On election day, I always remember what Joe Stalin said: It doesn't matter who votes; it only matters who counts the votes.
I was living in St. Petersburg when Putin was elected and I spoke to Russian friends about the new President. They said, we will decide if life is better when he is President. I wonder, today, if life is better in Russia now.
I had ominous feelings about Putin at the time. Like almost every other person, I didn't know that much about Putin, except that as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, he was pretty chummy with the local mafia. As life changed for the worse in Russia after Putin came to power, I moved to Kyiv to get away from him.
I used to go cafes in St. Petersburg with friends. One day, we were eating in a small place and there were other men too, a shadowy group, with one guy alone positioned facing one door and another guy facing the other door, guards guarding the entrances.
Some local mafia Don got assassinated in the street right outside the English Hotell (Hotel Angleterre) when I was living there.
I sat once with a girl while a mafia type ate at another table and she kept saying, they are criminality, criminality, with disgust.
That's Putin's world. Assassinations, poisonings, murder in parking garages and elevators, men committing suicide by jumping out of windows on the top floors of buildings. Berezovsky, Putin's great enemy, committed suicide in his mansion in Britain by hanging himself in his shower, of course, with two broken legs. And the guy who started RT (Russia Today), the Putin propaganda channel) died of natural causes in a Washington DC hotel the night before he was going to testify to Congress. Right! It was ruled an accident even though he was beaten to death. In Berlin, an enemy of Putin was shot to death in Berlin's biggest park. And naturally Navalny died of "natural causes" on the day his wife was due to speak at the Global Security Conference.
Is anybody's life better since Putin became the perpetual Czar of Russia?
Some good insight here from Jeffrey Nyquist, referenced in a prior post (https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/so-why-are-so-many-american-conservatives): "Controlled opposition is a great thing when the opposition is small, when it is predictable, when it is plodding. But when millions are aroused to spontaneous action, and there is blood in the streets, a few thousand security troops are not going to stop millions of determined citizens. This is how Russia’s system of controlled opposition broke down in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Revolution had no major leaders. It relied on thousands of small leaders. Ordinarily, the Russians can put pressure on a few important leaders – by threatening their families. It is not possible to control thousands of small leaders."
The real trouble lies in centralization - where people are looking for someone to lead them - "We need a leader, someone to tell us what to do..." The trouble with that is that such leaders can easily be corrupted or turned, or neutralized - and that either kills the opposition outright, or shifts it down a blind alley. The same goes for centralized governments, the greater the centralization and power, the greater the corruption and violence. If you want liberty, centralized government and "leaders" are not your friends, their promises are hollow and fake. If you want to see what a leader looks like, look in a mirror, if you want to know what principles that leader has, figure out your own and act by them. The only effective resistance is a decentralized, leaderless resistance. This is what drove the Romans crazy about the early Christians - they had no temple, no corruptible priests, no centralized structure to be subverted to serve the State. It was "No king but King Jesus" and the Holy Spirit - and against such there is no defense, it's like fighting fire with a sword...
On election day, I always remember what Joe Stalin said: It doesn't matter who votes; it only matters who counts the votes.
I was living in St. Petersburg when Putin was elected and I spoke to Russian friends about the new President. They said, we will decide if life is better when he is President. I wonder, today, if life is better in Russia now.
I had ominous feelings about Putin at the time. Like almost every other person, I didn't know that much about Putin, except that as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, he was pretty chummy with the local mafia. As life changed for the worse in Russia after Putin came to power, I moved to Kyiv to get away from him.
I used to go cafes in St. Petersburg with friends. One day, we were eating in a small place and there were other men too, a shadowy group, with one guy alone positioned facing one door and another guy facing the other door, guards guarding the entrances.
Some local mafia Don got assassinated in the street right outside the English Hotell (Hotel Angleterre) when I was living there.
I sat once with a girl while a mafia type ate at another table and she kept saying, they are criminality, criminality, with disgust.
That's Putin's world. Assassinations, poisonings, murder in parking garages and elevators, men committing suicide by jumping out of windows on the top floors of buildings. Berezovsky, Putin's great enemy, committed suicide in his mansion in Britain by hanging himself in his shower, of course, with two broken legs. And the guy who started RT (Russia Today), the Putin propaganda channel) died of natural causes in a Washington DC hotel the night before he was going to testify to Congress. Right! It was ruled an accident even though he was beaten to death. In Berlin, an enemy of Putin was shot to death in Berlin's biggest park. And naturally Navalny died of "natural causes" on the day his wife was due to speak at the Global Security Conference.
Is anybody's life better since Putin became the perpetual Czar of Russia?
Some good insight here from Jeffrey Nyquist, referenced in a prior post (https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/so-why-are-so-many-american-conservatives): "Controlled opposition is a great thing when the opposition is small, when it is predictable, when it is plodding. But when millions are aroused to spontaneous action, and there is blood in the streets, a few thousand security troops are not going to stop millions of determined citizens. This is how Russia’s system of controlled opposition broke down in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Revolution had no major leaders. It relied on thousands of small leaders. Ordinarily, the Russians can put pressure on a few important leaders – by threatening their families. It is not possible to control thousands of small leaders."
The real trouble lies in centralization - where people are looking for someone to lead them - "We need a leader, someone to tell us what to do..." The trouble with that is that such leaders can easily be corrupted or turned, or neutralized - and that either kills the opposition outright, or shifts it down a blind alley. The same goes for centralized governments, the greater the centralization and power, the greater the corruption and violence. If you want liberty, centralized government and "leaders" are not your friends, their promises are hollow and fake. If you want to see what a leader looks like, look in a mirror, if you want to know what principles that leader has, figure out your own and act by them. The only effective resistance is a decentralized, leaderless resistance. This is what drove the Romans crazy about the early Christians - they had no temple, no corruptible priests, no centralized structure to be subverted to serve the State. It was "No king but King Jesus" and the Holy Spirit - and against such there is no defense, it's like fighting fire with a sword...