Foreign leaders’ judgment of Putin is hasty and harsh

[Larry1]

Casual observers of Western media might well think that it is monolithic in its views about Russia and the Sochi Olympics.  But there is opinion that varies from the party line.  I came across one such article in The Financial Times:

Foreign leaders’ judgment of Putin is hasty and harsh

Those who criticise him on Sochi focus on a short list of causes beloved of western elites

Western critics of Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics have picked up too much speed and risk skidding off piste. A justifiable attempt to scrutinise the government of President Vladimir Putin has degenerated into an exercise in schadenfreude and ill will. Politicians who have decided to attend the games (including China’s Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan) have been level-headed. Those who have ostentatiously stayed away – the UK’s David Cameron, Barack Obama of the US and France’s François Hollande – are following what the critic Harold Rosenberg once called “the herd of independent minds”.

Media interest in the alleged corruption around Olympic construction has been obsessive. The Washington Post describes the various projects as “Stalinist excess”. At a January press conference, Mr Putin set the cost of the games at Rbs214bn ($6.2bn) and said related infrastructure ran far higher. Western sources estimate the whole project at $51bn, with some claiming a third of it was improperly diverted. That is a lot. But it is a local story: a Moody’s report this week described the credit impact on Russia’s companies as “mixed” and on its sovereign debt as “neutral”. Nor is Sochi a unique moral blot. The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics of 2002 were marred by a major corruption scandal and the Beijing summer games of 2008 were a more appropriate venue for protests about human rights.

... Mr Putin’s detractors have paid less attention to this history than to a short list of causes beloved of western elites: the EU, free trade, gay rights and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon Mr Putin jailed a decade ago and pardoned in December. This week hundreds of writers, including Salman Rushdie, published an open letter in the UK’s Guardian newspaper deploring a Russian law against “so-called gay ‘propaganda’” (the actual text of Article 6.21 forbids promoting “non-traditional sexual relations” to children) and another against blasphemy. “As writers and artists,” the petition ran, “we cannot stand quietly by as we watch our fellow writers and journalists pressed into silence or risking prosecution and often drastic punishment . . . A healthy democracy must hear the independent voices of all its citizens.”

But “stand quietly by” is what many of these writers did when the UK’s Labour government passed a blasphemy law just eight years ago (the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006), at the behest of some of the very groups (including the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs) that tried to ban Mr Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1989. That the UK House of Lords added amendments limiting the law’s reach does not change the spirit of censorship in which the bill was advanced.

... There may be an unwitting tribute to Mr Putin in the intensity of his detractors’ rage. Those countries lecturing him about “healthy democracy”, as Mr Rushdie et al put it, have lately shifted power from legislatures to executives and from voters to bureaucracies. In Europe it has been done through delegations of power to the EU. In the US, it has been done through judicial reversals of democratic election results (including on gay marriage) and congressional abdication (on trade, warfare, healthcare and intelligence gathering).

Mr Putin presents himself as a defender of sovereignty, an example to those who do not wish to be forced to submit to the ways of Washington and Brussels. Western societies remain more liberal and democratic than Russian society. But the difference is not quite so obvious as it was 10 years ago.
 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/752c5b6e-8e8a-11e3-98c6-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2smuvKhs8