I thought I told you to take care of this Caldwell, Johnny.
Posted on 11/21/2017 1:12:37 PM PST by NRx
...Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat...
...When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that. In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country...
(Excerpt) Read more at imprimis.hillsdale.edu ...
The last two paragraphs had the most objective observation; “Today’s biggest threat to the U.S. isn’t Vladimir Putin.
So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination.”
The uniparty hates Trump because he has no interest in the new world order and neither does Putin. They won’t accept that national self interest need not be colonial and expansive. Like the Soviet oligarchs the NWO crowd wants to control and loot the world’s resources using government powers.
Tell us it was inappropriate. I dare you.
You are in violation of Godwin’s Law. May God have mercy on your soul.
To understand Putin is not to necessarily like him, but it is more honest - seeing Putin in an appropriate Russian “nationalist” light, than seeing everything about Putin and Russia as “out to get the U.S.”, as much as we may remain rivals geopolitically in many areas.
I would add that in my view we lost out in Syria by attempting regime change on it.
The civil conflict (between Assad and the “Syrian opposition”) would have ended not too long after it started and with far less bloodshed and destruction (and refugees and ISIS expansion) if the west, some of the Gulf States and Turkey had not attached themselves to that opposition in what was actually their own regime change ambitions against Syria. All the states opposing Assad did was create a dysfunctional state, as much as invited the Islamists in to tear it apart and left Assad no choice but to massively change the Syria-Russia-Iran relationships.
Had none of that happened, the regional security situation vis-a-vis Syria would have remained for us in the manageable state it was in before the so-called “Arab spring” and neither Iran nor Russia would have been given the opportunities Assad had no choice but to give them in Syria.
I guess I am saying that the situation in Syria was to me NOT manufactured by Russia. Putin just accepted an opportunity our blunders there opened up.
And as for what Obama did or didn’t do? Conservatives like to complain that Obama didn’t do this or didn’t do that. I can only say that no U.S. president in 2008 to 2016 was going to get away with adding another flash point with American “boots on the ground” and without it the west was never going to command the situation in Syria and in fact the winning opposition - if we helped them succeed - was going to be another Islamist regime like Morsi and no friend of the U.S.
No. Syria is a gift from the west to Putin, because we were never going to take charge there in the fist place and those who would have (the majority in the “opposition”) were not really our friends.
I thought I told you to take care of this Caldwell, Johnny.
Dear Navy Patriot,
I get both these publications in PRINT by MAIL.
After my time in Russia, I have a counter narrative to the one this writer writes without discounting everything he says — as he makes plenty of legitimate points.
These points are made all the more legitimate by the sorry state of Western and American affairs, which unfolded at the same time during the post-Reagan years.
I will write further later, but for now, I say:
Putin’s legacy may have been more positive from my view had he left office when he initially did back in 2008. But actually, he never really left. And, the more I understand the transition of power from the 90s, the more I realize how, he took advantage of the chaos to continue the plundering of his people (albeit in a far more subtle way, at first) and enshrine heartbreaking levels of corruption in almost every facet of society from the very get-go.
I absorbed a lot of that resulting Putin-era anguish, and still do as I am in constant contact with Russian expats here in the U.S. - mostly millennials like me, who came of age in the 90s and 00’s and contribute to the new crop of out-migration from Russia of recent years. In 2015 alone, Navy Patriot, almost 300,000 Russians applied for a US Green Card lottery. Yes just for the mere CHANCE to leave. And many include people who are doing relatively well materially in places like Moscow and the like.
All I can say is: for all the “progress” Russia made materially, something much deeper and more sacred remains unrealized as a result of the Putin’s regime and the psyche of the Russian people has been broken, battered, and remains heavily bruised.
A lot of it has to do with suppressed repentance and collective healing over the horrors and atrocities of the country’s recent past.
Under Putin, Russians have lived through the revival of Soviet and Imperial demons that brought the country down in the first place. And Putin (and sadly, even the Orthodox Church) has a lot to do with this revival.
It’s not uncommon, as I did, to see portraits of Stalin side by side with icons of Jesus in the homes of average Russians.
These demons coexist with the external trappings of capitalism like McDonalds and new infrastructure (though the cities outside Moscow and St. P tell a different story infra structurally) open travel, and even the revival of religious practices.
Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, but his regime is a reminder that the State remains an inheritor to the Bolshevik legacy. And until that “cursed line” is broken, Russia will remain under the veil of a dark spiritual spell.
Yeah, primitive savages.
I third it.
“What then shall we do?”
“It’s kind of baffled me why we, Russia and China don’t get all in the same room, agree that all 3 countries benefit when they use their collective efforts to enforce peace and stop terrorism and Islamic crazies.”
Russia, China, and America. Hmm...Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania?
Just some Orwellian food for thought, comrade.
Another insightful analysis from Hillsdale College.
Ahh, now I understand, Putin has failed to make Russians apologize and prostrate themselves to Western Millennials for what Marx and Stalin (a Prussian and a Georgian) did to them.
How dare they.
He saw them as a conduit for looting Russia, and sought to restore to the country what had been stolen from it. He also saw that Russia needed to reclaim control of its vast reserves of oil and gas, on which much of Europe depended, because that was the only geopolitical lever it had left.
What did we just have happen here under the Obama administration in collusion with the Clintons? National assets/security being sold for what amounted to private gain .... $145 million at least going to the Clinton Foundation. Additionally, the Russians were trying to corner the market on uranium in the world ... and increase their geopolitical lever.
MUST reading.
He’s also refused to participate in the “international system” ;p of credit whereby the ptb enslave other countries, slowing their material growth, but saving their way of life.
One of my girlfriends is in China now. She was born in China and lived through Mao. She was a promising young student at the time and was the only child in her neighborhood selected to be sent to a special school in Beijing.
She was one year into the school when Mao started the Great Leap Forward. Her teachers were suddenly abused or even killed, and she was sent to the hinterlands to learn the ways of the proletariat by working in the fields.
She’s now a US citizen, but visits China often. This time, she says that all of her favorite stores are gone, and that she cannot find anything she wants while shopping.
I wonder what that’s about. She did send some pictures from what looked like a huge mall, and it had Christmas decorations and Christmas trees all over the place. This is Beijing.
She said she could still not find the things she wanted to buy.
Putin has made it so Stalin and his WWII victory over Hitler is the reference point by which millenials trace their national pride and identity.
The grandparents and parents of people my age continue to live under the weight of their traumas, secrets, and unresolved histories. Archives to things related to the Gulag and other records that were burst open shortly following Glasnost/Perestroika era are locked shut under Putin.
Lenin’s body remains unburied and lies in open display in Red Square in the manner of a saint.
The traumas of the Soviet era are not always as obvious as Gulag imprisonment. For example, did you know that at certain points in the 60s and 70s, there were five to seven abortions for every birth among Russian women? (The Soviet Union was the first country of the modern era to legalize the practice in the 1920s give or take a few phases of restrictions.) Those realities leave scars.
And abortion culture is just one of the major hurdles Russians must get over especially to address their demographic crisis.
I told you he was a SOB!
And you would be correct, without even reading the article!
Here’s an excerpt from the last paragraphs:
“In the same way, Putin’s conduct is bound to win sympathy even from some of Russia’s enemies, the ones who feel the international system is not delivering for them. Generally, if you like that system, you will consider Vladimir Putin a menace. If you don’t like it, you will have some sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our times. As our last election shows, that’s true even here.”
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