trump speaking at a rally june

 

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

 

Winston S. Churchill

 

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“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”

 

 

Jonathan Swift

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I am not a conspiracy theorist … never have been and never will be.

 

putin-militaryI will never suggest Putin and Trump have a “relationship.”

And I will never suggest that Putin has any particular interest in Trump, per se, but rather has a particular interest in what a Trump presidency may offer Russia.

 

I say that because we would be foolish to ignore the fact that Putin, an ex KGBer, would not want to insert himself and his country’s interests into any political field he could play on.

It was a tried & true Soviet tactic and I seriously doubt it has been shelved as a “useless failed tactic of the Cold War.”

 

In fact.

Over the past several years Russia’s “confrontational policies on the global political arena” have been well documented.

 

I say that because while we Americans tend to believe the world revolves around America the world is a bigger place … and Russia has been tied to politics & influence in Great Britain, France, Ukraine, Syria, a number of the past Soviet satellite countries and south America … as well as USA. Populists in the United States and Europe, from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to British politician Nigel Farage or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have voiced their admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

It is a fact … proven and unequivocal … that over the past two years, in particular, the Russian political establishment has only intensified its confrontational policies in the global political arena.

 

They are doing so because the more they can diminish and divide global entities the more likely they can fill in the gaps and step in as an equal.

 

Regardless.

 

My decision to write something about this had nothing to do with any newspaper headline or twitter conspiracy rumblings about Russian intervention into America’s election but rather it had to do with a Dollar Store book.

 

Yeah.

Every once in a while the Dollar Store <yes … I wander in there on occasion> has a book section with a fairly nice selection of outdated first releases for … well … one dollar.

 

I get them and throw them on my stack of ‘to reads’ and sometimes good … sometime bad. The other night I went thru the stack and decided to pull out “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” by Masha Gessen.

 

Well.

 

Within the first 50 pages I saw one after another comparison point to what Trump says and how he behaves to how Putin is described <words and actions>.

 

To be clear I was choicefull with regard to what I pulled out of the book because the author writes with little objectivity and lots of disdain for Putin.

 

Putin is an autocrat but one with characteristics like loyalty to Russia, maniacal self-control, hard work, and a spycraft trained insight into other people’s attitudes & behaviors. Putin’s autocracy seems driven by a commitment to Russia’s revitalization on a global stage balanced by a fear of loss of control <hence his heavy hand leadership>. it is wrong to solely draw distinctions with old Russia <czar or Stalin> but it would also be wrong to ignore the desires to use what may be perceived as the ‘best of the old’ to create and embed in the new Russia.

 

But it isn’t that Putin sees himself in Trump <he may … without the buffoonery aspects> but rather what Putin sees in Trump is the power of divisiveness and the management of power <internally thru law & order and repressing the press> and a desire to not manage power <externally as in isolation and lack of desire to embrace global commitments>.putin-trump-hillary-obama

 

I read somewhere:

 

NO ONE IS EASIER to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence.

 

 

Suffice it to say that Putin and Russia benefit on all counts with Trump.

 

Trump has denied the American people serious debate on policy because he has none himself to debate. Instead what he has offered a smothering blanket of lies promoting fear so that he confuses voters with regard to reality. The danger for the country is that his rhetoric <and potential style> creates huge divisions and brings chaos. He offers only a backward step and America’s “competitors” are happy to step forward.

 

Let’s just assume, take it at face value, that Putin will weigh in wherever he sees an opportunity.

 

The point in highlighting these interferences is not to call for permanent indignation <meddling in other countries’ internal affairs is not totally uncommon in international politics> or to feed the kind of paranoia that sees the Russian president’s hand behind every political development in Europe & the USA. It is, rather, to assess whether such tactics, if pursued, may work and whether any country which Russia targets might substantially change its course on Russia after the elections.

 

Anyway.

 

Here are some excerpts from the book.

Some of the thoughts I pulled struck me as parallels to the attitudes of a large swathe of the citizenry which gave rise to the possibility of Trump.

I will not draw any conclusions nor will I offer any thoughts. All I ask is you read and think about all you have heard and seen from Trump throughout this entire election process:

 

 

  • “He laid out his conditions for my appointment. He said, ‘As long as you don’t butt in on my turf, we’ll be fine.’” Kasyanov, entirely unaccustomed to street language, was struck by Putin’s wording much more than by the substance of what he was saying.

 

 

  • “He is a small, vengeful man,” was how she put it. The case against Gusinsky was, just like the case against Rozhdestvensky, a case of personal vendetta. Gusinsky had not  supported  Putin  in  the

 

 

  • The country was battered, traumatized, and disappointed. It had experienced hope and unity in the late 1980s, culminating in August 1991, when the people beat back the junta that had threatened Gorbachev’s rule. It had placed its faith in Boris Yeltsin, the only Russian leader in history to  have  been  freely    In  return,  the  people  of  Russia  got hyperinflation that swallowed up their life savings in a matter of months; bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who stole from the state and from one another in plain sight; and economic and social inequality on a scale they had never known. Worst of all, many and possibly most Russians lost any sense of certainty in their future—and with it, the sense of unity that had carried them through the 1980s and early 1990s. The Yeltsin government had made the grave mistake of not addressing the country’s pain and fear. Throughout the decade Yeltsin, who had been a true populist, riding the buses and mounting the tanks—whichever the situation happened to require—increasingly withdrew into an impenetrable and heavily guarded world of black limousines and closed conferences.

 

 

  • Yet the government seemed entirely incapable of convincing the people that things were indeed better than they had been a couple of years earlier, and certainly better than a decade earlier. The sense of uncertainty Russians had felt ever since the Soviet Union crumbled under their feet was so great that any losses seemed to confirm their expectation of doom, while any gains were transformed into fears of further loss.

 

 

  • As was the case elsewhere in Russia, a few people were getting very rich very fast, first by buying and selling anything and everything (for example, exporting Russian timber  and  importing  Chinese  umbrellas),  then,  gradually,  by  privatizing  Soviet industrial plants and creating new institutions. Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now, but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. uncertainty is a bitchUncertainty made people feel even poorer.

 

 

 

  • The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. “We will hunt them down,” he said of the terrorists. “Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse.” Putin was using rhetoric markedly different from Yeltsin’s. He was not promising to bring the terrorists to justice. Nor was he expressing compassion for the hundreds of victims of the explosions. This was the language of a leader who was planning to rule with his fist. These sorts of vulgar statements, often spiced with below-the-belt humor, would become Putin’s signature oratorical device. His popularity began to soar.

 

 

  • “Berezovsky would keep calling me and asking, ‘Isn’t he fucking amazing?’” she told me years later. “I would say, ‘Borya, your problem is, you have never known a KGB colonel. He is not fucking amazing. He is perfectly ordinary.’” “I was  curious,  of  course,  to  know  who  this  guy  was  who  was  now  going  to  run  the country,” she told me. “So I got the sense he liked to talk and he liked to talk about himself. I’ve certainly spoken to many people who were more interesting. I had spent five years writing about the KGB: he was no better or worse than the rest of them; he was smarter than some and more cunning than some.”

 

 

  • “I realized that this was how [Putin] was going to rule. That this is how his fucking brain works. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word Patriotism — just the way he had been taught in all those KGB schools: the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.”

 

 

  • The informals had no common political platform, or a common language for the discussion of politics, or even a common understanding  of  the  place  of  such  a  discussion,  but  they  shared  two  things:  a distaste for the ways of the Soviet state, and an abiding desire to protect and preserve what little was left of their beloved historic city. “The people of our generation saw only a dead end ahead: if you did not escape, you’d face degradation,” Yelena Zelinskaya recalled twenty years later. Zelinskaya put out one of several samizdat publications that united the informals. “We could no longer breathe among the lies, the hypocrisy, and the stupidity. There was no fear. And as soon as the first rays of light seemed to break through—as soon as people whose hands had been tied were allowed to  move  at  least  a  few  fingers—people  started  to    People  weren’t  thinking  about money, or about improving their standing  in  life;  all  anyone  thought  about  was  freedom. Freedom to conduct your private life as you wish, freedom to travel and see the world. Freedom  from  hypocrisy  and  the  freedom  not  to  listen  to  hypocrisy;  freedom  from  libel, freedom from feeling ashamed for one’s parents, freedom from the viscous lies in which all of us were submerged as if in molasses.”

 

 

  • Rigged for me while espousing rigged is bad. This was the same man who, just a day or two earlier, had emphasized to his biographers how vicious he could be if someone so much as seemed to cross him, the same man who flared up instantly and had a hard time winding down, the same man whom his friends remember all but scratching out his opponents’ eyes when he was angered. Why would this man sit idly while one private company after another violated the terms of the contracts he had signed with them, leaving his city without the food supplies it so badly needed? Because it was rigged to end that way from the beginning, Salye believes. “The point of the whole operation,” she wrote later, “was this: to create a legally flawed contract with someone who could be trusted, to issue an export license to him, to make the customs office open the border on the basis of this license, to ship the goods abroad, sell them, and pocket the money. And that is what happened.”putin-tv-media

 

  • The day the media died. I spent Election  Day,  March  26,  2000,  in    I wanted to  avoid  the  entire question of going to the polls in an election I felt was a mockery, following a campaign best described as a travesty. In the course of less than three months since Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin had not made any political pronouncements—and this, he and his spin people seemed to think, was a virtue: he felt that dancing for his votes was beneath him. His campaign had consisted essentially of the book that put forward his vision of himself as a thug, in addition to a turn at piloting a fighter plane amid much press attention, landing it at Grozny airport a week before the election. His entire political message seemed to be: “Don’t mess with me.

 

  • But I saw a lot of Putin voters among the Chechens too. “I’m sick of war,” a middle-aged man in Grozny told me. “I am sick of being passed on, like a baton, from one gang of thugs to the next.” I looked around: we were in an area of Grozny that had consisted mostly of private homes; now there were only metal fences separating one ghost property from another. “Wasn’t it Putin who did this?” I asked. “War has been going on for ten years,” the man responded, exaggerating only slightly: the first armed uprisings in Chechnya dated back to 1991. “What could he have changed? We long for  a  strong  power,  power  that  is    We  are  the  kind  of  people  who  need  an arbiter.

 

  • <the Kursk submarine disaster> “I did the right thing,” Putin said, “because the arrival of nonspecialists from any field, the presence of high-placed officials in the disaster area, would not help and more often would hamper work. Everyone should keep to his place.” The remark made it clear Putin viewed himself as a bureaucrat—a very important and powerful bureaucrat, but a bureaucrat still. “I’d always thought if you became president, even if you were merely appointed to this role, you had to change,” Marina Litvinovich, the smart young woman who had worked on Putin’s preelection image, told me. “If the nation is crying, you have to cry along with it.”

 

 

  • … spent  nearly  an  hour dissecting Putin’s behavior, replaying some of the president’s least appropriate remarks, focusing  on  showing  him  still  on  vacation,  tanned  and  relaxed  in  light-colored  resort clothing,  smiling  and  laughing  with  his  holiday  companions,  most  of  them  highly  placed officials. Again and again, he showed Putin to have lied. The president claimed that the sea had been stormy for eight days, hampering rescue efforts. In fact, said Dorenko, the weather had been bad only during the first few days, but even that had no effect at the depth at which the Kursk was situated. Dorenko compared Putin to a schoolboy who is late for class. “We don’t know what kind of teacher Putin’s fibs are intended for, but we know what a teacher says in these kinds of cases: ‘I don’t care what you thought was right—I only care that you get here on time.’” “The regime does not respect us, and this is why it lies to us,”

 

 

  • “What a shitty time we’ve lived to see,” said the museum’s director, former dissident Yuri Samodurov, “when we have to stand up in defense of people we don’t like at all, like Gusinsky and Berezovsky. We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalizing terror and a totalizing lie. I hope that totalizing terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalizing lie.”

 

horizon road destination open

  • “He has  put  Russia  on  ice,”  said  one  of  them,  a  man  in  his  fifties  with  a  beautifully chiseled  face  and  tiny  wire-rimmed    “That’s not necessarily bad.  It’s a kind of stabilizing effect. But what happens next?” “It’s like the revolution has ended,” said another, a former dissident with disheveled salt-and-pepper hair and beard. He meant that the society had reverted to its pre–post-Soviet state. “Old cultural values, old habits are back. The whole country is trying to apply old habits to new reality.” “I don’t think anyone really understands anything anymore,” said a third, a short man with a very big nose and a deep voice. I personally held him to be the smartest man in the room — and  he  certainly  should  have  been  the  most  knowledgeable,  because  he  worked  in  the presidential administration. “But all the changes in the last year have occurred in the area of public consciousness,” said another, a liberal political scientist who had come to prominence during perestroika. “The nation has come out of a psychological depression. This is going to be the toughest political era yet, because nationalist ideology is always the strongest.” “But he has to live up to expectations,” objected a scholar from a younger generation, a large man with bushy black eyebrows.

<note: a paragraph later someone noted “we forget this is no longer a liberal democracy … he doesn’t have to live up to expectations of the people.”

 

 

That’s it.

All I know is that every time the author described Putin’s behavior and words I could almost see & hear Trump. This is not to say Trump is a “Putin” <plus … we are stronger as a democracy with checks & balances> but it does give you some pause as you consider the potential Trump management style.

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Written by Bruce