Still time for jokes
White supremacist and pro-Putin – what’s not to like?
Republican leaders are facing fresh demands to expel the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, after she spoke at a conference of white nationalists and sympathisers with Vladimir Putin.
The event in Orlando, Florida, on Friday night was organised by the far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, who told attendees: “Now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler – they say that’s not a good thing.”
Fuentes, eh – is he aware that most white supremacists probably consider him non-white?
Liz Cheney, a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot, tweeted: “As Rep[resentative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep[resentative] Paul Gosar speak at this white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin event, silence by Republican party leaders is deafening and enabling.”
Trump loves Putin. What more do we need to know?
It’s hard to get more blatant than that, but I expect to see a flurry of defence along the lines of “he didn’t say the exact words “Hitler is good”, so it doesn’t count” all the same. To think the Republican love of authoritarianism is so strong, it would lead to them reversing their opposition to Nazi Germany and the guy that seemingly wants to revive the USSR!
Politics is no science. There are too many variables, and politicians tend to severe myopia.
The art of being a Putin and staying in the game means using what powerr one has to throw the odd rival to the wolves, and by that means, cower the others.
Russian history is littered with such monsters. Nikita Khrushchev, on a visit to the US was asked by a reporter: “What happened to Beria?” Beria was the feared and detested chief of the secret police. Khrushchev replied (from memory): “Beria made the mistake one day of coming into my office in the Kremlin without his usual bodyguard. So I shot him.”
All in a day’s work. But I would say that right now Putin’s main need , is to cover his own back; for when his best-laid plans go pear-shaped.
@Omar
I saw the film The Death of Stalin, also read the graphic novel, which dealt with the well-deserved death of Beria. A lot of huddling in corners and conspiring.
My fantasy at the moment is that the Russian conscripts in Ukraine, finding that they have been duped and that not only are they not having an easy ride, but fighting fellow Slavs, half of them Russian speaking, will lay down their arms and say Screw that for a game of soldiers. Just a dream of course – but if this did happen and the rest of the Russian high ups realise that Putin is a liability leading them into all sorts of crap, how would they get rid of him? They must be under constant surveillance – Putin is ex-KGB – and it’s hard to see how they would conspire against him. Even two or three going for a walk in a park together would look suspicious, and electronic communication would be out of the question.
This is only sort of ancillary, but it’s probably worth remembering that this isn’t new. The support within the USA of an enemy who is the opposite of every democratic principle that Americans supposedly hold dear, I mean. There was significant support for Hitler before WWII, for example, with pro-Nazi conferences and gatherings, and that continued even after the war started in the sense that a lot of Americans of German ancestry went to Europe and fought on the Nazi side.
KBP @#3:
An excellent prinnciple for the running of a military dictatorship: The army is there to back up your police force and to be seen as such by the wider population. It is not there for foreign wars and external military adventures. Those can have serious unexpected and unintended consequences.
If things go seriously pear-shaped in a foreign war, the population can turn against the government; which is what Gen Galtieri of Argentina learned the hard way over the Falklands, and closer to home, the last of the Romanov Dynasty learned in Petrograd in 1917.
Which is why a bloke called Vladimir Illyich Lenin got so excited when he heard the news fresh out of Sarajevo in 1914 that World War 1 had started, and that Tsarist Russia had been dragged in by its treaty obligations. (His own revolutionary zeal and personal obsession was driven by the Tsarist trial and execution of the elder brother he adored over a failed attempt on the life of the Tsar). After the April 1917 revolution brought down Tsarism in favour of an elected parliamentary system, and the troops of the former Tsar’s army started deserting en masse to get home in time for the planting of their crops, Lenin saw his best chance, and swiftly got himself back to Russia.
And the rest is history.
All of which inclines me to think that Putin and his Thought Police probably have their eyes on such entities as Netflix and DVD sales and rentals, particularly with regard to popular interest in Eisenstein’s classic Battleship Potemkin and his later (co-directed with Grigori Aleksandrov)Ten Days that Shook the World, after the popular book of the same title by the American, John Reed.
Ukraine could become Russia’s Vietnam. A significant number of Ukrainians are working to that end.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October:_Ten_Days_That_Shook_the_World
Another nitpick – every bit as nitty as the one about the Lincoln Battalion. Lenin wasn’t named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, he was named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin. It was one or the other, never a combination. In short Lenin was just Lenin, no first name & patronymic. I assume his buddies called him Tovarisch.
Some nitpicks are very serious business.
The Wikipedia article on Lenin made reference to a 3000-line poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky entitled “Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin”, written 1920-1924. I found an online English translation, but it made my eyes glaze over; I have no head for poetry anymore.
Ok almost never. That was the convention at any rate – conventions exist to be violated but we can’t violate them if we don’t know what they are.