You choose to believe what you want to.
Posted on 10/30/2005 11:04:36 AM PST by Dundee
Mark Steyn: Russia is dying and Islamists will grab parts of the carcass
REMEMBER the months before 9/11? The new US President had his first meeting with the Russian President. "I looked the man in the eye and found him very straightforward and trustworthy," George W. Bush said after two hours with Vladimir Putin. "I was able to get a sense of his soul." I'm all for speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but that's way too soft.
Some experts started calling Vlad the most Westernised Russian strongman since Peter the Great and cooing about a Russo-American alliance that would be one of the cornerstones of the post-Cold War world.
It's not like that today.
From China to Central Asia to Ukraine, from its covert efforts to maintain Saddam in power to its more or less unashamed patronage of Iran's nuclear ambitions, Moscow has been at odds with Washington over every key geopolitical issue, and a few non-key ones, too, culminating in Putin's tirade to Bush that the US was flooding Russia with substandard chicken drumsticks and keeping the best ones for itself. It was a poultry complaint but indicative of a retreat into old-school Kremlin paranoia.
Russia's export of ideology was the decisive factor in the history of the 20th century. It seems to me entirely possible that the implosion of Russia could be the decisive factor in the 21st century.
As Iran's nuclear program suggests, in many of the geopolitical challenges to the US, there's usually a Russian component in the background.
In fairness to Putin, he's in a wretched position. Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century.
The longer Russia goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it, and when it comes to the future, most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted. A smaller population needn't necessarily be a problem but Russia is facing simultaneously a huge drain of wealth out of the system.
Add to that the unprecedented strains on a ramshackle public health system. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. By 2010, AIDS will be killing between 250,000 and 750,000 Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are parts of Russia that are exceptions to these malign trends. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a "Mu" and end with a "slim".
So the world's largest country is dying and the only question is how violent its death throes are. Yesterday's Russia was characterised by Winston Churchill as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Today's has come unwrapped: it's a crisis in a disaster inside a catastrophe. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has AIDS, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia's got the lot: an African-level AIDS crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet.
Of course, the nuclear materials are all in "secure" facilities: more secure, one hopes, than the supposedly secure public buildings in Nalchik that the Islamists took over with such ease two weeks ago. They also killed a big bunch of people.
Poor old Russia is awash with resources but fatally short of Russians and, in the end, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource.
What would you do if you were Putin? What have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player?
You've got nuclear knowhow, which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in.
That's the danger for America: that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to US interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East and a stronger China.
Russia's calculation is that sooner or later we'll be back in a bipolar world and that, in almost any scenario, there's more advantage in being part of the non-American pole.
In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact crumbling before his eyes, poor old Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: "The Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system."
In an odd way, that's what happened everywhere except in the Kremlin. As communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Afghanistan and Indonesia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, who would have been Marxist fantasists a generation or two back, are now Islamists: it's the ideology du jour. And, despite Gorbachev turning down the offer, it will be Russia's fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world.
We are witnessing a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies. The ideological vacuum was mostly filled with a nihilist fatalism. Churchill got it wrong: Russia is a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss.
There are 10 million Muslims in Russia, a population of 143 million, now tell me again how the 1 in 6 was gotten? I'm waiting. Oh and they breed about as fast as everyone else. That's why the total of Chechens has fallen from 900,000 to 650,000.
No one realistically expects Kasparov to win, or even garner a substantial portion of the vote.
He will be crushed, and not even his most enthusiastic supporters-or even he himself-is insinuating otherwise.
Russians are still in thrall to a profoundly complacent, apathetic mindset.
That brief efflorescence of freedom that occurred in 1991-under Boris Yeltsin-was evanescent.
NTV is gone, the last independent reporter for Izvestiya is gone, and there are virtually no remaining broad-based channels for dissent.
The Russians have returned to the time of Samizdat, and subterranean outlets used by refuseniks to voice dissent from the diktats of the ruling regime.
Whether or not Khasnayov, or Kasparov, or Yavlinsky, or any other opposition leader is properly equipped to do battle with the forces of revanchism and blind allegiance to Putin's autocratic tendencies-and I'm not disputing your assertion that they aren't-is entirely beside the point.
People today-even ex-KGB agents such as Putin-love to valorize the achievements of heroic figures like Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, Sakharov, Nureyev; cultural, religious, and political dissidents all.
They hail the same individuals that were mercilessly persecuted by their predecessors.
Let me tell you, this idea that they were supported by a silent majority of Russians is complete and utter bunkum.
They were not only a numerical minority, but they were a minority in terms of opinion.
Most people living in the Soviet Union-unfortunately-were reconciled to their misery, lest they provoke an even more harsh reality at the hands of the USSR's internal security apparatus.
The Mitrokhin Archive is illustrative in this regard.
It explores just how successful the KGB-domestic thought police-and FCD-international branch-were in eradicating political opposition with ruthless efficacy.
The sad truth is that, prior to Glastnost and Perestroika-and the arrival of Gorbachev on center stage-Yuri Andropov had almost completely eliminated any significant internal dissent, save for a few implacable religious groups, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses.
This is a perpetual struggle, in which men like Kasparov will ALWAYS be in the distinct minority.
That does not make their fight any less worthy, or mean that their efforts should be denigrated.
Steyn is right
Christians and Jews...and maybe Sikhs too
need to get down baby and start getting some broods going
I'd hate to see the Moon Rockies whip us like this.
We can do better!
Come on people!
Big Families, Lotsa Children!
it's a tough job...we're counting on ya'll
I think the right folks in the West. (solid responsible conservatives)
....need to have a large families.
and now.
-Ban Wahhabi prison/military chaplains.
-Make foreign aid to countries like Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, etc., contingent upon their willingness to restrain the manifestations of radical Islam, and their ability to close Saudi-financed madrassas.
-Demand that Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, i.e. our client states in the Gulf, immediately allow Christian missionaries to proselytize in their countries.
-Start moving to (covertly) carve up Saudi Arabia, e.g. return the Hijaz to the Hashemites, threaten-in private-to give the Shia in the oil-rich regions of that country military support for any insurgency they're willing to undertake, UNLESS King Abdullah starts catering to our demands...
-Start encouraging the Kurds in Syria to assert their rights, and give their brethren in Iraqi Kurdistan, the peshmergas, carte blanche to assist them.
-Give the Azeris, Kurds, and Afghan refugees the equipment they need to start fomenting trouble for the IRI, before those mad mullahs finally go on line with those nuclear warheads.
And the moment it explodes we'll gather up the uranium isotopes and track it down (like a finger print) back to the reactor that created it.
They are losing their rate of growth in population due to ABORTION.
When you kill one child -- you are killing all the children she and he were meant to have, too.
yep...and we are almost as bad here
That statement is almost to funny. What happened under Yeltsin was a small clique of local billionaires and foreign interest raping Russia. Most of the population decline, economic collapse (there was very little real growth as the banking collapse of 98 showed and killed Yeltsin's regime), infrastructural theft and massive debt occurred under Yeltsin. All those liberal parties were the kings of the Duma from 1991-1998.
The Russian people got tired of being raped, poor, miserable and constantly told how dumb they were by the Liberal intelligentsia of Yablaka, SRS, etc and decided to show them where the door was. Good for them.
Oh and as far as Yeltsin and freedom...you mean the same Yeltsin who in 1993 massacred 500 members of parliament and their staffs in the Duma when they refused to sell off Russian assets directly to the Oligarchs and Western special interests (like the chums that Clinton sent over there)? Some freedom....surround the legislature and butcher it with tanks.
that is abominable
The Russian government owns one, ONE, television station out of 7 national stations and we're not even going to count the thousands of newspapers.
Good, since he is much closer to Gore or Kerry then to Bush.
Abortion after 12 weeks is against the law and there is a massive push by the Church, the nationalists and conservatives to end it period. Also the number of abortions have actually been declining from around 80-90% to 70% and dropping.
You choose to believe what you want to.
L
It seems to me that the reason why goes beyond what Mr. Steyn was barking about. You'd think that trend would reverse a bit. Perhaps some more muslim regions in Russia and parts of Siberia will actually break away from the federation. The remainder of Russia might even be better off as a result.
I'll bet you that Russians are more religious now than at any time in the previous century.
Would this be something similar to a turduckin?
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