Link:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/22/putin-dictator-tyrant-criticism-regimeThe west’s derisive reporting of Vladimir Putin’s election victory this week was a mark of his success. It was described as an abuse of democracy, “rigged”, “fixed” and “a sham”. The other candidates were shadows, while Putin’s true opponents were imprisoned, exiled or dead. According to this narrative, the 87% who voted for him were mere victims of coercion, the queues of silent protesters were the stars.
Putin’s vote had nothing to do with democracy. It was a rerun of his 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, a global dressing-up, a rallying of support. As he celebrated his win to an adoring crowd in Red Square on Monday, we saw Putin as the new Ivan the Terrible against a backdrop of Ivan’s St Basil’s cathedral. He even made an offhand quip about his murdered rival Navalny. The image was of absolute power smilingly defying the enemy. Two years ago, he was supposedly crippled by western sanctions. We don’t hear that now.
I sometimes think what fun it would be to spend a month as the London correspondent for a totalitarian state newspaper. The evidence of relentless failures by the British government would fuel my daily contrasts with the order and stability back home. I would ponder when these bickering politicians and their corrupt donors would fade to nothing. I would report on the excluded populists – the Johnsons, Andersons, Farages and Galloways – waiting in the wings to pounce, while Rishi Sunak twists and turns frantically to avoid an election.
How we describe other countries matters when our concern is not how it seems to them, but how it feels to us. Almost half a century of George Kennan’s policy of containment and cohabitation with communism has given way to a shrill new agenda. Not just Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria, but states across Asia and Africa are regularly castigated as tyrannical, terrorist or genocidal.
