Paranoia, alas, is buried deep in the Russian soul

I respectfully disagree. Paranoia certainly characterizes those Russians who work for the security services, which is to say Putin’s puppet-masters, and assorted dim bulbs among the populace who still think fondly of Stalin, but these folks don’t constitute more maybe 20% of the population, and nearly none of the under-50 population.

Russia’s big problem throughout its history has been intellectual isolation, the lack of access to ideas and information from the West. This is not a spiritual but a political condition: a deliberate consequence of government policy. Under the Soviets this isolation was total; under the tsars it was less rigorous in the decades after 1860 but still chilling.

After 1989, that isolation vanished, and with it ignorance and its stepchild, paranoia, also faded from Russian civic and social life. The stalinophiles are figures of ridicule, as are right-wing nationalist anti-semites. Zhirinovsky, the most notorious and prominent anti-semitic nationalist, is routinely referred to as syn advokata, or “son of a lawyer”, which was his response to a reporter’s bland observation that Zhirinovsky’s own father was jewish. As I say, what Hofstadter called “the paranoid tendency” in Russia as in America is more of a joke than anything else.

Nonetheless there are good reasons to loathe and mistrust the Russian government. Putin’s wretched regime commands no love or enduring support from the populace, but it is respected for the simple reason that Putin is trying to restore some semblance of organization and minimal effectiveness to a government that long ago ceased to govern. They see in Putin an alternative to the massive incompetence and grand larceny of Yeltsin’s regime.

Russians across the board are simply tired of chaos, kleptocracy and economic misery: of pensions not being paid, of a legislature that can’t pass laws and judges that can’t enforce them, of an extraordinarily corrupt and incompetent military that can’t protect borders or put down a mickey-mouse, bandit-led insurrection in Chechnya.

Even though it’s becoming obvious that Putin’s FSB handlers are themselves little more than another oligarchic gang– note the wonderfully mysterious entity, almost certainly an FSB front organization, that snapped up Yukos on behalf of state-dominated Gazprom– it’s not at all clear that ownership of nearly 40% of Russia’s economy by seven swindlers, incl Khodorkovsky, is preferable. Kohodrokovsky should have been thrown in prison in 1995 for his crimes. Or even in 1998, when his charade of a “bank” swindled thousands of ordinary Russian depositors out of their life savings.

Today’s Russians have the basis of a normal, healthy civic society. As is so often the case in other coutnries around the world, it’s the Russians’ miserably brutal, incompetent, kleptocratic leaders who are to blame for the mess.

best,

thibaud

Once again I run the odd risk of seeming sympathetic to Putin. Putin, it seems to me, is between a rock and a hard place in the middle of an avalanche.

Pull up the CIA World Factbook and start poking around at what that slice of the world between Russia and Iran looks like.

Russia already has its hands full just with Chechnya. Kazakhstan is predominately muslim. Uzbekistan is overwhelmingly muslim. Both are loaded with petro and other natural resources access to which is essential to any Russian hope of rebuilding their economy.

Russia has problems that dwarf their islamo terrorists problem. Putin is (according to my knuckleheaded speculation) trying to buy off Russia’s Islamic problem through influence with Iran. He’s got no end of problems and precious few tools to try to use to mitigate them, let alone solve them. Bribing the mullahs and gathering some cold, hard cash while doing so probably seems downright sensible to him. Who else but Iran represents any hope of keeping that wolf at bay for him?

He’s trying to keep that problem away from his throat with as few fingers as possible while his real fight is getting control of the internal situation in Russia so that, hopefully, he can the whole mess healthy enough to deal with China before its too late.

Not only that, but I once saw a report from some petro industry guru who made a convincing case that Russia’s most promising way to put its own oil on the market was through Iran. Maybe somebody who knows something about the realities of the oil situation in that part of the world can comment on that.

1. I hate to sound like a whack-nut but is anyone else wierded out by this coalition between Russia and Iran? It’s like someone watched that tv movie about Nostradamus’s predictions and decided “hey, this is a plan.”. ugh.

2. Russia is more than a 3rd rate power, it’s a 3rd rate power quickly becoming a 4th rate power. The “reforms” Putin has instituted has cost Russia most of the foreign investors that had been keeping the economy growing. Then there’s the issue of incredibly adult male mortality in Russia due to men drinking themselves to death. Add to this mix the millions of ethnic Chinese now occupying Siberia and the probable annexation of that land by China.

This is not the picture of a vibrant healthy nation. The only thing that could possibly make it worse is if they joined the EU. And don’t think that’s not a possibility either. Putin seems to have the “EU Commissioner” mindset down pat.

3. Is anyone else completely unimpressed by Putin? This guy is supposed to be sophisticated. A former KGB agent and now the President of Russia. And yet this twit doesn’t have even the slightest grip on American politics? Not even a single clue as to how American media works?

UNimpressive.

http://www.paulieworld.com/blog/archives/001966.html

Now what if the guys in that theatre had a dirty bomb?

The Angry Left addresses polities by purposefully obscene rants not to make its points, not emphasize priorities, but to claim attention out-of-context, that is, outside civil contexts where –they’re right [no pun]– little of substance can be addressed. But by this token, discourse becomes immune to dialogue… by emulating “broadcasts” they become impervious to all response. It is not a healthy situation. If not terminal, curative measures for the disease are ill-defined.

May their silence become more accurate!

“Too late Thomson, you’re in the penalty box for twenty minutes for misuse of the apostrophe.”

Sorry, misuse of apostrophe is only a 2-minute minor, not worthy of a 20-minute (much less 10) game misconduct.

The Return of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy!

You will be assimilated…

BTW – how did the gallbladder surgery go? I had one over 20 years ago when they had to little cut open your stomach and was in a LOT of pain for a while. Hope you’re feeling better.