Hot Type: The Sickening Nature of It All
As Vladimir Putin glad-hands Narendra Modi and Xi Jin Ping, Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports that, like the recent Alaska summit with Trump, the point of these events is to reputation wash Putin
“I really do feel a crisis of language,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Supplement. “Watching Trump roll out that red carpet for Putin — there's already been so much rhetorical inflation, and yet everything feels inadequate to capture the sickening nature of it all.”
Under the guise of ‘peace talks’ regarding Russia’s full-scale invasion of the independent country of Ukraine, the two criminals met with all the pomp of third world warlords.
As I recently wrote, murderers don’t want peace. The meeting on US soil was never about peace — it was about reputation washing Vladimir Putin in front of the world.
“If journalists really wanted to cover the summit adequately, they would need to juxtapose images of Putin on that red carpet with Russian soldiers tying captured Ukrainians to boards and electrocuting them,” said Shore, the author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution and the Chair of the European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in Toronto.
Shore said when the Alaska summit occurred three weeks ago, she thought she should write something about it.
“But I found I’d run out of words to express my disgust,” she said. “It's not just reputation-washing for Putin, it's a signaling that we are now in a world where there are no longer any rules and no longer any values. This is a Dostoevskyian world in which ‘everything is permissible.’ It's shameless moral nihilism.”
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