Tuesday 26th of November 2024
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

the secret of political longevity: a hard core of spontaneous consensus.....

In his 23 years in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has been dismissed countless times. This is because we did not understand whatever…

Nella foto sopra, quella a sinistra è una copertina di The Economist (Regno Uniti) del 2011: il titolo dice “L’inizio della fine di Putin”. Quella a destra, invece, è la Home page di Foreign Affairs (Usa) di pochi giorni fa, giugno 2023: il titolo dice “L’inizio della fine per Putin?”. In dodici anni l’unica differenza sta in quel piccolo punto interrogativo. Dodici anni per farsi venire un dubbio.

 

https://letteradamosca.substack.com/p/il-vizietto-delloccidente

BY Fulvio Scaglione

 

In the photo above, the one on the left is a cover of The Economist (UK) from 2011: the headline says "The beginning of the end of Putin". The one on the right, however, is the Home page of Foreign Affairs (USA) from a few days ago, June 2023: the title reads "The beginning of the end for Putin?". In twelve years the only difference is in that little question mark. Twelve years to get a doubt.

These are just two examples of the eternal vice of the West, especially pronounced when it comes to Russia. That of exchanging wishes for reality, assumptions for facts. Two examples, to be honest, not even among the most blatantly stoned. For 2011, The Economist was referring to the so-called White Revolution, or the wave of protests that followed the political elections, according to many Russian and foreign observers distorted by fraud in favor of United Russia, Putin's party. Foreign Affairs, on the other hand, examines the situation in Russia after the failed insurrection of Evgenyj Prigozhin, founder and leader of the Wagner Group, the powerful mercenary army which until recently was a faithful instrument of Kremlin policy. But we could cite many other examples of exaggerated predictions in the same sense. And so: why does this happen?

The tendency to judge Vladimir Putin and his power structure in the same way as a Gaddafi or a Saddam Hussein has prevented us, over the years, from understanding two fundamental questions of post-Soviet Russia. The first is that Putin did not arrive at the Kremlin with a coup d'état or even with a coup de main. That is, he did not seize power by force and monopolize it after arriving at the top by accident. Putin was chosen for that role. Not the only one, but the only one to get to the bottom of the ruthless Darwinian selection exercised by Russian politics during the years of Boris Yeltsin. Looking back on those years, the names of those who perhaps could have been Putin and were not come to mind: Sergej Kirienko, for example, who was very young prime minister for a few months; Sergej Nemtsov, who was deputy prime minister; Sergej Stepashin, an academic turned politician, Minister of Justice, then of the Interior and for three months prime minister. Instead, it was Putin's turn, who didn't have big cards to play and instead, at a certain point, was chosen by those who wielded real power. Just look at his biography to understand it. In 1991 he left his rather obscure post as a KGB officer stationed in East Germany and returned to Russia. almost immediately he becomes, he of the KGB, assistant and then deputy of Anatolyj Sobciak, the ultra-progressive mayor of St. Petersburg. In 1996 Sobchak for the municipal elections and Putin was called to Moscow and became deputy head of the Presidency's property department, in 1997 he became deputy head of the presidential staff and state councilor, the highest level of the Russian civil administration. In 1998 he became head of the FSB (one of the two branches of the Russian secret services) with the rank of minister, member of the Security Council and then his secretary. In 1999 he became prime minister and in March 2000 for the first time president.

 

It is clear that this, in addition to not being a violent career, is not even a normal career. It was rather a career prepared by the "powers that be" of the time, especially since the irreversible decline of Boris Yeltsin became evident. Behind Putin's rise, therefore, there was not some armed handful or chance, but the choice of circles that mattered most: at the time, the secret services (which, with Yurij Andropov, had also already facilitated the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev) and the leaders of the reformist movements. Once his power was achieved and consolidated, Putin then made the former prevail. The siloviki, the men who direct the ministries of force (sila, in Russian), that is, who have armed departments: Defense, Interior, the two branches of the secret services, Emergencies. Putin will fall or leave sooner or later, that's for sure. But they won't decide it. certainly the demonstrations in the streets or the head shots of a warlord, but the will of those structures that contributed so much to choosing him and which, in recent years, have decided to keep him at the top.

afferrare (o, più semplicemente, rifiutano di accettare), è che nella sua lunga permanenza al potere Putin ha sempre goduto di uno zoccolo duro di consenso spontaneo, non dovuto a brogli o leggi repressive o costrizioni assortite.

 

The second element that many Western experts fail to grasp (or, more simply, refuse to accept), is that in his long tenure in power Putin has always enjoyed a hard core of spontaneous consensus, not due to fraud or repressive laws or assorted constraints. No one seems to remember, in fact, that before his coming to power the Russians had experienced, from the death of Leonid Brezhnev (1982) onwards, two decades of upheavals culminating in perestrojka, the end of the USSR and the dramatic transition to a market during the Yeltsin era. In that period, to give just one example, the life expectancy of Russians fell by 8 years, in practice it was a decimation of the population.

 

Putin's arrival in power coincided with a substantial stabilization of the state, which risked the disintegration due to the centrifugal forces of many republics (from the armed one of Chechnya to the economic one of Tatarstan and Siberia), and with an equally visible recovery of the economy, obviously facilitated by a season of high prices for gas, oil and other raw materials. The demographic decline, which has brutally aged the population, and the end of a long period of troubles have created what I called a "base of spontaneous consent" for Putin. Saying it seemed like a heresy but time has shown the consistency of this thesis, up to the plebiscitary consensus that all the polls recorded at the time of the re-annexation of Crimea (2014).

 

It is obvious that there have been frauds and pressures in the past, just as it is evident that the repressive laws approved since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine have distorted the relationship between the authorities and the people. But if we do not keep these considerations in mind, we will never understand why Putin does not fall. And above all that he doesn't fall when we would like him to.

 

Fulvio Scaglione

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW#####################!!!

 

ending the war.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQhHwQZypkg

Can a Simple Phone Call Bring an End to the Ukraine War????

 

--------------------------

Why Did the West Learn to Embrace Fascism… Again?

 

BY Matthew Ehret

 

During the Cold War and especially after 1991, too few asked the question: Upon whose blood did such abundance and “freedom” arise?

We have often heard World War II described as “the war to end all wars”.

Many in the west have even been led to believe that the ideology of Nazi fascism was simply so evil that nothing of the sort could possibly arise ever again.

The 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis attempted to warn Americans that the greatest danger of fascism’s success resided not in its cartoonish goosestepping portrayed in the media, but rather in the mass psychological delusion that such a system could possibly arise in the freedom-loving land of America.

Sadly, as we have seen in the course of the nearly eight decades after the allied victory of 1945, fascism has indeed arisen once more in a more virulent expression than anyone had imagined.

As today’s financial system careens towards an inevitable collapse not entirely different from the controlled demolition of the casino economy bubbles of 1929, geopolitical forces are again being brought into play that are also evoking once more the very real possibility of a new world war.

Instead of efforts to avoid such a disastrous nuclear confrontation by honest attempts to accept diplomatic pathways offered by Russian and Chinese statesmen, only antagonistic sabre rattling can be heard across the self-flattering corridors of Davos and NATO.

Instead of seeing efforts to remedy the annihilation of viable forms of energy, food production, and industrial capacity needed to support life among western nations, the opposite trend has been seen to occur in lockstep. Across nearly every nation caught within the NATO cage, we find only puppet leaders devoid of anything approximating substance and who appear unwilling to reverse the self-induced crisis of scarcity threatening to destroy countless lives.

Some even appear to think this age of scarcity to be a good thing.

Unipolarists and transhumanists slithering around the corridors of power proclaim time and again that today’s crisis is actually an “opportunity” in disguise.

Changing Definitions: When “suicide” Became “opportunity”

Whether it is Mark Carney championing this civilizational crisis as a wonderful opportunity to break humanity off ifs addiction to cheap hydrocarbon-based fuels and embrace a new order of green energy, or whether it is Anthony Blinken’s uncomfortable celebration that Nordstream’s sabotage as a “tremendous opportunity” to liberate Europe from cheap Russian gas, the effect is always the same.

These detached elites all seem to believe that the collective behavior of the trans-Atlantic west can finally be transformed by this unfortunate crisis so that we learn to live with less, owning nothing while still being happy, eating bugs instead of ‘dirty’ meat and reducing our impact on the environment by “going green”. French President Emmanuel Macron stated this technocratic view most coldly in September when he proclaimed “the age of abundance is over”.

Amidst this new ethos emerging under the guise of a “Great Reset”, the U.S. Government has found itself allocating millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to explore techniques to block the sun’s light reaching the earth in order to stop global warming. Even the carbon dioxide molecule, once appreciated as a plant food (along with the also-demonized sunlight) has become enemy #1 targeted for banishment from the human kingdom under a post-reset age.

This is the same freedom-loving government that has poured trillions of dollars into bailing out zombie banks and pouring weapons mass destruction onto once-viable nations like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine in recent years while spending next to nothing to rebuild the vital infrastructure and industries which citizens desperately require as a matter of basic survival.

Across the NATO countries, euthanasia laws are extended far beyond the limits of reason to include, the depressed, and “mature minors” who want a taxpayer funded suicide pill. Mind-altering drugs are sold by government propagandists as forms of liberation to be decriminalized while the City of London/Wall Street financiers who launder such drugs via off-shore accounts go unpunished.

Even “science magazines” like Live Science publish propaganda pieces that justify the absurd notion that a “small nuclear war” may actually be good for the environment by reversing global warming which IPCC computer models tell us has been happening despite any empirical evidence to the contrary.

While everything outlined above are symptoms, the particular essence of fascism’s modern expression has been difficult for many to identify for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps the most important of those reasons resides in the fact that the minds of anyone too well adapted to modern academia are crippled by design. It sounds harsh, but the truth often is.

Educated to Stupidity

Where education was once premised on encouraging students to make discoveries and learning how to think for oneself as the foundation of becoming both good workers and also good citizens, today’s educational norms have sunk into depths of mediocrity not thought possible by our grandparents’ generation.

Instead of reproducing the discoveries of truthful ideas, students processed through modern institutions of higher education instead learn how to memorize formulas required to pass tests without understanding how or why those formulae are true. Across the STEM programs, science-oriented students are taught to repeat commonly held beliefs promoted by consensuses of experts who control the reigns of peer-review journals rather than use their own sovereign powers of reason.

The brilliant agronomist Allan Savory who performed miracles in terraforming desert regions of the earth through elementary holistic practices outlined the fraud of modern peer-review brainwashing in the following short video...

 

Although students of history are taught explanatory models which emphasize sanitized readings of our past that gloss over the reality of intentions (aka: conspiracies) and science students are trained to think in terms of “statistical probability” instead of causal principles, the truth of our own crisis goes even deeper.

The Subjective Side to Fascism’s Success

While it is comfortable for some people to think that the cause of our problems is found in the corruption and manipulation of a conspiratorial elite, the truth is, as Shakespeare noted in his play Julius Caesar far more subjective.

In that play, Shakespeare’s Cassius warned his co-conspirator Brutus that “our fate… is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings”.

In other words: It takes two to tango.

In that sense, one of the most important reasons for the success of fascism’s post-WWII rise has less to do with the conspiratorial planning of oligarchical forces which infiltrated our governments since the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt, and much more to do with the subtle corruption of the people themselves who make up the citizens of the so-called “free world”.

With few exceptions, the citizens of the “free and democratic rules based west” judged themselves to be free simply because they enjoyed high levels of comfort and abundance while much of the world did not.

If World War II had not been fully won by “the good guys”, we were told, then how could our personal freedom to consume whatever we wished, vote for whom we wish and speak what we wish be possible?

Sexual liberation, and freedom “to do what we willed” became the new standards of liberty and the idea that such freedom was contingent upon moral principles or the weight of conscience became synonymous with “authoritarianism” and “the obsolete wisdom of dead white European males”.

The new generation of baby boomers that learned to “not trust anyone over 30”, “live in the moment” and just “let it be” as new words of wisdom soaked in a post-truth ethic that was relatively alien to western civilization. While it appeared to many who lived through that age, to be an innocent shifting of values towards a more “emotionally”-driven relationship to truth based upon “empathy”, making love not war, and embracing relativism, something much darker was let in.

And as the flower power generation that turned on, tuned in and dropped out became the me-generation of the 1980s corporate world, the myth that fascism was forever defeated became ever more deeply enshrined into the zeitgeist. The ever more fluid definitions of truth and value slid into relativism as speculative financial instruments like derivatives that carried little connection to reality became treated as legitimate forms of value within the new market-driven society. Culturally, younger generations lost access to older non-liberal role models that exhibited truthfulness and dignity resulting in ever deeper slides into nihilism among Generation X, Y and millennials.

During the Cold War and especially after 1991’s disintegration of the Soviet Union, too few asked the question: Upon whose blood did such abundance and “freedom” arise? Why did nationalist leaders of Africa, Latin America or even our own trans Atlantic west die gruesome deaths or suffer coups under the careful coordination and financing of intelligence agencies connected to governments of England and the USA? If we, in the west ceased producing our own industrial goods for our own consumption, then who was filling the void? Where were the slave labor colonies that Hitler and his financial backers envisioned in our modern age? Is it possible that the intention behind the global plague of war, radicalism and famine plaguing the third world since 1945 has something to do with those forces managing the economic systems to which former colonial people have been expected to adapt by those same colonial powers we have been told had granted their independence over the past 80 years?

To restate the essential point: The real reason why fascism’s ugly grip is being felt once more, has much to do with the fact that too many of us enjoyed the fruits it provided to those “first world” subjects who benefited by its existence after WWII, and thus simply wished not to see it.

We may bemoan the criminal incompetence and malevolent agendas pushing our society towards a new dark age, but it is only once we realize that a people will get the political leaders they deserve, that we may begin to properly start healing from the self-inflicted wounds which we did to ourselves over the course of several generations.

Currently, nations of Eurasia have demonstrated that they do not wish to erase their histories, ancient systems of cultural heritage or traditional values in the face of a Great Reset. They don’t want war, and would much rather have win-win cooperation with nations of the west.

The concept of “adapting to scarcity” has been rejected in favor of creating abundance via the embrace of scientific and technological progress across nations of the multipolar alliance and not a single statesman across Russia, China or India has demonstrated an intention to either go to war or sacrifice their people on an altar of Gaia. With so many nations representing so many people and diverse cultures of the world wishing to reject fascism (aka: Transhuman neo-feudalism) amidst our current crisis-ridden age, why would we not do everything in our power to redeem the sins of the west by fighting to join this anti-fascist movement today?

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

 

 

READ MORE:

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2022/10/26/why-did-the-west-learn-to-embrace-fascism-again/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

hartcher is a boofhead......

As Putin fails, Xi gets fired up

 

Peter Hartcher

Unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s regional muscling has been unsettlingly successful for Xi Jinping.

When it comes to encroaching on neighbours’ territory, Vladimir Putin is simply a boofhead. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, is simply brilliant. Both dictators are intent on imperialist expansion into the territories of their neighbours. But they are experiencing wildly different fates. Putin is wanted as a war criminal*, his troops are dying**, his economy suffering***, his grip on power under pressure****. And, after early gains, Putin is losing his war. Xi is feted wherever he goes, his military is expanding, his economy has slowed yet still growing, his power unquestioned. And Xi is winning his war.

The key difference? Putin chose to launch a kinetic war to expand his territory, bullets and bombs, the traditional way of warfare. Xi chose ‘‘grey zone’’ warfare – distinctly aggressive, but without firing a shot. So, on Saturday, when Russia was firing missiles into Ukraine, China was shooting a water cannon at a Philippines ship. Both were hostile acts, yet only one was deadly.

The world knows how to deal with Russia and its missiles. But no one yet has devised an effective counter to China’s forceful muscling.

SMH 08/09/2023…….

 

-------------

 

HOW DO WE DEAL WITH PETER HARTCHER’S BULLSHIT? THE NEW WORLD KNOWS HOW TO KICK AMERICAN BUTTS, BUT NO-ONE HAS DEVISED AN EFFECTIVE COUNTER TO HARTCHER’S IDIOTIC RANTS, until now… 

SO FAR THE WORLD (THE WESTERN WORLD THAT IS) HAS FAILED MISERABLY AGAINST RUSSIA AND THE TREND IS GOING TO CARRY ON. "THE WORLD KNOWS HOW TO DEAL WITH RUSSIA AND ITS MISSILES?..."... SURE… BRING YOUR ABRAM TANKS AND WE’LL BLOW THEM UP LIKE THE LEOPARD PANZERS SET.

AND CHINA ISN’T TAKING THE TAIWAN BAIT YET… ANNOYING. 

MEANWHILE NIGER AND A FEW NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES ARE THROWING OUT THE AMERICAN HEGEMONIC POWER. LITTLE THAT THE AMERICANS OR THE FRENCH CAN DO — WITHOUT SPILLING A LOT OF BLOOD, AFTER HAVING TREATED THE LOCALS LIKE BLOODY SLAVES… AND THE USA AND THE COLONIALIST “FRANÇOUSES” COULD FACE THE WAGNER TROOPS AS WELL… BEAUT. WAGNER IS STILL WORKING FOR RUSSIA. SURE. 

AMERICA AND FRANCE HAVE DONE NOTHING TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF NIGER, EXCEPT PLUNDER AND INSTALL “DEMOCRATIC” PUPPETS VIA PROPAGANDIST MANIPULATIONS. NO MORE. FINISH.

YES, CHINA IS WINNING…. AND RUSSIA IS WINNING…. AND PETER HARTCHER IS A BOOFHEAD WHO CAN’T WRITE PROPER ARTICLES, SINCE HE GOT A BRAIN BYPASS VIA THE SPHINCTER OF HIS INTESTINES.

 

Putin is wanted as a war criminal* — BUSH BLAIR AND HOWARD FIT THE BILL FAR MORE THAN PUTIN WHO SAVED KIDS FROM BEING KILLED BY UKRAINIAN SHELLING...

his troops are dying** — YES... BUT ZELENSKY'S TROOPS ARE DYING 10 TIMES TO 100 TIMES FASTER....

his economy suffering*** — THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY IS BOOMING, YOU'RE A FIBBING TWERP, PETER....

his grip on power under pressure**** — YES, PUTIN'S TENURE HAS GONE FROM 80 PER CENT TO 83 PER CENT APPROVAL....

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........................................