Most of us are fond of urging others to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before coming to a judgement about them. We don’t do it that much ourselves, but we quite like prescribing it for others. But that’s usually at the personal level. At the public or international level, we tone down some.
For example? Take Boris Johnson, now the man politicians in his own party won’t come within twenty feet of. And yet it’s probably fair to say that Johnson saw himself as a boon to his country and his party. Walking in his shoes would reveal that he believes he did the Tory party an unprecedented favour by delivering an 80-seat majority in the last election, the President of Ukraine thinks he’s a great guy, and he is by far the most charismatic politician in the UK. Don’t say that out loud, though, or the mob may rip you limb from limb.
But it’s on the international scale that shoe-walking is particularly difficult. In Ukraine, we see buildings shattered by relentless mortar attacks by the Russians, Vladimir Putin is frequently compared to Hitler, and the assumption is that the Russian people, if they knew what was happening in their name, would rise up and cast Putin into Siberia.
If we make even a feeble attempt to walk in Putin’s shoes, we’d see things differently. Putin believes, with some reason, that the West is intent on isolating him and Russia. He was intent on keeping Ukraine as a buffer state between Russia and the west. It’s not good news to hear that the enemy has parked on your doorstep, as Russia found in 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis occurred. JFK was so intent on not having Russia on his doorstep, he came within a whisker of using nuclear weapons. And the American people backed him.
So too the Russian people support the war in Ukraine – opinion polls show that again and again. We in the West don’t want to believe this, so we talk about false reporting, censorship and the general military grip Putin has on his people. Maybe there’s truth in that criticism. But it’s hypocritical to denounce Putin on the grounds of shattered buildings and schools : the West has done the same and worse. When you’re in a war, you do everything imaginable to win. The Germans bombing Coventry during World War Two, the British bombing Dresden: neither paid any regard to civilian life. There is much criticism of Putin for the fact that his forces have “flattened” buildings and towns. What did they expect? In war, you don’t just shell a target in a limited way. You go all-out.
If we put ourselves in Putin’s shoes, would our condemnation of him continue at the present simplistic level?
Comments are closed.