| |
DANCES WITH
BEARS
Putin's pact with the
devils
By John Helmer
MOSCOW
- One of the benefits the restoration of Christianity
has brought Russia since 1991 is that almost all Russian
politicians can publicly say that God is on their side
against the devil.
The church hasn't been
especially helpful, however, in inculcating the lesson
that, for more than a thousand years of European
history, the real fight isn't between God and the devil,
but between those on earth, crusaders or infidels, who
wield the bigger guns. Looking retrospectively back over
the history of countless crusades, it should be obvious
that the spoils of victory have also determined how the
historians would describe the outcome. In history, God
never backed the losers, nor the devil the winners.
It was Raymond VI, the count of Toulouse against
whom Pope Innocent III declared the Albigensian Crusade
of 1209, who saw the personal downside of this problem
more succinctly than most. Among the heretical beliefs,
which the crusaders were inspired to root out that year
in what was really a civil war between impoverished
northern France and the prosperous south, there was the
idea that if the world is full of evil, the devil must
have created it.
And so, according to what was
called the dualist or Cathar heresy of the time, the
devil must be working through the church and other
institutions which claimed to be on God's side.
Raymond's contribution to the heresy was the complaint
that all politicians have harbored ever since - the
devil must have created the world, he said, "because
nothing that ever happens in it goes my way".
When President Vladimir Putin issued the first
of his national election campaign speeches last week,
you can believe that God was on the side of all the
things the president and his men are standing for. They
are for doubling Russia's Gross Domestic Product in 10
years (that's annual growth of 10 percent per annum,
roughly twice the current rate). They are also for more
competition in the marketplace; for less bureaucracy in
administration; more flexible and predictable taxation;
more effective ministers of state; and greater
parliamentary influence over government.
It
doesn't require much religion to understand that nowhere
in the president's call to arms was there the
old-fashioned attack on the devil. In the days of
president Boris Yeltsin, that was invariably the
Communist Party and their fellow-travellers in
parliament who formed the obstructive majority in the
state Duma.
Facing growing electoral support for
left-of-center critics of the government, Putin chose to
position himself closer to them than to their targets,
with just the slightest of objections to "unclear
ideological positions and insincerity" in politics.
"Those who are not afraid to call businessmen robbers
and bloodsuckers", Putin added, "are not ashamed to
lobby the interests of big companies". If this is the
toughest Putin intends to be on the Communist Party for
the elections due in December, it is also a hint that
the devil (read the donations of the Yukos oil company)
might have corrupted the communist leadership, and that
Putin is already on the path they should return to.
In the days of Raymond vs Innocent, it was
sometimes possible to avoid a fight by arranging a
disputation between the advocates of God and advocates
of heresy, to allow the logic of the arguments to
prevail. Since the Russian media are virtually closed to
the left, and it has been reduced to an ineffectual
minority in the Duma, the only serious disputation of
this kind that takes place in Russia is the concealed
faction-fighting behind the walls of the Kremlin. It is
therefore from Putin's speech-making that the keys to
the disputation must be sought. And from last week's
address to parliament, there is the notable fact that
Putin not only omitted mentioning the Yeltsinite devil,
he also omitted to identify any other.
When he
proclaimed himself for the god of GDP growth, he could
have warned against the scourge of oil-exporting
economies known to economists as the Dutch Disease, when
concentration of revenues in the oil sector cripples
diversification of industry and growth of employment.
All Putin said was that unemployment in Russia is on the
rise again, and that the proportion of Russians in
poverty remains unchanged since the crash of 1998.
When the president spoke for the god of
competitiveness, he could have railed against the
increasing concentration of Russian corporate capital.
But then how might he explain the fact that he himself
encouraged the sale of the state shareholding of
Slavneft oil company to Sibneft and Tyumen Oil Company
(TNK); then approved TNK's sale to British Petroleum;
and finally encouraged Sibneft's merger with Yukos. With
his artful advisors, perhaps Putin believes that the
fewer devils there are in the world, the easier time God
and the faithful will have to resist and control them.
But that's an argument he would have a hard time
persuading Russian voters to accept. The two touchstone
words for the devil which Russian voters all understand
were missing from the president's speech - oligarch and
corruption.
Back in France in 1209, when Raymond
VI realized he had no chance of winning a disputation
with the Pope's men; when he calculated that what the
crusaders were really after was his castles, his tax
revenues, his wealthy towns and industries, the count
contrived the idea of accepting all of Innocent's
demands, and renouncing the heresies of which he was
accused.
He then proposed joining the crusade
himself, ensuring that its target would be the dominions
of his neighbor and cousin, Raymond-Roger Trencavel,
viscount of Beziers. This was a temporary success, at
least for the count of Toulouse. When Beziers fell,
Arnauld-Amaury, the Pope's legate and commander of the
crusaders, ordered everyone in the town to be
slaughtered. Asked how the crusaders should decide
whether to spare the faithful catholics from the
heretics, Arnauld issued one of the most famous
pronouncements in the history of fanaticism - "Kill them
all," he said. "God will recognize his own."
In
the Russian crusade since 1991, Arnauld's policy has
been that of the so-called reformers, now grouped in the
small parliamentary party called the Union of Right
Forces. Ex-prime minister Yegor Gaidar, ex-Yeltsin
favorite Boris Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais, chief executive
of the electricity monopoly, and their henchmen still
favor that approach, ideologically speaking. Several of
the oligarchs who have financed them continue to use
these tactics as they raid those sectors of the Russian
economy that are not yet under their control - paper and
pulp, electricity, agribusiness. Before last week's
speech, the president was lobbied by some members of the
Duma to pronounce himself against such tactics, and the
banners under which they fly. He refused to do so.
Was this because the president accepts that
election campaigns are always pacts with the devil? If
so, there is plenty of time still, along with the
example of Raymond VI's tale, to judge which side God
will end up on, and at what price. Bear in mind, though,
what the medieval politicians understood better than the
theologians. The price is paid on earth now, not in
heaven later.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
