Russian president echoes Al Capone as he says ‘weapons and politeness’ are better than ‘politeness alone’
Vladimir Putin issued a defiant message to the West on Tuesday, accusing the United States of trying to subjugate Russia while promising it would never succeed.
The Russian president also appeared to channel Al Capone, the Chicago mobster, when he joked that weapons and politeness were more effective than politeness alone.
Meeting supporters at a forum in Moscow, Mr Putin corrected another speaker who said that the United States wanted to humiliate Russia.
They don’t want to humiliate us, they want to subjugate us, to solve their problems at our expense, he said. They want to bring us under control. Mr Putin added: Throughout history no one has ever succeeded in doing that to Russia and they never will.
The president was speaking to members of the All-Russia People’s Front, a coalition of groups that back him.
His characteristically sharp-tongued delivery suggested Mr Putin was keen to dispel any idea that he had been cowed at the G20 summit in Brisbane over the weekend, which he left early after a series of Western leaders upbraided him over Russia’s military intervention in the Ukraine crisis.
Before his speech on Tuesday, the Russian leader was shown a new military vehicle described as a cross between a car and an armoured personnel carrier.
Manufacturers had jokingly labelled the vehicles polite armoured cars – in reference to the polite people, a phrase that became popular in the spring to describe the Russian soldiers who led the Kremlin’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
On seeing the machine, Mr Putin quipped: You can get a lot more done with weapons and politeness than you can with politeness alone.
The phrase appeared to echo a saying attributed to Al Capone: You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
Gun-lobbyists in the US also use the slogan: An armed society is a polite society. Mr Putin said that events in Crimea and Ukraine – where pro-Moscow rebels have carved out a de facto independent territory in the Russo-phone east of the country – had united the Russian people.
Our nation has shown the way with real civil participation, empathy and patriotism, and it has demonstrated its unity, he said.
Mr Putin defended the government’s decision to introduce a ban on food imports from western states that imposed sanctions on Russia over its alleged meddling in Ukraine. He said those countries had put themselves in a spot by introducing sanctions and provoking the Russian measures in response.