By Samson A. Bezabeh,

The World War II war time correspondent Emie Pyle once said that “there is no atheist in the fox hole”. What he meant does not only indicate the brutality of war but the honesty that can come out in war. In pronouncing these words, Pyle was pronouncing the truth about mankind, a deceptive being with layers of ideas. The whole thinking behind Pyle’s statement is that man need to be cornered to shade the various facades that he has adopted. As a Christian, the core for Pyle was the presences of God.

I am not here interested in Pyle or for that matter his view of God but on Putin and his recent comment on the ongoing Syrian affair in New York Times. Russia has been deeply enmeshed in the Syrian affair as a result of a number of strategic interests that the Assad government has been able to give to Russia. Yet Putin goes on to lecture about issues of morality to the American government without mentioning these issues. His focus in that essay was about the animosity as well as cooperation that his country had and is still having with the USA. His other focus was on the American exceptionalism that was pronounced by President Barack Obama. This point he apparently obtained after deeply studying Barack Obama’s recent speech.
Putin’s moralizing article was even more moralizing in its conclusion. Putin invoked the power of the people as he claimed that his article is addressed to the people of America. In his conclusion he even invoked a much higher power: God. He tells us:

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal (emphasis added).

Although hearing this from an x communist and a former KGB spy is stunning, it is even much more shocking when one realize the dishonesty that is embedded in Putin’s statement. Putin here is talking about a war situation where hundreds of Syrians die every day. Writing from the comfort of his Kremlin palace I don’t however think that he has realized the extent of the contradiction that he has made when he has invoked what God did in his last statement.
What he is telling us in his last statement is that whatever shade we have, we are all equal before God. In saying this he is of course criticizing Barack Obama’s claim regarding American people’s exceptionalism. For Putin the exceptionalism is just a layer: Americans are humans like everybody else. I fully agree with Putin on this assertion, but it baffles me that in making the statement he himself has not shaded the layers of pretense that surround his government when it come to the war in Syria.

His statement is in essence quite similar with the statement of Ernie Pyle that I mentioned in the beginning of this commentary. Both inform us of the ultimate: of the things that one finds when one shades the layers that surround him. Sadly, however, Putin’s statement was not a statement written in the fox hole. It was a statement written at the Kremlin and Putin is still thinking that he is playing dice with God. Rather than shading his government layers of pretense and telling to his American audience the truth about Russia’s interest in Syria that effectively paralyzed the UN security council, Putin is writing about international law and how it should not be violated by unilateral action. He also professed concern about the inferno that will be unleashed in the Middle East if the US takes action.

Indeed one might be suspicious of the U.S. claim that Assad has used chemical weapons on his people, given the similar claim that the US has made when it wanted to intervene in the affair of another sovereign country, namely Iraq. But this does not however preclude that we should believe the Russian President when he sympathetically talks to us about international morality, since his country interest is partly responsible for the prolongation of the war in Syria. I believe Syrians and the people of the Middle East know more about the situation of war than Putin. As people who are placed in the fox hole, I don’t believe they have the time or the capacity of playing dice with God by invoking his name. They don’t also have the luxury of putting layers of pretense regarding their suffering. Mr. Putin, however, does and he is playing it by pretending to stand for the people in Syrian and the wider Middle East.