Posted on 11/11/2017 12:20:21 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
I liked Fred Barnes when he was on the show “Beltway Boys” on FoxNews. We probably disagree on a few things, but is he a sabotaging never-Trumper the way Kristol is. I do not think Kristol is religious.
Putin has done great harm to Russia and taken advantage of American weakness. His system is collapsing from within though and it is only a matter of time before massive changes come to Russia. You will know it when it happens. Pray for the Russian people.
Read for later:
But is Fred Barnes a never-Trumper the way Kristol is?** is meant to be a question. Sorry typo.
If so, that is unfortunate. Otherwise, I respect that he is trying to lend a Christian perspective to things even if there are some conclusions I disagree with. I do not think Kristol identifies as Christian. This specific article is on point though.
‘’’BUT Russia BOTCHED its 2-decade opportunity to be a genuine standard-bearer for what has been lost in the West and instead chose to revive nostalgia for everything which made it collapse in the first place. Nostalgia for both tsarist Empire days AND the Soviet Union — the VERY SYSTEM whose reverberations of 1) socialism, 2) bureaucratization, and polluted fumes of 3) godless secularism continue to choke the foundations of our own civilization and act as cancer on the human spirit.’’’
What was BOTCHING it before Putin? And what has shaped his policies in the first place? You need to answer these questions for the analysis to be consistent.
As for socialism you should pay more attention to his debates with actual socialists which are available online. He is certainly on the right of many Western politicians who calls themselves ‘conservatives’.
Pay attention to actual policies as well. Right now they are seriouly considering to abolish socialized health care and duscussing privatization of federal pension fund.
As for godless secularism don’t get me started. What was the starting point? Don’t you know what Soviet Union was in that department? Regardless all the flaws Russia is closer to God than ever in a hundred years.
‘’’And finally: * The republics of Chechnya (ran by Putin’s pal Kadyrov) and Dagestan are bastions of Islamic radicalism. * More ISIS fighters coming from Russia than anywhere else. * The most recent NYC attack was committed by a terrorist raised in the former SOVIET nation of Uzbekistan — which remains heavily under the Russian sphere of influence.’’’
Did you pay attention to what was going on in these places just a decade ago? Not to mention Uzbekistan is designated as a bad place by State Department not because of islamism but because its bad for ‘civil society’ which is a newspeak for authorities who are ‘too hard’ on islamists.
I am not saying it IS the Soviet Union. I am saying they are stalled by the fact that they still celebrate the USSR’s former glory while not dealing or healing from its crimes. Hence the Stalin nostalgia going unchallenged.
Russia had an opportunity to modernize, be prosperous, and truly live out its new re-discovered faith — but even the faithful are choked by the toxic statism and revival of Soviet demons.
When you are there long enough, it is palpable and disturbing, which is why there are so many Russians emigrating out to the “decaying West.”
That being said, once Putin’s system finally crumbles, I think it will finally come to its own. So much potential.
Stalin was condemned by the Soviets themselves in 1956, like half a century before Putin took office. Stalin’s crimes are well-known and studied as a part of school curriculum as such in both Soviet Union and Russia ever since.
When you see a bunch of old idiots marching with his portraits or photoshopping his images into religious symbols it is nothing but their freedom of expression. Let them do it and ignore them.
As for prosperity before that international anti-Russian campaign and sanctions took place their PPP per capita GDP was around $25,000. That’s firmly First World.
Under Yeltsyn government most Russians couldn’t earn enough to eat every day.
I can’t disagree that Putin’s policies has its flaws but what do you want to see after ‘the system crumbles’?
Any exact variants, please?
That you can see in Russia today is a lot like South Korea 40+ years ago. There was corruption here and some authoritarism there but was destroying it for a sake of hope and change a good idea? They had plenty of leftist who’d say it is.
In a long run you can compare South and North Korea for the answer.
Its not enough to look at numbers. These national transitions have a psycho-spiritual dimension to them that cannot be quantified economically. The Korean people’s “psycho-spiritual” and historical circumstances are different from Russia’s - though *suffering* and *trauma* are most definitely common elements of both. I will give you that. And the Korean national psyche is most defined (however subconsciously) by the border line with the North on the peninsula. They are, in effect, at constant war with their “other half.”
Political history and culture different, not to mention South Korea has an American military presence...and American influence is felt beyond the military. And even if Koreans don’t always admit it, it has been crucial to their success in developing.
The Russian GDP of the 2000s was indicative of increased standard of living to be sure and even a nascent middle class...but the system was such that most of wealth (result of lucky oil prices) still somehow managed to be swallowed up by a chosen, kleptocratic few.
‘’’’The Russian GDP of the 2000s was indicative of increased standard of living to be sure and even a nascent middle class...but the system was such that most of wealth (result of lucky oil prices) still somehow managed to be swallowed up by a chosen, kleptocratic few.’’’’
Yes, it is a shame when the wealth is swallowed by the chosen but it is how governments are operating and Russia is not unique it that.
Bottom line is current Russian administration presides over a country with the level of the wealth and opportunities unseen through all of the Russian history for thousand year before this administration and you believe this administration has to be destroyed over swallowing wealth and taking away opportunities which weren’t in place ever before?
That doesn’t seem logical.
What do you believe will replace it?
Indeed economically and even socially, the country is stronger than before, despite all its problems —> but in order to maintain power and co-dependence, the State sees it in its interest to brainwash the people into thinking the Soviet Union glory days were oh so much better and the goal is to recapture them in some fashion...hence slogans like “Crimea is Ours!” Holding so much sway.
And “damn the crazy 90s when we had all that awful freedom.”
It has to be this way lest the public demands a complete transition into a truly federal, democratic system...which I believe is what will replace it. Eventually.
The main problem in Russia is that the people have not properly dealt with their past. There is a LOT of suppressed grieving for horrors of Soviet past. No repentance = no healing.
They did not go through a Nuremberg process like the Germans did.
‘’’And “damn the crazy 90s when we had all that awful freedom.”’’’
What freedom did they have in 1990s and don’t have now?
‘’’They did not go through a Nuremberg process like the Germans did.’’’
Do you realize that Stalin is dead? Khruschev is dead too and so is Brezhnev. Who do you want to put on trial?
‘’’It has to be this way lest the public demands a complete transition into a truly federal, democratic system...which I believe is what will replace it. Eventually.’’’
And how do you think this transition should occur? Who do you think are potential leaders?
Despite all the mafia madness and resource plundering, the 90s also included novelties like oh you know: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, things like that.
Today, you could be sent to jail simply for “Liking” an offensive social media post. Saying something like “Crimea is Ukraine” in public falls under the classification of extremism and can also send you to jail. Non-Orthodox Evangelism outside church facilities is now also banned under the 2016 Yarovaya Law.
You can only hold protests with a permit and sanctioned by officials.
Russian opposition is a mess. For an update on the latest “challenger” to Putin for upcoming March “elections”, you can google/youtube the name Ksenia Sobchak. Is she a Kremlin stooge? Is she the real deal? Nooooobody knows.
Dubbed “the Russian Paris Hilton” (from a rich, political Putin-tied family) who transformed into a serious opposition crusader-journalist during the 2011-12 protests when Putin re-assumed the presidency after stepping down in ‘08....
But above all, you must watch at least some of this video I will link you to. This is what stirred up major protests in March, June, and October of this year in hundreds of cities throughout Russia and mostly among the youth. It features opposition leader Alexei Navalny who is currently banned from running for office due to embezzlement charges or something or other...apparently a politically motivated accusation...
He is the biggest voice right now, but many agree he isn’t adequate enough to be a true “leader.” Judge for yourself there are English subtitles:
The limits on freedoms you are mentioning are quite novel. Most are post-2012 and are a reaction to counter organized agitation bordering sedition which took place at the time.
You probably didn’t pay attention but a sort of Arab Spring was going on in Russia at the time too.
And these limitations aren’t near as harsh as propagated anyway.
"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"
*******************************************************************************
Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.
Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler -- an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics -- calling it a "collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."
But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939 nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower was built.
Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule.
Recent tributes celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis.
As Putin has sought to recover territory lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a "sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian speakers beyond his nation's borders.
On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.
Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia to Western domination.
Over the last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented dictator Josef Stalin's bloody 29-year reign as the foundation on which the Soviet superpower was built.
Stalin lives again, at least in minds and hearts.
Stalin "kept us all together, there was a friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America."
Such sentiments are no longer confined to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.
The share of Russians who look back approvingly has been increasing steadily in recent years, and the segment of those who tell pollsters they have no opinion on his place in their history has shot up even more sharply, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center.
He points to this year's massive Victory Day events as the Kremlin's message to ungrateful neighbors that they owe their peace and prosperity to the wartime deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens.
"The figure of Stalin is being justified through the war," Volkov said. "There is an attitude now that, yes, there were repressions and, yes, there were huge losses, but we won the war after all."
Victory exonerated Stalin's excesses, just as it does Putin's "strongman" posture toward neighbors and former Soviet subjects now outside the Russian Federation's borders, Volkov said.
Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin -- the Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel."
Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall. Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and streets, institutes and schools were renamed.
But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid recounting of his era was attempted.
Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit of criticism of Stalin’s errors. During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered as immoral.
The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges, summary executions and slave labor camps.
The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million.
"The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves -- a hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day.
The Russian Military-Historical Society, established by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany.
The sanitized exhibits recounting Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on Russia's totalitarian era.
Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.
The stillborn museum was one of several official efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his 1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula.
Stalin has weathered more than six decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalin’s political purges.
"Just as Stalin defeated the West 70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."
Svanidze also predicts there will be no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html
South Korea makes products like cars and TV-s and cellphones. They have almost no natural resources. Russia just sells oil and gas. Putin got lucky as his start of rule coincided with the oil price boom.
As historians point out its not “mass” repressions going on today, but “targeted.” So the “occasional” journalist is murdered. The “occasional” harmless protester is beaten up, the occasional “religious minority” is imprisoned etc...
How Russia works is on pact agreements between the people and its leaders: “IF you provide me A, B, and C - I shut up.” And the Putin agreement is basically: “Ikea-catalogue living standards and enough money for vaycays abroad in exchange for freedom.’ Or “National pride in empire in exchange for elections.”
But the economy tanks (even before Western sanctions) - then the Crimea high is gone and replaced by sanctions...the oligarchs somehow grow more grotesquely wealthy and flaunt it.
People may feel a sense of buyers remorse, but have staked so much on “the system” they refuse to question it....so some just casually, you know, just move abroad. You know just to “check things out” “try something new.” Nothing to do with Vlad of course. They’re still good with him. *rolleyes*
The reality: they see no real future for themselves or their children in Russia.
That’s all sounds great but for about a decade Russia was only second to US per number of people from around the world coming to live there, only recently replaced by Germany.
They aren’t only Ukrainians and Uzbekistanis.
About 120 000 US citizens holds Russian green card and work permits.
Life there is better as a foreigner esp as a western expat than as a native Russian. More opportunities, higher pay, better social treatment, and outside enough of the State’s grip.
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