Erdoğan and Putin are practically twins. Both spout all kinds of foreign-policy nonsense to distract the public from domestic problems. Both use imperial ambitions and imperial rhetoric to shore up their personal power and enrich themselves. Both so hate social media and the free press. Both declare the West their main enemy and appeal to traditional values while being utterly amoral characters.
Both are liars and PR men. The most horrible thing about the situation with our plane being shot down (especially if the pilot really was killed) is that it became a victim of a meaningless PR war.
Putin is conducting an “operation in Syria” that has not the slightest military significance in terms of the war against ISIS (the Americans have carried out ten times more airstrikes, and even there the results are negligible). Its purpose is to fool citizens with blurry videos of sheds exploding and political officers’ tales about how “34 ISIS command posts and a suicide bomber training base were destroyed.” Pure fiction with nothing behind it. It’s the classic: “Three domestic cigarette cases, a suede jacket... also three” (a quote from the Soviet comedy Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future, used to mock obvious lies).
I’m not even talking about firing cruise missiles from submarines at those same Syrian sheds and donkeys hauling firewood.
Erdoğan also needs to puff himself up in front of his Turkish mourners for a Great Turkey and the would-be restorers of the Ottoman Empire. Hence the menacing statements that aircraft violating Turkish airspace must be shot down. First a downed drone. Now a downed plane. Turkey’s equivalent of Dmitry Kiselyov (a notorious pro-Kremlin TV propagandist) will be beside himself with delight on his “analytical program.” Turkey has shown Russia who’s boss here. The might of Turkish arms and all the rest of it.
And yet both Erdoğan and the Turkish military understand perfectly well that Russia is, de facto, part of the anti-ISIS coalition; the plane posed no threat to Turkey; and there was no military or human justification for shooting it down. That plane should not have been shot down. It was all done just for posturing and to “manage the media narrative.”
And in the end, both are satisfied: one will talk about the triumph of Turkish arms and the rebirth of the Ottoman Empire, while the other will talk about an imminent asymmetric response and Turkey’s fear of the rebirth of the Russian Empire (supposedly enslaved by the West).
Both will repeat the word “sovereignty” 37 times, and both will hint at a “secret ally of ISIS.”
But the pilot is the one I truly feel sorry for. What did he die for?
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