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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Vladimir Putin: Whissssspering Serpant


Jeremy Putley has noticed that, writing in The Observer, columnist Nick Cohen insightfully explains how certain British capitalists are betraying the nation's democracy and security interests by selling out to the Kremlin:

Bibliophiles value first editions, not second. The only exception to the rule I know is Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The founders of the London School of Economics first published it in 1935 as Stalin's terror was building, the labour camps were filling and a manmade famine had killed millions in Ukraine. They justified them all.

The Webbs did note the incessant propaganda, but dismissed it by wondering whether the 'million-fold listeners-in' to the BBC weren't also the victims of a brainwashing that was just as sinister. They were, they concluded. There was no moral difference between Josef Stalin and Lord Reith. 'For the individual citizen, propaganda is inescapable. His mind is bludgeoned to compel him to admit a whole series of ideas. Where systems differ is in who wields the bludgeon.' As for the murders, they were regrettable but essential means of meeting the people's needs. 'It must be recognised,' the Webbs continued, 'that this liquidation of the individual capitalists in agriculture had necessarily to be faced if the required increase of output was to be obtained.'

By 1937, Stalin's terror had engulfed the Soviet empire. Whole races were being transported, the Communist party was being massacred, every petrified citizen knew they must denounce or be denounced. The Webbs responded to the catastrophe by amending the second edition. I don't know if you spotted it but the title of the first - Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - ended with a question mark that delicately suggested it was possible to doubt that the Soviet Union was a workers' paradise. All hesitation was abandoned for the second. The Webbs responded to the creation of a slave economy by dropping the question mark and publishing the unambiguously titled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation

Seventy years on, I sat in a lecture theatre at the Webbs' LSE for a debate on whether freedom of speech in Russia could survive the murders of journalists and sweeping censorship that have accompanied Vladimir Putin's push to a one-party state.

It was easy to think nothing had changed. On the stage were sleek representatives of Putin's new civilisation. Like the Webbs before her, Dariya Pushkova, the London correspondent of Russia Today, a state-controlled TV channel, dealt with the difficult question of Kremlin repression by changing the subject. The British media were just as bad, she said. They reported unverifiable facts as truth and came out with half-baked accusations that Alexander Litvinenko had been poisoned with polonium 210 on the orders of Putin's henchmen. What was the difference between her propaganda and ours? Who were we to throw stones?

Pavel Andreev from Novosti, the state-controlled Russian news agency, took the stage to argue for the censorship of investigative reporting. Eighty per cent of Russians approved of what Putin was doing and tough tactics were needed to give the people what they wanted. 'Russia has always been best under strong leaders,' he added with a nod towards the legacy of the Webbs' Stalin.

I expected the audience to go along with him. Just as urban legend has it that you are never more than six feet away from a rat on the streets of London, so dismal experience has taught me that you are never more than six feet away from an apologist for tyranny at a meeting of London liberals. (A good example of this came a few days later when Martin Amis, a serious novelist, was confronted by Chris Morris, a light entertainer, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Amis was so exasperated by the betrayals of principle that he asked members of the audience to raise their hand if they considered themselves morally superior to the sexist, racist, homophobic and psychopathic Taliban. Fewer than a third did.)

The scene at the LSE was more comforting. Although the LSE academic who wrote up the debate afterwards sympathised with Putin's journalists - 'Are we in the West really in a position to judge?' he asked - his students went wild and stood up for the rights of Russians.

It was good to watch and if you had been there, you might have thought that liberal Russians fleeing autocracy would find a welcome in England (one denied to the enemies of the Taliban). That would be to ignore a new pro-Kremlin lobby no one in the 20th century imagined. Politics has been stood on its head. In his forthcoming The New Cold War and How to Win It, Edward Lucas of the Economist will point out that in the past, communists and their fellow travellers made excuses for Russian despotism. The right opposed it on the understandable grounds that the despots were communists. Now, bankers, manufacturers and Tories explain away the rigged elections and the muzzled press because they want a slice of a crony capitalist state that is awash with petrodollars.

Just before Tony Blair resigned, a telling scene illuminated the new world. At the June G8 summit, Blair warned Putin that unless Russia shared Western democratic values and tolerated dissent, there would be a business backlash. No, there won't, replied appalled business leaders. Hans-Jorg Rudloff, the chairman of Barclays Capital, said Blair's approach was 'unbalanced'. Peter Hambro, executive chairman of Peter Hambro Mining, an Aim-listed company with extensive interests in Russia, said that Blair's comments 'ran the risk of being damaging' for British business interests in Russia. The outgoing PM's position was 'very different to that business'.

And so it went on and few noticed that a regime filled with ex-KGB men was now being defended by the beneficiaries of global capitalism.

There will always be people on the left who fellow-travel with dictatorship or, more usually, ignore it. But now, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Webbs, are the louder, more powerful voices from the City that say we have no right to criticise because criticism is bad for business.

1 comment:

Artfldgr said...

'It must be recognised,' the Webbs continued, 'that this liquidation of the individual capitalists in agriculture had necessarily to be faced if the required increase of output was to be obtained.'

Its fundamentally why such systems cause misery, because they are deluded that the misery they cause is in some form a product of progress, and therefore are the natural growing pains of change, and therefore the people complaining are conservatives that want to maintain the status quo.

While someone reads that they might side with it, except that the quote is not followed by the later truth of what happened. “Increase of output” didn’t occur, as people hunkered down and tried to be invisible to avoid the iron hand.

To put it another way: the Kulaks were killed because they were too productive. So the people that replaced them realized that if they are too productive, they would be killed too. so all they did was attempt the minimum. If the state says make x amount and they could have made x+y amount, they only made x.

The state then thinks that because the increase of productivity as promised doesn’t happen, its because the people are not doing what the state wants. But since the state not only calls the requirement shots, but also the means shots, the ‘workers’ become incidental, and just a bunch of lazy nothings that intend to cheat to have more for less (violating “each according to their ability”, which is why nuclear physicists got broom sweep jobs so they could work in the sciences).

So the state then starts to raise the value of x. and productivity picks up. they get bolder and think that they can just keep bumping up x, restricting the inputs, etc. and they can get x**2. however, it never even reaches potential capacity since everything in the system works against everything else because those that control the means seek to do so very carefully so they are not held to blame for not being able to swim with both hands and feet tied and a weight on their necks.

That’s when things start to get punitive. Exactly as in the Stamford experiment. So its not even that putin and such are special. They are not, and they are put in the same structural situation that makes superthugs even of the nice.

They then realize that only random acts of violence will solve the problem. select someone from the line and shoot them.. and for a short while, you get more productivity.. people are cheap in a tabula rasa system where they are not educated to full flower, and are interchangeable cogs. So you waste one person to double the work of 1000 people. To the followers of moral pragmatism, it’s a fair deal.. the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and there is no compromise on this. so OFF to the gulags you go… or to something else.

The randomness is their own creative addition to it. that way, a person cant figure out how to work the system. its capricious, random, and everything that can get you out of trouble can get you into trouble. In fact its designed (like our system is becoming in the west) to create a legal situation where everyone is breaking the law in some way, so that doing this is not really a matter of guilt for the specific, but for the known generality. In other words, if they are living ok, and such, then they are cheating, and so it doesn’t matter what they get dragged in for. Validity is not a quality that matters. Being punished for A when you do B, and B is considered just as bad, is an equivalence to them.

don’t think this is natural? Then you are ignoring all the people who think such is a good. take the famous feminist/socialist/communist quote

"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience." - Catherine Comins

Its easy to see that she feels this way because of other premises in her doctrine…
(and it’s the leaders that define that doctrine. No one records the one person underneath them that says, “that’s not what I believe, but I am still a feminist”. No the presumption of history will be that all who are part of it are in line with the leaders. Isnt that how we look at the german people? That we feel that the person who didn’t like what was going on, was the exception?)

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman." -- Catherine MacKinnon

"All men are rapists and that's all they are" -- Marilyn French, Authoress; (later, advisoress to Al Gore's Presidential Campaign.)


So to her, he may not actually be guilty of rape, but he MUST be guilty of something. Same thing in the old russian court system, which we are copying. (other things like some presumed level of crime does the same thing – lots of X go unreported, so any drop in the level is not because its slowing, but because victims are not reporting. This in effect is to put a self confirming quota on things like rape, or other crimes. Remember no one here is talking about REAL rapes. But the change to the legal system through political assumptions)

Anyway… back to russia… the same legal things happened in russia, but its hard to explain them to people who think that kind of stuff is long ago and far away. its not, its here today, and here in the US, and its made a huge part of the population into useful idiots who are increasing the power of the state to do things. for instance, in the west a police officer and such needs a search warrant (or permision) to enter your home. his powers are GRANTED from the constitution. The constitution makes comments specifically prohibiting and forbidding of delegations of powers. Right?

Well then how can a child enforcement officer gain access to a home to investigate it without a warrant? How can they have the power to remove children from parents, without due process, and forbid the parents access till they PROVE their innocence?

Now before you say “its for the children, they must be kept safe”, you should also know what others said on the same subject.

"people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both" Benjamin Franklin

"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." Adolph Hitler


Why did I digress so far?

Because: "how can you see the splinter in your brother's eye, when there is a plank in your own?"



How can we sit there and figure out whats right and wrong when we have been fooled into thinking much of the wrong is right for us?


Ultimately, the site and others of the same mind set, are against such things no only being in the soviet union, but everywhere else.

What was the difference between her propaganda and ours? Who were we to throw stones?

Well, there is a lot of difference… bout the same difference between an advertisement (grey propaganda), a medical notice (white propaganda), and Goebles propaganda.

The main difference is in what it tells you, and how truthful it is, and so forth.

So a health notice that informs women that perimenopause starts at 28, and that fertility goes down from 25 on, while downs syndrome and other defects go up more than 100% in incidence. Is white propaganda.

But a health notice that promotes not having periods, and then putting off fertility till its too late, while touting solutions that cost upwards of 50k, and putting the blame for biology in some effort to separate that which vowed “let no man put asunder”, would depend on your pragmatic view. its black propaganda since its mostly a lie told over again to get a group to behave the way they want, rather than what most beneficial to their goals in life. Of which this group sees many normal goals as horrible.

But again, they are taking and tearing their lesson plans out of the playbooks of lennin, stalin, Hitler, and others they idolize.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Joseph Goebbels

What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?
We would only shake our heads.
Exactly the same applies to political advertising.
The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly. Adolf Hitler,mein kampf


Pavel Andreev from Novosti, the state-controlled Russian news agency, took the stage to argue for the censorship of investigative reporting. Eighty per cent of Russians approved of what Putin was doing and tough tactics were needed to give the people what they wanted.

The power in Russian politics comes from falsely getting the democratic masses to side with their own demise. Which is why the US was created as a republic, not a democracy of the proletariat..

I really really urge people to go back and read the articles from the time… most don’t read the history, let alone actual works of the authors at the time. so they think that somehow they are superior and that that superior thing gives them a pass.

Well, guess what? that moral high ground, the ability to decide whats right for others, the use of half lies and propaganda to further aims, and so forth.

IS what makes socialism totalitarian and a guaranteed hell eventually…

Take a look at the middle east.. I said turkey was the vulnerable one in our plan to stop weapons in the middle east and africa… right? So they failed a bombing… and what did democrats or socialist supporters (traitors) inside our government do? they decided to drum up an old genocide thing that will piss them off and cause them to abandon helping people who think that way aobut them NOW. why didn’t they do the same for all the genocides of russia? Well, because they like communism.

Now, bankers, manufacturers and Tories explain away the rigged elections and the muzzled press because they want a slice of a crony capitalist state that is awash with petrodollars.

And it would help if you didn’t use Marxist designations in explaining things. crony capitalism, and fat cats is from das capital…

There is “no such thing as crony capatlism”, that’s an appellation that belongs to REAL FASCISM.

The marriage of state and business – which puts the common man on the out.

Communism/socialism – is a single bride and rules alone over both business and the people. Which is another reason why business fails, because if it succeeds, it becomes a power base.

Crony capitalism, is a Critical theory way of saying Fascism, and not describing capitalism, which is a all sides benefit thing…

In order to have crony capitalism you need the power of a strong state to insure the outcomes for the busineses and the cronies. After all, who are the cronies? The state… and who are the busineses… presumed capitalists… so you have state capitalism… which is fascism.

They play word games.. and even worse we have taken in those terms and use them in a way that spreads the poison!!!!!!!! Fascism isn’t about despotic things.. that’s a side effect of absolute power, and no ability to see, and the need to create a reason for the public to rally around to keep them looking the other way as the state does its tricks.

By using these things, you and others are insuring the final communst end eventually… it inserts propaganda into your own phrases by meme infection.

To refer to successful business men in the west by the same terms that are used to describe the socialist despots and their thug partners. You do what to the west?

You automatically create propagandic relativism, the very thing that you complain about others doing, when they try to reletivate the two systems as equivalent.

There was no moral difference between Josef Stalin and Lord Reith. 'For the individual citizen, propaganda is inescapable. His mind is bludgeoned to compel him to admit a whole series of ideas. Where systems differ is in who wields the bludgeon.'


You have swallowed the meme… and while fighting the same meme, incorporated it into your work to express disdain… but since its not the correct term, you misattribute. And by doing so, you create the same condition that you are fighting against.

How can you have free markets if you think that capitalists follow cronyism?

The propaganda has been so thourily applied that one has internalized these things and do not even know where they came from (when most are just phrases they tried that stuck to the wall! Which is why you can read how the right to choice people feel they dropped the ball by not coming up with the right to life as their theme… it would have short circuited the opposition, and stopped the sneaky eugenics).


How can we fix it, and get back to things, if we cant even figure out what we are saying comes from where?