BOSTON, UNITED STATES — Am I nuts? I feel like I might be nuts.
On the one hand, unlike Tony Abbott and John McCain, I don’t want to provoke nuclear war with Russia on behalf of the Ukraine.
On the other I still find comments like Pauline Hanson’s:
Eventually, Russian leader Vladimir Putin was brought up. Hanson has taken to defending Putin recently… she didn’t hesitate to defend him once more when Russia’s involvement with flight MH17, the passenger plane shot out of the sky by a Russian-made missile over eastern Ukraine killing 298 people, was mentioned.
‘You are picking out something,’ she said. ‘Do you think everything that our prime ministers have done has been in the best interests?’ she asked. ‘You know, everyone has done something.’
– or, for that matter, Donald Trump’s:
During that interview, Trump had this to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin when [Bill] O’Reilly called him a killer: ‘There are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?’
– well, slightly bonkers.
Statements like these play right into the Russophobes’ hands. They’d love for us all to believe that those seeking to normalise relations with Putin are wilfully ignorant: that, if we didn’t whitewash his crimes, we’d see there’s no alternative to overthrowing him.
‘That’s all well and good,’ you say, ‘but if we are to normalise relations with Russia, our leaders can’t go around slagging him off.’ Point taken. But they could just as easily say, ‘It’s not my place to comment on Russia’s domestic affairs.’ (Because, you know, it isn’t.) They don’t have to slag off their own country with this false moral equivalence instead. We are better than Russia. We have a more robust democracy and a better track record on human rights. Our nationalist politicians should be proud of that fact. Instead, they’re making the case against confrontation with the world’s second-largest nuclear power look paper-thin.
I appreciate what Hanson and Trump are doing, but they’re going about it all wrong. I can promise you Putin won’t make the same mistake. He won’t gaze on us through rose-tinted glasses. He wouldn’t lie to make us look good. That’s called appeasement; it clouds one’s vision and it makes one vulnerable.
If we know anything about Putin, it’s that he admires strength as much as he scorns weakness. And this makes us look weak.
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