This thin post telegraphs in web links a few of the essentials about President Putin’s Soviet / post-Soviet ultra-nationalist neo-imperial Russian project and revanche. For the viewer, it may work as a portal both into related posts on BackChannels as well as a channel out for greater web-bound curiosity.
The ROC has made billions from trading concessions granted to it by the government. It is increasingly asserting its position as the largest of the 14 self-governing Orthodox Churches and is using its political muscle in support of Putin’s aims. It’s no friend to evangelicals, especially in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, seeing them as puppets of the West.
But how has it become so powerful – and how is it using its power?
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the church received official privileges including the right to import duty-free alcohol and tobacco. In 1995, the Nikolo-Ugreshky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol. The patriarchate’s department of foreign church relations, which Kirill ran, earned $75 million from the sale of tobacco. But the patriarchate reported an annual budget in 1995-1996 of only $2 million. Kirill’s personal wealth was estimated by the Moscow News in 2006 to be $4 billion.
During this period, the church has been silent about genuine moral issues, such as Russia’s pervasive corruption and the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants in Chechnya. As Kirill begins his reign as patriarch, there is little reason to expect this to change.
Yakov Krotov, a liberal Russian Orthodox priest, recently compared Kirill to a “court Jew,” like Peter Shafirov, the foreign policy aide to Peter the Great. The role of the court Jew, according to Krotov, is to put a civilized face on a repressive system.
In effect, Moscow, with its penchant for total control, bears responsibility for using the Palestinian refugees to block western democratic and open society (with free press) expansion while also milking the world under the guise of a good deed.
Moscow (Bogdanov) has met with PFLP in recent years (November 2014) and continues to refuse to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization.
In Syria, and keeping with its “total control” outlook, it appears that Assad himself incubated ISIL as an element that could be used to blackmail and goad the west.
Examine, query, test each URL. As a post on Facebook, the cited URLs taken together tell a story about Putin’s Soviet / post-Soviet transformation of Russia into an ultra-nationalist neo-imperial dictatorship.
The “PLO” became the “PA” — but I’m going to call it the “PSO” — “Palestinian Slavery Organization” from here on out. The Fatah Party, a secular-nationalist political machine, continues to dominate the PLO / PA. The chain of association between it, the old Soviet, the Baath Parties, and pan-Arab nationalism should be clear.
I don’t know the early history of Hamas, but two characteristics certainly stand out today: we know (we know, I know you know, and everyone knows) it”s a Muslim Brotherhood organization. However, it is also an organization approved and manipulated by Moscow and Tehran, neither of whom — from Tehran, we would expect this but not from Putin’s Moscow — will join the west in designating the same as a terrorist organization. In fact, and despite Putin’s “anti- anti-Semitism” stance, Moscow hasn’t altered its relationship much since Soviet days, and the neo-feudal / neo-imperial revanche has sought to sustain old “friendships”.
Although Hussein and Gaddafi have been shoved off the world’s stage, Putin appears to regard the Russian client Syria as essential to his state’s ambitions and defense — and mafia ways of doing business. It appears to me that Washington and NATO have chosen to contain the Russo-Syrian-Iranian arrangement rather than challenge it while at the same time seeking to accept the fallout in jihadism (ISIS was incubated by Assad’s counterrevolutionary strategy, and I have plenty of evidence for that) and refugees, leaving the blame for Syria on Moscow’s doorstep.
Back to the “Palestinians” — the refugees: they remain representative of Cold War / Soviet politics. As Putin plays extremes against the middle, i.e., supporting Far Right and Far Left organizations and personalities worldwide, the PA and Hamas suit his ends, which includes promoting and sustaining absolute and frequently criminal political power at state level in his world and in others.
Into this comes Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi who for his good nature slipped through the fence, figuratively in his reading, literally with the visit to Auschwitz with his students, and now I think the has a larger problem: what does one say to a whole population that has been duped by political machinations they could not see? How does one approach decades of disinformation, miseducation, and deep political manipulation?
As suggested in the excerpt From the Awesome Conversation, the Obama Administration and NATO have adjusted to perhaps containing the apparent (!) energies of a revanchist Russia while choosing to let that most dispassionate of political scripting that has been “Assad vs The Terrorists” play itself out into the horror that it has become.
From Cold War to Cold Struggle and from the installation of the Middle East Conflict to this day seems not that long a span by the measurements of history — 68 years of statehood for Israel and the same period for the Arab world’s separation of the Refugees of 1948 from the mainstream of Arab history; 71 years since the collapse of Nazi Germany and the near concurrent initiation of competition and hostility (and fear) between Moscow and Washington — and 24 years and six months since the dissolving of the Soviet (December 26, 1991).
Where are we now?
I doubt the 25th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet will go unremarked in major media, and perhaps it is about now, this summer, and not to mention this American Independence Day, that analysis, lowly bloggers, and major media pundits will be asking the same question: as regards Moscow and Moscow-Tehran and the many “worlds” spun up around central absolute or authoritarian power, indeed, where are we now?
His criticism of Luhansk and its corrupt, thuggish, and authoritarian Regionnaire authorities has remained unsparing. They’re easy to lambast and deserve every bit of his ire. Luhansk suffers from a rust-belt economy, collapsing social services, unhealthy living conditions, and a particularly sedentary Regionnaire elite.
Post-Soviet and Eastern European scholar and political science professor Alexander J. Motyl comments on Russia’s co-evolving dissenting political competition with his take on “Proctologist” blogger Stanislav Tsikalovsky, whom he predicts will climb the web vine up into a local political career between five and ten years from now.
I wouldn’t make such sunny predictions: in Putin’s Russia, a lot can happen in five hours — ask Khodorkovsky (Khodorkovsky’s main advocacy page)– much less five days, months, or years.
I’m less certain of what to make of the nom de blogging guerre “Proctologist” except to note the scatological relationship to “Pussy Riot” and the potential for Putin’s Russia to develop an entire generational legion of brothers and sisters in virtual arms and mutual contempt for what they will perceive as the ethical and moral failings of a regime to which they may relate as moral avatars and otherwise disenfranchised outsiders.
The worse it gets, the worse they’ll get would be my prediction. Even so, my impression is such a development may not have much room for maneuver as Putin’s post-KGB FSB organizes defensively in relation to them.
I will try to be more careful with exclamation marks! — now that I see so many of them in one place in relation to related subjects.
* * *
Perhaps not with “Blueberry Hill”, I wonder if Putin could not play Carnegie, setting in his autocratic wake a plethora of great homes and monuments that over time might integrate the greater Russian tapestry. In that the rich, however they may have gotten there, believe the world should serve them, they may realize they have the obligation to spend it some. Locally. Regionally. Nationally.
Or face taxes.
Or worse.
Eventually.
I jest today.
The emerging oligarchy is not Romanov, and its basis for being rather seems to twine with feudal national building: why not control the initial engines and outflows of the post-Soviet economy to one’s own temporal advantage but also to create an influential class — that “new nobility” — from varied quarters, including old school chums?
Metals and banking tycoons Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Fridman, who made their fortunes in the 90s, are still high on the list of Russia’s richest men. But the past decade saw a rise of new billionaires who draw their wealth from state contracts and some of whom are known to be the presidents’ friends, like Gennady Timchenko.
It reads awfully unfair, but that’s today’s news, not next generation’s news.
For a few Russians, there is a “gilded age” — their own. What they amass, what they build, what they leave by way of constructive investments spells the fortunes of an era to come.
However he has done it, Putin has organized a state, and that being so, he has given his emerging political competitors a lot to work with.
* * *
Related on the vicissitudes attending wealth and noblesse oblige:
BackChannels 