Hello Everybody,

One more time.
You're Vladimir Putin.
What do you do?

--Lee

                     -=-=-=-=-

YOU'RE VLADIMIR PUTIN
by Norman Spinrad

You're Vladimir Putin, and you don’t understand why the
so -called “West” finds you so hard to understand. Perhaps
because the United States and the European Union are so
blinded by their ideology that they genuinely can’t even
see that they have one?

But it is glaringly obvious from inside the Kremlin looking
out.  Their leadership and their press proclaim that their
globalized transnational banking dominant brand of market
economy is no ideology but the triumphant “end of history,”
as their pundit Fukuyama so grandiosely put it before their
“Great Recession” and their current so-called “New Normal,”
with its massive national governmental debts, massive
unemployment, downward pressure on wages, and grotesque
levels of income and wealth inequality rendered such
ideological breast-beating pathetically ridiculous.

You're Vladimir Putin, and since you were a product of
the Soviet Union’s Communist ideology, you can certainly
recognize a failed ideology when you see one!  Just because
Communism failed it doesn’t meant that predatory globalized
transnational capitalism is in the process of succeeding.
In Greece, for horrible example, in Spain, in Ireland,
indeed in the European Union as a whole or for that matter
in the holier-than-thou United States.

You're Vladimir Putin, a former KGB professional, and
therefore a pragmatic realist who doesn’t make decisions
on the basis of any ideology at all.  You’re the thrice-elected
President of the Russian Federation, and your job is to defend,
protect, and enhance the national self-interest of the Russian
State and the Russian people, period.

And the Russian people have been betrayed, and welched on ever
since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is why you have
famously declared that collapse the greatest catastrophe of
the 20th Century.  For the Soviet Union was a transnational
state with complex levels of internal autonomy, a true
federation bound together by bonds of mutual economic
self-interest, not narrow tribal chauvinisms.  When Gorbachev
announced that he would “deprive the west of an enemy” and
acceded to the reunification of Germany within NATO, the deal
was supposed to be that NATO and the European Union would not
move west into Russia’s near abroad.  But they did just that,
into the Baltic States, into Poland, into the Slavic Balkans,
and now they would swallow Ukraine.

You're Vladimir Putin, you’ve reclaimed the Crimea virtually
without firing a shot, and you’ve massed Russian forces near
the eastern borders of Ukraine.  But you have no intention
of invading. For the last thing you want is to annex Ukraine
or the Eastern part of it into the Russian Federation by
military force or any other means.

You have a much grander goal--a Eurasian Union, stretching
from Kaliningrad and the western border of Russia east across
vast Siberia to Vladivostok and the Bering Straight, from north
of the Arctic Circle to the Caucasus and the border of China.
Not an expanded Russian Federation per se, but a transnational
confederation something like the European Union, with Russia
as its senior member as Germany dominates the EU only more so.

This dream has been belittled as a “Soviet Union Lite.” And
in truth it would be something like the Soviet Union without
the Communist ideology.  Not ideologically based at all but
a multicultural civilization vaster than Europe, with a
customs union, common currency, economic integration, but
not a national state.

For all of its history, Russia has vacillated between looking
west to Europe or east across Siberian to the Pacific.
You're Vladimir Putin and you say it should do both.
You're Vladimir Putin and you dream of of your place in
history as the creator of this Eurasian Union.

And an independent sovereign Ukraine with a government
you can deal with is the key.  For the core around which
the Eurasian Union has to be built, is the very same core
whose disintegration doomed the Soviet Union--Russia, Belarus,
Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.  Alone, these four states, would
already be the core of a Eurasian Union.  But if the
globalized American dominated west swallows Ukraine it
can never be.

You're Vladimir Putin and you cannot allow Ukraine to join
either NATO or the European Union.  And you won’t.  The military
force you have assembled on its eastern borders is the stick.
But once there is a Ukrainian government you can deal with,
you have an even mightier carrot to wield.

Let the European Union and its Troika strong-arm banking
enforcers lay their severe economic demands on the table so
that all the Ukrainian people understand that their “austerity”
will mean poverty and hardship in the service of their “fiscal
responsibility.”

And then you offer your alternative.  If Ukraine joins the
Eurasian Union, Russia will not merely lend it the money to
carry its debt in return for austerity.  It will wipe out
the debt entire by purchasing the Crimea from Ukraine.
You're Vladimir Putin.  With the stakes this high you can
afford to do it.

You're Vladimir Putin, formerly of the KGB.  You're Vladimir
Putin, and if you’ve learned nothing else there, you’ve learned
how to make an offer that can’t be refused.

                          end

       Posted 7th April 2014 by Norman Spinrad

                     -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Comments, anyone?

--Lee

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