One thing that an observer of Russian politics can’t help noticing is the sheer impossibility of appeasing the Russian liberals. Here are two recent exhibits from the Moscow Times.
First, coming to the end of his Presidency, Medvedev pardoned some people in a list of political prisoners presented by the non-systemic opposition a few months ago. The choice of pardons seem justified on grounds of reason and proportionality although it is unclear to what extent, say, someone convicted to three years in prison for selling 70g of marijuana qualifies as a political prisoner (if that was a criterion for political repression, I wonder how many “political prisoners” are currently rotting in US jails?).
But predictably enough the liberals are far more concerned with Medvedev’s refusal to pardon Khodorkovsky without at least first receiving a petition requesting a pardon from the imprisoned. Of course one would also think that withholding many billions of dollars from the tax authorities and defrauding minority shareholders – as repeatedly established by not only the Russian justice system, but the ECHR – are far more serious crimes than selling weed even in a country as regressive in its attitudes to drugs freedoms as Russia. Not that Russia’s so-called “liberals” see it that way.
The second case concerns the liberalization of party registration laws and the return of direct gubernatorial elections. One would think that after years of demanding these reforms, the liberals would welcome these developments. You’d be wrong. The liberals have condemned the eased registration requirements for providing “unlimited opportunities to multiply fake, pro-Kremlin parties.” The Kremlin can literally do no right. If requirements are tough (40,000+ signatures), it is a ploy to bar access to liberals from the political arena. If the requirements are easy (500+ signatures), it is a ploy to drown out the liberals with fake parties.
Both accusations are, of course, preemptive rationalizations of the liberals never-ending failure to attract support. Never mind that they already have two parties, neither of which ever gets more than a tiny fraction of the vote. The possibility that this could be due to the fact that many Russians simply dislike the liberals – for their lies, self-pitying whining, “Rashka” bashing, and proud association with the 1990’s and foreign interests – most likely never enters their puffed up heads.
Just a few moments of thought would reveal this critique for the sham it really is. Contrary to conspiracy theories, keeping control of fake parties is exceedingly hard, indeed practically impossible. If they are small, they are (electorally) ineffectual anyway. If they gain broad-based popular support, then they de facto break loose of any remaining ties that bind. Case in point is the Fair Russia party, which started off as a Kremlin project but which no even minimally informed observer can now deny is as oppositional as any other, being the driving force between the protests over the mayoral elections in Astrakhan.
Then there is the brouhaha over some fairly minor restrictions over eligibility to participate in gubernatorial elections. Rather than being appointed by the President as before – or in numerous acknowledged democracies like France or India to this day – they will have to have the support of 5%-10% of local legislatures. This sounds like a very modest and not unreasonable requirement.
The real reason that the liberals protest the very “liberalization” they’ve endlessly harped on about is that protest is all there ultimately is to them; the only way they can keep themselves heard, and somewhat relevant. They will not be getting votes from people they regularly insult and dismiss as unthinking, primitive masses. This makes them all the angrier and more vitriolic.
EDIT: This article was translated into Russian at Inosmi (Либералам не угодишь).
Dear Anatoly,
This article is spot on.
In my opinion the big mistake of Medvedev’s Presidency was Medvedev’s attempt to meet these people half way. The only effect was that they took his concessions as an indicator of weakness and as a vindication of their positions and demanded more. Since Medvedev couldn’t satisfy them (the only way to satisfy them is to surrender all power to them) he ended up appearing weak. Putin has never made this mistake.
One further comment I would make for the historically interested is that this primitive oppositionism seems to be rooted in Russian liberalism’s DNA. There is an eery similarity between the behaviour of the Russian liberals today and that of their pre revolutionary predecessors. The best book on pre revolutionary Russian liberals in the run up to the 1917 Revolution remains George Katkov’s Russia 1917 (1967 Longmans). Katkov was a conservative monarchist and the grandson of the famous nineteenth century publisher. He was actually present in Petrograd during and before the Revolution and was closely acquainted with both government and liberal circles there so his book captures the atmosphere to an extent that is missing in nearly all other accounts. Though his book has many faults including a propensity to believe in unsubstantiated German plots and to excuse the tsarist government’s anti semitic policies, Katkov’s discussion of the liberal parties and of liberal politics and liberal politicians during that period rings true and remains unsurpassed. Any reader of the book will find all the same characteristics of Russian liberals so visible today: the same monstrous sense of entitlement, the same uncritical worship of the west and willingness to sacrifice Russia’s interests to it, the same pathological factionalism and addiction to intrigue, the same cynicism and disregard for truth, the same contempt for the wider Russian people, the same ruthlessness and arrogance, the same extraordinary corruption and incompetence and above all the same relentless vilification and abuse of any and everyone who stands between the liberals and the power they unshakeably though quite unreasonably and undeservedly believe is by right theirs.
Easy registration led to fake parties, as is proved by Italy where we have a specific term for them “lista civetta” (lit. owl-list, means decoy-list). They’re just a minor annoyance and another proof that this world isn’t perfect. Every party here has made some decoy-list, thought no one ever admitted it. I expect the same is going to happen in Russia, i.e. there will be fake parties at the next elections. They won’t just be pro-“Kremlin” (that is to say made by UR), there will be pro-KPRF, pro-LDPR, etc.
I don’t expect to see fake parties used against the liberals for two reasons:
1) fake parties are never made against minor/fringe/lunatic parties, they’re not worth the effort;
2) the liberals will make anti liberal fake parties themselves without realising it.
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/04/26/dark-sacrament/#comment-203028
A commenter over at Belmont Club made this point, which I think is highly relevant to this discussion. It’s akin to the classic Twlight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder” episode where everyone is off camera until the very end where the ‘deformed’ girl is actually the only human being without a pig nose.
Once you live in a world where all sorts of crazy stuff seems possible, and you have seeming bits of evidence like black helicopters buzzing downtowns of American cities for urban warfare drills, then suddenly a guy like Alex Jones that ten years ago you would’ve dismissed as a total nutjob starts to seem reasonable as at least a FEW of the things he’s predicted start actually happening. Meanwhile the ‘reasonable’ people who’ve been discredited time and again for supporting or silently going along with massive bank bailouts/money printing, TSA groping little girls, guns being deliberately sent to Mexican drug cartel psycopaths, and deliberate targeting of civilians so long as they’ve been issued Russian passports (08/08/08)…well they start to seem not so sane when they tell you YOU’RE CRAZY.
I’m not dragging any Tweets on to these threads, but I just make the larger point. The ‘mainstream’ might seem quite reasonable until people started getting arrested in the middle of the night and sent black bag over their heads to some hole somewhere (probably in Latvia).
So although I quit Twitter, I do know some of those folks read DR and they need to wake up to the larger stuff. Maybe colonizing Siberia won’t seem like throwing good money after bad fifty years from now. After all the U.S. purchase of the ‘icebox’ of Alaska in the late 19th century was known as ‘Seward’s Folly’. We could all use a bit more humility — even the host of this site appears to have calmed down a bit on Peak Oil and the idea (as James Lovelock admits) that the planet is not going to melt down in ten years, though there are plenty of other very real environmental threats to worry about.
So it is with the Russian liberals. People feel an innate psychological need to feel like they’re with a crowd and if not they’re martyrs. Perhaps just as some say there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart there’s also that potential or hidden desire to sacrifice one’s self, even if the god in question like Communism is a lie. But I think engaging in endless speculation about and bashing of Russia while ignoring the clear and imminent danger signs to liberty in the West is akin to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace’. There is no sacrifice required to sign a KONY 2012 petition or tweet endlessly about the horrors of Putinism, but we’re long past the point in the West if you think some vaccines are hurting people or the drones are for us it could be damaging to one’s career prospects, at the very least.
Alex Jones might be considered a kook in some quarters, but I found that on the Libya war he was 100% right. Everything he wrote on that checked out as accurate. His “crazy conspiracy theories” about Al Qaeda (being a type of American paramilitary force for the Muslim world) also turned out to be completely factual, as both Libya and Syria scenarios prove. Therefore, I respect him, although my overall political views are very different from his.
I don’t know Tolya, the scholarship here seems softer than what I’ve read in your other posts. Cherry picking views of a bunch of different Russian domestic malcontents is like shooting fish in a barrel. You’re bound to get a bunch of extreme views if you sample choice statements from the likes of Ponomaryev, Latinina, Tor, Kashin, Alexseeyva, etc. I think everyone who has an even passing familiarity with the internet knows that you can always find someone who objects to something…no mater how positive it may appear. So, well done in tracking some of those down I guess. Still, I’ll admit that it is worth pointing out, however obliquely, that the opposition won’t gain much traction if the only tune it can play is “AGAINST”; kids these days need some “FOR” as well.
And is that all the analysis of the gubernatorial filters we can expect from you? I was hoping for a breakdown of the…how many are there now? 4? 5? Perhaps a statistical breakdown of why each are reasonable? How about a scenario to show how easy it would be to get an opposition candidate on the ballot in say…Sverdlovsk? No?
And lest I be tarred with the ‘always negative’ brush, I have to give you a nod for your excellent point about Fair Russia. What was once a Kremlin distraction is all grown up now. When and if Mironov steps down the last serious argument that they are still controlled will evaporate.
The choice of pardons seem justified on grounds of reason and proportionality although it is unclear to what extent, say, someone convicted to three years in prison for selling 70g of marijuana qualifies as a political prisoner (if that was a criterion for political repression, I wonder how many “political prisoners” are currently rotting in US jails?)
AK, you’ve missed their line of reasoning. The person isn’t a political prisoner because he sold 70g of marijuana. That charge was either trumped-up or incidental (a trivial matter) to that person’s supporters. He’s a political prisoner because he just happens to be in prison and happens to share their political views. Hence “political prisoner”. Further they (in a state bordering on paranoia of the kind exhibited by conspiracy theorists) would refuse to believe that the real reason this guy is in prison has to do with the formal charge, but with his political beliefs. And since they don’t seem to think anyone who shares their views (or gives them healthy donations) should ever be in prison no matter what they do (even if it is to evade taxes and possibly be involved in murder like one of their more famous political prisoners).
That to me is the scariest part of their belief-system and politics; that some people can be above the law once they share certain political beliefs or hand over enough money (even if they don’t say so openly, that is basically the gist of their campaign). I for one don’t like the idea that just because you might be the local equivalent of William Wilberforce, Mother Theresa or Bill Gates that you won’t find your ass in prison if you sell crack or murder someone. That would be a truly horrifying society to live in.
Good point overall, @hunter, but one tiny quibble: I would not place Mother Theresa in the same category as the saintly Reverend Wilberforce. Wilberforce was truly a great man and political activist who helped end the slave trade in Great Britain. Whereas Mother Theresa… well, suffice to say, I am not a member of her fan club. She was a right-wing Opus Dei type Catholic/fascist who worshipped the elites of the world, despised the poor, and hyped herself endlessly. I could cite many sources if needed but, for starters, the conditions in her hospice were appalling and medically unsound, for example she did not allow patients to get out of their cots or even be turned over, many were forced to lie in their own filth for days. Her patients were treated with appalling and unnecessary cruelty. Virtually no money was spent on their care, while Theresa herself jet-setted around the world living a lavish lifestyle on the money that was supposed to go to the poor. She was basically a sadist who got her rocks off watching poor people suffer and die horrible deaths, she regarded their suffering as a valid religious experience for herself, and then had the gall to portray herself to the world as a saint. As for Bill Gates… well, I think he’s a good guy, he’s trying to use his $$$ to do good stuff around the world.
Dear Anatoly,
Congratulations on publication by Inosmi of this article!
Does anybody have link to INOSMI translation? I can’t find it.
Linked to in the article body.
Dear Hunter,
I am afraid I am altogether more cynical about the “political prisoners” list than you. In my opinion it was simply another one of the many devices cooked up to try to spring Khodorkovsky from prison. It was awkward to argue that Khordokovsky and Lebedev were alone as political prisoners so a list had to be cobbled together of people whose convictions looked dodgy in the hope that Medvedev would grant all of them including of course Khodorkovsky and Lebedev a blanket amnesty. Also I have previous pointed out in an earlier comment that if the liberals say that Putin is a dictator and tyrant who oppresses people then they have to find examples of people he has actually oppressed ie of political prisoners, otherwise the claim that Putin is a dictator and tyrant simply stops being credible .
In the event the list does seem to have done some good in that it has highlighted a number of miscarriages but I strongly doubt that even the people who compiled the list seriously ever seriously thought that many of the people on the list were political prisoners in any meaningful sense. If I am right in my belief then the list has totally failed in its intended purpose in that it has not resulted in Khodorkovsky’s release whilst its propaganda effect has been spoilt by the government’s decision to review the case and free many of the people on it. Doubtless that explains much of the anger that Anatoly discusses in his article.
@ Yalensis, I totally agree with your comments about Mother Teresa. I once had a massive and very public row with one of her many admirers in which I made essentially the same comments as you. Besides anybody who exalts poverty in others but conspicuously does not practice it herself is to be treated with the greatest suspicion. Contrast her comments about how poverty brings the poor closer to Christ with those of Mahatma Gandhi, a much greater man whatever you may think of him, who also had to confront the reality of Indian poverty and who said that the greatest violence of all is poverty.
The Papacy runs the Grand Inquisition until this day. They need to fight any temporal “corruption” that would deny the elites their power. So this is why the current Pope was the persecutor of the “liberation theologists” in Latin America and why I have seen footage of one Central American bishop tell a congregation that they should not worry about this life, just the next. Mother Theresa was politically correct so she was propagandized as a living saint. If she had followed in Gandhi’s footsteps she would have been excommunicated. Humans matter only in the afterlife so “saving” their souls is way more important than saving their lives.
Nice racket. Even the selective quote “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is pure BS. Who determines what is Caesar’s? It is not so obvious when Caesar makes his fortune and issues his coin off the oppressed masses. I don’t see supporting tyrants and oppression, economic, or otherwise (remember that liberation theology arose in the context of death squad juntas) as being moral. It is sick and obscene.
@kiril
“give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is pure BS. Who determines what is Caesar’s?It is not so obvious when Caesar makes his fortune and issues his coin off the oppressed masses.I don’t see supporting tyrants and oppression, economic, or otherwise (remember that liberation theology arose in the context of death squad juntas) as being moral. It is sick and obscene.
Caesar determines what is Caesar’s.
As Christian I find your comment unfair and little bit violent, thus not completly based on good content.
The comment only passonet for “justice” principles…
Violence breeds violence and passonet “justice” does not bring peace.
Correct me if I’m wrong but dimension of “economic, or otherwise ” justice makes no sense in Christianity be cause Christians are called upon sharing everything they poses with each other and endless compassion and sacrifieses…
Giving to “oppressive” Caesar what he claims to belong to him is not “supporting tyrants and oppression”.Just simple submission.
Isn’t often, when we find something ” sick and obscene” (from pedestal of moral high ground) nothing but “vanity of vanities” just ultimate “vanity”?
@kiril
“give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is pure BS. Who determines what is Caesar’s?It is not so obvious when Caesar makes his fortune and issues his coin off the oppressed masses.I don’t see supporting tyrants and oppression, economic, or otherwise (remember that liberation theology arose in the context of death squad juntas) as being moral. It is sick and obscene.
Caesar determines what is Caesar’s.
As Christian I find your comment unfair and little bit violent, thus not completly based on good content.
The comment only passonet for “justice” principles…
Violence breeds violence and passonet “justice” does not bring peace.
Correct me if I’m wrong but dimension of “economic, or otherwise ” justice makes no sense in Christianity be cause Christians are called upon sharing everything they poses with each other and endless compassion and sacrifieses…
Giving to “oppressive” Caesar what he claims to belong to him is not “supporting tyrants and oppression”.Just simple submission.
Isn’t often, when we find something ” sick and obscene” (from pedestal of moral high ground) nothing but “vanity of vanities” just ultimate “vanity”?
Do you think that the birthday parties, with strippers, for Ferdinand Marcos attended by the upper stratum of the Catholic hierarchy in the Philippines was acting up to Christian standards? It’s quite transparent that the church was and still is in bed with power all around the world. Don’t try to hide behind high principles of Christianity. The church is quite temporal in reality.
I stand by my statement that “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is out of context and a fig leaf for the worst sort of corruption. Your indignation does not offer a refutation.
Dear Alex and Yalensis,
Another Mother Teresa basher here!
Initially I was suspicious of Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Missionary Position” which exposed Mother Teresa’s hypocrisy. Then I noticed newspaper reports about her travelling to Switzerland to stay in an expensive medical clinic for malaria treatment and I realised Hitchens was on to something.
I’ve also seen and heard rumours that a few people who worked at her hospice in Calcutta wrote about their experiences and tried to get their manuscripts published but to no avail. It seems that the manuscripts portrayed a very unflattering picture of Mother Teresa and her treatment of patients and the publishers wanted no part of them.
I have since found an article that reveals Mother Teresa helped to protect a pedophile priest in the San Francisco Bay area. Follow the link!
http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-01-11/news/mother-teresa-catholic-church-john-hardon-donald-mcguire-child-abuse-jesuits/
Thanks for link, Jennifer. This is extremely interesting and important research that I was not aware of. But, It does not surprise me that Mother Theresa protected a pedophile. It is very obvious to anyone who has studied this issue that the Catholic Church has institutionalized and defended the practice of pedophilia,up to the highest levels of the Church hierarchy (including the pope and his inner circle). I do NOT believe this is an issue of sexual repression of individual priests, or even the peculiar custom of celibacy. Most of the priests may not even have a hankering for little boys, but they will defend the right of the “boys club” to do whatever they want without legal ramifications. This is the inevitable result of any purely patriarchal system in which men have unlimited power and women have little or none. Just like in the monkey world, groups of males who bond together for unchecked power, when left to their own devices, inevitably use this power for sexual dominance. Taliban in Afghanistan also have an institutionalized system of raping underage boys (especially from Khazar minority – allude to book “The Kite Runner” by Khalad Hoseini). Similarly, Catholic Church has perfected and institutionalized this system, and found an efficient way to funnel children to pedophiles. Mother Theresa was aways a faithful servant of the corrupt and powerful, so, in summary, it is not surprising that she assisted the powerful pedophile and ignored the tears of the powerless children.
yalensis
“This is the inevitable result of any purely patriarchal system in which men have unlimited power and women have little or none.”
Raping little boys “inevitable result of any purely patriarchal system”?!?
Inevitable!!?!
And how so?! Please explain to me?
Must be word “patriarchal” that hides all “evils” from feminist perspective, specially when “argumented” with “monkey world” paralel.
“groups of males who bond together for unchecked power, when left to their own devices, inevitably use this power for sexual dominance”
so they hump everything that moves?!
I’m obviously ignorant when, it comes to biology be cause this is 1st time I read about collective rape perpetrated by groupe of animals, but if you say so…
Still I can’t follow completly through your (gender problem) logic based on your examples, unless “patriarchal” is synonime for “primitive” in your dictionary.
Yalensis,
I think you keyed “Khazar” accidentally and you meant to say “Hazara”. I saw the film that was based on the book and I have heard of the Afghan custom of dancing boys too.
Since you mentioned “Khazar”, you won’t be surprised to learn that some sects of ultra-Orthodox Judaism also have ongoing pedophilia issues among rabbis. Rabbis often have unlimited power among their followers and will even dictate who their followers should marry. The whole sect may behave like a cult with all that the term implies. Sexual frustration is a big problem among ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish men and they are said to patronise brothels in Israel very heavily.
From time to time, strange news stories about circumcised baby Jewish boys affected by and even dying from herpes appear and it turns out the rabbi who performs the operation has given the children the disease by sucking the blood directly from the wound. In some communities the rabbi is supposed to use a tube to suck out the blood but many rabbis refuse to use it. How on earth does the rabbi get herpes in the first place anyway?
Thanks for factual correction about “Hazara”, Jennifer. Other examples of child-abuse in patriarchal religious sects:
Well, the most famous example is classical Mormonism. Polygamy was instituted primarily as a way for powerful church leaders (all male) to be able to possess underage girls. For example, an elite male would marry a young girl and impregnate her. Once she got beyond a certain age, he would want a younger model, but no need to get rid of the older wife: she stays onboard, and he now gets to add-on a 12 or 13-year-old girl. Soon she is pregant too. And so on.
To be fair, official Mormon church long ago abandoned polygamy, in order to be compliant with U.S. federal laws. However, Mormon offshoot sects remain in many Western states of USA, and polygamy is still practiced; in almost all cases this involves middle-aged (powerful) men marrying teenage girls. The reason is very obvious: teenage girls are cute and desirable. But normal sexual desire is given a religious justification, hence appalling hypocrisy.
Problem with these sects involves the mathematics of it: If females constitute 50% of the population, and the older men are getting all the young chickies, this means the younger (less powerful) men and boys are left lonely, with no girls to marry. They would have to become bachelors, except that bachelorhood is not an option in these societies. Therefore, as the only logical consequence of this, the younger unattached (low-status) males are actually driven out of the society. This is great hardship for them, as these boys, not even in their 20’s, are disowned by their own parents and forced out on their own into the world.
Other example: Amish. One thinks of Amish as being kindly, eccentric types, and they are, mostly. But recently there has emerged a darker underside of this religion, involving (once again) older males sexual abuse of younger girls, including fathers abusing their own daughters.
yalensis
“This is the inevitable result of any purely patriarchal system in which men have unlimited power and women have little or none.”
Raping little boys “inevitable result of any purely patriarchal system”?!?
Inevitable!!?!
And how so?! Please explain to me?
Must be word “patriarchal” that hides all “evils” from feminist perspective, specially when “argumented” with “monkey world” paralel.
“groups of males who bond together for unchecked power, when left to their own devices, inevitably use this power for sexual dominance”
so they hump everything that moves?!
I’m obviously ignorant when, it comes to biology be cause this is 1st time I read about collective rape perpetrated by groupe of animals, but if you say so…
Still I can’t follow completly through your (gender problem) logic based on your examples, unless “patriarchal” is synonime for “primitive” in your dictionary.
Well to be fair he did also give the example of the Taliban which is purely patriarchal system. And Jennifer observed something similar among ultra-Orthodox Rabbis.
Overall though it sounds like the raping of the powerless (little children, not just boys) seems to quite often (and perhaps) inevitably results from a purely patriarchal system in which official limitations are placed (or self-imposed) on the males in said patriarchy. The same thing happens in prisons – men are placed in a tiny society which is practically patriarchal because they rarely if ever keep the two sexes in the same prison so in a male prison there are almost only males except maybe for some prison staff and among the prisons there will usually develop many subcultures and societies (“prison gangs”) which are entirely patriarchal. What happens in prisons? Well, men (the powerless ones) get raped. I think the same thing happens in female prisons but it certainly doesn’t have the same reputation. So likely in any kind of system dominated by one sex (patriarchal or matriarchal) where sexual limitations are imposed there will be rape of the powerless even if it is more likely to occur in a male-dominated system.
And yes, yalensis is right. Males with unchecked power will, if left to their own devices, sometimes (and quite often do) use this power for sexual dominance. Males do tend to think about sex a lot more than women (and speaking as a male will readily confirm this because its true). Some males think about sex a LOT more than others and quite a few males WILL hump anything that moves if given half a chance. And unchecked power does give them that chance.
Females will do it too (think of Catherine the Great and her many lovers or Elizabeth I) it is just that males have more a reputation of doing so (sultans with harems, Bill Clinton, JFK, Tiger Woods – and yes he had a lot of power socially until he was embarassed by all those women; remember when the story first came out and it turned out he had crashed a car? Well the police didn’t just go to him and take the usual statement and investigate…..in fact Tiger Woods basically told them to butt out in diplomatic language and the police actually did butt out for a little while. That would surely not have happened with some minimum wage no-name worker in America who seemed to crash a car after leaving home and who may or may not have been drunk at the time)
I hope nobody thinks I am saying that men are evil hairy beasts vs women = sweet sugar and spice. Anyhow, female cliques can be pretty brutal too, but studies show more inclined to use mental cruelty against each other (like ostracism and psychological bullying). Rape and violence also occur in all-female groups, just not as frequently as with males. Which type of cruelty is worse? I don’t know – pick your poison. Let’s face it, we humans (be it male or female) are not exactly white and fluffy angels! Hence, society needs to place legal restraints on bad behavior, otherwise we will end up abusing each other without end like spiders trapped in a jar.
Yalensis,
We don’t hear so much about female cliques because most Western societies have no experience of rulers keeping harems, among other things. Though we may start to hear more about harems as Turkey becomes a wealthy country and rediscovers its Ottoman heritage through its popular culture. I did read a book years ago about harems in Ottoman Turkey and the scheming and bullying that went on among the women, the vast majority of whom were young (the average age was 17 years), was unbelievable. Women frequently took eunuchs as lovers and used them to get rid of rivals: strangling, poisoning (the typical murder weapon chosen by women) and drowning were common ways of despatching rivals. Suleyman the Magnificent’s wife Roxelana (aka the Hurrem Sultana) was a typical example: she used the sultan’s love for her to get rid of his legitimate heir Mustafa so that one of her own sons would inherit the throne. It’s a classic bad-fairytale scenario: the able son banished from Istanbul, sent to a distant province, accused of treason and then strangled by the sultan’s own guards, to be replaced by a choice of Roxelana’s three sons: one alcoholic (who became the next sultan after Suleyman died in 1566; he was known as Selim the Sot), one deranged and one who had a deformity. The only one of Roxelana’s children who had the intelligence and ability to be a sultan was her daughter Mihrimah – but of course women didn’t inherit the sultanate. Roxelana died in mysterious circumstances in 1558 and she may have been strangled herself.
There was a story I saw on the Internet about a part of Istanbul’s harbour being drained and sacks of bones mixed stones were found at the bottom. Forensic experts determined that the bones were those of young women who had died over a period of several hundred years. They deduced that these were harem women who had been bundled into the sacks with stones to weight them down when the sacks were thrown into the harbour.
I don’t know very much about harem intrigues in China and Japan but I do know they did occur and the Empress Cixi who ruled China in the 1890s – early years of the 20th century was originally a concubine who got to the top by court intrigue and wily manipulation of people.
Women are just more subtle in the way they achieve their ambitions and use men (their sons especially) as proxies to get power
Dear Jennifer,
Harem intrigues happened on a simply epic scale in Imperial China. However the major practitioners of harem intrigues were not women but eunuchs. The two most notorious periods of eunuch intrigue were the late Han Dynasty (around 200 AD) and the late Ming Dynasty (around 1600 AD). However there was one other woman apart from the nineteenth century Dowager Empress Cixi who gained power through harem intrigues. This was the Empress Wu Zeitian who became the only woman to rule China in her own right as its Sovereign Empress in the late 7th Century AD during the Tang Dynasty (Cixi ruled through child Emperors). If the traditional stories are true (some doubt them) then the murders, poisonings and intrigues the Empress Wu engaged in make those attributed to Cixi look almost childish. She is nonetheless acknowledged to have been an exceptionally able ruler whose rule brought China to a peak of prosperity and power. Her immense tomb near Xian has not been opened and is believed to be intact.
I would add that there has been a recent reassessment of Cixi and the consensus amongst scholars today is that she almost certainly never poisoned or murdered anyone.
Dear Alex,
Thanks for the information about Empresses Wu Zetian and Cixi. Most of what I’ve heard about Empress Wu is fairly positive – she is praised for her administration but not for the way she acquired power – and as for Cixi, I’d say most of the information I’ve picked up has been through jaundiced sources critical of how she appeared to dither over reforming the Manchu government and of her role in the Boxer Rebellion in 1901.
It is interesting how harem women and their eunuchs in China and Ottoman Turkey could take advantage of weak sultans or child emperors and rule entire empires. Selim the Sot’s accession to the Ottoman sultanate in 1566 enabled his wife Nurbanu to exercise influence over him and their son Murad and she can be said to have been the effective ruler; likewise her daughter-in-law Safiye also influenced Murad and their son. Anyone interested in the political intrigues of Ottoman Turkey in the 16th and 17th centuries can follow this link:
http://www.allaboutturkey.com/harem.htm
I guess that should be a lesson to all alpha males with fantasies about gathering a collection of concubines!
Dear Jennifer,
Cixi’s reputation was massively damaged by a book co written by two British authors Backhouse and Bland in I think 1911 called “China under the Empress Dowager”. Nearly all the most infamous stories you hear about Cixi originate from this book. Unfortunately the book became well known in China and in a way that is very familiar to students of Russian history many of the stories about Cixi that appear in it were picked up and repeated in China by people anxious to smear Cixi and to damage her reputation. As a result they have become incorporated in many Chinese people’s conception of Cixi.
In the 1980s it became known that many of the documents upon which the book is purportedly based were actually forged by Edmund Backhouse, one of the book’s two writers, who spiced the book up by drawing on his own highly erotic imagination. The result is that the book is now discredited amongst all serious scholars but many of the myths about Cixi it launched have gained such wide currency and such a powerful hold over the public imagination that they still continue to form people’s ideas of her. The idea that she was an adamant opponent of reform is one myth that thought it did not originate with this book was widely popularised by it and which more recent scholarship suggests is wrong.
I ought to say that there is a common belief especially in Russia that history written by westerners is somehow more objective and more fact based than history written by others. This is emphatically not always the case and one should be very careful before assuming the truth of all one reads.
This is particularly true of western writing of countries with which the western powers have come into conflict such as Late Imperial China and Russia. By way of example very recently I read a book by Orlando Figes about the Crimean War. In it Figes shows that much of the case for war against Russia was made in Britain through the spread of anti Russian pamphlets that were based on documents supposedly stolen from the Russian Viceregal Palace in Warsaw but which were actually forged by the writers of the pamphlets. Having demonstrated the existence of these forgeries and the fabricated nature of the case for the war, Figes in his desire to prove that Russia was nonetheless to blame for the war then goes on himself to distort and misrepresent repeatedly things that Russian statesmen of the time (especially Nicholas I) said.
One bizarre example is Figes’s use of Nicholas I’s famous comment that “Turkey is the sick man of Europe”. It has long been known that Nicholas I never made this comment but that it originates from a misrepresentation of certain comments Nicholas I made during a private meeting he had with the British ambassador. Figes nonetheless quotes this comment in the book as if Nicholas I actually said it and as if it actually tells us something about Nicholas I’s intentions but then, in a totally different part of the book, quotes the very different things Nicholas I actually did say when describing the meeting Nicholas I had with the British ambassador at which the comment was supposedly made. At no point does Figes make clear that the comment he had previously quoted was made at this same meeting.
Incidentally another serious misrepresentation in Figes’s book, which I suspect would offend a lot of people in Russia, is that he tries to pass off the many war memorials in Sevastopol as memorials for the Russian dead in the Crimean War. Some doubtless are but the vast majority must surely commemorate the far more terrible siege Sevastopol experienced during the Second World War. That siege Figes never mentions at all.
Dear Alexander and yalensis,
You both are right about Mother Theresa.
sinotibetan
Thanks, Sino-T. Nice to hear from you again!
http://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Religion-Reporting-Unexpected/dp/0061626813
I heard a radio interview with the author and it opened my eyes on the sort of evil that occurs in the Catholic church. As they say in Russian, the pedo-priests have a “roof”. Responsibility goes all the way to the top. You don’t just tolerate these monsters, you excommunicate them. Contrast the Grand Inquisition aimed at good priests in Latin America and basically nothing but coverups for these sexual deviants. Hey, it’s only problems in the temporal realm, when the victims die they will go to Heaven. Unless they are f*cked up psychologically for life that is, then they will go to Hell.
Whenever a “believer” puts forward the proposition: “I have faith in God”, he declares that “God” exists inside of his mental experience.
Whenever a “believer” talks about such a god, therefore, he is talking about his ideas.
Whenever a “believer” talks about “God” without equivocation, as though “He” were real, the “believer” is forcing his ideas on other people.
At the very least, such browbeating by “believers” is for me and, no doubt, very many other people, extremely irritating.
However, when “believers” base, unequivocally, their judgement of the really real on what should be treated as their equivocal understanding of the World, they allow for others to be injured in the name of their “Faith”.
In this scheme of things, the rape of children, and enabling the rape of children, can be treated respectively as “sin” and as a regrettable oversight rather than legal crimes.
As has happened in recent times in the aftermath of the sexual molestation of children by Irish Roman Catholic bishops, such cases of paederasty have been characterised by some as terrible sins that are to be dealt with inwardly, in the form of “Faith”; with deep thought, rather than with jail sentences that befit such crimes.
In such a scheme of things as undertaken by the RC church in Ireland, the secular attacks that have rained upon a child-raping ecclesiastical institution can be treated as “a test” of that institution. Furthermore, such a “test” is undertaken as some kind of perverse introspection, because a “believer”, a “man of Faith”, recognizes no higher power, such as that of the State, for example, or its laws, other than the “God” of his “Faith”.
In the really real world, however, in the real world of transgressions, crime takes priority over sin.
In the secular world, a world where, ideally, each and every one of us should live in societies where all are equal in the eyes of the law, that same secular law should take precedence over church law, a law in which the preferences and ontology of “men of Faith” endow “believers” and their preferences and their literally super-natural beliefs with a special position.
And if any should think that I am perhaps exaggerating the case by suggesting that there still exist in “advanced” societies remnants of laws made before democratic laws began to overtake the theocentric, I should like to point out that in my own lifetime in parts of the United Kingdom public houses were not allowed to open on Sundays, Good Fridays and on Christmas Day.
Drinking beer on Sundays, it seems, offended “God”.
PAX DOMINUS SIT SEMPER VOBISCUM
And those remnants of the laws made in the old days, before the democratic laws began to overtake the theocentric, ought to be struck from the books. Beer on Good Friday is just such a law.
“Wazzert” is, by the way, Moscow Exile.
A little error on my part.
Dear Moscow Exile / Wazzert,
Consuming alcoholic or other intoxicating substances on Christian holidays was banned by the Church originally because this activity was associated with celebrating pagan or pre-Christian holidays and festivals. Taking hallucinogenic substances was a way of achieving communion with the divine but that wouldn’t have sat well with a highly authoritarian, centralist power structure. Likewise the Church sought to control sexual activity because that’s an alternate way of attaining divine communion and was also a feature of pre-Christian religious rituals in some parts of Europe. This is how for a time the Christian Church came to control brothels.
The RCC’s desire for control even extended to persecuting mystical Christian sects like the Gnostic Cathars in southern France and the Bogomils in southeast Europe during mediaeval times. The Gnostics had a mixed bag of beliefs, some admirable, some not so, but they practised a form of democracy that allowed women and peasant farmers to achieve leadership positions and this riled the RCC leadership. So the Cathars had to be destroyed and their destruction allowed northern France to dominate southern France.
Compared to most other religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism (Kabalah) and Islam (Sufism), Western Christianity doesn’t have a strong mystical tradition and that is due in part to the RCC’s extreme and successful determination to destroy heretical sects that threatened its power and influence. The Inquisition in Europe is a continuation of the Church’s policies against the Cathars and Bogomils. The RCC’s persecution of the Bogomils may also explain why some communities in the Balkans (Bosnians, Albanians) adopted Islam when the Ottomans took over their areas.
I forgot to add that for those who are so minded, you can try reading “Malleus Maleficarum” (“Hammer of the Witches”) by Kramer and Sprenger which was published in Germany in 1486. There may be English-language reprints available of this horrible manual: it is two-thirds legal instruction on how to interrogate people suspected of witchcraft and bring them to trial but the other third of the book which is the part most people talk about is a misogynist rant with false arguments and crazy fantasies about incubi and succubi.
I’ve heard two-thirds of the Inquisition’s victims died in German-speaking states and England but I haven’t come across anything yet that compares the figures with those of Spain, Portugal and their empires.
This raises an important point about organized Christianity. It is all somebody’s interpretation of the Bible. Do Catholics actually believe that the Pope is some successor to Jesus? The “you are my rock” statement needs to be contorted in a horrendous way to establish a religious royal dynasty. “Malleus Maleficarum” isn’t a book in the Bible, yet people were dying because of it in the name of the Bible and Jesus. Truly and utterly sick and evil.
The whole point of Christianity is that it is a mind control system. It was suddenly elevated from the status of a Jewish sect into the state religion of the Roman Empire in order that it be used as a state mind control system.
After Christ’s death, his Apostles, practising Jews all, as was their “Messiah”, went into hiding from the authorities for fear of their lives. One of their persecutors was Saul of Tarsus, later St. Paul, a Jewish Roman citizen. Saul did a sudden about turn in his way of thinking and became a follower of the “Anointed One”. After changing sides as it were, Saul was arrested and taken in front of the Jewish religious court, the Sanhedrin, on more than one but occasion, but escaped punishment because of his Roman citizenship. I have a strong suspicion that Saul was a Roman agent whose task was to cause dissension amongst Christ’s followers.
It was Saul who really founded “Christianity”. The Apostles believed that in order to be a follower of Christ, one had first to be a good practising Jew, whereas Saul promoted the idea that anybody, not just practising Jews, could become a “Christian”. His ideas were hotly contested by the Apostle James the Elder: Saul won the argument.
Saul began to proselytize his “Christianity” amongst non-Jewish people in the Roman Empire, adding his own touches and adaptations that would have been familiar to his Hellenic and Roman converts, such as allowing statues and icons to be revered in Christian homes and places of worship and recounting tales of miraculous powers that Christ and his saints were in possession of, which powers could be invoked by Christ’s priests and faithful.
The Romans were pretty easy going as far as religion was concerned: they drew the line at human sacrifice, but, in general, tolerated other beliefs, often adapting them into their own pantheistic system. With the Jews and Christians, however, it was different: both Jews and Christian would only recognise one god. The Romans insisted that their emperor was also of a divine nature, later maintaining that each emperor was a god on earth. That was anathema to both Christians and Jews. Result: the iron fist of Roman rule in the imperial province of Judea and the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 80, as well as the near constant persecution of the Christians.
All this ended in A.D 313 when the emperor Constantine, whose mother, Helen, was a Greek Christian, declared that Christians were no longer to be persecuted. Christianity eventually became the state religion of the empire – on one condition: that the emperor should be recognized as god’s “anointed one”, his agent on earth. In Greek, Khristós (Χριστός) means “the anointed one”, as does “Māšîaḥ” (Messiah) in Hebrew.
So the icons, statuary, incense, demigods, magic and miracles of the ancient world were melded with the Judeo-Christian belief that there is only one god. That one god of the Roman empire, however, had only one top man on earth: Caesar.
The state controlled your body: it had the legal right to take away your life; the state religion controlled your mind and concerned itself with the destiny of your “soul”. And the state religion controlled the mind by playing on the natural fear that one has of death, promising the fearful that they would continue to exist after death, but should be ever wary of god’s ire if they should disobey god’s will.
Two parallel state control systems: the one over your body, the other over your mind.
With their smoking altars and forbidding temples the ancients kept the baffled and fearful on their knees.
No smoking altars and blood sacrifices now, but “Christ” is still metaphorically “sacrificed” on both Eastern and Western Christian altars many times every day of every year; the heavy incense still swirls around the temples and, through the “miracle” of transubstantiation, the flesh and blood of “the anointed one” is still consumed daily by believers.
The fear of death is still systematically used to coerce the poor and powerless.
Gimme that old time religion!
Google information about the “Black Legend” – the largescale exaggeration of Spanish crimes, repression and brutality by English writers. Hispanophobia was the Russophobia of the 16th-18th centuries and a lot of those false claims about the Spanish are just taken for granted today.
Dear Jennifer,
Thanks for your elucidation of the Bogomils and the Cathars!
It is my belief that the beliefs of the Cathars, Bogomils, Montanists, Paulicians, Waldensians and Anabaptists are heterogeneous because each congregation was ‘independent’ and the knowledge we have regarding their ‘heresies’ are mostly from their enemies – the Roman Catholic Church and thus we can never be absolutely sure what their beliefs might be. To be honest, I consider among these people ‘the original Christians’ persecuted by the ‘bogus’ Church which was(and is) the RCC. The behaviour of the RCC at that time(and to a more limited extend, today) was to persecute anyone that did not submit to their authority and beliefs – a behaviour that is clearly un-Christian.
I remember a ‘quote’ from an Anabaptist leader…can’t remember who:
A true Christian believer is a sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter – neither should he use war or killing in his proclaiming the good news.
sinotibetan
Yalensis,
As I admitted to one fellow on Twitter who’s been making Alex Jones enemy number one since day one of his feed, yes Alex Jones is a jerk who tends to devolve into loudmouth rants. Yes many of his theories including the notion that the elites are about to release a killer virus to wipe out 90% of humanity are far-fetched (though it disturbs me that scientists that make pyschopathic statements like Eric Pianka are working in bio facilities). Why bother going through all the trouble to set up a police state ‘control grid’ with armies of TSA goons, when you could immediately do it more easily in some Outbreak/Contagion scenario after all the bitter clingers with their guns or most of them are dead?
Even AJ admits the elites have no hope of disarming the American public, they can only try to ‘starve us out’ by shutting down family farms and or tampering with the food and water supplies to dumb everybody down. But the grand contradiction in AJ’s overarching weltanschuung is that the elites then kill off themselves, as fat chance their seed banks, alleged bunkers and Appalachian or Rocky Mountain redoubts will be of much use. Besides most elites in my view seem to want to live, go on drinking and whoring but it’s a tiny minority who’ve gone off the full Caligula deep end into collective insanity.
Nonetheless, I agree with you that since the Libya war and Obama/Panetta’s contemptuous responses to Congress with regards to the War Powers Act and Constitution being trumped by NATO and the UN, it’s as if the elites in D.C. seem determined to give Alex Jones credibility. Perhaps that’s why many of the folks cited by one ReginaldQuill are all conspiracy theorists themselves who think Alex Jones is there to direct the conspiracies. (BTW, I suspect Reggie is in fact the hardcore ‘Fourth World War theory’ advocate J.R. Nyquist, aka ‘USSR collapse was evil Commies playing possum because a defector 25 years ago during Glasnost said so’).
The urban warfare drills and failure to prosecute Corzine (suggesting MF Global very well could have been a ‘dry run’ for a bank holiday/de facto nationalization of Americans’ investment accounts) are yet another example where D.C. seems determined to prove AJ right and Catherine FItzpatrick, Craig Pirrong, and other conventional Democrat/Republican types naive about their government’s increasingly predatory nature. But in the end I suspect all these control freak/creeping fascist measures will fail and fail spectacularly. The only question is how far they will get first before the American people say no.
Hence I became interested in ReginaldQuill’s twitter feed as an example of the type of rhetoric Homeland Security might deploy against ‘right and left extremists’ in four or five years if things turn into Grapes of Wrath (true 25% unemployment) and the dollar gets so debased even food stamps for 40% of households (it’s now approaching 30% with a greater percentage of American households with children) can no longer prevent Mexico-type unrest/lawlessness.
Societies and nations can devolve into lawlessness. Dictators can rise to power in times of crisis. That’s not conspiracy theory, it’s just historical fact. American government is definitely becoming more oppressive and authoritarian, that is also documented fact. Going the way of Roman Empire. Bring on the gladiators!
In this period of crisis caused by predations of international finance capital and collapse of the American Dollar, NRA/survivalist types sense that something important is happening, and some of their intutions are correct; however, they do not possess the intellectual or political skills to make a correct analysis of what is going on, or to respond in an effective way. They remind me of the dull-witted dinosaur who looked up and went “duh!” at the moment the asteroid impacted. Dino saw the explosion on the distant horizon, he knew something big had just happened, but he didn’t know exactly what it was, or what to do about it.
And I cannot comment on all the Catholic church pedophilia horrors nor do I know enough about Mother Theresa’s life to discuss her. I agree with AJ that pedophilia as at Penn State serves the function of allowing certain elites to endlessly blackmail each other, including perhaps politicians (per Louisiana politician Huey Long’s infamous statement that the only way he could lose an election during the 1930s was to either be caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl).
I can only say that as with Patriarch Kirrill’s infamous watch it’s quite possible that a wealthy person donated the cost of her airfare and cancer treatments in Switzerland, as the Russian Railways oligarch Yakunin may have donated that 30k watch to his Patriarch (so in an indirect way, the American taxpayers might have partly funded a teensy amount of that watch via Northern Supply Route to Afghanistan).
We shall see if the ‘lefty and righty libertarians go on RT, ergo they are foreign subversives whose copyright violating websites should get shut down under CISPA’ accusation gets any legs. If it does, we know who’ll be cheering the government (not private or self) censorship on, in that case.
Anyway, trolling people who are probably not Cointelpro but one or two who might aspire to it is not productive. I’m glad AK is focusing more on his own writings and possibly publishing a book instead of debating those people.
I think that this comment and this method should be used to make the People and the Governments of Continental Europe see the sense in lowering Military Spending, and having Cooperation and Security in Europe, or at least on Continental Europe.
…
AK Edit: Please stop spamming. I realize you are concerned for Serbia and dislike the Clintonites, but leaving multiple, very long comments on a post that has nothing to do with the topic isn’t a solution (or courteous). Thanks.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20120501/173153339.html
The “liberals” (actually laissez-faire fascists) are a bunch of whiners. My oh my they could not get into a pub while Putin and Medvedev were there. What planet are these clowns living on?
@Alexander
Nazi Germany is a contradiction to most of the cherished beliefs in the west about itself. Such as no democracy ever goes to war with another democracy. Germany was a democracy, became a totalitarian state in a few years and started the worst war in world history (on an absolute scale). So I think many western “scholars” would rather bury that history by ignoring it. I am not claiming that this is dominating the current western historiography but I see it creeping in over time.
There used to be TV programs covering WWII in a sober way. These have all disappeared from regular TV. And if you get the History Channel (how many people actually do in North America?) then you get “the Nazi channel” shtick. I think over the course of a couple of generations WWII and the especially the Eastern Front horror will not be know to the vast majority of the population. In the case of the Holocaust, it will become a self contained bit of history without much context: some war then death camps.
@kirill: good comment, I agree with your point.
I add: existence of Nazi system has created ideological dissonance for proponents of capitalism. They equated capitalism = democracy. (Which, as anybody can see, are actually independent variables.) Nazi Germany contradicts this equation, since Nazi Germany was a completely normal capitalist society (just with a crazy war-mongering Fuehrer in charge, and a lot of government interference in “free market” due to war constraints). To explain away this dissonance and deny that capitalism and democracy are independent variables, Western ideologues then had to perform some contortions, they had to deny that Nazi Germany was a normal capitalist country. So, they invented a new category called “totalitarianism” which was supposed to encompass a political/economic totality that was something separate from capitalism. This also allowed them to lump together 2 completely different economic systems (Nazi Germany + Soviet Union) and pretend (based on some superficial political similarities) that they were pretty much the same animal.
Yeah, same animal in the way that a dolphin is exactly equal to a fish, because both have fins and swim in the ocean!
Meanwhile, I heard a rumor that some western economists are actually starting to write REAL histories of Nazi Germany, that actually study the workings of this (normal capitalist) economy, under the constraints of war and idiocies of Nazi Party. Does anybody know the titles of such books, I would be interested in reading them to back up my point.
Kirill etc I respectfully disagree. The Third Reich was a corporatist, command economy whereby the state controlled industries through the back door of cartelization rather than the front door of Lenin or Hugo Chavez style expropriation/nationalization. I am glad however that there has been a revival of studies of the Nazi Economy (and even discussion of the verboten question of whether Hitler ‘cut unemployment’) considering that Hagmar Schacht was hanged at Nuremberg (mostly because he unlike Speer acted unrepentantly Nazi) whereas I think Walter Funk had his sentence commuted. All of the top Nazi economists deserved to be in the dock at Nurnberg as they were key managers of aggressive war and provided the reasons WHY Hitler was in such a hurry to annex Czechoslovakia and Poland into the Reich war economy. For one thing, had Hitler carried on peacefully it is highly likely many of the fiat Reichsmarks his economists had printed would’ve lost major value (this of course would’ve been blamed on the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ attacking an autarchic Euro-continental system aka Die Europische Wirtschaftsgemeinschafts), reminding Germans of the Weimar era problems the Nazis had claimed to have solved.
The reason Nazi economics is not more widely published is that academic historians do not like the similarities to some command and control aspects of the European Union, at least in terms of how the Nazis ‘sold’ or attempted to sell their fundamentally exploitative empire to their ‘racially equal or ok’ French, Dutch and Norwegian subjects.
Or as P.J. O’Rourke has quipped, the trouble with the crushing battlefield defeat of Fascism is that people assume all of its bad ideas have gone away.
But it was the big German capitalists that put “command economy” Hitler into power. There is no such thing as self-regulating stochastic economics for the trivially obvious reason that the more money you have, the more power you have to manipulate the market (and the politicians). It is all managed from behind the scenes by the oligarchy that exists throughout the OECD. They realized this in Russia around 1998 when “the era of market romanticism was over”. Communism was a scam and so is Capitalism.
But I do notice that many of those on Twitter ranting about the ‘extreme left and right’ supposedly converging at admiration for ‘Putinism’ because RT interviews self-styled U.S. dissidents and marginalized American voices are themselves quite happy to converge on their love for the Federal Reserve’s unlimited money printing and loathing of Ron Paul. The only difference being that the ‘Left’ wants the Fed to print money for ‘stimulus’ and the ‘Right’ wants it all for the military industrial complex.
See Craig Pirrong’s tweets about Krugman’s debate with Ron Paul. The q the Pirrong twitterati always ignore is why Paul managed to raise more money from active duty U.S. military than nearly all other GOP candidates and Obama combined.
It may be true that the Nazis left small business owners alone, provided they weren’t Jewish or politically active Catholics (a very broad category, especially in Berlin where something like 25-30% of the shops were expropriated or destroyed in attacks like Kristallnacht). But the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy were subject to five year plans just like in the Soviet Union. The Nazis simply didn’t go as far in collectivizing agriculture but during their Occupation of Ukraine and western Russia they left the collectivized system intact rather than return lands to farmers which would’ve made them more popular with die untermenschen.
I don’t understand all this jeering at Paul for referring to Diocletian (even if he’s mistaken about the Byzantine Empire). Besides killing lotsa Christians as scapegoats for the empire’s problems Diocletian DID debase the currency. This is not a ‘hidden in the sands’ of time thing, to use Krugman’s phrase, this is historic fact as any collector of Roman coins can verify.
But hey, every hipster’s got their ‘we gotta hate Ron Paul’ signals loud and clear from The Man.
Out of all the right wing candidates Ron Paul was the only sane and intelligent individual. All of the other specimens indicate that the Republican Party has degenerated into a mouth piece of the nutbar minority in the US. If Romney wins this year then the US is on its way into the toilet for sure.
You didn’t find Huntsman to be sane and intelligent?
Great News! The liberals are fleeing the Presidential Human Rights Council. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
http://rt.com/politics/human-rights-council-putin-400/
Congratulations Anatoly. You just gave Reginald Quill a gift with the interview. The last time I saw his tweets he was getting punked by some Armenian guy pretending to be a NATO bigwig.
???
How about a post on the Russian threat today?
I, like Pat Buchanan, have always said Nato should have been disbanded with the fall of the Curtain.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20120506/173266773.html
“March of Idiots” is a more apt description than “March of Millions”. As the comment below the article says, these people are not prepared to accept the will of the majority. So the majority should be prepared to send them a message that it will not subjugate itself to the desires of these morons.