The story of how opposition figure and social activist Yevgeny Roizman beat the authoritarian system and won the mayoral race in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, is truly amazing. It’s a story about raw courage and what it means to be a man.
Russian democracy – when in my opinion it inevitably breaks out – will not look like what we are used to in the EU. Think the politics of Turkey or Israel. For example in the Urals the most popular politician is Evgeny Roizman. He’s an opposition activist, a nationalist, a poet, half-Jewish and a democrat. But not exactly a liberal – he runs a vigilante organisation that locks up drug addicts and incarcerates them in private lock-ups in the forest where they are cuffed to beds and given only water, bread and garlic in this horrific “cold Turkey” treatment. Roizman though is an unbeatably popular man in the Urals – in a democratic Russia he’d be the mayor of Ekaterinburg, the governor of Sverdlovsk oblast – or more.
The bold italics are mine.
Wikipedia notes of the new Mayor of Yekaterinburg, “Roizman was a State Duma deputy between 2003-2007 and attempted to run for parliament from the Fair Russia party in 2007, but was taken off the election list after a conflict with Fair Russia leaders.[6] He is a political ally of Prokhorov[7] and is supported by the Civil Platform party.[8]”
It would seem Russia is now truly democratic.
Well, perhaps with Roizman’s election it is a little more so for its politics having become a little less totally manageable.
Incidentally, my inner jury is out as regards how to think about President Putin in his inhabiting the role of autocrat.
He doesn’t believe that Asad will give up his chemical weapons, and he will do any sort of trick in order to conceal them and hide what he has in his stockpiles of death. The Russians have won a big victory over the United States, and they are taking advantage of Europe’s lack of will to use force. And in general, what is all this business about giving up chemical weapons? Can a murderer’s punishment be mitigated by confiscating the pistol that he used to commit murder? What kind of ethical or legal standard is that? Why don’t they even issue an international arrest warrant against al-Assad to bring him to justice in the International Criminal Court? How is he different from Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Milosevic of Yugoslavia?
I’ve added the citation to the previous post, but for those involved with strategic analysis in the middle east, it’s worth a careful reading.
My line has been consistent: Russia by way of Putin needs to clean up its Syrian client’s act, and it cannot do that today with deceits, RT cameras, and massive state-controlled media: it needs to become an authentic force, even if or especially if authoritarian and reactionary, for peace and social justice in Syria. The political cynicism brought to the brutal Assad regime’s state of affairs has steeped in blood and misery long enough for Russian foreign policy to either pivot about or become the familiar old criminal and domestically, internally much loathed state.
Putin is a master at having it both ways. Without acknowledging that more Syrians have been killed with Russian-supplied weapons than with poison gas, he could with a straight face insist that all countries stop feeding the flames in Syria so that his Geneva II peace process can flourish.
“The diplomatic duel” between the Moscow and Washington over what to do with Syria’s chemical weapons had ended in “the great victory of Russia,” Kiselyov declared, while the Obama Administration had seen its “geopolitical amateurishness swept away, leaving only the ruins of narcissism.”
However, now that our ironically lovely term “narcissism” has crept into the greater political conversation — soon, I expect to see “malignant narcissism” elsewhere (than here) plus, perhaps, an empty variant in “political narcissism” — we may be treated to the spectacle of the image hypersensitive vigorously denying interest in the management of their image while, in effect, desperately trying to maintain and improve their image.
🙂
It may be difficult leaving the center of one’s own universe and one’s own uniquely valued place in it, but the demand associated with Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere along the contours of the Islamic Small Wars is exactly that in immediate service to ameliorating suffering brought about by political chaos, conflict, decay, excessive ambition, and the monstrous attitudes held by some with regard to the life and the lives of others.
Oh superpower leaders, whether or not image matters, act as if it doesn’t and — I am having a Kumbayah moment — show the love.
Selflessly.
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To understand Moscow’s policy toward Syria, it is important to understand that Russia sees Syria as part of its Mediterranean policy and not a part of the Middle East. The Arab Middle East has been a relatively low priority in Russia’s foreign policy. The Mediterranean, however, and especially the Eastern Mediterranean region, is a policy priority for Moscow.
The “Arab Spring” (more like the “Arab Springboard” and pretty much out of control at that), Mubarak’s fall from grace in Egypt, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia’s pique with these suddenly shifting political sands, and Russia’s neglect of a post-Soviet Syria long due for an overhaul would seem to have made way for this Sumo match that has pitted Anglo-Sunni interests against Russo-Baathist ones in Damascus and overshadowed a nascent developing Russo-Saudi oil rivalry.
Plainly, Syria remains in Russia’s sphere of influence as a critical asset — more than a buffer, a block to political Islam in relation to the seventh dimension 😉 in which the Kavkaz Center worldview would apply; more than a client state and trading partner, the host of a strategic port; and more than an inconvenience, a base for New Russian Influence in the Region: how Putin has eluded taking public responsibility for all of this (not to mention returning Maher al-Assad to business in the battle space), I do not know.
The Saudis were on the brink of victory, and Asad’s use of gas took it away from them. That’s why they are so angry with Asad, and with the West as well, which did not take the necessary steps immediately, to act without discussions, without votes, without Congress and without Parliament.
Related Heritage Foundation Video Published June 27, 2013
Will the report by the UN inspectors, the conclusion of whose work Russia, at a minimum, proposes waiting for, help to resolve the dispute between Putin and that portion of the international community that supports him, on the one hand, and, on the other, the leaders of a number of Western countries, including several regional powers, who have been certain from the outset that the use of chemical weapons was the work of the Syrian president and that he therefore needs to be dealt a retaliatory strike?
The whole world is watching, also judging, thinking, weighing, and a greater percentage of its citizens, from Riyadh to Islamabad, have today the intellectual tools for separating substance from bullshit.
In the above cited piece, Vitaly Naumkin pitches the Putin line — no surprise there — even while knowing that view also may be subject to dissection.
From whence came this:
Who held the camera, edited the recording, produced the music?
Who manufactured the projectile, the rocket engine, the launch platform?
If the production represented a rebel false flag, why is the launch team not in Syrian uniforms?
Would that not have been more authentic?
Or would it have been too much?
Also, who has the reputation for lying baldly?
How did that come about?
When is it going to stop?
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“We don’t know if Syria will accept the offer, but if imposing international control over chemical weapons stored in the country can help to avoid military strikes, we are immediately going to start working with Damascus,” explained Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday.
American discredit in the region seems to relate primarily to Bush’s dumb lie over Iraq WMDs, but the removal of one of the world’s most vicious dictators and his army plus the restoration of the Marsh Arabs and the securing of the Kurdish Community against Saddam Hussein’s depredations, which included gassing, would seem to make for a bright side. Add in the possibility of modern open democracy (MOD, lol), access to international news, and modern education, global in breadth and concerns — perhaps those are worth something too.
While remnants of the still leftward Arab finger in Iraq often points to America for subsequent bloodletting, it really has to point back to itself for the internecine and sectarian bloodshed that continues by way of its own hands.
Russian discredit starts with the accusing and contemptuous language of the old propaganda and drifts off into the cesspool of known banditry, corruption, dictatorship, and culture-permeating mafia technique.
Even so, Russia has become a modern state.
Perhaps it faces a primarily medieval post-modern question: if “information is power” how much power may one (man, organization) have over information and its effects in influence, intimidation, and perception?
It’s the question of the day.
The post-KGB KGB-infused (at minimum by Putin) FSB and post-Soviet new oligarch Russia has still in place old business, intellectual, and state political architecture, and while it has demonstrated its power to transfer wealth to its own, perhaps, and drive a Far Out Left propaganda press, perhaps, Syria continues to come down, day by day, hour by hour, and within miles of Bashar al-Assad’s own feet, and there is no one, including Russia, who wants to fiddle with it other than to let it burn a little more safely — without chemical weapons, if Putin is sincere in this matter — and toward a secular path, as no one between NATO and Russia wants Al Qaeda or Chechnya II either, and the cultural results of apparent if superficial convergent evolution by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar toward the west — neither of those official Al Qaeda or Muslim Brotherhood buddies either — remain to be seen.
But what rankles many analysts about this paragraph is that it ignores Putin’s own role in enabling the already quite awful violence, as well as the extremism it’s inspired. Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime has killed so freely and so wantonly in part because it knows Putin will protect it from international action. Putin has also been supplying Assad with heavy weapons. It’s a bit rich for him to decry violence or outside involvement at this point.
China Today (Chinese: 今日中国; pinyin: Jīnrì Zhōngguó), formerly titled China Reconstructs (Chinese: 中国建设;pinyin: Zhōngguó Jiànshè), is a monthly magazine founded in 1949 by Soong Ching-ling in association with Israel Epstein. It is published in Chinese L anguage, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, German and Turkish, and is intended to promote a positive view of the People’s Republic of China and its government to people outside of China.
I haven’t yet done the reading, but let’s call it the “Face of the Nation”, a portal with a role to play, and, at that, a role of immense importance, more so to the People’s Republic of China than to the international reader.
It is registered as an autonomous non-profit organization[2][3] funded by the federal budget of Russiathrough the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.[4][5]
Basically, RT would seem the Russian “Radio Free America” or U.S. Information Agency — it was born with obligations and today has impressive reach.
What the world on the World Wide Web needs now, of course, might be a few international media assembly giants of trustworthy record.
One exists already.
He may be called the International Reader.
* * *
Whether owned by capitalists or communists, private parties or states, complicated boards of directors — we should take a side trip to Time Warner to look at how that works, and with such as Kingdom Holdings in an influential position — the guts and substance of a news organization resides in its journalists and in the humanity, independence, and integrity they bring to their work.
Some may be aware of their career options and who is sitting in the board room; some on the happy-face beat may be naturally inclined to write always “the best truth possible”; some in their early years may have latched on to the thought that “information is power” so how much cooler would it be to have “power over information” and write to an agenda?
This morning, one of my Facebook buddies asked me to prove Syria launched attacks with chemical weapons because the German intelligence services suggested some disconnects. I countered with Obama’s more specific mention of 11 neighborhoods attacked and communication intercepts of high-level Syrian chatter over the results and, admitted, my trump card: complete trust in Israeli intelligence reporting. If any entity on earth has a premium stake in displaying, promoting, and valuing integrity, it’s that bunch.
Even if recordings of intercepts were furnished by governments and published on the Internet, there would be some readers who would claim that as much could have been put together in a recording studio.
And articles like it reported out in an odd assortment of left and right — but not middle — oriented publications, from Mint to The Blaze (and between: Global Research, Godlike Productions, Missing Peace, Prison Planet, Activist Post, etc.).
What is it with some readers that they will devour such contraptions — and with some writers that they will invent or promote them?
Better yet: what is it with some leaders that they believe that controlling people starts with controlling their information environment — and that they have the muscle in money and thugs to do it?
* * *
“Follow the BBC,” said my Skype friend. “At least they try to tell the truth.”
I don’t know about that, but at least the Wikipedia entry has been clever about the organization:
Its main responsibility is to provide impartial public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man.
“Look, I’m not just talking about Snowden and Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “What about Pussy Riot? What about your anti-gay laws? Total jackass moves, my friend.”
Who else in St Petersburg publicly declared, as he did, that Syria’s “so-called chemical weapons attack” was in fact “a provocation staged by rebels, in hope of winning extra backing from their foreign backers”?
In making that categorical claim, the Russian leader left little room for compromise and ended up looking, perhaps, somewhat isolated.
For real, Bridget Kendall writing for the BBC reports that eleven countries endorsed a statement agreeing that evidence associated with Syria’s most recent chemical weapons attack “pointed to Syrian government culpability.”
As suggested here, also recently, the world is witness to a war about integrity and power.
Indeed, it is one thing for Putin to go about the business of restoring Russian grandeur and might and adjusting his state in a Russian way to the new day — and let Russians respond to that as they may: it is another thing to abet the state-driven barbarism on display daily in both Iran and Syria and to become identified with it.
This morning’s live feedfrom Fox featuring President Obama and Prime Minister Reinfeldt stunned me, really, as being the most open, most candid, most off-the-cuff press conference I’ve been aware of since the inauguration.
In it, Obama talked about Syria every which way — either he couldn’t get away from the subject or the reporters could not — including asserting that a transition from the Assad regime seemed impossible given the tens of thousands of civilian lives taken by the regime. Obama then noted that President Putin seemed to disagree with that logic, thereby throwing the policy-on-Syria hot potato to Putin who may look increasingly disingenuous and transparent clinging to his lines on behalf of Bashar and Maher al Assad.
If the “center will not hold” will there be a center?
When I started receiving the CTC Sentinel (from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) I don’t believe I was vetted in any way but, so my impression was, on a controlled list for a publication neither secret nor to be redistributed.
Again, that was some years ago, and here I may be merely befuddled, paranoid, whatever.
Over the years, I’ve kept reference to CTC to myself and partially for the effects of its “granularity” — the detail in reported relationships — involved in combat arenas from Afghanistan to Somalia. Such material, I thought, wouldn’t tell anyone involved on any side of “field operations” what they didn’t already know, but it would suggest how deeply American defense intelligence and analysis gets into societies of interest, and that may have promoted some resentments in my social networks.
A few weeks ago I had cause to ask CTC (Facebook) about distribution and got back this answer: “We publish all of our research in the open source (on our website and in social media), and from there, we don’t have any control over its distribution.”
So there.
Short of subscribing to Jane’s, taking lonely walks (in the rain) around Foggy Bottom, and hanging out in Georgetown (now that I’m 90 minutes northwest of all of that — way out of town!), I think the following two links to Combating Terrorism Center and Foreign Policy (Magazine) reports are pretty good — and granular.
Rebels have been told by these states that they must endorse the SMC and its politics to gain access to future arms shipments.[5] Recently, the United States, the United Kingdom and France have all indicated that they will channel money and possibly weapons via the SMC.[6]
The SMC has provided wildly varying estimates of the total number of fighters in its member groups. In June 2013, Idris claimed to control 80,000 fighters, but days later an SMC representative insisted that the true figure is 320,000.[7] In practice, a meaningful headcount of rebels is almost impossible to make, both due to the scarcity of reliable information and to myriad problems of definition.[8] There is no disputing, however, that most of Syria’s large rebel factions have chosen to publicly align themselves with the SMC, recognizing it as the best way to tap into Gulf, Western and other support.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may yet turn out the bad boy who knows more about good than so many goody two shoes arching up on their hind legs over the seemingly endless tragedy in Syria.
What Putin knows, I am sure, is from where has come from, the ingredients of his own frame, from poverty to KGB, from Soviet Russia to the post-Soviet FSB of his own making, from Russian heroic sports culture to the more measured testing of waters to, perhaps, restore Russian pride in empire.
Take the Tale of the Pocketed Superbowl Ringand a fast denial plus offer of complete restitution as signal of a different kind of explorer, albeit a shrewd autocrat on the make for a good deal, cash to swell out a country, a new energy industry with clout, and a little respect even from his critics.
This month’s imbroglio over anti-Gay legislation hasn’t helped Putin with either western or progressive audiences — I am certain of that — but it too may symbolize the difficulty of parting with yesterday’s story.
And Syria is all about the entire host of interests parting with yesterday’s story.
Putin first.
* * *
Throughout the Cold War, third world actors could and did manipulate Eastern and Western patrons to further their own parochial objectives or regional ambitions, and Baathist Iraq was no different in this respect.
Currently, the Syrian Communist Party officially supports the Baathist regime, although it follows the Soviet line on certain key political issues. The party, for example, recently urged Arab terrorists to be “more responsible” in their political activities, and its delegation to the recent international Communist conference went along in supporting the Security Council resolution of 1967 for a political solution to the Arab-Israeli crisis. The party’s 3,000 members make it the third largest Communist Party in the Arab world, and a Communist now holds a cabinet post as minister of communications and foreign trade.
Call it a reunion: “You haven’t changed a bit” one always says, but with these –Russia and Syria, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, Israel and God (maybe) — time has changed them some or altered their surrounds, and the bulwarks in power and sustained relationships have been eroded, and no more so than in long neglected Syria where forty-four years of competition, cultural evolution, and diplomacy on its flanks have turned a family’s military dictatorship into a merely and deeply selfish anachronism.
I’ve no friends for whom the end of a marriage or other long-lived relationship has been not only traumatic but life changing.
Such events are not about the one thing.
Everything comes under review, and while most don’t beat themselves up with “should have done this” and “should have done that” — and they shouldn’t — they may change some principles in what I’ve come to call “social grammar”, i.e., inevitably frozen in language, the most deeply ingrained ideas and rules by which they have maintained their own program.
Even so civil a split — cloaked in mystery and, beneath the Al Jazeera clip on YouTube, accompanied by a relatively gentle public humor — would seem to support this view.
Something has changed and done so in some unalterable way.
One floats free of the past after a while, but perhaps it takes a while to do that.
* * *
Syria’s civil war, already irreversible in its effects — more than 106,000 Syrians dead because of it; more than 1.7 million refugee in surrounding states; add some more millions for displaced and homeless; cities like Aleppo and Homs ravaged or razed — should close a chapter that in retrospect may be seen as having been about several forms of intellectual poison, an aspect of conflict I suspect Putin recognizes, being himself so public, so accustomed to the development of information and the projection of image.
“Moscow has never had much political influence in Syria, a xenophobic country that has known little other than periodic power struggles over the past 20 years. Moscow’s virtual inability to moderate Damascus’ hard-line posture has been, in fact, the only constant factor in the shifting Soviet-Syrian relationship” (page 7).
Fourty-four years of that same old same old.
Time for a change?
* * *
No longer completely opposite the Russian course and sensibility, Cameron and Obama may have to tell Qatar that it may not always get what it wants. That too would depart from yesterday, but as much Qatar may already know, having rushed an heir to the throne.
That too may depart from yesterday’s story, one of several that have been run to ground and drowned in blood and suffering for years to come.
The World Wide Web has changed how the world experiences its one separable experiences: now we can see what we are doing in light of what we have done, and we cannot but help see all of that laid out in the sun together.
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