From our comparative analysis, it emerges how both Russia and Turkey present astonishing similarities in their leaderships styles. It is important to outline such feature of the nations’ political life because, being both “leader-politics” countries, the style of their leaders influences greatly the shaping of the national political agenda and the strategies used by the states to pursue such agendas.
To sum up, one could say that all the facts taken into account here highlight the presence in both countries totalitarian democracy regime, centred on the figure of the all-powerful leader. None of the leaders actually ever rejected the principles of the pluralistic state. In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.
“In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.”
Perhaps if each were more secure with such an assertion, the press in each state would be free (it’s an easy look-up as to how they are not) and their political rivals less often inhibited, jailed, muzzled, or murdered.
The truth is each may be wrong about himself (there’s also an interesting psychology at play in their “malignant narcissism” and respective kleptocracies), and that’s why open and vibrant national conversations supported by “fair and free elections” matter in democracies — and not at all in dictatorships.
Order: reverse chronological or most recently encountered material toward the top, a flexible guide.
People protesting in St. Petersburg's Palace Square in 1917 and today, chanting "Down with the Tsar!" pic.twitter.com/hGj5EwO40S
— THEY/THEMARS 🇺🇦 #ArmUkraineNow (@Mortis_Banned) March 26, 2017
The Guardian’s latest:
Hundreds of protesters have been detained by riot police in cities across Russia, as some of the largest anti-government protests in years swept the country.
The call to protest came from the opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who was himself detained at the Moscow demonstration. A monitoring group said at least 700 people were detained in Moscow alone, while the news agency Tass gave a figure of 500.
The post may exist only to get the Sunday reader started on the “All Russia Protests Against Corruption” (the title is BackChannel’s interpretation of the Russian billing for the event).
Note: many of today’s gatherings across Russia in protest of the Putin regime’s feudal indulgence in theft and corruption (reference: Gary Kasparov’s Winter is Coming and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy) have not been permitted by state officials, so all who have responded to the call for protest risk arrest and other methods of political repression known to those who have challenged similar regimes in the past.
Add the supporters of opposition leader Alexei Navalny now organize such actions in dozens of Russian cities. In many places, authorities have not agreed on the meetings under various pretexts, and some are already there have been reports of detentions.
“The Italian Minister of the residence and you pay for it” (machine translated); posted to YouTube March 16, 2017. English subtitles available using the “cc” (caption) control.
Well, the Jews are not “fighting the Arab World” — there’s a kind of defamation in that statement.
Israelis are defending themselves from those who wish to annihilate them — and considering who has been friendly toward and paying for Hamas and Hezbollah, well, gosh, it’s just not the Arab world after all.
Moscow-Tehran as an axis appears to want to maintain a common interest in positively medieval political absolutism. Somebody has learned how to make a lot of money (for themselves, their cronies, their lackeys, and their tools) that way.
Of course the Arab and Muslim worlds have within them strong anti-Semitic currents, but let’s go back to the 1920s and endemic 19th Century Russian anti-Semitism and the echoes of other medieval anti-Semitism, the same that compelled Herschel and others to entertain the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel, and come forward to three distinct aspects in the character of the 1920s: Stalin’s installment in power in Russia as the dominant state in the Soviet Union; the development in the universities of an intellectual path leading to Nazism; and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).
The mercurial, paranoid seventy-four-year-old tyrant was certainly capable of ordering the mass deportations. During the Second World War, he removed Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, ethnic Germans, and Crimean Tatars from their homelands—more than two million Soviet citizens in all. He was no novice, either, when it came to purges and show trials. In the Pravda report, most of the accused “murderers in white smocks” were identified as Jewish and agents of the U.S. and Israel. There were further arrests of Soviet Jews, exemplars of “national and racist chauvinism.” Jews were dismissed from their jobs. They were insulted on the streets, in shops, and on public transportation, according to Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews.”
“Different Talks – Same Walk” is the conclusion I’ve come to with “malignant narcissists”.
The Hamas leaders don’t care about the Palestinians at whose expense — and the expense of lives — they have aggrandized themselves. We’re numb to the labels: “autocrats”, “dictators”, “kleptocrats”. Each — Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Orban, Erdogan, Haniyeh, Mashaal, et al. — starts from a different positions, but using criminal means, each winds up a tyrant.
Hamas may be sold as a Utopian movement, but . . . it’s a criminal enterprise, and its idea of power is the power to impose suffering on others with impunity.
Our democracies are fragile by comparison to feudal kingdoms, but as they have their differences between them, we — North America, Europe, for the most part, and others — have been able to navigate between them as peace pays off with prosperity. What the dictatorships do please the privileged, but they don’t really pay for themselves. They don’t shift for themselves. They, in fact, devour themselves.
There’s no need to defend this post.
The privileged of Russia know how much they depend on Putin for favor — and the “outer rings” (“rings” referring to driving belts around Moscow) know that no matter what they do if they’re out of favor — complete unknowns — there isn’t much new for them. The economy simply hasn’t fare well under kleptocracy — golly gee — and the distribution of capital and gains from capital remains deeply skewed.
Investment continues to decline, both industrial and in residential construction. Private consumption declines as well, while Russian people say they are cutting their purchases of goods and services to survive. Then again, industrial production is stable, agriculture continues to grow, export is growing slightly in physical terms, despite the drop in commodities prices.
This economic dialogue will continue for a long time, but the main conclusion we can make is already visible.
The difference between the two strategies is fundamental. Kudrin’s formula is “business environment first, private investment later,” while his opponents want “public investment first, business environment later or never.” The two visions cancel each other out and this is exactly what Vladimir Putin seems to like about it. Both projects emphasize domestic growth based on either private initiative (Kudrin) or public spending (Titov). The first path means backpedaling on aggressive foreign-policy projects and depends on reviving and empowering the urban middle class. This poses a problem however, since the Kremlin is convinced that professionals who are paid more than 1500 U.S. dollars a month are a potential threat as proved by the protest movement of 2011-2012. The second path, exemplified by large public-works projects, will inevitably lead to even more corruption than currently exists in Russia.
Was “Vegas” better in its wild mafia days?
I don’t know.
I was too young for all that.
I didn’t exist.
🙂
“Moscow” — used here as a metonym — has suffered years of capital flight and frankly fearful foreign investment.
The state appears to leverage other states amenable to a medieval worldview of competition and political absolutism; it certainly has projects like “Turkish Stream” and a few hefty nuclear programs going with Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban, but get right down to it, the “good” despise “the criminal” and wear out on coughing up payola.
“This is not a hybrid regime!” shouted Andrei Illarionov as the conference wrapped up. Illarionov is an economist who was an economic advisor to Putin in 2000–2005—though he was never fully integrated into the regime—and now lives in Washington. “Thinking about it that way is a mistake, and analytical mistakes like that can have long-term tragic consequences.”
Capital flight from Russia looks dramatically reduced this year from where it was last year, but the prior years of losses may anchor the greater “longitudinal” picture in time.
In the past couple years, Russian hackers have launched attacks on a French television network, a German steelmaker, the Polish stock market, the White House, the US House of Representatives, the US State Department, and The New York Times.
And according to press reports citing Western intelligence officials, the perpetrators weren’t rogue cyber-pranksters. They were working for the Kremlin.
Cybercrime, it appears, has become a tool of Russian statecraft. And not just cybercrime.
Vladimir Putin’s regime has become increasingly adept at deploying a whole range of practices that are more common among crime syndicates than permanent members of the UN Security Council.
If there’s the sniff of a Clinton tie to corruption and crime, the conservative press will find it. In the listings below, The Daily Caller shouts on that.
For any interested (including the FBI) in Fethullah Gulen, BackChannels has visited the presentation of the personality in online news at least twice (as listed) and somewhere on this blog there’s a related poem involving “winks ‘n’ nods” (you’ll appreciate it more if you find it on your own). 🙂
Erdogan the Malignant with the White Palace?
BackChannels has had some say (also as listed).
Psychological alignment: Erdogan along with Orban may share more with Putin as personalities than they may with other NATO leaders and the leaders of westward-leaning former Soviet states or clients.
That’s life with “malignant narcissists”.
Their people will be beaten up for a buck; their manipulated constituencies will drift toward fascist nationalism or some near equivalent (on this blog, keep in mind “Syndicate Red Brown Green“); but they will be glorious in wealth and treasure plundered from state coffers — just as Putin would have it (and has as much for himself as regards kleptocracy and absolute power).
Americans, often written off as being more concerned with Kardashians and sports scores, probably should immerse for a brief spell in Cold War and post-Soviet history, so as to get a grip not only on machinations driving contemporary foreign affairs but to check the state’s own Machiavellian preference for developing perhaps too much business and politics “behind the curtains”.
Here’s a suggested schematic for the big story behind so much indoctrination. Billionaires –> nationalist / religious state dictators –> control, enforcement, and expansion organizations that include elements that attend to intellectual development and resources, internal and external.
Out of that model and through separable national socialist and Islamist pipelines come old Fatah and Hamas and emerging Jobbik (Hungary) and obvious ISIS. At the evident top: Putin-Khamenei. Behind the scenes: extraordinarily wealth personalities much enriched by criminality in state politics.
The commandeering of intellectual resources, whether targeting the kindergarten or college campus, is a part of sustaining criminal power. Where audience is captive or deeply susceptible, indoctrination and training go deep, so much so that the poison turns the world upside down. Where less area (geopolitical space) is captive, then intellectual skirmishing takes place with perhaps discouraging results.
I think a part of the answer to kind of bigotry and conflict addressed here may be to drive highest-integrity information — most open, tested, reviewed, criticized, most probable, etc. — into otherwise closed societies and the minds that have been kept closed by them. “B” may be living in a world of lies and mirrors that she cannot see for having been deeply manipulated within it. Those who wish for peace, who want an honest future (and it may be different than immediately contemplated) may have to disassemble that intellectual wall.
Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.
But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed wider.
The economy bears more than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized, but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations, controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their supporters.
Iran has other lethal secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow army of enforcers.
More than political criminality and cronyism are at play here.
The intellectual subjugation of entire constituencies is thematic throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars and now in the development of a post-Hitlerian nationalism and national socialism in relation to the Russian nationalist stance on which Putin has relied for popular legitimacy. Axes of power Khamenie-Putin and Putin-Orban (the same as would have been Putin-Yanukovych had there not been the revolution in Ukraine) and Putin-Assad represent the development and expansion of immense piratical wealth and power far at the expense of ordinary people.
So far, neither the European Union nor the United States nor anyone or anything else has gone so far as to explicate these drifts and relationships for popular overview although with Russia, the articles and books by academics and journalists have produced a handy few volumes for anyone’s home library (more on that later).
“Obummuh” rhymes with “Jimmuh”, it’s true, but the Administration has been opaque as regards the distance between surface impression and authentic Administration policy. To get at the authentic takes some Washington-style research — down into the world of wonks, Jane’s and other specialized publications, and probably some grip-and-grin plus elbow bending and rubbing with the Georgetown set — only partially available online.
Regarding ISIS, the best rumor I’ve heard is Iran’s VEVAK may have been able to blackmail some Saudi and Qatari private wealth into seeding ISIS, expecting in the long run to give ISIS the Great Sunni-Shiite war it wants and thereby ennoble and enlarge the Ayatollah’s image of himself and Iran. 🙂
The hypotheses get a bit mad.
I don’t like the idea that “What ISIS scours, Qatar will devour”, but that too looks like a possibility, one buttressed by an $11 billion arms sale to Qatar.
Perhaps following the principle of “least war possible”, getting the “world left behind” on to the western program may be Washington’s chief headache best owned by Washington’s chief.
Having set out to learn what one might glean about things online, I’ve learned one can learn a lot from “yesterday’s news” combined with old fashioned library-style reading that helps structure and integrate the narratives formed by news clips.
The inside-the-beltway journos involved in political spychology, however, have great advantage in being able to at least park, briefly, at Langley, hoof it down to Foggy Bottom, stop by the National Press Club, and refresh with ears alert in the Georgetown bars. Such jealousy may be more literary than functional, but, alas, I’m somewhere else where it’s quiet and one may read quietly and without interruption, leaving outlooks right and left to climb up the branches they know before the “Wait a minute — let’s look again” sets in.
ISIS et al may represent piracy cloaked by a pretentious delusion anchored in the Islamic discourse.
Khamenei has built a $94 billion enterprise — Setad — beneath aegis of the “Islamic Devilution” and his station: does he regard himself as a thief? Whether he does or not, the Setad story is a pirate’s story and related political repression on one hand and patronage on the other only underscore it.
Putin, imho, reminds that there is the secular version of the same thing. The Colonel President Emperor (apparent) beneath the Russian Nationalist banner handily plunders the state’s wealth in production and its productive potential while the Russian economy contracts and Russians suffer along with capital flight — or the failure of new capital to arrive.
I’m not going to post a whole (my sided) conversation, but here one may feel that BackChannels has found its theme in political science. Clearly: the despotic and kleptocratic latched together in common “malignant narcissism” are enjoying a very good ride along the Russo-Iranian crest, and God only knows, truly, how similar psychology and political psychology on the side of immense Sunni wealth and privilege may be navigating similar but perhaps different autocratic interests.
@ naganoff_ru
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