Pro-Democracy Protests Put Putin, Russia at Turning Point | News | English

Pro-Democracy Protests Put Putin, Russia at Turning Point | News | English

I will be the first to admit my knowledge of Russian politics could be broader and deeper than it is. However, the headline in this VoA story, and the lede, are part of this fallacy Western media has, intentionally or not, fallen into. Simply because people are protesting the government they have, or fraudulent elections, doesn't turn them into pro-democracy of the Western style advocates. Thomas Hobbes's theory laid out in The Leviathan had little use for democratic governance and yet there's a reason the picture on the cover was what it was. A ruler whose body is made up of the people. So Mubarak and Ben Ali and Assad and Qaddafi and Saleh and Putin have/had lost legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. What of it? That doesn't necessarily mean the people have turned into budding democrats. Tunisia and Egypt both have seen major victories for Islamists at the polls. The party with the second most impressive results in Egypt has been the Salafists. The largest minority party in Russia is the Communists. They're also the party that gained the most in this election compared with the previous one four years ago. These should be obvious signs to Western observers. Yes, the people are rejecting their rulers. But they aren't turning to Western-style democracy. The US and the rest of the West are in danger of inaccurately perceiving the meaning of the actions of people across the Middle East and now in Russia too. Maybe supporting the opposition is what's best for us. But, then again, maybe not. Neoconservatives may be warmongering when they talk about the "hidden hand of Islam" that permeates the so-called Arab Spring, but that doesn't make them wrong.

We helped overthrow the leader in Libya, and may just well have set everything up to allow a more implacable foe come to power there, as in Yemen and Iraq and Egypt. In the cases of Yemen and Egypt, we backed opposition to leaders more or less friendly to us and our interests. We may have hurt those interests now for the sake of our "values" that, it would appear to an admittedly confirmed cynic like me, the opposition we have backed don't even share. In the long run it was all maybe necessary and much of it unavoidable. But we didn't bother gaming it out properly, or discussing it as a citizenry, because we (at last!) were able to marry out interests with our values (or so we told ourselves, at any rate). My point is that there is some protesting of the unfair election in Russia and of Putin's rule in general. Possibly this means a move back toward democracy (as that country has been moving away from that for the past decade). I wouldn't count on it though, and neither should the media and most especially neither should the movers and shakers in the West.