by
Phillip Todd*
Vladimir
Vladimirovich is the elected leader of Russia, relatively poor,
militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently
humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his
country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international
system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general in favor of a one
world government and views Russia’s sovereignty, in particular, as a
threat to that goal.
Putin did not come
out of nowhere. You can get a better idea of why he has ruled for 17 years if
you remember that, within a few years of Communism’s fall, average
life expectancy in Russia had fallen below that of Bangladesh. There
are two things Putin did that cemented the loyalty of the Russian
people, he restrained the billionaires who were looting the country,
and he restored Russia’s standing abroad. Russian people not only tolerate him, they revere him.
When
Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was
defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new
elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the West.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “As a result of the Yeltsin era, all
the fundamental sectors of our political, economic, cultural, and
moral life have been destroyed or looted. Will we continue looting
and destroying Russia until nothing is left?” The world's elite had
them where they wanted them. The untapped treasures of natural
resources that they had waited decades to exploit looked as if,
finally, were there for the taking.
Putin changed
that. He refused, forcefully, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept
for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn
up by foreign politicians and business leaders. He rescued his
nation state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his
country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. His
voters credit him with having saved his country. He put a stop to the deceitful attempted take-over of his country. The controlled
western media immediately attacked. He would not do as he was told.
Under
Communism there was oligarchic control of natural resources. The
transfer of Russia’s natural resources into the hands of
KGB—connected Communists, who called themselves businessmen, was a
shameful one for the West. Western political scientists provided the
theft with ideological cover, presenting it as a “transition to
capitalism.” Western corporations, including banks, provided the
financing as the elite began it's plan to carve up the country.
Putin came to call
these people “state-appointed billionaires.” He saw them as a
conduit for looting Russia, and sought to restore to the country what
had been stolen from it. He also saw that Russia needed to reclaim
control of its vast reserves of oil and gas, on which much of Europe
depended, because that was the only geopolitical lever it had left.
The other thing
Putin did was restore the country’s position abroad. He arrived in
power a decade after his country had suffered a Vietnam-like defeat
in Afghanistan. Following that defeat, it had failed to halt a bloody
Islamist uprising in Chechnya. And worst of all, it had been
humiliated by the United States and NATO in the Serbian war of 1999,
when the Clinton administration backed a nationalist and Islamist
independence movement in Kosovo. This was the last war in which the
United States would fight on the same side as Osama Bin Laden, and
the US used the opportunity to show Russia its lowly place in the
international order, treating it as a nuisance and an afterthought.
Furiously nationalistic, when Putin took office he stated, “We will
not tolerate any humiliation to the national pride of Russians, or
any threat to the integrity of the country,” and he meant it. He
beat back the military advance of lslamist armies in Chechnya and
Dagestan, and he took a hard line on terrorism—including a decision
not to negotiate with hostage-takers, even in secret.
The main theme of
attack on Putin and Russia is do attempt to de-legitimize the
president and de-stabilize the country once again as to leave it open
to their exploitation. The controlled western media has gone into
overdrive to accomplish this. The current is attempt started by the
outgoing Obama puppet administration to cast doubt on the legitimacy
of last November’s presidential election by implying that the
Russian government somehow “hacked” it. This is an extraordinary
episode in the history of manufacturing opinion. Anyone who has read
the public documentation on which the claims rest will find only
speculation, opinions, and attempts to make repetition do the work of
logic. They have been beating this dead horse to a pulp.
There are other
steams of mis-information that the western media has attacked Putin
with. In November, the Washington Post ran a blacklist of news
organizations that had published “fake news” in the service of
Putin, but the list turned out to have been compiled largely by a
fly—by-night political activist group called PropOrNot, which had
placed certain outlets on the list only because their views coincided
with those of RT on given issues. Then in December, the Obama
administration claimed to have found Russian computer code it
melodramatically called “Grizzly Steppe” in the Vermont
electrical grid.
This made front-page headlines. But it was a
mistake. The so-called Russian code could be bought commercially, and
it was found, according to one journalist, “in a single laptop that
was not connected to the electric grid.”
Why is the West
doing this? Russians has long been thought of as 'less than human.”
That European idea dates back centuries well before the founding of
the United States. That subject will be shelved for another day.
Today, it is the exploitation of it's abundant natural resources at
the lowest cost by means of political upheaval that drives the
western elite's campaign against Putin's Russia. More on this subject and their continuing efforts next
week.
*Many thanks to Christopher Caldwell for his helpful insights on the preparation of this article.
No comments:
Post a Comment