Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Timothy Snyder is super good -- "‘Just by existing, he’s extended this war’: Timothy Snyder on Trump, Russia and Ukraine
Martin Pengelly in Washington
[...]
Again, Snyder sees parallels with Russia: “It verges on being … a kind of Stalinist-style purging device. The thing is entirely imagined. But nevertheless, you’re gonna go after people on the basis of something that’s entirely made up. It’s reorganized all of American politics. And that was something I expected. If you look at South Korea a couple of weeks ago … both parties resisted the [president’s] martial law declaration. But we didn’t get [resistance to Trump] out of our American Republicans. We got it out of them for about two days [after January 6]. And because of that, Trump was able to come back.”

Snyder also laments as “laughable” the behavior of the US supreme court, which “cleared the landscape as best it could for Trump to return. This [legal] immunity business … and the ruling that he was not an insurrectionist, or that the insurrection clause in the constitution, article three of the 14th amendment of the US constitution [which disqualifies insurrectionists from federal office], has effectively been vacated: these are extraordinary actions to make it possible for him to come back.”
[...]
“I think the throughline for Trump, going all the way back to the 1980s and his visit to the Soviet Union, through his first presidential campaign and up to the present, has always been submissiveness towards the power in the Kremlin. I would be very happy for him to break with that. I don’t see any evidence of it yet.

“The scenario is that Trump is made to understand that Vladimir Putin is bullying him and that Trump should therefore do the right thing. But so far in his entire career, Trump has seemed to enjoy being bullied by Putin. And so far [Trump’s] negotiating strategy for Ukraine, so far as they’ve revealed it, has not been to make Russia weaker, it’s been to make Ukraine weaker.”

Snyder has said Trump is Russia’s “only chance of winning the war”. He said so “because the Russians say it”. Snyder speaks “five languages reasonably well, a few more quite badly, and read[s] about a dozen”.

“A lot of the stuff where I’ve been right about Russia in the past has just been because I’ve been channeling what they say. And they’ve been saying for a year in their media that they need Trump to win. And I think the existence of Trump and the possibility that he would be president is itself a cause of this war, because [it] was something Russia could factor in the whole time. They could tell themselves: ‘We just need to stay on the battlefield to January ’25 and then the floodgates will open for us, because we’re going to have our guy.’

“If Trump didn’t exist, if Trump had retired from politics, I think the whole Russian attitude towards this war would have been different. This war is strategically idiotic for them, as they must know. But the fact that Trump was there meant … they could always rationalize it. Just by existing, he’s extended this war.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/01/timothy-snyder-trump-musk-russia-ukraine-putin "

Timothy Snyder is great. So are Nick Cohen and David Remnick. Posted 2016.

From Cohen's -- Russia Today: why western cynics lap up Putin’s TV poison
[...]
The reaction of the naive observer to Russia’s prostitution of journalism is to think its elite has found a new way to steal from the Russian masses. The obvious question is the best one: what’s the point? However many the communists killed, Marxist-Leninists still persuaded people to follow them in large numbers until the 1970s. No one tries to persuade you today that Britain or any other country would be happier if the prime minister had Putin’s dictatorial powers and the state became a collection of thieves without an independent judiciary, opposition parties or free press to constrain it.

But the reality of modern Russia is not the impediment it seems. Suppose instead of trying to sell you Putin, Russia Today were to sell you the idea that Britain is as bad as a dictatorship. You might agree, however foolish the sentiment. If you are campaigning for change in a manifestly imperfect but still free and prosperous society, you exaggerate in the hope of attracting attention. (If the government passes this restriction on freedom of speech, we’ll be no better than Iran. If the Tories stay in control of the NHS, we’ll have third-world hospitals and so on.) A lie is still a lie, even if it is made in a good cause. But I can see why people do it.

The disbelief that oozes through much of public debate in our time is rarely in the service of any cause, however. It is radical indifference; a furious determination to condemn accompanied by an equally determined refusal to commit. Like Russell Brand, millions of people don’t want to say what change they want to see, because a commitment would force them to take a position and lay them open to attack.

They aren’t cynics but pseudo-sophisticated innocents. They shout “liar” automatically at everyone who tries to rule over them – and doubtless they are right more often than not. But to dispense with the search for proof – the need to demonstrate that the politician or banker is lying – leaves the supposedly wised-up open to capture by cults, conspiracy theorists and Russia.

The Institute of Modern Russia releases a report .. http://imrussia.org/en/ .. this week that shows how the collapse of communism liberated Moscow. Communists had to pretend to support leftwing movements – Putin can support anyone. Where the old communists claimed the Soviet Union was freer and more democratic than the west, Putinists claim “all liberalism is cant and anyone can be bought”. Russia Today feeds the huge western audience that wants to believe that human rights are a sham and democracy a fix. Believe that and you will ask: what right have we to criticise Putin? At least he is honest in his way.

David Remnick of the New Yorker described Russia Today’s “nastily brilliant” ability to feed “resentment of western superiority and resentment of western moralism”. He forgot to add that nowhere is that resentment stronger than in the west.

Russia Today’s second mission is to spread conspiracy theories that help Russian power and provide sensational audience-grabbing stories – in every sense of the word. If you have heard that the Ukrainians who oppose Putin are fascists, that there is a land called “Novorossiya” in south-east Ukraine that historically belonged to Moscow, or that Assad did not gas Syrians, the odds are the story will have started on Russia Today.

Occasionally, its journalists have crises of conscience – Sara Firth, a London-based correspondent for Russia Today, resigned because of its lies about flight MH17 .. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/russia-today-reporter-quits-malaysia-airlines-mh17-crash-coverage-article-1.1871924 . But replacements can always be found among the ranks of the desperate and unscrupulous.

I said that no one believed Putin offered a future for humanity. But his post-communist, postmodern flexibility means that many are prepared cut a deal when the bent copper makes an offer. Alex Salmond admires him because the break-up of Britain is in Russia’s interests. Nigel Farage, Marine le Pen and all the other leaders of Europe’s far right run to him because he shares their hatred of the EU. Despite his alliance with what we once called neofascism, the old communist left in Germany, George Galloway and Julian Assange support him because opposition to the west trumps anti-fascism in their book.

Russia Today provides a platform for anti-fracking greens because Putin wants us to remain dependent on Russian oil and gas. Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdogan see how Putin has accumulated dictatorial power in Russia and wish to imitate him in Hungary and Turkey. London’s banks and law and PR firms work for him because the oligarchy pumps money their way. In Europe and at the United Nations, bigots of all descriptions welcome Putin’s leadership in fighting calls for gay equality and religious freedom.

However battered he looks, Putin knows how to manipulate all he comes across. It is about time the rest of the world knew it too.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/08/russia-today-western-cynics-lap-up-putins-tv-poison

and from Remnick's - Trump and Putin: A Love Story

The attraction is mutual, but history shows who’s really using whom.

By David Remnick , August 3, 2016
[...]
Even if the Russian government is not responsible for the hack on the D.N.C., Putin’s affinity for Trump is clear. Some part of it may be a matter of kindred temperament. Just as Trump talks ominously about Mexican “rapists” and tens of thousands of “illegal immigrants … roaming free .. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974 ” in the land, Putin won early popularity by vowing to dispense with terrorists from the Caucasus: “We will ice them in their shithouses.” Trump is, after all, a kind of parody of Putin: the bluster, the palaces. As the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.”

The fellow-feeling between the two is complex, but it is not hard to see who gets the better of whom. Trump sees strength and cynicism in Putin and hopes to emulate him. Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him.

Putin’s view of the world­­—of the future of Russia and its increasingly dangerous confrontation with the West—is rooted in the fall of the Soviet Union. His behavior and his resentments, to say nothing of his shrewd foray into our current electoral follies, are based entirely on that event.

Twenty-five summers ago, Communist ideology and the Soviet Union itself teetered on the brink of nonexistence. On the morning of July 23, 1991, two newspaper articles .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/07/24/hard-liners-appeal-to-military-to-prevent-soviet-humiliation/8aaaffad-4f6a-43a3-8ee5-babfc5059036 .. appeared that, each in its own way, signalled the end.

A liberal paper called Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper) published a leak of a new draft platform for the Communist Party. The draft rejected Marxist-Leninist ideology in favor of European-style social democracy, and it “unconditionally” condemned the “crimes” of the Stalin regime, which “broke and maimed the lives of millions of people, whole nations.” The draft had the endorsement of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was still the Party’s General Secretary, but of no more than a third of the Central Committee.

That same morning, Sovyetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia), the most prominent daily outlet for orthodox Communists and hardcore Russian nationalists, published a front-page call to arms called “Slovo k Narodu” (“A Word to the People”). The appeal, signed by leading figures in the military, the security apparatus, and the right-wing intelligentsia, accused Gorbachev and more radical reformers of leading the Soviet Union to ruin. Only if the “healthy forces” of state power united and acted swiftly could “humiliation” and “fratricidal war” be averted.

[One reason i'm posting this article in full this time is the clear abundance in echo of anti-Gorbachev Russian words and sentiments
in the trashing of Obama and Clinton and of America in Trump-talk. It's almost like the Russians wrote much of his material, yet no way
as the vocabulary here (see just below) far outshines anything out of Trump's mouth. The sentiments and tone though are no doubt an echo.]

“An enormous, unforeseen calamity has taken place,” it read. “The Motherland, our country, a great power, given to us by nature, with its glorious ancestors, is perishing, breaking apart, falling into darkness. And this collapse is taking place with our silent acquiescence and tolerance. Brothers, we are late in waking to this, late in observing the misery when our home is already aflame in every corner. We must extinguish this blaze not with water but with our tears and blood.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-putin-a-love-story

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