Posted on 09/19/2016 8:56:10 PM PDT by Olog-hai
I don’t recall Putin ever having called himself a Marxist ever since the fall of the old Soviet Union. But he is indeed a “Thug Crook in a Suit”.
Flat taxes can be progressive in nature. The Manifesto mentions “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” as Plank 2 of communism; it does not get any more specific than that.
How Russia governs herself is none of our business.
Not my circus. Not my monkeys.
OK then. Same applies to North Korea, Iran, Red China and their other allies, correct?
Doesn't matter what he calls himself, or admits openly. The Russians, particularly the KGB/FSB were/are masters at the art of deception.
Check out my post 26 on this thread. You can, if you want, read both books online.
Putin is a untrustworthy and unsavory despot, but Golitsyn is a fraud. He claimed that the collapse of Communism in not just the Soviet Union, but also the rest of East Europe was staged.
"The "Sino-Soviet Split," the alleged splits between the USSR and Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and Moscow's "break" with so-called "Eurocommunist" moderates in Western Europe were all elaborate deceptions managed by the Kremlin and its KGB strategists. An equally elaborate deception is the KGB-created "Russian Mafia," which is blamed for the corruption, violence, chaos, and mayhem that have plagued Russia and the CIS since they "went capitalist."
In truth, all of the leading Russian crime bosses, the "oligarchs," — Loutchansky, Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Khordokovsky, Mogilevich — are veterans of the KGB-FSB and/or the Komsomol, the Communist Youth, and were "set up" in business by the KGB, following a refined version of Lenin's New Economic Program of the 1920s. Besides providing the fictitious appearance of a genuine free market to attract Western capital and technology, the KGB-Mafia also provides an efficient means for dealing with political undesirables: when a foreign or domestic "troublemaker" needs to be liquidated, it can be done with the blame falling on unidentified criminal elements, rather than the State, or communist officials.
Amazingly Accurate Predictions
With his intimate knowledge of the KGB strategy, Golitsyn accurately foresaw, years ahead of actual events, many specific developments that have now occurred. He correctly predicted that Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov would be succeeded by "a younger leader with a more liberal image," perfectly describing Mikhail Gorbachev and the political restructuring process that would be carried out under the name "perestroika."
In his 1984 blockbuster book, New Lies for Old, Golitsyn correctly predicted that Solidarity would be legalized in Poland and allowed to form a coalition government with the communists after sham multiparty elections. He also foresaw, with astonishing precision, democratization in Czechoslovakia, with a revival of former communist dictator Dubcek and close allies; the opening of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany as the core for a United Europe; the implementation of "democracy" in such countries as Romania and Hungary; the end of the Warsaw Pact; and the efforts of Eastern European governments to join the European Community as a prelude to unification with the West. Golitsyn even stated that these changes would begin during the five years following his 1984 book — which actually happened, from Gorbachev's appointment in 1985 to the renewal in Eastern Europe since early 1989.
Mark Riebling, author of the important 1994 book Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, says of Golitsyn's predictions in New Lies for Old: "139 out of 148 were fulfilled by the end of 1993 — an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent." That record is even more astonishing when one considers that Mr. Riebling's assessment includes only the more prominent of Golitsyn's projections; it does not include many of his more subtle analyses and forecasts. No other foreign policy analyst even comes close to Golitsyn's level of accuracy and depth of analysis.
James J. Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, and Alexander Count de Marenches, who headed French intelligence, both saw Golitsyn as an invaluable ally and an indispensable asset in our efforts to understand the Soviets' geo-political chess game. Unfortunately, both of these men were opposed by powerful forces in their governments who wanted to believe in and embrace the perestroika deception. Angleton and de Marenches were fired, while Golitsyn and his warnings were ignored — when they weren't scorned and ridiculed.
A Not-so-grand Bargain
On May 20, 1991, Russia's economic adviser Grigory A. Yavlinsky met with a group of cognoscenti from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the private U.S. organization that has dominated both Republican and Democratic administrations since at least FDR's time. The group, which included Stephen Sachs, Graham Allison, Stanley Fischer, and Robert Blackwill, drew up what they termed a "grand bargain" which recommended granting the Soviets $15 to $30 billion per year for several years. A few days later, on May 24, the New York Times went even further with an editorial ("A Western Spur to Soviet Reform") urging a Soviet bailout package of $150 billion. This was followed with an article by Allison and Blackwill in the CFR's prestigious journal Foreign Affairs calling for aid of "$15 billion to $20 billion per year for each of the next three years."
At a 47-nation Soviet aid conference convened in Washington in January 1992, President George Bush (the elder) pledged more than $5 billion. But that was just to prime the pump; untold billions have followed since.
As costly as our Russian foreign policy has been financially, the cost to our national security has been immeasurably greater. For more than two decades, America's leaders have marched our nation headlong into the deadly perestroika trap, ignoring the warnings of Anatoliy Golitsyn and the overwhelming evidence that vindicates those warnings. They have embraced the Russian and CIS leaders as our "allies" and intertwined our military, police, and intelligence agencies as "partners" in global security.
Now, with Putin's FSB Chekists coming brazenly into the open, it is long past time to repudiate this deception and reverse course — before the trap door is shut and bolted behind us.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia
For some detailed discussions on the subject...
Golitsyn’s Predictions re: The Phony Collapse of the Soviet Union
New Lies For Old and Perestroika Deception (books) | 1984 | Anatoliy Golitsyn
Posted on 2/20/2005
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/1347260/posts
_____________________________
The Golitsyn Predictions
Mark Riebling ^ | 08-17-06 | Mark Riebling
Posted on 8/17/2006
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1685620/posts
Give me the “Golitsyn predictions”, and let me see them myself. MI5’s official historian, Christopher Andrew,called him an “unreliable conspiracy theorist”.Andrew believes that although intelligence data provided by Golitsyn was reliable, some of his global political assessments of the Soviet and KGB strategy are questionable. In particular, he disputed the Golitsyn claim that the “Sino-Soviet split was a charade to deceive the West”.
You can find a careful analysis of all of that at the 2 FR links above.
I think that Golitsyn was, at least to some extent, a legit defector; however, I think that he may have basically exaggerated some things or even made some up in order to ensure his value.
I know, but is Russia’s flat tax progressive?
Here’s some of Golitsyn’s “predictions”.
“…introduction of false liberalization in Eastern Europe, and probably, in the Soviet Union.”
He’s saying that the collapse of Communism in not just the USSR, but the rest of Eastern Europe was staged. Doesn’t look like that to me,
“…and the exhibition of spurious independence on the part of the regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.”
“Spurious”, yeah, right, Czechoslovakia ethnically split—fortunately peacefully—and both Czech, Slovakia, Romania and Poland are now in NATO.
“A coalition government in Poland would in fact be totalitarianism under a new, deceptive, and more dangerous guise.”
Accepted as the spontaneous emergence of a new form of multiparty, semi democratic regime, it would serve to undermine resistance to communism inside and outside the communist block.”
Poland’s hardly totalitarian, and as I said, a NATO member.
“New possibilities would arise for splitting Western Europe away from the United States, of neutralizing Germany, and destroying NATO.”
“The Czechoslovaks, in contrast with their performance in 1968, might well take the initiative, along with the Romanians and Yugoslavs, in proposing (in the CSCE context) the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in return for the dissolution of NATO.”
“…but the dissolution of NATO could well mean the departure of American forces from the European continent and a closer European alignment with a “liberalized” Soviet bloc.”
Uh, NATO’s alive and well and incorporated Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. I’m no fan of Putin-I’d trust him about as far as I could throw him, (and I couldn’t even pick him up), but Golitsyn sounds to me like a big bull sh*t artist.
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