If you aren’t old enough to remember the ‘60s, the extreme left applied the term to Russia and America or, more specifically, to the KGB and the CIA.
That was firing both barrels: by putting the USSR and the US on the same moral level, the left exonerated the former and demonised the latter.
The KGB has murdered 60 million of its own citizens? Yes, but Joe McCarthy accused good communists of being communists. The Russians introduced concentration camps to half the world? Well, Americans had the audacity to resist communism in Korea and Vietnam. The Russians spy on America? We spy on them too.
In those days such rhetoric was mainly associated with pimply youths who marched through campuses singing “Ho, ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh”, “Hell no, we won’t go”, “Off the pigs” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”.
Having done their marching and singing, the youths would usually grow up and begin to pursue happiness in downtown offices and suburban bungalows. They still called themselves liberal at cocktail parties and voted for chaps like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey.
Amazingly, it has taken a supposedly conservative US president to bring back these nostalgic memories. But then Donald Trump probably doesn’t know the difference between a conservative and a third baseman.
This he proved by taking moral equivalence off the mothballs. A Fox News interviewer queried Trump about his affection for Putin, whom the journalist described as ‘a killer’, specifically of political opponents.
The president replied: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”
No, it isn’t. Ever since Adam and Eve indulged their taste in fruit, we haven’t been blessed with unadulterated innocence in human institutions. Now, having got this theological point out of the way, let’s make an empirical one: all countries may be sinners, but they don’t all sin to the same extent.
A country that executes one wrongly convicted man commits an evil act. So does a country that murders millions of people by category, be it class, race or wealth. Both countries should be condemned.
But, this side of a lunatic asylum, they can’t be condemned equally. If they are, that means somebody’s moral compass has gone haywire.
Now at least 200 journalists and political opponents have been murdered on Putin’s watch and – as anyone familiar with Russia will confirm – on his direct orders. Some of those murders were committed by Putin’s hit squads abroad, including London and the Home Counties. Hundreds, possibly thousands more dissidents have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges, mutilated, savagely beaten up or threatened into silence.
I’m unfamiliar with any such crimes perpetrated by the US government in recent memory. Journalists can criticise the administration without fearing a bullet in a dark alley, politicians can oppose the government without having radioactive isotopes added to their diets. If Trump has information to the contrary, he should by all means speak up: the world has the right to know.
If, however, Trump can’t list the US equivalents of Litvinenko, Nemtsov, Politkovskaya, Khlebnikov, Magnitsky, Borovik, Shchekochikhin, Baburova – the list is long – then his statement was inspired by what Trump believes to be realpolitik (I’d rather not speculate on what else it might have been inspired by).
This he confirmed by a characteristically platitudinous clarification: “It’s better to get along with Russia than not. And if Russia helps us in the fight against Isis, which is a major fight . . . that’s a good thing.”
If the combined might of America and the rest of Nato is insufficient to the ‘major’ task of fighting Isis, we should all pack up and go home – the West is going to the dogs. By inviting Putin to bomb Syria flat with his typical KGB savagery, all America does is provide a Middle Eastern foothold to a hostile foreign power.
It is indeed better to get along with Russia than not. But not at any price, and certainly not at the cost of sacrificing whatever is left of intellectual and moral integrity in the US administration.
I am, however, grateful to Trump for confirming my lifelong observation. Though I can’t support this by statistical data, I’ve noticed that vulgarity of taste is inevitably accompanied by vulgarity of thought.
Trump has the taste of a parvenu upstart in just about everything: his Tower, the epitome of look-I’ve-made-it kitsch; his propensity to marry gold-diggers with a dubious past; even his neckties, usually three inches too long.
His foray into moral equivalence proves yet again that such aesthetic lapses are unfailing indicators of moral and intellectual ones. The great Greeks had a ready explanation for this link.
They considered what Aristotle called ‘transcendentals’ and what Plato specifically identified as Truth, Beauty and Goodness to be the inseparable ontological properties of being. A deficit in any one element of the triad would automatically produce a failure in the other two.
A.N. Whitehead once described all philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato”. Trump proves that the same comment applies to politics.
The U.S. is certainly not on the same moral level as the Russian administration, or the Soviets before it. I don’t doubt that we have some duty to act on some things Russia has done, though not all. I just can’t justify another state reacting to purely internal Russian affairs, like how Putin treats the Russian media and politicians. My biggest dilemma is what price are we willing to pay to deal with some of his actions. I just can’t settle on that price in my mind.
Us joining the war in Syria to a greater degree is out of the question in my mind. Us doing what we are doing there now is almost impossible to justify. It just needs to end, even if that means Assad wins. And what are our other options? Only radical Islamists are left in Syria fighting Assad. And to ensure a new leader is installed (though where we would find one, I don’t know), a large ground force would be required. Even without Russia there, it would be bad enough. As former Secretary Gates said recently to West Point cadets, any future Secretary of Defense who advises the President to send a large American army into the Middle East or Africa or Asia, needs to have his head examined. History has shown we only make things worse. Since Russia is there, it would inevitably lead to war with Russia. As would establishing safe zones, probably.
With Europe, I think the situation is a little easier. But again, I don’t now how far I would push it. For the States, at least. I wouldn’t presume to tell the European countries and the UK how to deal with. Their interests are greater than ours.
These are dilemmas I just can’t resolve.
“It’s better to get along with Russia than not. And if Russia helps us in the fight against Isis, which is a major fight . . . that’s a good thing.”
As with Churchill and Roosevelt and Uncle Joe [Stalin]. An ally but understood all the time not to be an ally. At least Churchill thought that way. FDR I am not so sure about.
FDR always thought that he was the smartest man in the room and he probably was. He thought he knew how to handle Stalin (too smart to fail syndrome?). Visceral malignant animal cunning cannot be reasoned with. To handle that, you need experience rather than intelligence but preferably both. As for Trump, we shall have to hope for the best that Vlad will tuck his shirt in and Donald will at least tuck his tie in.
Vince Foster. Look into the Clinton closet and you will find a dozen more.