In his book
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks of pride as the deadliest of the sins. And he notes how proud, arrogant people tend to turn off everyone they encounter. As he puts it, "I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else' and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves...The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit..." I must confess that I myself am guilty of pride, and so I must temper my tendency to condemn pride when I see it in others. And yet when I encounter those people whose pride - whose narcissism (both personal and national) - moves them to try to turn the world into their own special possession, I do tend to regard as guilt-free pleasure the eventual humiliation of such people. So we come once again to Russia.
At the time of this writing, Ukraine still exists as a sovereign
non-Russian country. And the events of the last several weeks have shown that Russian president Vladimir Putin is not quite the chessmaster he had made himself out to be. In fact,
he has stumbled rather badly. Now in the West, many of us have been brought up to believe that the governments of nations exist for the purpose of providing for the common good of their citizens, and that this purpose is the reason why citizens pay taxes. So I thought it good to enumerate for you who are of the Russian people the things you are getting for your tax rubles.
First, you all know - just from looking around yourselves in day-to-day life - how things are going for you. I too have some idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources. What those sources tell me is that things are not going well for you who are citizens of Russia. There is the
botched response to COVID-19, there is the staggering
wealth inequality, the
surge in death rates across all regions in Russia, and the
death of the Russian middle class. There have also been awesome ecological disasters, such as the huge wildfires of
2019,
2020 and
2021. I fully expect that this year, 2022, will see outbreaks of wildfires whose size and extent of damage will dwarf the damage done by the previous years' fires. I also fully expect your government to do nothing to address these wildfires or any of the other crises I have mentioned.
So then, what exactly are your tax rubles buying? Perhaps not for you, but for the rest of the world? Here again I have a fairly strong idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources. I know that from at least 2010 until 2020, your tax rubles bought the destabilization of liberal democracies throughout the world. I also know that your money bought the breaking of sovereign governments in many nations which had been part of the Soviet empire and had managed to break free and re-establish their own national identity after the Soviet collapse. Such nations include Georgia, Belarus, and Montenegro, among others. In each of these recaptured nations, the pro-Putin puppet governments have managed to reproduce the same little bits of Putinesque hell on earth that characterize daily life for most Russians. Your government tried to do the same thing here in the United States, and so for four years we endured the piece-of-garbage presidency of Donald Trump.
Your government has been especially active in the wrongful spending of your money during the last twelve months. During that time Putin has sent troops into the Czech Republic in order to destroy Czech defense plants. He has
sent troops into Kazakhstan in order to put down a civil resistance uprising against the pro-Putin government there. Those troops have shot unarmed protesters. Kazakhstan is interesting, because it is an oil-producing country whose mineral wealth is being stolen by Russia as the pro-Putin government rapes the country to enrich that
thieving little man in his bunker. (It is only natural that ordinary Kazakh citizens would object to this sort of thing.) And he has sent troops to the Ukraine border in what he thought would be an easy bid to conquer Ukraine. That bid has turned out to be not so easy.
For Putin has begun to buy a few unexpected things for himself along the way. His soft power (as well as the soft power of Russia) has begun to erode. Soft power is at its maximum when a people or nation genuinely demonstrates itself to be a model worthy of imitation because it brings genuinely good things to the world. I think of Japan as a case in point. I am a small business owner and recently I discovered some fascinating Japanese commercial cultural practices that make me think that Japan has some really cool people who are worth getting to know because they have something to offer. I also think of Indonesia and the musical inventiveness which I have seen in some of the artists from that nation. For instance, there is an Indonesian fingerstyle guitarist named
Alip Ba Ta who in my opinion is the current reigning king of those who play an ax. In short, there are nations which produce cultural or scientific or commercial artifacts which bring genuine pleasure or benefit to the world. On the other hand, there is Russia as it now is under Putin. Putin's Russia seems genuinely to be good for nothing. Rather, to Putin, the rest of the world exists solely as a source of supply of living human victims to sacrifice on the altar of his narcissism. We are not interested.
