Social Matter

Last Wednesday, USA Today obtained a 2008 report commissioned by a Pentagon think-tank that postulated long-time Russian President and part-time bare-chested Siberian horseman Vladimir Putin had Asperger’s Syndrome, “an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions.” Further accusations include a citation from a psychiatry professor that “Putin carries a form of autism,” that Putin “carries a neurological abnormality” and that his “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy.” These reports get mighty specific too:

“Today, project neurologists confirm this research project’s earlier hypothesis that very early in life perhaps, even in utero, Putin suffered a huge hemispheric event to the left temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex, which involves both central and peripheral nervous systems, gross motor functioning on his right side (head, rib cage, arm and leg) and his micro facial expression, eye gaze, hearing and voice and general affect,” the report said.

Work by “autism specialists,” apparently, backs up the report’s findings. The news article takes the time to (rightly) dryly note that “researchers can’t prove their theory about Putin and Asperger’s, the report said, because they were not able to perform a brain scan on the Russian president.”

Now, dear readers, I am no psychologist. I am no psychiatrist. I do not fund Pentagon think-tanks, and I can’t say I’ve spent much time studying neurological or developmental disorders, let alone patterns of behavioral tics and their relations to psychological traits. I am, however, a currently still bipedal homo sapiens with an intelligence quotient North of 70 and useful pairs of both functioning hands and functioning testicles, so I think I am qualified to decide whether or not a major world leader who is:

1. “The Most Badass Leader in the World” according to Business Insider.

2. “The World’s Craziest Badass” according to Cracked.com.

3. “Terrific, Triumphant, All Good, Totally Badass” according to Foreign Policy magazine.

4. “The Richest Man On Earth” according to Bloomberg.

5. “The Most Powerful Man in the World” according to Forbes.

…is also in possession of any deep-rooted anti-social mental disorders.

Here are the official United States government National Institutes of Health factsheets on autism and Asperger’s syndrome, which you may peruse to your heart’s content. Let’s take a look at the factsheets and see how they compare to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s very public behavior and history.

Autistic children have difficulties with social interaction, display problems with verbal and nonverbal communication, and exhibit repetitive behaviors or narrow, obsessive interests.

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a developmental disorder.  It is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), one of a distinct group of neurological conditions characterized by a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behavior. 

You can click on Link #1 above for 39 photos of Vladimir Putin displaying highly un-obsessive and un-narrow interests, ranging from motorbiking to piano. The same set of pictures makes me doubt whether President Putin has any inherent difficulties with communication or social interaction, considering he can be seen successfully interacting with little boys in martial arts costume, little girls in tea-party costume, other world leaders in very serious grown-up costume, Russian outlaw biker gang leaders, sleeping tigers, horses, baby birds, giant fish and polar bears. In fact, judging by the amount of wild animals Putin is seen hunting, comforting, riding, putting down or knowingly glaring at, it might be inferred that he actually possesses better social skills than the rest of us, confined as we are to mere human-to-human social interactions. By the way, for reference, here’s a picture of the Russian outlaw biker gang leader smiling at Putin like a virginal maiden might smile at her deflowerer:

Speaking of deflowering, Vladimir Putin also happens to be the father of two daughters with his ex-wife, who has by now long ceded the spotlight to Putin’s rumored younger conquests. I will spare the details, since you can easily Google “putin luv life.” Putin also happens to be — as if it actually bears repeating — the three-term President and (by progressive standards) tyrannical dictator of the biggest country and largest nuclear power on the planet. This power, by the way, is currently flouting the established unipolar geopolitical world order with the United States government at the helm, to the great chagrin of pale bespectacled hermaphrodites all over the West. To add insult to injury, this power is succeeding at it too, in no small part thanks to President Putin’s wily statesmanship. I am doubtful that it is possible to reach and maintain this position of Putin’s, especially after surviving a career in the brutal Soviet security services (the KGB), without possessing social skills that are — at a minimum — not fundamentally crippled.

Here’s a video of that old dog Vladimir singing ‘Blueberry Hill’ to a live television audience. I would question deeply how many of the researchers mysteriously discovering new mental disorders in Putin would be able to imitate Putin’s performance, from the singing-in-a-foreign-language part to the singing-publicly-on-television-in-front-of-millions-of-judging-people part.

But of course, the point was never about whether or not Vladimir Putin is actually mentally disordered or not. Taken at face value, it would be a damning fact that the defense apparatus of the United States government doled out money to hucksters claiming that the most ruthless, calculating, successful and powerful men on the planet are in fact secretly shivering nerds incapable of communicating with other human beings. The characterization of President Putin as a sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome is the final proof yours truly needs that the Western government-psychiatric complex — and I include the government- part because the institutions have become practically inseparable at this point — is full of charlatans spewing complete and utter hogwash for easy government grants. If their mad prescriptions will result in a populace addicted to anti-depressant chemicals, blatantly false assessments of dangerous foreign leaders, and self-mutilating leftists standing as examples of health and normalcy to the populace at large — so be it! So much the worse for society: the God of Science(tm) has spoken, through his archangel Psychology(tm). The joke, in the end, is that the real mentally disordered are not in the Kremlin, but in the Pentagon and its think-tanks itself.

Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, writes an excruciating column on the American defense industry’s transparent focus on expensive power fantasies to the detriment of actual national defense. His examples primarily stem from the air defense industry, but the situation in intelligence and psychological warfare is undoubtedly similar. There is little incentive for cosmopolitan psychologists and psychiatrists receiving multi-million dollar grants from cosmopolitan careerists at the Pentagon to study foreign leaders to actually develop truthful and applicable recommendations and conclusions — this would just reduce the need for more “studies,” for more multi-million dollar grants. Because, you see, “…this is all about money, and [has] nothing to do with defense.” To the undoubted eventual horror of the cosmopolitans, the same just might not be true for the Autist in the Kremlin.

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