Each malign leadership personality — Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei, Orban, Mobarak, Morsi, Putin, Yanukovych, etc. — makes himself also an independent actor in his own right as well as one bickering or cooperating with fellow dictators in the context of pursuing or sustaining “political absolutism”, i.e., themselves as the sole power of their feudal estates. In place of a decent politics, which cannot be had with any playing out this kind of script in personality (all are emperors), come only a limited practical politics — carrots, sticks, and horse swaps.
Internally, “patronage” fits in infantilization and dependency inducing behavior that is itself a part of a defeating spectrum of controls – blackmail, intimidation, incarceration, and murder on one hand, and kind approvals of the powerful, financial patronage, sweet and seductive lying — which in the dark mirrors of the evil includes the promotion of anti-Semitic libel and promise of violence against the Jews — on the other. All such leaders regardless of “nominal affiliation”: thieves. They mask what they really do — and what they are really all about (power over others without limit) — beneath their various banners, but they are also much the same person.
To be fair, Putin, who has been pro-Semitic in public, and whose state has some relations with Israel, should not be considered anti-Semitic despite the inherent anti-Semitic legacies of the old Soviet communism and the Russian Orthodox Church or portions of the same (untangling Russian history after what the Soviets did to it, lol, at least according to Pacepa and Rychlak, will take some time — in the meantime, I feel like I’ve just glimpsed a conciliatory Russian Orthodox Church by way of first encounter with a few voices associated with it).
As I type (and gather from the web as I do), this article may have some clues as to how modern new modern Russians may be as Putin continues on a revanchist neo-feudal path:
Benevitch, Gregory. “The Jewish Question in the Russian Orthodox Church.”
Some wake up knowing we are all “in it” together.
🙂
Related:
According to Oleg Usenkov, press secretary of the Sophia association of Russian Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, there are about 70,000-100,000 Russian Orthodox Israelis, and perhaps “the real figures are even higher.”1The number is significant, as the “Greek Orthodox Patriarchy of Jerusalem was informed by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption that approximately 10 percent of the total Aliya from the former Soviet Union are of the Christian Orthodox faith.”2 This makes the Orthodox Church by far the largest among the past several decades of Israeli immigrants.3 It is also the largest among Palestinian Christians, of whom there are about 400,000 worldwide, and through whom it traces itself to the first Christian community.4
Smith, Hal. “Is the Orthodox Church ‘Supersessionist'”? Orthodoxy Today, October 17, 2013.
Even while positioning Russia as anti-western, Putin nonetheless and recently laid out toward the end of his most recent Federation speech a familiar western cant:
Transcribed:
Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.
We cannot imitate education.
We cannot imitate health care or social security.
We cannot imitate caring for people.
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”
If that ain’t modern and “western” — how about civilized? — what is?
The World Wide Web is the largest lens and mirror ever devised for having a look at other cultures and nations and for seeing how one’s own culture and nation looks in return.
The combines of old communist and fascist puppet masters should not fare well online, but as regards gravitational effects on “information space” and “intellectual resources” worldwide, some are trying like mad to get the world and have the world back as they would wish it to be.
As a guy with a library — and a “19th Century Modern” attitude — I’ve much enjoyed looking over the palaces of the obscenely enriched by politics, but one might look forward to an other than revolutionary reversion to rule of law and redistribution of wealth as capital driven back down to the floors of economies where cash is needed and a new engineering may come into view on a global stage.
The age of creating and sustaining breathtaking deceits?
Let it end.
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