Does reflexively calling Vladimir Putin "a brutal thug" — make one a virtuous person with globally valid insights?

© 2022 Peter Free

 

15 February 2022

 

 

A premise

 

We cannot think objectively and accurately, when we pander to unwarranted and propagandized hostilities.

 

 

To wit — the West's idiotic, but obligatory semantics

 

Professor (and former US Army colonel) Andrew Bacevich is a credible observer of international affairs and the United States' often embarrassingly evil contribution to them.

 

Yet even he falls victim to the customary American requirement that demeans Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin on the basis of no stated evidence whatsoever.

 

For instance, just today, Bacevich published the following:

 

 

Yes, Vladimir Putin is a brutal thug, as media commentators incessantly remind us.

 

But, no, his decisions in office have not claimed the lives of over 900,000 nameless victims.

 

© 2022 Andrew J. Bacevich, War on Terrorism: The Ultimate Self-Inflicted Wound, The American Conservative (15 February 2022)

 

 

Those 900,000 victims are people Bacevich attributes to the United States' War on Terror.

 

Bacevich, indicatively I think, rounded down from his initial quote of the Watson Institute's Cost of War Project's estimate of 929,000. After all, what's 29,000 more people to the United States, when we've already executed almost one million?

 

For the 929,000 number, see:

 

 

Jennifer Walkup Jayes, Beyond the War Paradigm — What History Tells Us about How Terror Campaigns End, Watson Institute, Brown University (08 February 2022) (at page 17)

 

 

With regard to historical context, notice Bacevich's logically unrequired, but blaring "brutal thug" addition.

 

No evidence for this judgmental proposition — or the comparatively assessed contexts within which Putin's alleged bruteness purportedly operates — is ever objectively forwarded by any of these analysts.

 

It is assumed that Vladimir Putin is "a brutal thug" simply because he is both Russian and has an attributed KGB background.

 

And, presumably also, because Putin heads an autocratic state that is:

 

 

(a) somewhat like Canada today

 

(witness Prime Minister Trudeau's imposition of the equivalent of martial law against a peaceful protest by truck drivers)

 

and

 

(b) close enough to the similarly autocracy-prone, COVID-19 era United States.

 

 

Let's go a step deeper

 

Bacevich overtly admits that Putin has not killed hundreds of thousands of people.

 

Yet Putin nevertheless (in Bacevich's lexicon) remains a "brutal thug" — while miraculously the American leaders who killed the 900,000 are not.

 

At least not, in any explicitly delivered language from Bacevich.

 

Indeed, Bacevich chooses to call the War on Terror an "ultimate self-inflicted wound".

 

So much for the 900,000 to 929,000 dead foreign folks.

 

Evidently, it is we Americans who bled. Not they.

 

This is a very typically American twisting of moral culpability.

 

You died, but we bled. And Putin's still a brute.

 

 

What kind of moronic logic is this?

 

Do y'all think our Western logic is strengthened by deeply insulting foreigners — even while we tacitly admit (in the same sentence) that we are the planet's worst demons by a few orders of magnitude?

 

 

The moral? — One cannot be an objectively minded Realpolitiker and continue to use . . .

 

. . . deliberately selected, grossly propagandized and historically inaccurate (in the comparative sense) language.

 

No points or pinnacle-type credibility for you today, Andrew.