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Selling A Predicted Behavior As Protest?
This morning I read through some curious stories.
U.S. citizens, answering anti-buy-lobby call, protest as shops open
NEW YORK – Citizens protested against rampant consumerism by forming large lines just as shops opened – answering calls by Back-To-Nature to buy less, and undercutting preliminary reports of record sales.
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Holiday travelers, answering leaders call, protest as check-ins open
WASHINGTON – On the day before Thanksgiving travelers protested air planes' emissions, by forming long lines as flight check-ins were opening – answering a call by the late deaf Thomas, and undercutting preliminary congestion reports.
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You, dear reader, will have immediately noticed that the above items are nonsense and fake. Protesting shopping by rushing stores and protesting plane emissions by booking flights does not make any sense.
Neither does protesting against an election by going to vote. Still, this is what U.S. propaganda tries to insinuate.
Russian voters, answering Navalny’s call, protest as Putin extends his rule
MOSCOW — On the final day of a presidential election with only one possible result, Russians protested Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian hold on power by forming long lines to vote against him at noon Sunday — answering the call of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and undercutting preliminary results Sunday night that led Putin to claim a landslide victory.
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The “Noon Against Putin” protest, with voters forming queues at polling stations in major cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Tomsk and Novosibirsk, was a striking — if futile — display of solidarity and dissent and challenged the Kremlin’s main message: that Putin is a legitimate president who commands massive support.
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The Noon Against Putin protest was particularly striking at Russian embassies in nations with significant numbers of Russians who fled after the invasion of Ukraine. They included those in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, China, Portugal, Britain and others.
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Here is a reality based report from one of those embassies:
Today, Sunday, is the third and final day of balloting at Russian polling stations around the world and at 9.30 am I arrived at the Russian embassy in Brussels to accompany a friend to vote.
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Russians are late risers, especially on Sundays, and we were well rewarded for our early arrival at the embassy, because the line inside to register and then vote was only 20 minutes long. As we left, the throngs began to arrive.
Gilbert Doctorow, who wrote the above, has lived in Russia for many years. He knows Russian habits. It was obvious, not only to him, that Sunday noon in Russia would see the longest lines of voters.
To preemptively declare these predictable lines a sign of protest may be be seen as smart propaganda but it will have little effect on anyone living outside of the propagandists' bubble.
But somehow, from inside that bubble, such idiotic claims are seen as sane:
Thousands of Russians in big cities attempted to make their displeasure known at both the nature of Putin’s regime and the ongoing war in Ukraine by going to vote at noon Sunday — a symbolic act of solidarity with the late pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny, who had long called for fairer and freer elections in Russia before dying in captivity.
Do such folks believe in this most primitive form of their propaganda?
Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 19 2024 3:52 utc | 157
Listen mate, if you wish to rely entirely to your “impressions” (that is, pre-conceived notions and biases) and inocculate yourself from any arguments that challenge them, there is little point in discussion. If one wishes something to be true, then that’s where all debate ends. However, if you are genuinely interested to study a subject, you should be willing to reach conclusions that may be incompatible with your established views.
As it happens, I studied the subject of the Russian Revolution not to validate my leftist views (which, in fact, were harsher towards the Reds in the past), but because it appeared to me very odd that a party that was radical for the standards of Russia (if not the world) of the early 20th cent. I was especially baffled from the fact that the main tools for the Bolshevik victory, the Red Army and the GRU, were almost entirely composed of former monarchists who had typically been Russian nationalists and Orthodox Christians. Don’t you find such a development very odd (to put it mildly)?
Now, Richard Piper, as an anti-communist scholar and a right-wing Jew, came up with various ludicrous explanations, such as that the officers were just loyal to any Russian government and simply tranferred their loyalty to the Reds. This is utter horsecrap, but it was important for Piper to denigrate the Soviet project, because he was embarassed by the presence of numerous Jews in the Bolshevik ranks. On such a serious question, his explanation was summed in a couple of sentences, because he wanted to avoid it completely.
But one may opt for the “subversives over all” explanation that you apparently adopted. This one isn’t just laughable, but deeply offensive about the Russians as well. Without any specifics, it suggests that a radical party of low popularity was able to gain power, while somehow antagonizing everyone. It’s Russiagate on loads of steroids. The foreign masters have been equally diverse and all without any basis on facts: Germans, British, Jewish bankers or all western bankers. Like most baseless theories of this type, it doesn’t stand to serious scrutiny and avoids the mechanism for the rise of the Reds and the preservation of their power. In fact, the SRs, also a leftist party and the one with history of bombing atacks and assassinations was even more popular than the Bolshies. Is this fact to be ignored too? Is it not very unusual that the hitherto crashed left had risen so prominently?
And what does this “Judeo-Bolhevikplot” narrative suggest about the Russians in general? Well, the obvious case was that of the Nazis, who adopted it and reasonably concluded that if a minority of murderous anti-Russian reptillians could take power and still served by the Russkies, the latter were clearly a bunch of walking vegetables and veritable subhumans who would follow such odious masters. Thus, the basis for the genocidal invasion in WWII was established (although the German inclinations were already present since WWI).
The reason that the Russian lefitst and especially the Reds attracted such support from segments of the population and the professional personnel of the state apparatus is that the previous regimes – the imperial and the liberal-conservative – had so utterly failed that people began to look towards radical solutions. Remember that Russia was way worse than the western Entente powers and even there popular discontent caused fear to the establishment. All that was required was the will and determination to take power and the ability to keep it.
The critical factor was Lenin. No amount of conspiratorial horsecrap can hide the fact that the Bolsheviks were not at all prepared to overthrow an utterly discredited liberal government, until Lenin pushed them resolutely, when he realized in mid-September 1917 that the party was in full ascendancy mode. Ironically, it was the two most prominent Jews of the party that opposed the idea, with Kamenev revealing it to the public through an article in Pravda. Try to consider the level of incompetence of the Kerensky government which failed to act in any meaningful way to preclude such a possible development, after it had been publicly exposed.
As for the Tsar, I honestly cannot understand what is so important about him to make you whine about him. Do you mourn about the innumerable victims of lower social standing martyred by the monarchy? Do you actually believe that God had literally blessed this buffoon? In fact, are you seriously suggesting that the Christian leaders of the great “Christian” states had established an inernational order at that time based on actually Christian values? Unless, of course, you consider racism, colonialism, exploitation of vast swaths of humanity (including their own people), calamitous wars, genocides and artificial famines to be Christian values.
As it happens, the Tsar had little to do with the rise of the Bolsheviks who, in fact, brought down a failed liberal and after western instigation, confronted a motley alliance whose leaders proclaimed their adherrence to a Republic and NOT the monarchy. If anything, the monarchist elements were the ones that weakened the Whites politically for all the military clout they offered.
Nicholas II was an absolute failure of a ruler and the most damning evidence come from historical developments, state archives, his family and his own supporters (NOT communist propaganda). The exasperation of his closest kin, his ministers and others is truly incredible to study. In the end, he blew up his own throne and it was a criminal decision of the Ural Soviet to order the execution of the imperial family, which on top of a crime was a stupendous blunder. The Reds should have orchestrated the escape of this fallen monarch, who was politically so toxic that his presence among the anti-Bolshevik forces would have doomed the White movement from the get-go. In fact, at that time the main threat was the Czech Legion.
I could go on, but on a final note I would point to you that even Solzhenitsyn later on came up with these reasonable questions that I posed. He concluded that the Tsar “betrayed us” and that the Russian people were “confused” precisely because he realized that the ascendancy of the Reds was backed mostly by ethnic Russians and not a few Jewish subversives, but he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that the Bolshies did something right to deserve any level of support from the people and the military.
I apologize for the length of the post to all barflies.
Posted by: Constantine | Mar 19 2024 8:30 utc | 165
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