Taibbi On Putin, Our One-Time BastardBy Rod Dreher
February 28, 2022
You know how the hive mind says that we are now forbidden to consider the ways the West contributed to Putin’s unconscionable and utterly indefensible attack on Ukraine? Matt Taibbi, who cut his reporting chops as a gonzo journalist in 1990s Russia, is not letting folks get away with that. From his blockbuster Substack essay,after Taibbi quoted DC think-tanker Ben Wittes saying that we need to do “regime change” in Russia. Taibbi says he wouldn’t care if Putin were shot into space, but:
I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.
Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man with whom we could do business,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”
Thus follows a long list of detailed ways the West facilitated the rise of Putin. Honestly, I knew very little of any of this, though as Taibbi documents with quotes and links, much of it was out there in the press back in the day. Here he’s talking about actually covering Russia in the Wild West Nineties:
This was my first experience learning that “experts” lie. I’d believed all the tales of a benevolent American aid program helping Russia convert to democracy. Unfortunately the real story of Russia during those years was that it was leapfrogging both Europe and America in its progress toward a purely predatory capitalist model. It became overnight what America’s own future would eventually resemble. Occupy Wall Street would not identify the “1%” in America until 2011, but Russia achieved the parody version — a handful of mega-billionaires surrounded by a vast population with negative wealth — as early as 1995-1996.
The revolution of 1991 was really a greed-fueled intelligence mutiny, in which a collection of senior communists and KGB officers worked with Western partners to dismantle the Soviet Union. A happy by-product was that these insiders got to act as the bulwark to counter-revolution by privatizing the country’s wealth into their own hands, becoming the billionaire owners of obscene mega-yachts and jets and sports teams like Chelsea football and the future Brooklyn Nets. They became the instant-coffee elites whose personal investment in the survival of their states’ institutions are a consistent element of modern neoliberal democracies everywhere.
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Taibbi recalls that the Russian oligarchs’ hold on post-Soviet Russia was settled at a 1996 Davos meeting at which their looting of the country was ratified internationally. Yep, Herr Great Reset himself had a hand in that. Now, if you have read anything about the 1990s in Russia, you know that for 99 percent of all Russians, it was a horror show of poverty, decline, misery, and humiliation. I remember thinking at the time that well, democracy and capitalism are messy, but it’ll all work out. What a fool. I was buying the same wishful thinking propaganda appearing in our media. Taibbi says that independent Russian journalists in the 1990s — some of them friends of his — risked their lives to tell the truth about what was happening to their country. That’s not the picture we had in America. We huffed hopium and looked the other way.
When he took power, Putin stabilized things. He did it crudely and cruelly, but he had overwhelming support from ordinary Russians who couldn’t take anymore of the chaos and suffering. Taibbi said Putin used to be our bastard, but then he became his own bastard, and here we are today. He goes on:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/matt-taibbi-putin-onetime-bastard-russia-ukraine/
