Posted on 09/19/2016 8:56:10 PM PDT by Olog-hai
At this point I can’t say I feel sorry for Russians. Its on them now. They put this tyrant back in power, so as all foreign investment dries up and they end up out of work, they can blame themselves. And I hope to hell the IMF, World Bank and the US do not come riding to their rescue.
He plays the “them and us” card perfectly. He unifies the people against the Great Satan, the US, and he was very smart to get the Orthodox Church on his side (scratch their back and they scratch his).
Unlike Nazi Germany, none of the emblems of Russia’s totalitarian past have ever been dismantled. That has to tell you something.
Chomsky must be delighted.
I think in secret many in the left in the US are smiling as well.
Excerpted from here.So one should not be in a hurry to bury the Soviet regime. It is still, fairly firmly, on its feet. There are several reasons for its stability-the scores of millions of corpses within its foundations, disinterested Western help, the reluctance of the free world to defend its own freedom. But there is one other most important factor which gives the Soviet regime its internal stability-the triangular structure of the state.Only three forces are active in the Soviet political arena-the Party, the Army and the KGB. Each of these possesses enormous power, but this is exceeded by the combined strength of the other two. Each has its own secret organisation, which is capable of reaching into hostile countries and monitoring developments there. The Party has its Control Commission-a secret organisation which has almost as much influence inside the country as the KGB. The KGB is a grouping of many different secret departments, some of which keep an eye on the Party. The Army has its own secret service-the GRU-the most effective military intelligence service in the world.
Each of these three forces is hostile to the others and has certain, not unreasonable pretensions to absolute power but its initiatives will always fail in the face of the combined opposition of the other two.
Of the three, the Party has the smallest resources for self-defence in open conflict. But it has a strong lever at its disposal-the appointment and posting of all officials. Every general in the Army and every colonel in the KGB takes up his post and is promoted or demoted only with the approval of the Administrative Department of the Central Committee of the Party. In addition, the Party controls all propaganda and ideological work and it is always the Party which decides what constitutes true Marxism and what represents a deviation from its general line. Marxism can be used as an additional weapon when it becomes necessary to dismiss an unwanted official from the KGB, the Army or even the Party. The Party's right to nominate and promote individuals is supported by both the Army and the KGB. If the Party were to lose this privilege to the KGB, the Army would be in mortal danger. If the Army took it over, the KGB would be in an equally dangerous situation. For this reason, neither of them objects to the Party's privilege-and it is this privilege which makes the Party the most influential member of the triumvirate.
The KGB is the craftiest member of this troika. It is able, whenever it wishes, to recruit a party or a military leader as its agent: if the official refuses he can be destroyed by a compromise operation devised by the KGB. The Party remembers, only too clearly, how the KGB's predecessor was able to destroy the entire Central Committee during the course of a single year. The Army, for its part, remembers how, within the space of two months, the same organisation was able to annihilate all its generals. However, the secret power of the KGB and its cunning are its weakness as well as its strength. Both the Party and the Army have a deep fear of the KGB and for this reason they keep a very close eye on the behaviour of its leaders, changing them quickly and decisively, if this becomes necessary.
The Army is potentially the most powerful of the three and therefore it has the fewest rights. The Party and the KGB know very well that, if Communism should collapse, they will be shot by their own countrymen, but that this will not happen to the Army. The Party and the KGB acknowledge the might of the Army. Without it their policies could not be carried out, either at home or abroad. The Party and the KGB keep the Army at a careful distance, rather as two hunters might control a captured leopard with chains, from two different sides. The tautness of this chain is felt even at regimental and battalion level. The Party has a political Commissar in every detachment and the KGB a Special Department.
#9. What the “Russian people” want is irrelevant in a Marxist-Criminal Russia, led by eternal KGB thugs in league with the Russia Mafia.
Russia is NOT Kansas, Toto.
Yes, and we have a tyrant too. Sad. Well, the world should leave Putin to his own problems. Putin needs money — he should earn it the old fashioned way. Capitalism and some freedoms. How many times does communism have to fall before they get the message??
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That is because True Biblical Christianity is freedom.
Communism is it's own cult-style belief system. Pootie is a rabid follower. It is slavery with corrupt and evil individuals at the controls to lord over their underlings. Putin has never gotten over his Soviet brainwashing and now he is compelled to reinvent it in his image.
He has already started an attempt to remove the Gospel from being preached.
9/15/16 “A New Russian Law Targets Evangelicals and Other ‘Foreign’ Religions”
http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-russia-foreign-religion-crackdown-498551
I agree. Did you see Solzenitzen’s old comment on the forum yesterday?
I don’t remember it word for word, but he seemed to think these organizations existed in Russia because the people didn’t care and allowed it.
I have no idea how he thought they could stop it.
Missed the Solzhenitzyn quote but he had a good understanding of the Russian people and how the intellectual and moral life had been squeezed out of them, first by the Czars and then by the Communists.
They were worn into submission and never really figured how to get their freedom. That is why alcoholism shot through the roof. Alcohol was the refuge from Communism and their bleak existence under it.
It was mainly the literary intellectuals who spoke out, through their writings, against the system, i.e. the original “Rage Against the Machine” movement in a 20th century country.
If you have a monopoly on “force”, you win. It is only when the military turn against the regime is there a chance to overthrow a communist government as they tried to do in Hungary, 1956 and successfully in Romania in the late 1980’s.
Other Soviet bloc countries regained some semblance of freedom when the Soviet Union collapsed and its military was significantly withdrawn from the occupied countries.
Even then, Soviet military presence in Ukraine and possibly Latvia or Lithuania (one has a Soviet base), remain daggers in the heart of real freedom.
Those comments sound reasoned. I agree with your thoughts.
Strange, isn’t it? None of the regular Putinista low lives showed up on this thread to defend their hero. They usually appear like roaches.
They’re sleeping another one off. Or, it might be a Russian holiday of some kind. In any case, they remain relatively quiet unless Vladi invades another defenseless country. So we have that going for us . . . maybe nothing is in the works.
Russia is no more socially conservative than any other Communist state (Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Venezuela). Why we have conservatives cheering for Russia while condemning the others is beyond me.
One might as well sing the praises of Castro or Chavez as Putin.
Yes, I don’t quite get them. Yes, I understand we have our own problems, but lets not be fooled by the KGB.
Yet Russia has a flat tax, if I’m not mistaken. Real Marxists believe in progressive taxation. Putin is a authoritarian statist, but I don’t think he’s really Marxist anymore (if he ever was)
#58. What you are saying is that Putin is “A Marxist in Name Only” but is really just a “Thug Crook in a Suit”.
Can’t argue with that.
I’m saying that Putin is not a Marxist anymore, just a statist crook and despot.
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