Showing posts with label Yeltsin-Boris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yeltsin-Boris. Show all posts

Friday, July 21, 2017

What About the Russians?

[Prominent pols and pundits now recall] the Sovietology era, when Russians were cast as evil, emotionless manipulators, cold as their icy homeland.

[...]

For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout.

[...]

Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime.

There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to restore Russia to an archenemy role.

[...]

After Boris Yeltsin won re-election in 1996, Time magazine ran a gloating cover story – YANKS TO THE RESCUE! – about three American advisers sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign strategy. Picture Putin sending envoys to work out of the White House to help coordinate Trump's re-election campaign, and you can imagine how this played in Russia.

[...]

The Yeltsin regime, which incidentally also saw wide-scale assassinations of journalists and other human rights abuses, was widely understood to be a pseudo-puppet state, beholden to the West.

[...]

Essentially, Yeltsin agreed to privatize the jewels of Russian industry into the hands of a few insiders – we call them oligarchs now – in return for their overwhelming financial and media support in the '96 race against surging communist Gennady Zyuganov. The likes of Vladimir Potanin, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were gifted huge fortunes before bankrolling Yeltsin's re-election bid.

[...]

This may have prevented a backslide into communism, but a by-product was accelerating a descent into gangsterism and oligarchy.

[...]

Former Yeltsin administration chief Sergei Filatov denied that the three advisers did anything of value for Yeltsin. But even if Filatov is right, American interference throughout the Nineties was extensive.

  Matt Taibbi
Continue reading. There's lots more there.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Anti-Russian Rhetoric Has Meaning

But not much any more.
In their zeal to portray Donald Trump as a dangerous threat to national security, the Clinton campaign has taken a starkly anti-Russian stance, one that completes a total role reversal for the two major American parties on U.S.-Russian relations that Hillary Clinton will now be committed to, if she becomes president.

  WaPo
It's a good point, but a false one. Hillary Clinton will not be committed to anything she says before she's elected (nor even afterward). No politician is. Look at Barack Obama's record, if you need proof.
[I]n the past year, Trump’s Russia-friendly policy has filled the pro-engagement space that Democrats once occupied.
Now that's the point to be pondered. When you have a political system that operates like a sports event (two teams vying for the top position), you invite disingenuous politicking. When one side comes up with something, the other side has to oppose it. If Donald Trump is good for one thing, it's to point a finger at this absurdity.
And now, for mostly political reasons, the Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric on Russia.
Exactly. While there are still plenty of die-hard anti-communists in the Democratic Party, this posture is for mostly political reasons.
Russia clearly does not need Trump’s permission to hack U.S. political organizations or government institutions. And there’s no consensus that Russia released the Democratic National Committee emails in order to disrupt the presidential election. In fact, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has his own personal vendetta against Clinton, claimed that he alone chose the timing of the release of the DNC emails.

[...]

Former national security adviser Tom Donilon said that Russia is interfering with elections all over Europe and said Trump is helping Russia directly.

“The Russians have engaged in cyberattacks in a number of places that we know about, in Georgia, in Estonia and in Ukraine. . . . In the Russian takeover of Crimea, information warfare was a central part of their operations,” Donilon said.
How dare they? Interfering with international elections is our prerogative.  1  2  3, etc.

Oh, and...



A Time magazine "exclusive":  The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win.

That would be Boris Yeltsin, of Russia, in case you're very young.  You need a subscription to read that.  Here's the LA Times story.

And wasn't Yeltsin a boon to Russia?  Yeah, right.  Yanks "to the rescue" indeed.
Former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said that if Donilon was still in the White House, he would have tasked the CIA to retaliate against Moscow. Panetta then doubled down on Sullivan’s argument that Trump’s comments by themselves are making the United States less safe.
Yeah, yeah. We know. Be afraid. Get in line. Do not say anything other than what is state sanctioned. Loose lips sink ships. The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming.
"It has already represented a threat to our national security,” Panetta said. “Because if you go abroad and talk to people, they are very worried that someone like this could become president of the United States.”
Yes, and if you went abroad when Dubya was elected, you heard the same thing.
Now that the Democrats are the tough-on-Russia party, they should explain exactly what that means. What would Clinton do about Russia’s increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage and information warfare in Europe and around the world? Would she expand sanctions on Russia in response to the hacks? Would she use U.S. cyber forces to retaliate? Would she abandon President Obama’s plan to deepen U.S.-Russian military and intelligence cooperation in Syria?

The Clinton team hasn’t said.
And it wouldn't matter if they did, because after she's in office, she can do whatever she likes, no matter what she's said.

If your interest was piqued by the Yeltsin "election", here's another article.
With Russians on the streets protesting yet another fraud-riddled election, and Hillary Clinton lecturing the Kremlin on the evils of election fraud, we are reposting this important background story on Russian election fraud, and how the West, led by Hillary’s husband Bill, enabled and whitewashed Russia’s 1996 fraud-riddled, stolen elections, which assured that the hugely unpopular Boris Yeltsin, “the butcher of Chechnya” and the creator of Russia’s oligarchy, would remain in power for another term–thanks to the Chechens overwhelmingly “voting” “for” Yeltsin by an overwhelming 73% vote (of 1 million votes even though there were only an estimated 500,000 voting-aged people living in Chechnya at the time of the 1996 presidential elections). Yeltsin’s Western-backed victory allowed him to pick his own successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2000–and here we are today. Among the top whitewashers of 1996’s stolen elections was none other than Michael McFaul, President Obama’s nominee to become the new US Ambassador to Russia.

  Exiled

Read the whole thing here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


Saturday, July 23, 2016

Does Tim Kaine Remind You of Anyone?





This never gets old.

   

Reminds me of that scene in "O, Brother Where Art Thou".

Monday, January 2, 2012

Meanwhile In Russia

Check out this Democracy Now segment with Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies discussing what's happening in Russia vis-a-vis the massive public protests, and how the US media and official line on it is wrong. He makes the case for something I've believed since the demise of the Soviet Union - that Yeltsin and the Russian oligarchs of the 90s were Washington's wet dream for Russia (which didn't go well for either the US or the Russian people, surprise, surprise, only for a handful of very wealthy crooks), but that the true movement toward democracy was instigated by Gorbachev.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.