Putin’s Russia has crossed a Rubicon: it now has sanctioned the Anti-Maidan Movement, a domestic version of Hitler’s storm troopers, and thus created a monster that almost certainly will engage in pogroms against one group or another in the future, according to Moscow commentator Matvey Ganapolsky.
Despite Putin’s ratings in the polls and the power of various state agencies, the Kremlin leader has clearly decided that it needs another weapon to control society and direct it along the lines it wants, and he clearly could think of nothing better than to adopt one of the “attributes of the Third Reich.”
“The times have passed” when the Putin regime used informal groups of bullies against those it doesn’t like or approve of, the Moscow commentator says. Now, those bullies are being officially recognized and legalized, they are holding press conferences, and they are “talking but the salvation of the Motherland.”
As Ganapolsky reports, “the new Russian storm troopers call themselves ‘the Anti-Maidan Movement” and have ostensibly been created by the Militant Brotherhood, the Union of Afghanistan Veterans, the Central Cossack Forces and the Night Wolves, thus allowing the Kremlin plausible deniability about who and what is really behind them.
The primary victim of Mr Putin is Russia – the Russian people.
However, most Russians do not know that – as Mr Putin controls the media.
The situation in the Ukraine is tragic – utterly tragic, but so is the situation in Russia itself.
Putin has destroyed the Civil Society that was emerging after the nightmare of the Soviet years.
And those Westerners who appear on Putin’s propaganda television outlet, should hang their heads in shame.
It is not “funny” to “hang out” with Max Kaiser and the others – it is disgusting.
People who continue to do it are scum.
Paul Marks,
I’d have to disagree with in that Putin gets away with what he does because of indifference of the Russian people. Get rid of this cunt and another cunt will take his place(Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clinton, Bush, Obama). This is universal, how many people eligible to vote actually vote?
Meanwhile our leaders pay bum-licking tribute to a fascist Saudi scumbag and terrorist, lauding the terrorist as a “reformer”.
Flags at half mast for the Wahabi fascist, a national disgrace.
I wonder if some cultures and societies are doomed forever to be run by despots, simply because of their nature?
There was a slim chance of a civil society in Russia, right after the Mensheviks overthrew the Car. However they didn’t stand a chance as the Bolsheviks who were nothing else as the fifth column of the imperial Germany were having at their disposal money, material, military and a diplomatic support.
Had the Mensheviks succeeded, the history would, perhaps, take another turn.
Let’s bear in our mind that Bolsheviks have annihilated practically the entire intelligentsia in Russia thus destroying the future of this unlucky country.
But at least Russia is not as cancerous or as dangerous as the vile House of Saud.
Its high time we nuked Saudi Arabia back into the stone age.
Pardone,
Would it not suffice to be in a position to not buy Saudi oil? If we bought oil from ‘ethical’ sources, like Nigeria, Norway, Venezuela, Iraq and Kuwait, with the current glut we might be in a position to have an economic impact. Anyway, nuking is wrong except in defence of self or others.
Norway hunts whales, Venezuela seems irredeemably socialoid, and Iraq is fragmenting into two or three countries. Can Nigeria and Kuwait supply the world? Or is this an attempt to get us to buy only expensive ‘fracked’ oil from America?
I disagree that nuking is wrong. The west has become too comfortable with “clean” wars where firepower is directed only at combatants. We can kill them all, but then the society that sent the first lot will send a second lot, and a third. Wars are not won by killing soldiers, but by crushing cultures. Nukes would achieve that end at almost no cost and certainly no lives of our own lost. If you have to slaughter a few cities for people to get the message, why not do it in a blink rather than a long drawn out bombing and shelling campaign?
Wrong on many counts. Radiation poisoning would affect everyone, and if someone else had a grudge, they’d strike first against us because they’d learned a different lesson from your nukem approach.
and that’s ignoring the fact that Libertarians shouldn’t believe in initiating violence, and should leave enough of the other side so you can extract compensation from them.
Some libertarians may believe that, but in the natural world, unprotected by professional armies, they’d be the first to die. And anyway, bombing muslim cities hardly counts as initiating force, they’ve been hitting at us for decades. We just have more firepower.
And I have my doubts about the claimed danger of radiation poisoning. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both rebuilt in place and Chernobyl releases literal tons of material while a nuke is a dozen kilograms. It could be opening Pandora’s box once we launch but I’m happy to flatten cities with B-52 strikes too. Whatever it takes to destroy their will to wage war.
Oh I am not an anarchist and I am all for professional armies: it is one of the few legitimate roles of the state. And we need institutions to protect us from mass murderous collectivist lunatics like, well, you.
Yeah because area bombing worked so well in WW2 and Vietnam. Sheesh. You may not have got the memo yet as you seem to be stuck in 1938 but precision attacks are vastly more effective militarily.
Anti-maiden movement? So in addition to murder and pillage, they rape?
So do those names sound less like bad supervillian groups in Russian? I mean seriously I was surprised I did not read one of the being “The Association of Jackbooted Oddfellows.”
Perry, in case it skipped your notice, you might also realize the western world has not won a single ideological war since those days when we bombed cities to the ground. We can only win “short” wars where the outcome is decided by taking ground, we cannot win long wars where one culture must subdue another. We kill solders and blow up tanks and leave the civilian culture that nurtured war completely untouched. If we’d just gone after the Wehrmacht and left Germany alone, they’d not have felt beaten, as they would not have been. Same for the Japanese.
Bombing in WW2 didn’t win the war all on it’s own but it did bring the fight to the civilians and they all knew the cost of more war was more bombings until every one of them was dead. If they’d been voting on when to surrender, I suspect it would have been a long time before the physical defeat of their army.
And the bombing against North Viet-nam failed because we went after strictly military targets, avoiding civilian casualties where possible. Flattening their cities as policy would have eliminated their industrial capacity and human resources. We lost because we stopped short of doing what it took to win, and that was crushing their people and their ideology.
That is how wars are won, not by killing soldiers on a far away battle field. That is only a battle.
Completely wrong from beginning to end. If there is anything learned from the Strategic Air Campaign in WW2 it is that area bombing cities does jack shit to people’s willingness or indeed ability to fight. The *only* strategic bombing that has ever had a significant effect on war fighting capabilities has been against point targets, such as submarine production and oil facilities. ‘Terror’ bombing a la Douhet simply does not end wars and most importantly is simply does not ‘break’ morale. It was an error to think it would in 1944 and it is a delusion to still think so 2015.
It is a weakness of the Russian state that it has to rely on a new force to maintain control. It is right to call them stormtroopers, for they are the new Brownshirts. But soon after he took power, Hitler had to wipe them out because they threatened his own power. Many of these people now empowered see Putin as too moderate; they support him now only against their combined enemies. But they want the power themselves. I think given enough time, Putin and his KGB friends will determine this was a mistake.
Perry, I do not imply we should bomb cities to frighten people, I’m saying we should bomb cities to kill them. All of them. As in not one survivor. Let the next city be frightened.
And again, you misunderstand my main point, perhaps intentionally. Ideological wars are not won on battlefields. Knocking out enemy tanks and killing their soldiers does NOTHING to impact their culture. I’m advocating mass slaughter as a way of hitting them at their recruiting bases, the schools and mosques and local communities that foster terrorism. Their entire social structure exists to make war. We must show them that war is now coming to their door and not some far away place, like usual. They will either reform or die and I don’t care much which they choose. Either way, the war will be won by us. Your way, the “losing more slowly” campaign of pin-pricks against military targets just guarantees we face an enemy culture that never has to pay a price for warfare and so will continue to send killers after us for as long as they exist.
This is why Nukes are so useful, in a half hour we could make quite a statement. Everyone knows it is the state sponsors that are behind 90% of it. I think we’d find that they’d quickly work to clean up their networks if the alternative was the glass their country, and them with it.
This is the way culture wars are fought. You kill them until they surrender or there aren’t any left alive. We’ve forgotten this as most wars in recent history have been political conflicts that could be settled by battles between soldiers until one side gave in. We are not fighting soldiers, we are fighting a civilian culture that produces soldiers. So we target them there, where it all starts.
Yeah except you will not kill them all, given that these are not highly urbanised first world enemies. You will not even destroy all their industry, which can all be dispersed here and there, particularly if they are just making low tech high leverage weapons like IED triggered with mobile phones bought from eBay somewhere. It is the same kind of obsessive thinking that suggests a failed policy can work if only you do it harder. The only way nukes can really make a difference is against a highly urbanised civilisation. And of course you only have to use nukes once the way you suggest, for every industrialised and semi-industrialised nation on earth to arm themselves with nukes in responsive.