Quote (thesnipa @ Aug 8 2018 08:39am)
it is indeed a false equivilence, putin for all his crimes, is still no where near as bad as the US has been historically. What's murdering a few of the opposition compared to propping up slavery for 100 years after europe, genocide of an entire race of indians, constant war mongering around the globe for profit, etc. Putin can't even hold a candle to out electoral influencing.
I don't see why there needs to be an equivalence in the first place. What value comes out of moral comparisons in a vacuum?
What matters is understanding motivations of rational world actors. And there's never been any doubt that Putin was motivated by retaliation to the 2011 election interference by the US. IceMage asks me what the specifics are of that, and I don't know. I can't name you the NGOs that the State Department was funding or exactly what they did. But I know that Hillary publicly accused Putin of rigging his election and called for a full investigation into irregularities, and that Putin alleged Clinton was personally interfering in his elections by 'sending a signal' to demonstrators and using the state department to incite them. And I know that the US responded to that allegation by saying the state department was only funding 'pro-democracy groups', a spin and justification rather than denial. And I know that the 2011 protests were organized largely on social media, via facebook, twitter and blogposts, and I know that Russian agents were actively running a cyber-interference campaign where they bombarded the trending twitter hashtags to make it harder for protesters to organize. And afterwards, Hillary Clinton openly acknowledged that this 2011 campaign interference was the source of a 'personal beef' that Putin had with her and she did not deny any state department shenanigans. And at the time, Obama and Biden sat it out and were passive towards Putin. And major foreign policy analysts and commentators have just treated it as a given that Russia was responding to 2011.
Now, I ask is the question of moral equivalence and justification actually relevant at all? Does it change anything, if America was busy running cyber-agitation or not? Given the CIA and state-department record, the prior Arab Spring color revolutions and the later lack of pushback on the allegations, its quite probable that the US was doing at least something to provoke Putin, beyond just "Hillary condemning him publicly"- although that itself was a diplomatic aggression that interfered in domestic russian politics in and of itself. But what difference does it make? Maybe Putin was only spinning a propaganda deflection from his unrest. Maybe Putin was just being paranoid and genuinely mistakenly believes spooky state actors were interfering. Maybe they really were, and he was slapping back with righteous indignation. We have a dearth of information and the combined obfuscation from a Russian media and intelligence apparatus that brazenly lie about everything, and obfuscation from American media and intelligence apparatuses that routinely spin propaganda and confabulations to serve them. But whatever the rationale, the actions are the same, the reasoning is the same.
I've always been a critic of moral absolutism and the jingoistic tendency to declare oneself justified. Its one small stones throw from Deus Vult. Any reasonable person can identify that Putin is both simultaneously a pseudo-dictator who rules a mafiocracy and makes an example out of anyone who credibly challenges his authority and rigged the entire country to operate as a one-man state- yet he's also responsible for overthrowing the robber baron oligarchs and bringing their wealth to the common people of Russia and dramatically lifting the quality of life and reestablishing Russia as both a modernized first world country and world superpower with a large sphere of influence, regaining what the soviet dissolution lost.