dagblog - Comments for "The Hidden Author of Putinism"

The term, ‘Putin apologist as

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 23:06:56 +0000

In reply to "But there is an increasing

The term, ‘Putin apologist as an indictment has an unflattering opposite that is just as derogatory and you demonstrate it well. To be either in any and all cases is ridiculous. And, listing numbers of deaths caused by his government is meaninglessas an attempt to demonstrate that Putin is a fabulous propagandist successfully gaming the whole world while the news in the Western world is nothing but the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Pick a date after which you can hold Putin responsible for misery and deaths inflicted by his government’s actions and then compare the numbers since that date with the numbers that the U.S. has caused. Then try to convince anyone with the sense that god gave a jackass that the U.S. citizenry supported those actions based on truthful evidence supplied by our government and the various ideologically motivated think tanks and pundits and then critically investigated and then reported on by our MSN outlets. It is ironic hypocrisy carried to extreme to propagandize about Russian propaganda, to say it is so powerful and dangerous and to use those descriptors to demonize Putin if the reason is to justify more idiotic ‘muscular’ foreign policy that is both dangerous and stupid. And, it is VERY stupid, partly because it is very dangerous. I do not understand how people can know so much of the revealed past and still be so much in denial that anything similar is going on in the present.

"But there is an increasing

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 22:14:02 +0000

In reply to I had every intention of

"But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine's most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists" - uh, Azov is a couple hundred soldiers at best - hardly "Ukraine's most potent". More propaganda.

1000 people have been killed in East Ukraine in the last 2 1/2 months, total from start of war 4400 including militants and civilians. "And there's also, I think what Putin was referring to there was not so much the Nazi trends, but the civilians being killed," - oh what a fucking apologist she is. She knows fucking well that Putin and his cronies are labeling Kiev Nazis and neo-Nazis every 2nd breath.

" I mean, it's horrific and it was civilians in the East calling themselves Ukrainians and saying stop killing us, Petro Poroshenko. Stop killing us. " In Putin's 2nd Chechnyan war, over 25,000 civilians were killed, much of the country was turned into an ecological disaster, and the 2 sides laid over 500,000 landmines. But suddenly Putin's worried about humanity, the average Joe in the street, the children... never mind Putin's overreaction that killed hundreds of kids in Beslan and civilians in the Moscow Theater he pumped poison gas into. He's now a peacenik preaching against the West's evils.

What a stupid game she's playing, and then she tries to dig her way out of it with her ad hominems against Amanpour - 15 years as tool of the State Department? Because her husband worked there their first 2 years of marriage? Even though she'd been a journalist for 15 years already? Foolish female minds, they get so distracted with love that they can't stick to the truth... James Rubin's sister writes for the CFR & the New York Times - I hope she realizes that she too is just a mouthpiece for the State Department whatever professional scruples she thinks she has.

I had every intention of

A Guy Called LULU — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 18:47:03 +0000

In reply to The Hidden Author of Putinism

I had every intention of giving the discussion of 'propaganda' a rest but what the hell, this just seems to be too good and too timely an example to let pass For best affect watch the following videos in the sequence presented, First is an interview/debate hosted by CNN's Amanpour as presented

http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/11/20/intv-amanpo...

Next you can watch what was edited out by CNN.

http://rt.com/news/208302-cnn-propaganda-interview-edited/

Some more on the same issue with editorial comment:

http://russia-insider.com/en/tv_media_watch/2014/11/22/10-32-10pm/rt_hos...

I'm hitting the road for a family Thanksgiving wishing all a good holiday.

Just another opinion but one

A Guy Called LULU — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 19:33:49 +0000

In reply to The Hidden Author of Putinism

Just another opinion and one likely to have some bias considering the author's origins, but one which deserves consideration, in my opinion. Everybody comes from somewhere and where they came from usually has a lot to do with where they are coming from.

We decided to publish this article in full, since it’s by far the best description we know of the rise of fascism in the Ukraine. The author, who’s a top American scholar, shows that Ukrainian fascism isn’t the fringe phenomenon that western governments and media say it is, but that it’s central to Ukrainian politics and is the key to understanding the Ukrainian political crisis and the way that crisis is evolving as the situation in the country worsens. He shows by drawing on the latest academic scholarship that the fascism currently loose in the Ukraine is fascism in its classic form, identical to the fascism of that existed in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and that like that fascism, it disguises its racist and genocidal agenda behind slogans of anti-communism.

Vladimir Golstein is a professor of Slavic studies at Brown University. He was born in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1979.

The western media, never squeamish about pointing a finger at Russian nationalism, or decry Russia’s covert and overt attempts to interfere in Ukraine, becomes surprisingly timid when describing Ukraine’s turmoil. Of course, it will admit the growing pains of Ukraine’s pro-Western democratic turn, including the activity of violent groups or parties, like Right Sector, that flaunt Nazi paraphernalia and expound bizarre and racist notions. But this acknowledgement is quickly modified by the insistence on the marginal nature of these groups. Rather than being marginal, these groups, however, constitute the tip of the ultra-nationalist iceberg that is going to crush the modern Ukraine.

What remains hidden in the plain view of recent Ukrainian politics is a highly recognizable pattern shared by numerous fascist regimes.

A school of current historians of fascism (Emilio Gentile, Roger Griffin, George Mause, Stanley Payne, and Robert Paxton) has established generic features of the fascist phenomenon. Fascism for these scholars does not necessarily imply its Nazi variant with anti-Semitism, yellow stars, and concentration camps. It is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon, a “cultural revolution in nationalist key” (Comparative Fascist Studies, Routledge, 2010: 114) as the result of which society embarks on a new mythic course. It “sacralizes earthly entity --the nation” (Gentile in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2004: 18); it re-imagines its past and articulates utopian future that remains out of reach only because some group serves as an obstacle. It also targets and utilizes the inexperience and alienation of youth by providing it with the sense of belonging, direction, and “destructive emotions against a hallucinatory enemy” (Griffin, Radical Right, 1999: 298). According to Payne’s A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, London, 1997: 487-95), in order for a country to embark on a fascist course, it has to exhibit a series of cultural, political, social, economic, and international elements. Majority of these elements are fully deployed in Ukraine: be it preexisting strong currents of nationalism; a comparatively new state; a political system that approximates liberal democracy but existed only for a single generation; economic crisis of dislocation or underdevelopment; politically neutralized military; fragmented or polarized party system, status humiliation (loss of Crimea) and the apparent danger from the left (cf. Self-proclaimed People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine).

https://02varvara.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/the-ukraines-descent-into-fas...

And from The Guardian:

But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine's most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukr...

Whatever its intent, an

EmmaZahn — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 14:27:29 +0000

In reply to This reminds me of an

Whatever its intent, an article like that puffing Zukov up against Putin cannot be good for him back home. I should put his name in my follow up file to see how long his 'power' lasts.

From "The Guardian".

A Guy Called LULU — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:37:53 +0000

In reply to This reminds me of an

From "The Guardian".

The American fear-mongering machine is about to scare us back into war again.

Thanks to this wall-to-wall fear mongering, a once war-weary public is now terrified. More than 60% of the public in a recent CNN poll now supports airstrikes against Isis. Two more polls came out on Tuesday, one from the Washington Post and the other from NBC New and the Wall Street Journal, essentially concluding the same thing. Most shocking, 71% think that Isis has terrorist sleeper cells in the United States, against all evidence to the contrary.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/10/american-fear-monge...

This reminds me of an

LULU — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 19:05:24 +0000

In reply to The Hidden Author of Putinism

This reminds me of an interview with one of the principals I heard a long time ago about the production of “Mash”. Apparently it was originally conceived as a straight drama but they tried the addition of a laugh track and it became great comedy without changing the script. Peter Pomerantsev’s essay would be improved with a laugh track in that it could be honestly seen as the dark comedy that it is and would at least be good for a laugh.

In this ironic essay on the power of Putin’s propaganda It would be an additional level of irony if the irony was not apparent to the author but I don’t believe that to be the case. His attack on and description of the propaganda is itself propaganda, not merely by definition but by the common connotation of the term in its strongest sense. There can be no doubt that Putin’s government uses propaganda but to me at least the act of putting it all in the hands of an evil genius [luckilly for them, our stupid enemies all seem to have a few evil geniuses pulling deadly strings] who can pull a string and make one or another other of many groups jump to whatever tune he chooses is, I believe, a concocted device to help create a simplistic understanding of a more complicated story so as to sell a product. Pomerantsev is selling a product. Right now his product is scary stories about Putin and Russia. To push for closing the sale he is using hype. Still, he managed an impressive 1.5 paragraphs before making a Hitler Youth comment.

He [Zurkov] claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential pro-democracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square.

What, I wonder, is the clapping code that tells Russia’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth to stay quietly at home shaving their heads and getting more tattoos but not making a ruckus until they are called for by the pulling of a string. I think maybe Pomerantsev has heard the sound of one hand clapping and interpreted that mental Rorschach splatter as the equivalent of a technical blueprint designed by the evil genius whose diabolical genius is a necessary plot device to sell his own story.

Another belief of mine is that we must recognize that if the Russian population is so susceptible to thought control, that our population may share the same weakness. If we accept that our government along with pundits representing certain points of view or ideologies also puts out a lot of propaganda, then we should expect that it overstates or completely creates emotionally charged attacks against Putin while also being deceptive about itself in ways designed to encourage belief in its stories and support of its actions. That is propaganda's main device. Is it logically consistent to believe that enough Americans were deliberately mislead in their beliefs by clever wordsmithing that they stupidly voted, against their best interests, for Republicans but not believe that they might be mislead on international issues by the same sources? I don’t think so, but maybe that's just me.

One thing that struck me was that the essay was written like a novel about a charismatic villain who wields great power through his relationship with a greater power that he cleverly controls. Very Strauss-i an. When we hear in a novel the voice of the omniscient story teller we have heard the truth of the story because that truth is whatever the story teller says it is. In a novel the author can honestly tell us the inner workings of the man’s psyche, his motives, his wishes, and his desires.Peter Pomerantsev does not have that privilege regarding his story about a real life person in a real life situation in another universe far far away unless we give him the suspension of disbelief required of us to see the power of his charge as presented, to give it face value

Another thing I noted was that at one point, because it serves the author's purpose of demonstrating the evil genius' great power, we are told that he saved the pig’s [Putin's] bacon when it appeared Putin might lose a close election. His propaganda coup saved the day. If we are to believe that then we must believe that Putin could have lost an election. Hmmm.That isn't the common idea floated about Russian elections.

Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

But, but ... ... oh, never mind. I’ll just try to face the revealed truth and accept it as both a price and a perk of living in the one great super power.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Did Zukov say that? Clever bastard, we are in his diabolical grip for sure. Glad to see someone noticed.