Putin is the World’s Biggest Hypocrite

“Attempts to replace the universal principles of the U.N. Charter by unilateral actions or partisan deals, moreover to use force bypassing the U.N. do not do any good, as is well known.”

That was Vladimir Putin speaking to a group of foreign ambassadors in the Kremlin  yesterday, as he received their credentials.

Oh really, Mr. Putin? Did you wait for the approval of the United Nations before you invaded Georgia in 2008?  What nation, Mr. Putin, stood by your side as you made that attack,  so that it was not “unilateral” force such as you decry in your statement?

The Russian word for hypocrite is “лицемер” and it’s clear that Putin is the world’s biggest one. How in the world can this man, with a straight face, complain about circumventing the UN and acting unilaterally when that is exactly the policy he pursued in Georgia?!  Only be being utterly detached from reality, just as the rulers of the USSR always were.  He lives now in his own fantasy world, one where he can say anything because nobody in Russia will dare to challenge him, and like the Emperor and his “new clothes” nobody will tell him that the outside world is laughing.

For good measure, the Putin Kremlin also announced that the legislative elections which just transpired in Belarus, one of the world’s darkest and most barbaric dictatorships, were “free, open and relaxed“.  Such statements as these rank with the very most bizarre and unhinged Soviet clangers from the Cold-War era.  And in fact, not even then did the KGB dream of wielding kind of direct power it now has under Putin, meaning that, if anything, the neo-Soviet era is even more horrifying than its predecessor.

Julia Ioffe’s List of Bad Things About Russia

Upon leaving Russia, here is Julia Ioffe’s list of the nation’s faults:

(1) Horrific drinking, including drunken “journalists”

(2) Psychotic “thinking” and “debating”

(3) Racism

(4) Antisemitism

(5) Misogyny

(6) Purging of Jews, lack of diversity in religion and race

(7) Total distrust of institutions and people

(8) Lack of fathers/husbands

(9) Virtually no good bars or restaurants even in giant Moscow

(10) Paranoid fear of cold water and other Medieval belief systems

(11) Bad plastic surgery and incompetent medical treatment

(12) Need to prove identity everywhere you go

(14) Totalitarian bureaucracy

(13) Aggression

(14) Rudeness

We find it rather odd that in leaving Russia Ioffe does not feel compelled to reflect even for a second on how badly she misreported the Russian protest movement, which she said was changing Russia forever when in fact it was disappearing. We also find it very strange that she doesn’t list Russia’s #1 fault, its people, people who have blithely handed power for life to a proud KGB spy and looked the other way at the murder of Ioffe’s colleagues, like Anna Politkovskaya.  People who embrace racism and misogyny and the invasion of Georgia and the Cold War and who will not exert themselves for freedom or democracy.

But we are comforted by the fact that the world’s Russia IQ will now rise considerably with Ioffe no longer reporting on the Land of Putin.

Showing Magnitsky’s Memory the Money

Hermitage Capital has issued a report documenting where the money involved in the fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky went. For his trouble, Magnitsky was arrested and murdered by the malignant Russian Kremlin, which should have pinned  medal on his chest.  We republish it in full after the jump.

Isolated, Impoverished, Backwards Russia

You already knew that Russia has an utterly pathetic, puny level of Foreign Direct Investment in its economy, roughly half that of tiny nations like Netherlands and Belgium, and that its level of FDI has been falling consistently under Vladimir Putin.

Maybe you even knew that things were so bad that the Russian Kremlin is actually bribing foreign investors to sink their cash into Russia.

But you still didn’t know how bad things really are. Because Ben Aris of the Financial Times reveals:  “Russia has a woeful record when it comes to investment. According to a paper about to be released by Aton, a leading Russian investment bank, some 70 per cent of all foreign direct investment into Russia comes from offshore havens – meaning it is Russian flight capital returning home.”

You read that right:  70% — seventy percent! — of all money Russia counts as FDI is in fact just money that is brought back to Russia by Russians in connection with capital flight, that is, money that’s now needed for spending purposes and is recovered from its hiding place. In other words, it’s an illusion!  So the true level of new money sent to Russia by foreigners who believe they can make more money in Russia than other places is so tiny that it’s barely measurable, comparable to a backwater like Chile or South Africa.

This is what Russians have given themselves by choosing proud KGB spy to govern them:  isolation, impoverishment and backwardness, for the foreseeable future.

Putin’s Neo-Soviet Internet

Azerbaijan, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka.

Those are the wretched countries that pose the greatest risk to Internet freedom in the coming year, according to Freedom House.

That’s right:  Putin’s Russia is one of them.

Pages 408-421 of FH’s 2012 Internet Report examine the state of Russia’s Internet in horrifying detail, giving Russia  woeful 52 on a 0-100 scale of Internet freedom (with zero being total freedom) and classifying Russia’ Internet as already being party unfree.

It confirms that less than half of Russia’s population can access the Internet at all, which explains why polls show most Russians have never even heard about the leading figures of the Russian opposition.

It states:  “Since January 2011, massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and smear campaigns to discredit online activists have intensified. After online tools played a critical role in galvanizing massive anti-government protests that began in December 2011, the Kremlin signaled its intention to further tighten control over internet communications.”

None of this should be surprising, of course, given that Russians have just handed unchecked power for life to a proud KGB spy.

Welcome back to the USSR.

Russia and its Icepick

There is only one real truth about Russia:  If you try to befriend it, Russia will stick an ice pick in your back when you are not looking.

Barack Obama and Michael McFaul learned that lesson recently when, despite their “reset” policy followed by four years of Chamberlain-style appeasement, Russia booted USAID out of the country, falsely accusing it of seeking to rig Russian elections.

It was an epic humiliation for Obama and McFaul, who previously have watched slack-jawed as Putin and Russia, despite their unilateral concessions on issues like missile defense and their feckless betrayal of the forces of democracy in Russia, have sided with every anti-U.S. dictatorship throughout the Middle East, from Egypt to Syria.  Russia has staunchly defended each and every one of the, up to and including the maniacal regime in Iran, from U.S.-led international pressure to be democratic, exactly what Obama claimed the reset would avoid.

And now Russia has spit in the face of Obama and McFaul by liquidating the primary engine of American philanthropy in Russia, without warning or reason, in simple knee-jerk display of anti-American hatred.  It has made clear that it intends to launch a whole new round of neo-Soviet crackdowns, and that Obama and McFaul have been suckered the exact same way Hitler suckered Chamberlain.

Fortunately for Americans, they will soon have the opportunity to show Obama and McFaul the way to the exits, and the ash heap of history. Unfortunately for Russians, they face a Putin who will be “president” for life, in the manner of Stalin and Brezhnev, and misguided U.S. policy has contributed mightily to that costly hardship.

Navalny Turns to Communism

Once again, this time shouting that “there is not enough personal anger in this fight,” Alexei Navaly has led a street demonstration in Moscow against Vladimir Putin.  He has proved unable to maintain the size of the demonstrations, which are now half what they were in their heyday, and unable to expand their geographic reach beyond Moscow – a feeble gathering of barely 2,000 showed up in St. Petersburg.  The demonstration was called a the March of Millions, and indeed sex months ago Navalny had promised to have a million or more on the streets. But the size of gatherings has moved in the opposite direction from what he predicted, consistent with what we have said from the beginning.

In fact, as has been the pattern, it was quite difficult to get a clear picture of how man people there actually were on the street this past Saturday. Reuters and Financial Times said it was 50,000. AFP said 40,000. AP and New York Times lacked the courage to quote any figure.  Russian police said it was just 14,000 while the psychotic left-wing charlatan Sergei Udaltsov claimed it was 150,000.

Meanwhile, in craven fashion, Putin’s press secretary refused to comment on the fact that tens of thousands were calling for Putin’s ouster on the streets of Moscow, while he sojourned in Sochi and met with the dictator of Belarus.

Navalny sounded desperate, and vaguely like a new sort of Russian Communist. He screeched:

The other side knows that they stand to lose millions, their yachts and their houses on the Cote d’Azur . . . we have to see our fight for freedom and for equal rights as concrete things. The destruction of corruption means the country’s riches for all of us and equal rights mean equality for all our children and not just cushy jobs for the children of the Kremlin elite. We have come out and demonstrate to ensure the future for ourselves and for our families. We have to come out as if we were going to work.

Navalny, it seems, has abandoned his ludicrous claim that he would force the Kremlin to hold a new round of less corrupt national elections that would allow him to gain a foothold in power.  Now, he appears to be courting the support of the Communist Party, by far the  largest single group in attendance (their red flags dominated the protest square, along with the black-white-yellow banners of the Russian Nazis). One demented Communist went about declaring:  “Death to the Bourgeoisie!”  The Party itself beamed with pride, stating that the protests had turned “notably red.”

This is what Russia’s so-called protest movement has come to. Navalny has failed so miserably that his last best hope is to become a communist, just another way of leading Russia into the same sort of darkness favored by proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin.

Putin Teaches Russia a Lesson

Here’s part of what the Russian dictator recently told journalist Masha Gessen in a private interview recently published by the Russian website Bolshoi Gorod:

Это как с амфорами. Потом все начали кричать, что амфоры были подложены. Ну конечно, они были подложены! — он засмеялся над идиотами, которые вообще могли подумать, что это не так. — Но я же зачем нырял? Не для того, чтобы жабры раздувать, а чтобы люди знали свою историю. Вот даже вы, наверное, с вашим образованием, не знаете, что там, в этом месте, раньше был каганат, что степные народы приняли иудаизм. А потом все начали писать, что я, как мудак, достал подложенные амфоры. Но кто-то же начал читать!

“It’s like what happened with the amphorae. When the pictures came out, they all started shouting that amphorae were planted. Of course, they were planted!” He laughed at the idiots who might have thought it could have been otherwise.  “But what was the reason for my dive? Not to give my lungs a workout, but to help the people of our country learn their history.  I suspect that even you, with your lofty education, were not aware that in that location there used to be a khanate and that the steppe peoples converted to Judaism.  But they ignored all this, and depicted me as some kind of asshole who went around planting amphorae to trick people.  But meanwhile, the Russian people started reading their history!”

If this were any other world leader besides Putin, it would be hard to believe these statements were actually made.   But anyone familiar with Putin doesn’t even have to see his name in text in order to immediately recognize the speaker.

Putin is now so immune from accountability that he simply doesn’t care what he says or who hears him.  He feels perfectly comfortable openly admitting that he repeatedly lies to his fellow citizens, and equally at ease using the course language of the street thug he used to be.  His contempt for his fellow citizens is palpable. He believes the only way they can be educated is with trickery and deceit, the way a person might hide medicine in her dog’s food dish.

What other brazen lies has Putin told his fellow citizens?  How can he believe that Russia, any more than the USSR, can survive as a nation when its very foundation is based on falsehood? Rusia’s roads are getting more dangerous by the day, and Putin’s response is to launch a neo-Stalinist purge of the Duma.  Instead of developing policy, he develops lies and strategies to liquidate anyone who confronts him about them.

Nothing else could have been expected from handing unchecked power to a proud KGB spy.  If Russia repeats the mistakes of the past, it will repeat the pain of the past.

 

Holy Russian Empire, Batman!

Over on American Thinker, Kim Zigfeld describes the latest round of attacks by the Russian Orthodox Church, teaming with up with the Kremlin, on its religious rivals, this time Protestants and Jews.  And she shows how the neo-Soviet state is adopting Russian Orthodoxy as its ideology, whereas the Soviet state attacked religion.  In the manner of the Tsar, Putin is attempting to constitute a Holy Russian Empire with himself holding absolute power as designated from On High.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Traitor

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Vladivostok and told the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that he would have two magnificent gifts under his Christmas tree this year:  First, America would bestow additional trade benefits on Russia, and second it would ignore Putin’s outrageous human rights record and would do all it could to block legislative efforts in the USA from confronting Putin about them.

And how did Putin thank Clinton for her shameless appeasement?   He soundly repudiated any possibility that Russia would assist the United States in grappling with the forces of dictatorship and terrorism in Syria and Iran. This forced Clinton to conclude the U.S. would have to work outside the purview of the United Nations if it wanted to stand up for democracy and peace in those two rogue states.

Clinton is, of course, in full reelection mode, in cowardly fashion doing the bidding of her lord and master Barack Obama. So she will lie, cheat, steal, do whatever it takes to make that happen.  And if she needs to throw American interests, democracy and world peace under the bus in order to make that happen, so be it.

These are the wages of appeasement. The world saw what happened with the likes of Hitler were treated in this way by the Chamberlain government, and it cannot expect anything different from Putin.  The craven Obama regime is inviting Putin to obliterate democracy within Russia and support terror and dictatorship throughout the Middle East, as long as it helps Obama maintain the pretense that he has “reset” relations with Russia.  This is misconduct for which the USA will pay a heavy price in the future, just as Chamberlain’s Britian did during the blitz.