Here is one of them, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin a Russian politician and former member of the KGB who is the current President of the Russian Federation.
Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy:
Putin has embraced an opportunistic but sophisticated campaign to sabotage democracy. Putin has been desperate to get out from under these sanctions so that his regime can thrive domestically and internationally. His goals appear to be twofold. First, he seeks to restore some form of Russian empire—with at least informal dominion over all the territories of the former Soviet Union—while forcing the West to accept this new balance of power and treat Russia as a superpower once again. Second, he seeks to invert Woodrow Wilson’s famous call to arms and instead “make the world safe for autocracy.” Democracy is his enemy. He is smart enough to know that he cannot undermine it everywhere, but he will subvert, corrupt, and confuse it wherever he can.
I take the following remarks from Arthur Waldron, from his Letter from Beijing, of October 2016 —
Over the course of almost seventy years in power, the People’s Republic of China has reversed its priorities. At the start, the Party had a purpose: it proclaimed its task was to save the Chinese people, to lift them up to a better life.
Maintaining Party rule, whatever that means, is the true purpose of all actions, however unrelated they may seem. The Party is the primum mobile of China. Whatever happens, it cannot be threatened or sacrificed, even if the price is poverty or war. For one who remembers both the honest dedication of many communists and the fairy tales carefully vetted Westerners retailed (no tourist visas existed until 1980), it is a chilling transformation, and a worrying one, and one that is slowly breaking the spirit of one of the world’s greatest civilizations.
And here are we, left to defend ourselves, say with Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, — We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Or with Abraham Lincoln’s memorable words at Gettysburg, — Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Try these words out, say in the Donbas region of Southeastern Ukraine or in the South China Sea (“Is China’s nuclear bomber flying over the South China sea, a message to Donald Trump?’) Even in correct translations of the words of Jefferson and Lincoln you won’t be heard or even listened to.
It’s probably true that at this time in our history the words of Jefferson and Lincoln are in fact no longer any kind of barrier to the destructive waves of organized world wide criminal groups operating under ruthless codes of behavior and subject to no higher governmental or moral power.
Putin and XI represent two ideologies we thought were dead, Fascism, that is finding a second life in Europe’s far Right as well as in Donald Trump’s America, and Communism, now in China really not communism, whatever it may have been in the beginning, but now a kind of Mafia with a huge army of its own and nuclear capability.
These two men, and the powers and forces they represent, seem to be directing the world’s events. They’re doing things, and at best we’re responding, usually too late to stop them. They are taking the world in directions we thought we had left behind us in the wars of the 20th. century, directions of imperialism, nationalism, intolerance, bigotry, trade barriers, closed societies, and fanatical religious beliefs, as well as a worship of the past, a past that never was and the desire to make things great as they never were once again.
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Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité
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