Once again, we have a stinging rebuke of the Putin government from the Russian press. According to columnist Alexei Melnikov of Russia’s Gazeta, the Kremlin has worked tirelessly to make the interests of influential businessmen tied to the Kremlin synonymous with the interests of the Russian people, alienating the country from civilized nations and making genuine friendship with the free world impossible.
For Gazeta, Alexei Melnikov starts off with a direct slap at the Kremlin’s face – and moves on to describe the consequences of the Putin government’s policies:
The nervous reaction of Russian plutocrats to discussions in the U.S. and other countries in regard to the “Magnitsky list,” and other obstacles Russians are erecting to toppling the Syrian dictatorship, are not a result of concern for Russia’s strategic interests. Rather, the Kremlin’s stubborn insistence on protecting tyrannical regimes and its preoccupation with the ease with which Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik protagonists travel to the U.S. and Europe are solely the result of a concern for private interests, and fears that similar sanctions might be used against Russian leaders and their families.
[Editor’s Note: Vladimir Sorokin is one of Russia’s most highly regarded authors, and his novel Day of the Oprichnik, which takes place in the Russia of 2028, depicts an authoritarian Russia ruled by members of the secret police. To say the least, he is out of favor with the Kremlin].
The class interests of businessmen-cum-government officials are being presented as if they were the interests of the entire Russian people. Like a Christmas tree, coarse materialism is being festooned with garlands of patriotism and lit up by the lights of “national interest.”
It can be argued that in some sense, there is no distinction between domestic and foreign policy. At least not at a time when universal ideologies – be they socialist or liberal – are on the minds of a considerable number of members of the globe’s political class. On the other hand, the quickening spread of political, economic, cultural, and scientific globalism, despite the problems associated with it, remains a consistent trend. If so, then the nation state, which by the way is historically only one of the many forms of human coexistence, is a vestige of the past, a relic, a political entity on the brink of extinction. It will undoubtedly take a fairly long period to expire. Still, the main trend is that of a global humanity, living in a society based on a common set of values, on the doctrine of human rights, and with a more-or-less fair wealth distribution.
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