It’s game over if Putin is even a fraction as farsighted as le Carre
Might Vladimir Putin see worlds and possibilities we cannot even imagine? Is he destined, therefore, to be more successful than other plodders on the planet? Might he trump Trump?
I ask the question because I’ve been re-reading The Tailor of Panama.
What Mr Putin and this spy thriller have in common is they emerge from the world of spooks.
The Russian president was a KGB spy. And John le Carre, author of The Tailor of Panama was a spy before he harnessed his skills and insights to write thrilling novels that earned him great fame and a whole lot of money.
If Mr Putin has even a fraction of le Carre’s farsightedness, he would be classed a wizard in an earlier age. And be spectacularly successful too.
Let me explain.
December marked four years since le Carre passed, but to read his 1996 novel set in Panama is to be smack in the middle of 2025. Oh yes, the world le Carre created and portrayed back then is Trumpian alright, sans mobile phones and TikTok. And that’s some 20 years before Mr Trump came down the golden escalator in Trump Towers and declared his (then much-scorned) plan to run for president of the United States. (Click here for an earlier blog on how the novel has a strange premonition of American claims once again to the Panama Canal, a la Donald Trump’s newly expressed determination to “take back” the waterway, by military force if necessary.)
It makes me wonder if le Carre saw deeper and further than other writers and whether it was his background as a spook that equipped him to do so. If that’s the case, might Vladimir Putin be similarly blessed?
Read for yourself this revealing fragment from The Tailor of Panama. It put me in mind of some of the culture wars currently raging in the United States and elsewhere over DEI, the much-reviled abbreviation for three perfectly decent aspirations: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. You can almost hear Donald Trump, J D Vance and Elon Musk thinking all of the below. Or saying it to each other. Or to the MAGA crowds. Or Mark Zuckerberg, for that matter, musing to himself that this is the one true way. After all, it was Mr Zuckerberg who declared, all childish and snivelling, that he and others needed protection from “President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies”.
Poor little big tech bros.
[Note that Ben Hatry in the excerpt below is a media tycoon. He sounds, at least in his own estimation, like the 1990s equivalent of Rupert Murdoch, Musk and Zuckerberg all rolled into one.]
…Ben Hatry’s treasured If Not Now When? doctrine that lay at the root of his trans-Atlantic arm-twisting and wire-pulling and intriguing, the thrust of which theory being that the United States cannot conceivably remain the world’s one and only superpower for more than another decade at most, after which it was curtains, so if there was any heavy surgery that needed doing anywhere in the world, said the doctrine, however brutal and self-serving it might look from the outside or for that matter from the inside, then for our survival and our kids’ survival and the survival of the Hatry empire and its evergrowing stranglehold on the hearts and minds of the Third and Fourth worlds: do it now while we have the clout, for fuck’s sake! Stop pussyfooting around! Take what you want, smash what you don’t! But whatever you do or don’t do, stop mollycoddling and conceding and wimping out.
And if that put Ben Hatry into bed with the North American Loony Right, as well as their blood brothers on this side of the pond, and made him the darling of the arms industry to boot — well, fuck it, he would say in his sweet mother tongue, he wasn’t a politico, he hated the bastards, he was a realist, he didn’t give a tinker’s who he was allied to as long as they talked sense and didn’t tiptoe around the international corridors saying to every Jap, niggger and dago: ‘Pardon me for being a white middle-class liberal American, sir, and excuse us for being so big and strong and powerful and rich, but we believe in the dignity and equality of all God’s people, and would you be so kind as to allow me to get down on my hands and knees and kiss your arse?’
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
