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Putin, the Evil Emperor
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Vlad Putin is a malevolent little shit who learned what he knows of humanity in the dungeons of Lubyanka. His greatest achievement was to persuade Boris Yeltsin to take an immunity deal in exchange for handing over the Russian presidency.
Once KGB, always KGB. "If it walks like a duck..." Putin has a peculiar gate. His left arm swings normally when he walks. His right arm, however, remains relatively motionless at his side. That's his pistol hand. It's said to be a quick-draw technique taught to KGB officers in training.
Putin wasted no time when, as a freshly minted president, he displayed his murderous brutality in the second Battle of Grozny, slaughtering the Chechens and reducing their capital to rubble. In 2003 the UN declared Grozny "the most destroyed city on Earth."
Eight years later, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia went its own way, seeking to switch allegiance from Russia to the US and NATO. Small, pro-Russian forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia fought the rest of Georgia, soon aided by Russian forces. Even George w. Bush condemned Russia's invasion but refused to intercede. This led Putin's alter-ego, Medvedev, to proclaim a new doctrine that seemed peaceful enough except for the final principle, "there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests." Regions such as Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine - for the time being.
True to form, Putin recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent (pro-Russian) states. Sound familiar?
Now it's Ukraine's turn to experience Russia's "privileged interests." Putin is using the same playbook from his Chechen and Georgian wars only this time with a more menacing approach to the West, even to the point of threatening nuclear war. Putin has also leveled threats of military repercussions should either Finland or Sweden get ideas about joining NATO.
As for Ukrainian civilians, a British news team from Sky got a first hand taste.
Might Putin invoke some "privileged interests" in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania? Those states are newly fledged NATO members, host NATO forces and border Russia. Will the eastern Baltic region be NATO's OK Corral?
Could sanctions goad Putin to confront the West militarily? Just this morning colonel Vlad branded the sanctions as tanamount to a declaration of war. I think it's hot air. He's bluffing. Putin's forces wound up mired in Chechnya, in Georgia and now in Ukraine far longer than expected. Regardless, the West has to call Putin's bluff. There's a steep and endless price to pay for backing down to thugs.
UPDATE
The New York Times has a piece on "Operation InfeKtion" that looks at how Putin, from the outset of his presidency, has taken disinformation and raised it to an art form. Trump learned the "fake news" tactic at the knees of his mentor.
"I’m talking about the raw-power potential of Russia—the amount of economic might it has. Military might is built on economic might. You need an economic foundation to build a really powerful military. To go out and conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation that contemporary Russia does not come close to having. There is no reason to fear that Russia is going to be a regional hegemony in Europe. Russia is not a serious threat to the United States. We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today."
Putin is very exposed. I estimate his shelf life at under two years.
But any pushback from inside Russia, will be bottom up this time.
"The people we call oligarchs now, a Russian joke goes, are not really oligarchs, they’re just working as oligarchs. And there’s truth in that, a Russian billionaire today is as likely to be someone who got rich running a state company, or selling things to the government, as obtaining a natural resource in a rigged privatisation auction in the early post-communism days. They didn’t need chutzpah to get rich; they were just friends with Vladimir Putin.
This is not to say that many oligarchs have not hedged their bets, and evacuated significant chunks of their fortunes out of Putin’s reach. According to estimates from the economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies the international financial system, more than half of the Russian elite’s money is offshore, hidden behind multiple layers of shell companies in secrecy jurisdictions. But that does not mean they are willing to risk taking on the Kremlin; they have seen what happens to people that did."
If/when Putin falls, will we finally embrace the Russians or find help them find yet a new bogey-man to nurture our war industries?
Dick Cheney and his posse, including a naive POTUS, George w., failed to restrain themselves. Their unbounded triumphalism drove NATO to Russia's borders. Instead of working with Russia to smooth the transition from a failed command economy to a market economy they acted like Rome salting the fields of Carthage.
Ian Fleming wrote that America is a nation that went from infancy to senility without ever experiencing maturity. After 9/11 they replaced diplomacy with threats or use of armed force as America's principal instrument of foreign policy as they sought to implement "the new American Century".
Not just Bush/Cheney. Obama/Biden were behind the 2014 Maidan coup and this war was likely delayed about 4 years by tRump's unexpected 'win' in 2016.
Today's G&M headlines shed some light on the motivations of our so-called leaders who seem to love baiting the paranoid bear. They include calls to > 'finally' spend money on defense. (When the bogey-man can't seem subdue his neighbour let alone threaten Canada - with conventional weapons.*) > calls to replace the Russian fossil fuels that the EU buys, with ours.
* Some of us who were paying attention, watched virtually all the late 20th century Nuclear Arms deal lapse. Not one media outlet mentioned that last weak when Poutine** puts his nukes on alert.
**"A Poutine Chain In France Had To Explain The Quebec Dish After Threats From Putin Haters People keep confusing the French spelling of the Russian president's name with fries and gravy."
An overly 'capitalist' west has made this possible. We live in a world without restriction where the highest bidder rules. The west continues to support Russian business through every loophole available.
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy. Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal. We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head? Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions . Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget." I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in. 74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Alas, the world is not just good vs evil.
ReplyDeleteSo many shades of gray.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
"I’m talking about the raw-power potential of Russia—the amount of economic might it has. Military might is built on economic might. You need an economic foundation to build a really powerful military. To go out and conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation that contemporary Russia does not come close to having. There is no reason to fear that Russia is going to be a regional hegemony in Europe. Russia is not a serious threat to the United States. We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today."
Putin is very exposed. I estimate his shelf life at under two years.
But any pushback from inside Russia, will be bottom up this time.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-downfall-of-russia-s-oligarchs
"The people we call oligarchs now, a Russian joke goes, are not really oligarchs, they’re just working as oligarchs. And there’s truth in that, a Russian billionaire today is as likely to be someone who got rich running a state company, or selling things to the government, as obtaining a natural resource in a rigged privatisation auction in the early post-communism days. They didn’t need chutzpah to get rich; they were just friends with Vladimir Putin.
This is not to say that many oligarchs have not hedged their bets, and evacuated significant chunks of their fortunes out of Putin’s reach. According to estimates from the economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies the international financial system, more than half of the Russian elite’s money is offshore, hidden behind multiple layers of shell companies in secrecy jurisdictions. But that does not mean they are willing to risk taking on the Kremlin; they have seen what happens to people that did."
If/when Putin falls, will we finally embrace the Russians or find help them find yet a new bogey-man to nurture our war industries?
Dick Cheney and his posse, including a naive POTUS, George w., failed to restrain themselves. Their unbounded triumphalism drove NATO to Russia's borders. Instead of working with Russia to smooth the transition from a failed command economy to a market economy they acted like Rome salting the fields of Carthage.
DeleteIan Fleming wrote that America is a nation that went from infancy to senility without ever experiencing maturity. After 9/11 they replaced diplomacy with threats or use of armed force as America's principal instrument of foreign policy as they sought to implement "the new American Century".
Not just Bush/Cheney.
DeleteObama/Biden were behind the 2014 Maidan coup and this war was likely delayed about 4 years by tRump's unexpected 'win' in 2016.
Today's G&M headlines shed some light on the motivations of our so-called leaders who seem to love baiting the paranoid bear. They include calls to
> 'finally' spend money on defense. (When the bogey-man can't seem subdue his neighbour let alone threaten Canada - with conventional weapons.*)
> calls to replace the Russian fossil fuels that the EU buys, with ours.
* Some of us who were paying attention, watched virtually all the late 20th century Nuclear Arms deal lapse. Not one media outlet mentioned that last weak when Poutine** puts his nukes on alert.
**"A Poutine Chain In France Had To Explain The Quebec Dish After Threats From Putin Haters
People keep confusing the French spelling of the Russian president's name with fries and gravy."
An overly 'capitalist' west has made this possible.
ReplyDeleteWe live in a world without restriction where the highest bidder rules.
The west continues to support Russian business through every loophole available.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-03/wall-street-is-already-pouncing-on-russia-s-cheap-corporate-debt
Is this capitalism collapsing as has been suggested..
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-1-quote-and-who-said-it-prove-capitalism-is-dying-2014-05-10#:~:text=Even%20rock%2Dstar%20economist%20Nouriel,That's%20what%20has%20happened.
Or is it a sign of a dystopian future?
TB
"Putin is very exposed. I estimate his shelf life at under two years."
ReplyDeleteperhaps this was overly optimistic
https://theconversation.com/economic-sanctions-may-deal-fatal-blow-to-russias-already-weak-domestic-opposition-178274