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Why the far-left and far-right can’t resist Putin
Before he was booted off the ABC’s Q+A by host Stan Grant in a dramatic television moment, Sasha Gillies-Lekakis made history as the first student from the University of Melbourne to undertake an exchange program in communist Cuba.
Gillies-Lekakis has written glowingly about his experience on the Caribbean island, saying the one-party state had long been “misrepresented and misunderstood around the world”.
In a subsequent piece for socialist magazine the Monthly Review, Gillies-Lekakis showered praise on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua’s left-wing governments for their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. His conclusion: “socialism is far more effective than capitalism in reducing both the human and economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis”.
In his controversial Q&A question on Thursday defending the Russian viewpoint on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Gillies-Lekakis described himself as a member of the “the Russian community here in Australia”.
But Gillies-Lekakis’s question - which included misleading statistics about the number of people killed by Russian troops in the contested Donbas region of Ukraine - reflected something more than a pro-Russia perspective. It revealed a tendency evident on both extremes of the political spectrum - the far-left and far-right - to side with the Russian President as an expression of their discontent with the state of the modern Western world.
This trend, which is evident around the world, exemplifies the so-called “horseshoe theory” of politics attributed to French writer Jean-Pierre Faye. The theory holds that the far-left and far-right can end up closer to each other than they do to the political centre, with both tending to gravitate towards authoritarianism.
At times, especially on the right, you see this tendency manifest itself as outright admiration for Putin. It can also be more subtle, appearing in the guise of moral relativism, false equivalence and “whataboutism”. This strategy seeks to downplay Putin’s aggression by shifting the discussion towards the flaws and past mistakes of western nations.
On the progressive side of the leger, some older leftists retain a lingering soft spot for Russia as a legacy of their past support of the Soviet Union - despite Putin’s economic and social policies being, in the main, conservative. The crucial factor that draws many on the far left towards Putin is a meeting of minds on foreign policy. They see the United States as a destructive imperial superpower, leading to a reflexively anti-American and anti-NATO worldview they share with the Russian leader. This is essentially the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of international relations.
Guardian columnist George Monbiot, a strident progressive and fierce critic of modern capitalism, this week decried the willingness of some on the activist left to parrot Putin’s talking points.
“Among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK are people with whom I have, in the past, shared platforms and made alliances,” Monbiot wrote.
“The grim truth is that, for years, a segment of the ‘anti-imperialist’ left has been recycling and amplifying Putin’s falsehoods.”
Among Monbiot’s targets: the UK-based Stop the War Coalition which stated in a February letter that it “opposes any war over Ukraine” but said nothing about Russian aggression.
Fiona Edwards, a member of the coalition’s steering committee, as well as a self-described socialist and anti-imperialist, has insisted that “NATO is the aggressor, not Russia”.
Then there is Australian journalist John Pilger, the unapologetically left-wing documentary film-maker who is a longtime critic of American foreign policy. In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Pilger repeatedly ridiculed the idea Putin would start a war.
When the invasion indeed happened, Pilger described it as “lawless” but echoed the rhetoric used by Putin to justify the invasion. “NATO, with a proven record of rapacious war, now completely surrounds Russia in the West, with missiles aimed point-blank at Moscow,” he wrote on Twitter.
Journalist and documentary maker has echoed Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine.
Pilger has also claimed, with remarkable credulity, that Putin offered peace to Ukraine if the country embraced neutrality and rejected NATO.
At the other end of the political extreme, some members of the right are instinctively drawn to the Putin for different reasons. In their worldview, Putin is a champion of social conservatism, a refreshing antithesis to what they regard as the directionless, decadent and feminised direction of Western nations. They love his persona as a macho strongman and share his opposition to multiculturalism, gay rights and Islam.
For example, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s leading right-wing politician, has worn shirts with Putin’s face on them in the European Parliament. “I esteem him for free, not for money,” he has said, pushing back on suggestions Putin had bought his support.
Pundits on the far-right admire Vladimir Putin’s “macho strongman” persona and ignore his crimes. Credit:Sputnik Kremlin
Like Pilger, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, scoffed at warnings Russia would invade Ukraine. “I don’t see what the Russians would do in Ukraine and what would be their interest there,” she told reporters. “If I were President right now I wouldn’t have the glacial relations that exist between Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron,” she added.
In the US, former Republican president Donald Trump has long taken a noticeably friendly approach to Putin. “You think our country is so innocent?” Trump famously remarked in 2017 when a Fox News interviewer described Putin as a killer. As Russia launched its invasion Trump stunned many by describing Putin as “very savvy” and declaring he had made a “genius” move by declaring regions of Ukraine independent as a pretext to launch a war.
Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s top-rated host, engaged in a textbook case of “whataboutism” when the invasion began by questioning why so many Americans hate Putin. “Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Carlson asked his viewers theatrically. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? ... Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlton has had to walk back his support of Putin. Credit:AP
Most of these right-wing figures have since walked back their support of Putin. The brutal and unprovoked nature of the invasion has made him an increasingly unpopular figure to defend.
Le Pen, who is running for the French presidency in April, described Putin’s behaviour as “reprehensible”, saying the invasion had changed her opinion of him. Her party has been forced to bin over a million campaign leaflets showing Le Pen shaking hands with the Russian leader and describing him as a man of “international stature”.
As for Gillies-Lekakis, he stressed in a Facebook post following the outcry over his Q+A appearance that he was “unequivocally against war and the loss of any lives” - even if he agreed with Putin’s grievances about Ukraine.
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