‘Why don’t you move to Russia?” This is a phrase that has been around for a long time — certainly all of my life. Well, Karin Kneissl has gone and done it. And it is utterly fitting.
Kneissl was the foreign minister of Austria from 2017 to 2019. She served in the populist-Right government headed by Sebastian Kurz. He now works for Peter Thiel. Kneissl works for Putin, at least indirectly.
After leaving government — the Austrian one, I mean — she landed a position on the board of Rosneft, the Russian oil giant. And she started blogging for Russia Today. These things were perfectly natural. Politicians such as Kneissl have close ties to Putin and the Kremlin. Sometimes they are sneaky about it. Sometimes they are open.
Matteo Salvini, the populist darling in Italy, has been known to wear Putin T-shirts. He did so in Red Square. He did so at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Better the openness than the sneakiness.
And do you remember Marine Le Pen, in France, posing with a kind of trinity? Heroic portraits of Putin, Trump, and, well, herself? See it here.
In 2018, Frau Kneissl danced with Putin at her wedding. I always thought the photos of her curtsying to Putin, looking up at him adoringly, encapsulated the posture of that political type toward the monster in the Kremlin.
Yesterday, the BBC published a report headed “Austrian ex-minister Karin Kneissl moves to Russia with her ponies.” Ponies? Yes. The Russian military — otherwise busy slaughtering innocents in Ukraine — did her the favor of transporting her ponies from Syria to St. Petersburg. She will now live in St. Petersburg, to run some institute. She has gone home, in a sense.
So did many on the left in Soviet days.
In those Soviet days, many of us had to conclude that a lot of people in the Free World were simply on the other side. They did not labor under misunderstandings; they were not misinformed or confused. They were simply on the other side. So it is today. So it is always.