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Saturday 4 October 2014

Putin's Useful Idiot? Au Contraire

Vladimir's Lenin and Putin
It is obviously the case that when one weaves an argument, particularly in areas shrouded in emotion and controversy, that one will face criticism.

The views expressed in my essays and interviews are widely disseminated on the World Wide Web and one cannot police every website or message-board at which an essay or article of mine is reproduced.

It should be said that the overwhelming majority of such re-posts on websites or links supplied by posters on social media sites such as facebook and twitter are done by sympathetic organisations and persons.

But if a disagreeing party wishes to supply a critique then all is well so long as it is based on logic and not on an inflexible political mind-set or on tribal, racial or religious sentiment as a lot of views tend to be predicated upon whatever the protests of many protagonists.

Anyway, someone posted a reproduction of a report by the Russian news agency, RIA Novosti about my recent interview on the Voice of Russia radio international regarding my views of the Ukrainian crisis, onto a Nigerian message-board.

A different poster then followed by posting a link wondering if 'Adeyinka Makinde is one of those opinions-for-hire - a modern version what Lenin called "useful idiots".'

That term, coined, it is said by Vladimir Lenin - although the precise evidence justifying this is lacking- is used to denigrate those who supposedly propagandize someone or something without being cognizant of the full objectives of the person, cause or ideology.

I will re-produce the poster's comment later and my riposte further down but first things first.

Any person who is corpus mentis and who has read my essays on the Ukrainian crisis, NATO policy in the Middle East and on Israel-Palestine will be aware of the factual justifications which I outline.

My approach is based on an objective collection of historical and contemporary data which is then synthesized into an argument.

The facts and the arguments I put forward are clearly not proselytizing any form of ideology or validating, in this case, every action and policy undertaken by Vladimir Putin.

I have noted, for instance, that there are indications that he has amassed a large fortune inconsistent with his presidential salary. I have also written about suspicions of his government's perpetrating a false-flag atrocity in order to prosecute a brutal war in Chechnya.

In contemporary Russia, the rule of law continues to be severely challenged,  while the gangsterism which had its underpinnings in the Soviet system and came to full-blown glare in the wild and reckless years of the Yeltsin era continues to undermine the evolution of a genuinely civil society.

However, is one therefore compelled to assent to the reckless, aggressive actions by the US-NATO alliance -directed by neo-con agitators such as Senator John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland- to which ANY sane and competent leader of the Russian state would react?

The critics of those who rationalise Putin's reactions in regard to these specific matters themselves betray their own psychological hang ups as well as their intellectual limitations.

And not least, they often betray a certain amount of pre-existing anti-Russian prejudice.

They have been duped by the incessant anti-Putin propaganda that has been the standard fare of much of the Western press for some years now. They are swayed by tribal-nationalist attitudes and motivated by anti-Russian sentiment held particularly by those who were under the domination of the old Soviet Union.
 
Also, their blanket disdain for Putin's reactions is ideological: a resentment of Russia based on its role as the standard bearer -China notwithstanding- of totalitarian socialism-communism.

One thread of thinking bubbling in my mind is that a lot of anti-Russian sentiment, understandable to a degree because of Tsarist and then Soviet dominance of their nations, is that the resentful 'tribes' and nationalities in central and eastern Europe, never got to exact revenge against Russians in the manner that they did against German populations after the Second World War.

The irony is that those who blame Russia and Russians to this day for 'inflicting' communism on their nations may be the first to object to those who spin the thesis that Jews were the overwhelming force behind the political leadership of early communism and the barbarities perpetrated against what they term "Orthodox Christian Slavic" communities by the state security and gulag system of the Bolsheviks.

In fact, many of these eastern European and Baltic states were complicit in the Nazi persecution of the Jews precisely because of such identification. This includes the sort of people the US-NATO have put in power in Kiev.

Think about that.

Germans were pogromized, ethnically cleansed and raped on masse; the fate of the Sudetan Germans being one example. The Red Army itself perpetrated the mass rape of millions of German females as it conquered German territory from the Eastern parts of the Nazi state.

How any sane, rational and objective person can fault Putin for his actions over Crimea after the US sponsored a coup which put into power a government composed of neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists is truly beyond me.

How any sane, rational and objective person can fault Putin for his draconian acts against certain oligarchs and actually venerate criminals such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky as pro-democracy 'victims' of a dictator after the likes of Khodorkhovsky LOOTED Russia in the post-Cold War era with the aid of businessmen and academics from the US and other parts of the West is also beyond me.

Cold empathy, rationalization as well as an objective and pragmatic approach to specific issues ought to be the order of the day.

Opposition to Putin in the West is simply down to Russian resistance to attempts to destabilize and balkanize it; make it more pliant to the military and economic supremacy of the United States.

The Anglo-American world fears the rise of an independent set of powers in Eurasia which would end its lengthy global domination. It is as simple as that.

I have tried to sign into the website but it has such an inefficient mechanism and terrible administrative support that I have been unable to post this reply which I prepared a few weeks ago.

It would be interesting to find out just who "Cammy White 1878" is.
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The report of my Voice of Russia radio interview at RIA Novosti's website:

'Expert: NATO Enforcing US Financial, Commercial Power Globally'

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Cammy White 1878:

Nothing that the EU might do to Ukraine can ever exceed the horror of the Soviet era.

Millions starved to death in the 1930s after the Soviet state seized harvests and inflicted famine on the people in what became known as the Holodomor.

I wonder if Adeyinka Makinde is one of those opinions-for-hire - a modern version what Lenin called "useful idiots".
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My intended response (I had wanted to sign up, tongue-in-cheek, as 'Nikolai Vatutin', a World War 2 Soviet general  assassinated by Ukrainian partisans):

“Nothing that the EU might do to Ukraine can ever exceed the horror of the Soviet era.”

What is the logic of this entry?

The Russia of today is not the Russia of the Stalinist period or the Russia of the Khruschev-era.

On the contrary, the economic deal between Ukraine and Russia allows for a range of state subsidies; most importantly in the area of gas. Removing this will make the cost of gas double or even quadruple. And Ukraine has been a deadbeat so far as paying its dues to Russia is concerned.

EU-IMF austerity would lead to a cut in pensions, a cut in childcare, devaluation of the currency and so on.

If the result of an austerity program will lead to old people dying of hypothermia, increases in the child mortality rate, less spending on education, unemployment and so on, what good will all of that do?

Think about it. The reference to the Holodomor implies that the EU’s package amounts to “genocidal austerity” –only not as severe as the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s.

Methinks that “Cammy White’s” purported analysis makes him -or her- a craven idiot!

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