Putin, Yeltsin, Falstaff: the brutal reality of transferring political and criminal power
Posted by admin978 on March 5, 2022 · Leave a Comment
The video above combines two clips illustrating the transfer of political power and its cold brutality. (Click square in bottom corner above to view full screen.)
First, in March 2000: Vladimir Putin climbs to power on the back of Boris Yeltsin’s corrupt camarilla and Putin’s own KGB/FSB circle. In amazing video footage at Yeltsin’s home, the corrupt old president is seen celebrating because he assumes his protégé will continue his influence and that of his crooked family and friends. Yet as we see, Putin will not even accept or return Yeltsin’s phone calls.
Putin goes on to work closely with some of the kleptocrats and gangsters from the Yeltsin circle and KGB, while purging others. And so it has continued for more than 20 years.
I’ve combined this clip with a famous scene from Shakespeare, as adapted by Orson Welles in one of my favourite films, Chimes at Midnight.
Here the old rogue Falstaff approaches his former partner-in-crime Prince Hal, who has just become King Henry V. But his former protégé (like Putin to Yeltsin) rebuffs him:
““I know thee not old man.
…Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.”
That’s their world of ‘high politics’, and it’s one reason why we shouldn’t wish to surrender our loyalties and ideological commitments in exchange for the baubles of ‘power’, whether in a 21st century Moscow dictatorship or a 15th century English monarchy.
Putin will doubtless soon experience the same treatment he once gave to Yeltsin: as his grip on power loosens, the new powerbrokers will again “turn away their former self”.
We might see the victory of the true Europe in our lifetimes or we might not. But unlike these ‘statesmen’, honour and loyalty will continue to be central to our lives.
