have intervened to help them? Politicians
will always have political interests. But our interests are very different. We
much prefer pro-life and pro-family neocons than pro-abortion and pro-sodomy
neocons. Likewise, we much prefer a pro-life and pro-family Putin than a
pro-abortion and pro-sodomy Putin. The problem is, while Russia under Putin has
consistently opposed abortion and sodomy in the United Nations, there is no
similar example of American neocons opposing abortion and sodomy in the United
Nations. In fact, in spite of the massive power of American neocons, the U.S.
has become the main exporter of abortion and sodomy around the world. Putin and
U.S. neocons are free to build their “romanticized pasts.” But they should
remember to oppose abortion and sodomy in the United Nations and around the
world. And they should denounce and take measures against Christian genocide by
Muslims. Here is Pfaff’s article:
It
began in February a year ago. President Vladimir Putin of Russia found himself
engaged in what seemed a simple defensive battle against American intervention
in Ukraine. He is now under siege by the U.S. and NATO. The Western powers
promoted the advancing “color revolutions” in states neighboring Russia,
culminating in the coup in Ukraine and the small war that followed. Events did
not go as the State Department and NATO planned, and now they are looking for
revenge.
Germany
and France intervened at Minsk to block a further American intervention with
new arms for Kiev. A truce prevails for the moment. However, NATO has launched
an exceedingly imprudent program to encircle Russia with demonstrations of
force.
This
includes shows of military power in recent days in Poland and the Baltic
states, continued last week in Romania, and scheduled to be staged in the near
future in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Washington has also been reaching
out to Turkey, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan with political and economic
inducements meant to block Russia’s Eurasian trading and development ambitions.
The
Russian president claims that his real political ambition is to restore to
Russia the culture, religion and historical mission of its past. Reunion with
Crimea was a prize offered him by a clumsy American intervention in Ukraine. It
was not an invitation to aggression but rather an opportunity for Putin to
advance his mission at Washington’s expense. He wishes to remake the “New
Russia” that existed at the end of the Romanoff era.
He
has restored the Orthodox Church to the primacy it then occupied, and interestingly
enough has distributed among his senior officials the works of Christian
philosophers of the pre-revolutionary period (and later, of those in exile),
including Nicholas Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin, and has promoted
philosophical-historical reflection among these officials, summoning them to a
major conference last year in the period following the seizure of Crimea. The
subject of the conference was the destiny of Russia.
Putin
has denied that he wishes to impose a religio-ideological state doctrine in the
place of Marxism, but he does wish to sponsor the reintroduction of Russian
elites to the national past and its historical culture. He wishes to see a
sovereign democracy that is “qualitative” rather than arithmetical or quantitative.
This is not likely to find willing listeners in the West today.
The
French writer Michel Eltchaninoff suggests a comparison with the “new state”
created by Antonio Salazar in Portugal between 1933 and 1974, usually called
fascist but, while authoritarian, should more accurately be described as
conservative, religious and nationalist. It is a response to what Putin views
as the decadent and “anthropocentric,” or egoistic and materialistic, modern
West.
Politically,
Putin is moved by pan-Slavism and the Eurasian attachments of historical
Russia, and seeks alliances and support from West Europeans of the politically
incorrect persuasion, which to some extent he is finding. All this has nothing
to do with the “Hitlerian” comparisons and accusations of aggressive war and
expansionist intentions toward the West of which he was accused by Western
governments and press during and after the Ukrainian crisis.
Against
him stands the American foe. The energy behind the coup in Ukraine and the
proposals to deploy Western arms there and relaunch the crisis is generally,
and I think correctly, recognized as the work of the neoconservative alliance
in Washington to which President Obama seems to have sub-leased his European
policy.
This
group includes the European affairs office in the State Department, senior
Defense Department and NATO officials, certain Washington think tanks and
elements in the national press.
The
nature and aims of their program are fairly well known in American political
circles, but not in Europe. Anne Norton’s 2004 book, “Leo Strauss and the
Politics of American Empire,” provides a splendid introduction.
Intellectually,
neoconservatism has been a movement that embodies, among other influences,
ideas of two German philosophers, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. Strauss, born
in Germany, a classicist, migrated to America and taught at the University of
Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, having a great influence upon students who were
to become important enemies of the prevailing secular liberalism in American
intellectual and political life.
Schmitt
was an influential political scholar who defended the concept of the unlimited
power of the state. He became a Nazi Party member in January 1933 and held
important academic posts in Germany during the Second World War. His work
enjoyed a revival in America during the George W. Bush administration and
after. It influenced that administration’s controversial concepts of “unlawful
combatants” exempt from international legal rights, the practice of “enhanced
interrogations,” among others.
The
foreign policy ambitions of the movement have been expressed in various efforts
to build a political movement to create “a new American century.” Although this
no longer is made explicit, the programs of the neoconservatives in Washington
envisage the United States becoming a “New Rome,” exercising its unmatched
military power “against civilization’s opponents” in order to revive classical
values and eventually establish a universal American dominion—a New Rome.
The
resemblance of President Putin’s ambitions for his Russia to those of the
neoconservatives in the contemporary United States bear a striking formal
resemblance in the wish of both to recall a romanticized past. The means they
are willing to use resemble one another as well. That is a troubling
conclusion.
Visit William
Pfaff’s Web site for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny:
The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.
Source: TruthDig,
via Last Days Watchman
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