The Putin regime is beginning to resemble that of Leonid Brezhnev, who never stirred the waters and always maintained the status quo – while sending troops into Afghanistan in a show of might that turned out to be illusory. The Putin administration may be remembered in a similar way – for having maintained the status quo at a very high price, including a bloody war in Chechnya.
The Russia Journal, “An empty address” 18 May 2003 http://russiajournal.com/node/15335
http://russia-insider.com/en/dont-get-stuck-details-its-not-complicated/ri12383
The recent Litvinenko report has set me thinking. I’ve been writing about the affair (here from 2007) and reading about it since it happened. The story metastasises on and on. Scaramella comes and goes. First it was thallium, then it was polonium. The Chechen connection. A man who doesn’t speak much English suddenly writes a fluent death note. Berezovskiy loses all his money, begs Putin to let him back into Russia and then kills himself. Then there are the endless details of who met whom and where and when. New stuff periodically appears (like this video alleging Litvinenko was contaminating places before he was “poisoned”). Mountains of details to examine and argue over. The file grows bigger and bigger but no one is ever persuaded; it gets more and more confusing and the points of argument get smaller and smaller.
But there’s a much simpler approach that cuts out this interminable minutiae. William of Ockham would like it. And it’s simply this: if Putin had decided to have Litvinenko killed, there is absolutely no way he would have chosen this method. Natasha has nailed it. Therefore, whatever happened to Litvinenko, it has nothing to do with Putin. QED.
Weapons inspectors arrive in Syria to check whether Assad is using chemical weapons. As their plane is landing, about an hour’s drive away, Assad launches a CW attack on civilians. No way. No one is that stupid. Therefore, whoever did it wasn’t Assad. Don’t bother arguing with Bellingcat’s chin pulling, any rational person can figure that out. QED.
US Secretary of State John Kerry assures us that the US has all the data, who fired it, where it came from and everything else relating to MH17. But we’ve never seen a smidgeon of it or any explanation why we haven’t. Anybody can figure out that, if the evidence were there, we would have seen it. Therefore the rebels didn’t do it. No need to argue over a billboard on some grainy film. QED.
Who did do these things? Well, now we have to dive into the minutiae and argue about this and that. But an intelligent twelve-year old can figure out 1) not Putin 2) not Assad 3) not the rebels. QED.
But there are still some questions. Who is so contemptuous of us that he (or she) expects us to believe that Putin would chose such a roundabout method of assassination and one that immediately made people point at him? Who thinks we’re stupid enough believe that Assad would practically gas the inspectors? Who thinks we can’t figure out that the gigantic US intelligence organisation must have seen something and, if they haven’t showed it to us, what it must have been?
Questions for a later time: I have a theory but I’m still thinking.
Putin, of course, is no Peter. The KGB lieutenant colonel who was abruptly bumped into the presidential throne of a nation in total disarray comes nowhere near “the Great” in ambition, potential, drive or physical height.
Serge Schmemann, “THE WORLD: Czar Peter, Meet Putin; Eastern or Western? Both. And Neither.”, New York Times, March 12, 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/12/weekinreview/the-world-czar-peter-meet-putin-eastern-or-western-both-and-neither.html
It will take us approximately fifteen years and an annual growth of our Gross Domestic Product by 8 percent a year to reach the per capita GDP level of present-day Portugal or Spain, which are not among the world’s industrialised leaders.
Vladimir Putin, “Russia at the turn of the millennium”, 1999 http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Putin.htm
Here is the Litvinenko report https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/Litvinenko-Inquiry-Report-web-version.pdf
The word “probably” occurs 35 times; “possibly” 12; “maybe” 3; “perhaps” 35; “could be” 29.
The reader is invited to look for more incidents of what is basically “I dunno, but I’m going to say it anyway”.
Communism vividly demonstrated its inaptitude for sound self-development, dooming our country to a steady lag behind economically advanced countries. It was a road to a blind alley, which is far away from the mainstream of civilization.
Vladimir Putin, “Russia at the turn of the millennium”, 1999 http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Putin.htm
Today there is a new president, Vladimir Putin. It is not at all clear if democracy is his ultimate goal. What is clear is that his authoritarian methods are focused on restoring a centralized Russian state whose power relies on fear, not persuasion or education. He presides over a group of criminal oligarchs, former KGB and military men, and old communist apparatchiks, most of whom would have been right at home in the higher echelons of the Soviet government. Intelligence agents are now part of the presidential directorate; special military counterintelligence departments have been restored. ‘You can’t get anywhere without secret agents,’ Putin has said. Putin expresses pride in his own KGB background, without seeming to understand how the KGB made the Soviet Union a place of fear, even terror, for most of the past century.
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief, “A Great Step Backward”, U.S. News & World Report, October 9, 2000 http://www.russialist.org/archives/4556.html##5
Her first article, published as Syria’s government started to attack citizens, was met with a wave of criticism. Both Buck and Vogue’s editor, Anna Wintour, were accused of taking part in a public relations campaign on behalf of the Syrian regime.
Within a month or so, the article was removed from the magazine’s website. Almost a year later Wintour broke her silence on the matter to explain that “we were hopeful that the Assad regime would be open to a more progressive society” but “as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue.”
Buck’s contract with Vogue was not renewed and that’s when she decided to offer an a 5,000-word explanation for her original sin.
It suggests that she was the victim of of manipulation from beginning to end…
Reference: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/aug/01/asma-al-assad-anna-wintour
I don’t know when it became impossible to say anything good about Putin, but, as I’m trying to show by my quotations about Putin series, it was pretty early in the game.
But the Assad thing is interesting, isn’t it? The moment when the Word comes down from on high and otherwise trendy and with-it people are instructed that they must eat crow. We don’t often see it in action do we?
The author fired, the article withdrawn and a Big Wheel forced to apologise.
Ikea has arrived in Moscow. So has a tight-lipped 47-year-old KGB staffer, with clear blue eyes and authoritarian tendencies strong enough to bomb one of Russia’s republics back into the middle ages…Now a man like Vladimir Putin has arrived to remind the IMF just how far the dark continent has slipped back into the Tsarist 19th century.
David Hearst, How Russia was lost, The Guardian, 27 March 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/27/russia.comment1
Psychiatry recognizes a condition known as “moral idiocy.” Every time he opens his mouth in public, Putin confirms this diagnosis for himself. Do you want to know what life will be like in Russia over the next 8 or maybe 14 years? Go to the B. Pokrovsky theater to see Alfred Schnitke’s opera “Life with an idiot.” Geniuses are able to tell the future without even realizing it.
Andrei Piontkovsky, The Russia Journal, 2000 http://russiajournal.com/node/2857
Russia Observer 