With Vladimir Putin giving Barack Obama the back of his gloved hand in the Crimea, its easy to forget what the two leaders have in common. Neither of them likes democracy very much.
In Putins case that couldnt be more obvious, but Obama has given more than his share of signals to that effect in recent days, informing a complaisant Congress during the State of the Union that he was going to override them and take the law into his own hands by executive fiat if they didnt go along with his policies. His number one consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, repeated essentially the same thing during a recent interview on The OReilly Factor.
Unfortunately, thats about it in the similarity department (except they both seem to like sports). In two other major categories, the dissimilarities are striking. Putin is one tough dude and a patriot for his country. Obama is neither of these. In evidence I offer one five-letter word: Syria. I could offer a lot more, but I dont want to bore you.
#2
The real problem is that Aleksandr Dugin has developed the new ideology for all of the major parties in Russia. Here is a taste of the ideology:
The core idea of Dugins Eurasianism is that liberalism (by which is meant the entire Western consensus) represents an assault on the traditional hierarchical organization of the world. Repeating the ideas of Nazi theorists Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, Dugin says that this liberal threat is not new, but is the ideology of the maritime cosmopolitan power Atlantis, which has conspired to subvert more conservative land-based societies since ancient times. Accordingly, he has written books in which he has reconstructed the entire history of the world as a continuous battle between these two factions, from Rome v. Carthage to Russia v. the Anglo Saxon Atlantic Order, today. If Russia is to win this fight against the subversive oceanic bearers of such racist (because foreign-imposed) ideas as human rights, however, it must unite around itself all the continental powers, including Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Turkey, Iran, and Korea, into a grand Eurasian Union strong enough to defeat the West.
In order to be so united, this Eurasian Union will need a defining ideology, and for this purpose Dugin has developed a new Fourth Political Theory combining all the strongest points of Communism, Nazism, Ecologism, and Traditionalism, thereby allowing it to appeal to the adherents of all of these diverse anti-liberal creeds.
He adopts Communisms opposition to free enterprise. However, he drops the Marxist commitment to technological progress in favor of Ecologisms demagogic appeal to stop the advance of industry and modernity. From Traditionalism, he derives a justification for stopping free thought. All the rest is straight out of Nazism, ranging from the need for populations to be rooted in the soil, to weird ideas about the secret origin of the Aryan race in the North Pole.
Posted by: Florida Al ||
03/04/2014 16:12 Comments ||
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#3
I thought all the Bolsheviks left Mother Russia & became professors in the USA. Learn something new every day.
Posted by: Florida Al ||
03/04/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
There is only one other group Obama considers mortal enemies, and if Obama thought Crimea were members of the Tea Party, he would send in the gay marines.
[DAWN] PESHAWAR: The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP) holds the centre stage, changing directions of the game every now and then. In short, it is TTP's sweet will that is holding the sway.
When it decides to hit and kill us, we bow our heads and get killed. When it decides to talk and kill us as well, we oblige: we fly our helicopter to North Wazoo to facilitate its emissaries to meet their bosses and at the same time we keep collecting corpses from Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. to Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... .
And now when the state's fighter jets and helicopters have conducted surgical air strikes targeting TTP's sanctuaries, the gunnies announced ceasefire and we feel happy to oblige and live peacefully with them for the next one month.
Think the one month period in terms of the possibility: no kabooms and IED attacks. This has not happened for the past so many years. So we should be happy!
What is more interesting is the fact that the day TTP was about to make the ceasefire public in the evening, its operatives attacked polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set... vaccinators in Khyber Agency in the morning.
If the TTP bosses were giving serious thoughts to the idea of giving peace a chance, they should have postponed the Saturday morning attack in Khyber Agency.
But who cares? Ceasefire is the buzzword. The other catchphrase these days is 'on the same page'.
Earlier, doubts were being spewed whether the civil administration and the military leaders were on the same page or not. Now, at least, the TTP bosses are on the same page with the government. We should feel happy. We are moving to the next page!
How many pages of this untitled book written with the blood of thousands of civilians and soldiers are left? No one knows.
What is more interesting is the fact that we are hurling praises on TTP for its commanders' kindness to bestow us with a month long ceasefire. Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... Minister for Information Shah Farman was all in praise for the outlawed TTP for the generosity it showed.
He wants the federal government to reciprocate the terrorists' seriousness by holding serious and sincere talks.
It seems he does not know that, on its part, the federal government is not likely to disappoint him.
But what would happen to the families of the 55,000 civilians and thousands of soldiers killed at the hands of TTP? This argument seems to be a spoiler. It would surely be portrayed by the PTI leadership and its cyber brigade as 'negativity' and an attempt to sabotage the prospects of peace.
But, this forms a legitimate concern for the families, who suffered human losses and have every right to see TTP acted against by the military and the judiciary.
Do we think we have paid them ample amount of money in compensation sufficient to shut their mouths and do not look down on us for playing ceasefire and peace with TTP's murderers?
Our memory is deficient and objectives suffer from short sightedness.
We have forgotten that TTP killed 55,000 innocent Paks and thousands of our soldiers.
We have also forgotten that TTP caused us $80 billion losses. It made us hostages in our own cities and towns by unleashing a campaign of fear and mayhem. It destroyed our children's schools to keep us living with ignorance and illiteracy.
It bombed our mosques to deny us our right to pray and preach. It deepened the sectarian divide in the country by targeting and killing people belonging to the religious school of thoughts not of their liking.
They denied us our playing fields and made us to host cricket teams from other countries at London, Sharjah, and Dubai.
They sent us chilling videos of their hooligans playing footballs with the heads of our slain soldiers. They targeted our military assets and caused us billions of losses in dollars, destroying our expensive military hardware.
After TTP made public the killing of FC men kidnapped in 2010, prime minister and his cabinet colleagues gave impression that the peace talks and terrorist attacks could not go hand in hand.
And now, we are being bombarded with TV reports that contacts between the negotiators of the two sides continued during the period when there was a general perception that talks had been stalled to take the fight to TTP's bastion.
Well, those drumbeating and hurling praises on TTP for announcing the ceasefire should not forget that there is an important but voiceless segment of the society that is unrepresented in the grinding of the peace processor.
These voiceless people happen to be the families, who lost their near and dear ones to TTP's brutalities. We have no right to make deals with TTP at the cost of the victims' families, denying them their right to seek justice and get their victims honoured by bringing those, who killed their sisters, mothers, fathers and children to the book.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/04/2014 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] A LITTLE resolve can go a long way, it seems. Saturday's ceasefire announcement by the outlawed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain has left many questions unanswered, but at least this much is clear: the myrmidon group has blinked and it has blinked because of the firm response given by the Pak state. The killing of coppers escorting a polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set... team and the military shelling notwithstanding, after it became apparent that the government did not intend to carry on with talks if myrmidon violence continued and that the politicians and military were all too willing to explore the use of significant force to push back , the options for the Taliban narrowed. It also helped that even the most vociferous supporters of negotiations in the political and religious quarters grudgingly began to accept that talks in an atmosphere of myrmidon violence were deeply problematic. From there, the TTP had little choice: if myrmidon and terrorist violence continued, the group risked suffering significant damage caused by escalating retaliatory attacks by the state.
What the ceasefire means beyond the TTP trying to buy itself a short reprieve is difficult to know at the moment. For one, the ceasefire may or may not lead to a quick resumption of negotiations. Indeed, from the point of view of a strong state, the myrmidon group should first be made to prove its willingness to abide by what it says and to restrain its sub-groups and franchises. If myrmidon attacks continue and the Taliban leadership simply claims, as it has done in the past, that it is not responsible for a particular attack without either denouncing the attack or pledging to restrain the sub-group that may be responsible for it, then the ceasefire would be meaningless. Immediately resuming talks without verifying that the TTP is willing and able to ensure that a ceasefire holds would waste the advantage the state has gained through the tougher, more determined stance that it has taken in recent weeks.
For another, the negotiations process should not be open-ended. Thus far, the government has insisted that any agreement will be localised and, most crucially, must be within the ambit of the Constitution. Finding common ground there, if indeed it can be found, cannot be a debate that goes on endlessly. If anything, the state has to be careful about a ceasefire being just a ploy for the turbans to regroup or relocate their leadership before once again trying to wrest concessions from the state through violence. In the days ahead, there will no doubt be fresh surprises and new twists in the unfolding saga of how best to deal with the myrmidon group. Whatever those are, so long as the Pak state stands firm and refuses to countenance the impossible or unreasonable, there may be light at the end of the tunnel after all.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/04/2014 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Wazoo
