Newsgroup: it.cultura.militare
Titolo: Hunting the Russian Bear

Hunting the Russian Bear 
Why they're after Putin  
by Justin Raimondo 
At times it seems as though we've gone back in a time machine to the
darkest, sub-zero days of the Cold War era, when Americans were
frantically digging bomb shelters in their back yards, Godless Communism
was on the march, and the jackboots of the KGB were just inches away from
our waiting necks. Tony Blair, lecturing the Russian leader at the G-8
meeting, opined that the Western world, on behalf of which he presumed to
speak, is "becoming worried, fearful about what was happening in Russia
today, the external policy." These remarks echoed Dick Cheney's sally last
year against Russia's alleged attempt to use oil and gas as "tools of
intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to
monopolize transportation." That was said in response to Russia's threat
to raise the price of energy previously sold at subsidized Soviet-era
rates to Ukraine – a capitalistic act that was a bit too radical for the
supposedly pro-free-market Cheney. 
The Brits' beef with Putin also has to do with oil and gas. The Russian
seizure of British oil assets in Siberia is being cited by free-market
types as evidence that Putin is moving toward "corporatism," but is this
any more "corporatist" than legislation currently on the books in the U.S.
that forbids foreign ownership of key industries such as airlines and
telecommunications? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Who can forget the Dubai port-management brouhaha, when Democratic and
Republican lawmakers alike demagogued the issue to score political points
by conjuring the alleged threat posed by a Middle Eastern-based company
having anything to do with maintaining our – rapidly decaying – "vital"
infrastructure? The Dubai episode inaugurated a crackdown by U.S.
regulators and inspired a host of economically disastrous yet politically
popular measures in Congress that confirm "corporatism" is on the march in
Washington at least as much as it is in Moscow.
Remember when Chinese investors sought to buy out the oil company Unocal?
The uproar was deafening, and the deal was scotched. So it turns out that
British Petroleum is no more badly treated in Russia than Chinese-owned
CNOOC Ltd. is in the U.S. – which, come to think of it, is perhaps why the
Brits are so irked.
According to the mainstream news media's pampered pet pundits, Russian
President Vladimir Putin is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, and Russia
under his rule is rapidly "backsliding" into "authoritarianism." According
to Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin and now a senior
fellow at the Cato Institute, the resurgent Russian military is about to
take out its neighbors and seal a reestablished Warsaw Pact in the blood
of Georgian, Ukrainian, and possibly even Polish innocents. The British,
in particular, have been hyping this "new Cold War" narrative for all it's
worth – which, when it comes right down to it, isn't very much.
Is Russia embarked on a return to authoritarianism? The answer has to be
an unequivocal no. After all, Putin has not closed down a single Russian
"dissident" media outlet – instead, like their counterparts in the U.S.,
Russian media barons, at the head of vast corporate conglomerates, have
bought up the major television networks and newspapers and imposed a Fox
News-like unanimity on correspondents and pundits alike. While this may
make for boring television and patently predictable punditry, it doesn't
make Russia a fascist state, as all too many people who ought to know
better are trying to imply. 
I had to laugh when I heard the thrilling news that "hundreds of people"
marched through the streets of St. Petersburg recently to protest Putin's
supposedly repressive regime. This was one of a series of "dissidents'
marches" being held by the "opposition" – a seriocomic coalition of chess
champion Gary Kasparov and neo-fascist crackpot Eduard Limonov. Hundreds,
eh? Hundreds of thousands of antiwar marchers over the years protesting
America's policy in Iraq have failed to garner as much publicity as this
little band did in record time – now isn't that odd? 
Odder still is the nature of the "opposition" itself: Limonov is a
punk-rock skinhead "idol" and sometime novelist whose crazed views are
best summed up by his National Bolshevik Party's graphic incorporation of
Soviet and Nazi symbols to create the single most repulsive party emblem
in all of recorded history. Kasparov, aside from his well-known exploits
in the game of chess, is a pawn of American neoconservatives: his real
constituency isn't in Russia, where he remains an obscure political
figure, but in Washington, D.C., where he stands amid such neocon
luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and James Woolsey as a member
of the Center for Security Policy. The Center is a major neocon propaganda
outfit headed by longtime neocon activist Frank Gaffney, whose name is
virtually synonymous with the military-industrial complex. Kasparov served
on the Center's National Security Advisory Council along with Woolsey.
The neocons, by the way, are deeply committed to the Chechen cause and
have been in the vanguard of the movement to demonize Putin as a
latter-day Stalin: the list of endorsers of the American Committee for
Peace in Chechnya replicates the seating arrangements at the front table
at an American Enterprise Institute awards dinner. It was Richard Perle,
you'll recall, who averred that Russia ought to be expelled from the G-8
on account of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's arrest for crimes ranging from
embezzlement to conspiracy to commit murder. 
The neocons have allied themselves with the Russian oligarchs, who amassed
fantastic wealth in post-communist Russia by means that might meet the
approval of Tony Soprano, not the Better Business Bureau. These oligarchs
seethe at their expulsion as they plot from abroad to return the country
to their clutches. For years now, an unsavory popular front of Chechen
terrorists, neoconservative hawks, and shady Russian oligarchs wearing
Moss Lipow dark sunglasses and gobs of gold chains has massed at the gates
of Moscow, demanding the ouster of the czar – and the clamor has now been
taken up by Western governments.
"It would be funny if it wasn't so sad" was Putin's response to the U.S.
insistence that Poland and Czechoslovakia put anti-missile technology in
place in order to guard against the supposed "threat" from an attack…
launched by Iran. The joke is that the Iranians don't have missiles that
can reach either Warsaw or Prague. To pretend that these anti-missile
systems are aimed at an "enemy" other than Russia is the measure of the
West's disdain for Putin: like a schoolyard bully who "accidentally"
shoves his victims on the playground, they don't even bother to
convincingly conceal their belligerence. 
Putin's counterproposal to help set up a missile-interception system in
the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan is a deft deflection of Western
claims that Putin poses a renewed Russian threat to the security of
Europe. If the U.S. and Britain are genuinely concerned about a possible
Iranian strike at the former Eastern bloc, then they'll sign on to Putin's
generous offer. Their hesitation, one has to conclude, speaks volumes
about their real motives for putting up the missile shield in the first
place. Just as the demonstrators in the streets of Russian cities are
seemingly intent on provoking the Russian police into a violent response,
so the Western powers – alarmed at the rise of Putin on the world stage as
the Americans' chief antagonist and most eloquent critic – are engaged in
a series of large-scale provocations, including but not limited to the
Eastern European missile shield. 
Another irritant to Russia's increasingly fractious relations with the
West is the issue of Kosovo's independence. Again, the Western love of
double standards comes into play here, with Kosovo's alleged "right" to
nationhood being upheld by an American president while the corresponding
"right" of Russian-speaking (or pro-Russian) areas of the former Soviet
Union, such as Abkhazia and the Transdniester Republic, to independence
goes unrecognized by the West. 
The real evidence, however, of just how badly relations between Russia and
the West have deteriorated is the strange case of Alexander Litvinenko and
the mystery surrounding his death. Having covered this subject at length
in previous columns, I won't elaborate on the arcane technical and other
details of this downright weird episode, which seems like a story straight
out of a Hollywood thriller, except to say that the "official" version of
how Litvinenko came to be poisoned by a rare radioactive substance,
polonium-210, stinks to high heaven. 
This narrative, which holds that Litvinenko was targeted by the KGB
because of his alleged status as a Russian "dissident" living in exile in
London, doesn't hold up under even the most forgiving scrutiny. After all,
why kill him with a rare and easily traced substance – and with such an
overdose that the cost alone would seem to rule out this method – when a
simple shot in the back of the head would suffice? The sheer amount of
disinformation and propagandistic nonsense dished out by the British
tabloids alone on the subject probably consumed enough paper to deforest
half of South America. Nor is the British indictment of Andrei Lugovoi
enough to paper over the huge holes in the "official" story. Lugovoi, at
any rate, is fighting back, with revelations that the Brits and Russian
oligarch Boris Berezovsky tried to recruit him to root out the dirt on
Putin. 
In any case, the Litvinenko affair emanates the aura of a gigantic,
somewhat sinister scam, perhaps involving the smuggling of polonium and
the involvement of Islamic terrorist cells associated with the Chechens.
What ought to worry us is that someone was possibly trying to assemble a
"dirty bomb" of the type Jose Padilla was accused of masterminding – in
the heart of London. 
There seems little doubt the color-coded "revolutions," with Western
material and moral support, targeted the former Soviet "near abroad" and
aimed at reducing Russian influence and putting Putin on the defensive.
The construction of a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe was the
last straw. What had been primarily a propaganda campaign aimed at the
Kremlin has now taken a decidedly military turn, one that bodes ill for
the future and the cause of peace. There are those who never reconciled
themselves to the end of the Cold War – that crucible in which the
pestilential sect known as the neoconservatives was born and raised – and
it seems a supreme effort is being made to revive it. 
Today we hear endless stories about how the Russian leader and his country
pose a threat to Western interests: Russia is "authoritarian," newly
aggressive, "anti-Semitic," and, yes, even "homophobic." As the memory of
9/11 fades and the meaning of that historic disaster is increasingly
disputed, the War Party needs fresh enemies whose alleged evil will thrill
the popular imagination and satiate their hunger for villainy. Putin,
flush with oil money and eager to regain Russia's place in the sun, fits
the bill nicely.
The truth is more prosaic. Putin is no dictator, and Russia, far from
backsliding into neo-communism, is in a better position than ever to
create a middle-class-based liberal democracy with the rule of law roughly
comparable to the system that prevails in the West. The general rise in
the Russian standard of living, after a catastrophic post-communist
decline, puts a brake on any backward-looking authoritarian movement
(neo-communist or otherwise) making appreciable progress. 
That this occurred under Putin is the reason for the Russian president's
enormous popularity and accounts for the marginalization of his opponents.
As much as Western liberals and neocons loathe Putin and the prospect of a
resurgent Russia, it doesn't look like regime change is on the agenda in
the former Soviet Union, in spite of millions being poured into the region
by Western governments to aid the opposition. The endless provocations
aimed at the Kremlin will only have the effect of irritating the Russian
bear – and creating yet more anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. As
if we don't have enough of that already…
Russia has come a long way from being the land of the gulags, and it is
never going to go back to that – not unless the West succeeds in looting
that country, once again, and creating a Russian version of the Weimar
Republic. This is precisely why lunatics of Eduard Limonov's ilk have
joined the opposition as its noisiest and most visible wing – because the
rise of Putin, who created order out of mafia-inspired chaos,
short-circuited the Weimar Russia scenario and diverted the Russians down
a different path. 
 
-- 
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5 per mille all'Associazione di amicizia Italia-Cuba cod.fis. 96233920584 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
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 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuitohttp://
www.newsland.it/newssegnala
 gli abusi ad 
a...@newsland.it
non c'entra niente con il post ma visto che compare un invito a
visitare il sito dei comunisti italiani ti invito (se hai contatti) a
convincerli a essere "piu' seri" nel senso buono del termine :
cioe' a diventare adulti
e' il problema di tutta la sinistra (forse mondiale) sono rimasti dei
bambinoni
(forse con 13.000 euro al mese anche io sarei rimasto tale)

 (forse con 13.000 euro al mese anche io sarei rimasto tale)
Invece quelli di destra con altrettanti 13.000 euro al mese (e forse 
anche di piu') sono adulti ? Come scusa ? Ah, ho capito: intendevi TUTTA 
la sinistra mondiale. Che cultura......


quelli di sestra anche con 100 euro al mese sono cmq degli id...i
la mia e' una critica da sinistra
da parte di uno che vorrebbe vedere fare .... non solo litigare e
blaterare
se no la lezione sarkozy sara' solo l'inizio

 se no la lezione sarkozy sara' solo l'inizio
Non puoi contrapporre la Destra e Sinistra italiana con quella estera. 
Se parli dell'Italia posso anche essere d'accordo, anche perche' nel 
nostro paese non c'e' piu' un'ideologia, ma un magna-magna generale.
Ti stupisci di Sarkozy ? La Francia e' un paese nazionalista, il 
risultato e' ovvio, ma ricorda che la Destra francese ha tutt'altra 
struttura....
Tu vuoi vedere e fare ? Anch'io... Ma al punto dove siamo oggi l'unico 
modo rimane una rivoluzione civile.
Saluti: Shadow


il fatto incontestabile e' che il mondo sta andando verso destra
e la franvìcia e' si un paese nazionalista ma e' anche un paese dove
le sinistre hanno dominato alla grande
e invece adesso hanno preso una bastonata stellare
lo so che di sinistre ce ne sono tante, pero' intanto sono sempre
sinistre anche se molto diverse
e il mio giudizio era che globalmente sono andate in crisi o stanno
andandoci
i motivi sono tanti e anche molto difficili da "aggiustare"
pero' una cosa secondo me e' incontrovertibile:
LA SINISTRA DI GOVERNO NON FA COSE DI SINISTRA

le sinistre hanno dominato alla grande
Veramente nella Va Repubblica hanno governato solo 14 anni su 50 (e c'era 
Mitterand!). In tutte le altre occasioni hanno sempre perso.
Ciao,
Federioc Antola.