At the conclusion of the 2012 Asian-Pacific
Economic Cooperation meeting in Russia, the host president, Vladimir Putin,
likened the birds that had not following his motorized glider south to the
Russians who did not follow him. “Only the weak ones,” he quipped. “The weak
ones didn’t follow me.” Elaborating, he added, “not all of the cranes flew, and
the leader, the pilot, has to be blamed because he was too fast in gaining
speed and altitude and they were just lagging behind; they couldn’t catch up.”
In other words, the Russian protesters had been blaming him for what was in
actuality their own weakness—not his. A leader must accept the inevitable misappropriation
of blame because being erroneously blamed goes with being a leader.
Putin could not have been entirely objective on the protests against him.
Source: Democracy Chronicles
The full essay is at "Putin Likened Protestors to Weak Birds."
Source:
David Herszenhorn and Steven Lee Myers, “For Putin, a Flight of Fancy at a Summit Meeting’s Close,” The New York Times, September 10, 2012.
On Nietzsche applied to power in business, see On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management (available at Amazon)
