Why Won't This Russian Opposition Politician Watch His Language? |
How many good ideas over recent years and decades have been ruined for the sole reason they were expressed rudely?
Take Leonid Volkov, one of the leading figures of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. He not even publicly, but in private correspondence, called Denis Kapustin — the founder of the Russian Volunteer Corps — a “Nazi” and referred to Kyrylo Budanov, the former head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate and now head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Office, as a “vile provincial political technologist.”
And so the horse bolted out of its stable.
It’s not that accusing Kapustin of Nazism or Budanov of provincialism is, in itself, a brilliant idea. But if you strip Volkov’s words of their rudeness, his comments would have been far less incendiary. Though, of course, it would have been far more polite not to interfere in Ukrainian affairs at all and to leave it to Ukrainians themselves to decide who among them is a Nazi and who a country bumpkin.
But no. Volkov put his views forward (not for the first time) with cavalry-style bravado. Doing so never leads to positive results, but it stubbornly refuses to go out........