The Light That Failed by Stephen Holmes

Author:Stephen Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

IMITATION AS UNMASKING

In 2012, just as the Kremlin was discovering the dangerously subversive potential of imitating the West’s domestic institutions, it also came to appreciate the utility of imitating American foreign policy as an offensive weapon, and as a way to de-legitimate the liberal world order. A classic example of imitation in the service of undermining the enemy is the Nazi plot to collapse the British pound by flooding the UK with forged banknotes.84 But this is very different from holding up a mirror to force one’s foes to see their brutality and hypocrisy. Russia’s post-2012 policies show how such mirroring can be employed by a much weaker party to attack, confound and demoralize its ostensibly stronger adversary.

The most dramatic recent non-Russian example of this kind of aggressive imitation is the decision by media-savvy ISIS propagandists to dress ISIS captives in orange jumpsuits before executing them.85 The gruesome pantomime represents a conscious attempt to imitate America’s humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo. The jihadists sought to provide a mirror-image of the way America violates the basic human dignity of Muslim prisoners. They obviously believed that this cruelly scornful mimicry exposed the hollowness of the West’s claims to moral superiority.86

Since 2014 Putin has repeatedly resorted to this kind of violent parody of US foreign policy in order to reveal America’s congenital hypocrisy to the world. Because hypocrisy helps us avoid conflict by hiding beliefs that are insulting and hurtful, attacks on hypocrisy often signal a desire to fight. This is what makes Russia’s switch from simulation to mockery – from counterfeiting democratic accountability domestically to holding up a mirror to US misbehaviour internationally – so dangerous. The change was possible, presumably, only because the aspiration to become like the West was never genuinely internalized by powerful forces inside Russia.

A good example of aggressive imitation is Putin’s March 2014 speech announcing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. This official address lifted whole passages from speeches by Western leaders justifying the dismantling of Serbian territory in Kosovo and applied them to the Crimean case.87 Thus, what most Western observers took to be the first step in Putin’s attempt to restore Moscow’s empire was explicitly justified by the rhetoric of US President Woodrow Wilson extolling the fundamental right of popular self-determination.

What sets foreign-policy mimicry apart is arguably the way it is designed to show the absurdity of the bad original. By clothing its own violent actions in an idealistic rhetoric borrowed verbatim from the US, Moscow aims to unmask the Age of Imitation as an Age of Western Hypocrisy. Vaunted Western values, such as the self-determination of peoples, are simply Western interests in disguise. The implication is that the entire post-Second World War international system will collapse if other nations start imitating the real West. One might even suggest that Putin imitated Bush’s America for reasons similar to those that impelled Charlie Chaplin to imitate Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator. He wanted to weaken and demoralize the enemy nation by holding up a mirror in which enemy leaders are stripped of their pretensions.

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