Legitimacy of an illegitimate regime

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by the_tyrant

@Penguin

Why am I commenting? I read an article, and I passively pointed out that I agreed with some things in it.

Nope; a "who cares" does not imply an agreement, not does it imply that you answer has got anything to do with the OP's article. It is just the equivalent of Alfred E. Neuman's famous phrase: "What? Me worry?" - a show of indifference.
Your "he has the power you know, legitimacy is good, but power is what really matters " also bears no reference to the article, written as an universal statement, thus looking as if it represents your opinion.

Your quote "Putin has won in the only way that really matters: Once again, he is president of Russia." shows where you are coming from. You seem to think that this is the opinion of the article. First the quote cuts of the sentence behind it, which is essential for the context. Second, the article consists of several layers, (op-piece, fact reporting, rhetorics and polemics) so if you think your quote represents the authors opinion, you are wrong.
A suggestion: why not print out this article and discuss it in class - English, or politics? I don't want to sound lecturing, but to provide the experience about different layers in writing, and an experience how different statements can be seen by different persons (especially when taken out of the context)

Originally Posted by the_tyrant

Now there is a really interesting comment under the article:

Mind you, Putin is ex-KGB, but I don't think he is that good.
And anyways, even if the results are inflated by a few %, he must have gotten more than 50%, AKA, enough to avoid a runoff

The logical fallacy of this comment is that the poster implies that all of the vote discrepancy solely is the result of "bussing".

It doesn't matter for the judgement if he would have had more than 50% of the votes anyway. If you have 1 billion in your account and you forge a single Dollar note, you are still a forger, no matter if the rest of your dough is legit.

[Hottentot]

Not to interrupt these interesting discussions, but I'd just like to thank CCIP for his in-depth answer.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

If you really believe that then that is your truth. Myself, i'm not willing to so easily surrender the game.

A game that is already run by depending on the good will of foreign nations. I just say: finances.

Exactly my point. Once you surrender your liberty to a tyrant you cannot guarantee that he will ever give it back. When a successful tyrant dies, however popular or beneficial he may have been, there is absolutely no guarantee that his successor will be anything like him. Whatever stability his regime had quickly dissolves into a bloodbath as the various factions vie for power so whoever does emerge as the new "dear leader" already has blood on his hands before he ever issues his first edict.

The liberty voters hand over to the politcal olihgarchy they legitimise also does not get handed back by said oligarchy. Names come and go, the the principle nature of peope and chracaters gaining ranks and influence within that plltical system amongst whose candidates peope mare allowed to "chose", stay thew same. Its always the same thinking schools that parties represent. It'S always the same network of cliques parties are grounded in. Its alwaays the same financiers in the background. A name gets voted off by people - and some time later he gets inmstalled somewhgere else, have fallen the ladder upwards. I could vote for CDU, and see Germany being sold out to the EU. I could vote for SPD and see Germany being sold out to the EU nevertheless. I could vote for the communists, and would see Germany being sold out even faster. I could vote the liberal FDP, and would see Germany being sold out slighty slower. But the trend always is the same. The level of corruption remnaiosn tio be the same. The thinkiong dogma stays the same. The names having real influence in the backgorund stay the same. You cannot vote them in or off. Names change - structures stay. Or take thre pöolitical dynsties in the US - do you really believe that the Kennedys and Bushs have a genetical superoirity that enables them to have all their family generations being so superior in competence that they - as if by magic - come to polical offices time and again? It is modern aristocracy you see there.

And what means: having a choice? The choice people have in their minds - or the lack of. A brainwashzed mind has no choice but may be made to assume it has. Commercial adverts and political campaigns cost hilarious ammounts of money. Nobody wastes such ammounts of money if he does not get a return from it. Adverts work, and campaigning works, too. The wanted effect is to prevent folowers chnaging sides, and to win new followers. Beside all that stupidity and vitirol, schematic bacl-and-white-painting and propaganda, adverts and campaigns work. And they work for reducing the freedom of the mind that shoudl chose. A free mind that can choose freely, is a risk. Nobody wants it. The power of the "elites" - needs the weakness, the incompetence, the illusion of the crowds. The best way to control the crowds, is to install the censor of their opinion inside their minds. That's what politicians work for most of their time!

I do not call this freedom to choose. By rules, it is there, yes. But by capability and opportunity, it is at least handicapped by an alarming level.

This implies that such things do not also happen in a dictatorship too. Obviously that is not true, especially in the internecine warfare that I mention above. I suppose that a potentate, if he is strong enough, might be able to put some damper on this but then again he might just as easily encourage it if it helps to keep him on his throne.

A dictator - that is feared or disliked by his people - needs to control the people by force, intimidation, terror. Western politicians try to control the people by thought control, suggestive phrasing, manipulation of society from the backgrounds of the visible political stage. The effect is the same. You noted my attacks on the EU - it is a very obvious example of trying to gain control by changing the cultural climate, brainwashing people by censoring language and thinking, eroding established democratic principles silently. Its about making peoiple censoring themselves voluntarily. The result is the thinking of often so-called political correctness. The ironay is that many poltiicians fall for this trap themselves, too. That is one of the elements of self-dynam,ic I mentioned earlier. The system feeds back on those installing and maintaining it. It'S not the intended one way road of cause and effect.

It is a system that bases everything upon the whims of a single fallible man who is under the absolutely corrupting influence of absolute power. No thanks.

With only small variation the same could be said about Western nations, too, including yours and mine. The illusion of the greater freedom we have, is just this: illusory. A dictator'S mind-prison may be made with steel walls, makijng them more obvious. Our democracy'S mind-prisons have supersoft rubber walls, incraisng resaitence so slowly only that you hardly realise it in the beginning, you can push the wall by almsot one meter before they make you stop pushing anymore. It'S smoother and softer. Yes. But a prison envertheless - you can't get out if you do not break the system's rules. But then - you are the outlaw.

Well maybe not but it certainly does work well enough to be a better choice than any transitory utopia created by a benevolent dictator.

A tyrant'S regime that is successful in establishiong a dynsty, may last for severla generations. The cultural spike we have seen forming up in the West, also is transitory only, and we definitely are bveyond our climax. Today, our state structures are so ill and rotten and debt-ridden that I do not see how we will ever escape from this. The wealth we made we did not use for putting aside savinbg s and installing a stabile status with just y dynamic fluctuation within certain limits, no, we used it for "growing", and becoming more people. That way not only the wealth got eaten up, but the imminent demand at a given time has been increased, too, and it grew at faster pace than compensation for the bigger stress on our resources could be found. That'S why not only we do not earn saviongs any more that we could pout aside for later times of hardness, but why we could not even maintain the satus quo, but fall deep and depper into the finacial as well as the ecological credit trap.

[CCIP]

Another perspective: from long-time opposition activist, politician and writer Valeriya Novodvorskaya.

http://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/50466/ (in Russian)

Here is a condensed translation of her main points for you:

95 years ago, on these early days of March, the Tzar Nicholas II was signing his abdication. He made a great many mistakes (the worst of which - the small but lost Russo-Japanese war and the great victorious First World War), but still gave Russia the October Manifesto of 1905, which cemented in law all declared political parties and assembled the first parliament in the history of Russia - the Duma. He was being pressured to abdicate for a long time. Russia had outlived the monarchy; multi-party politics were already real, the Duma was not a fiction, St. Petersburg was full of political leaders, courts were independent, as were labour unions.

He abdicated both on behalf of himself, and his son, and did not even ask for any guarantees. Not for himself, nor for his family. He handed over power to the Provisional Government - until the General Assembly could gather, which was already on the horizon. He did not want to spill blood in order to preserve power, and the whole nightmare that followed afterwards was not his fault. [CCIP: this is where I disagree, but anyway...] The true greatness of Nicholas was revealed after the arrest of the emperor's family, and ended in martyrdom in a basement at Yekaterinburg.

In the same modest and voluntary manner, Mikhail Gorbachev left his post of president of the USSR, not wishing for a civil war, not resorting to violence and receiving as his only guarantee a two-dollar state pension. Yeltsin also left voluntarily, sensing the determined dislike and ungratitude of the people. Even the great Charles de Gaulle, who saved the French from the shame of the capitulation of 1940, retreated before France herself, when she rejected his project of political reforms in the referendum of 1969.

But the Soviet gerontocrats, who were carried out of the Kremlin with their legs forward, were not like this, nor is their heir Putin. Putin has alienated everyone who is ready to live in a manner contrary to the Soviet status quo - and even many pro-Soviet reactionaries are sick of him, too. He has lost his charisma, he has become silly, the market progressives mock him. The West speaks to him through their teeth. All the more since he has no achievements to his credit. He didn't give freedom to anyone, he took it away. And he is ready to stifle the press, to bring troops into the capital, to take it all the way to a civil war in a nuclear state, to fight it out with his political, economical and intellectual opponents.

Well, history knows examples when an obsolete regime, not wishing to depart gracefully, still departed, but in an ugly manner. Like Nero, Caligula, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Ghaddafi.

Just thought that this would be a valuable perspective to be aware of

[STEED]

The winner is the one with the biggest bank account and connections to the banks.

Next David Icke exposes the Russian lizard men.

[CCIP]

And another post-script that I came across today - written by the 19th century writer and politician Saltykov-Schedrin, it is still just as relevant today:

If the Russians are allowed to choose their own leader, they elect the most deceitful, ignoble, harsh one; together with him they murder, steal and rape, and subsequently assign all of the blame to him. After some time passes, the church canonizes him.

So, really not quite a new issue, but a historical tragedy merely continuing...

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by August

This is why George Washington was such a great man. He had the same personal power that Putin does but unlike Vlad he voluntarily gave it up and thereby set our country on the path to government by the people.

Right by 1000%

We should never overlook this one significant man, who set the right trend for our country. Many expected Washington to run and win the office for life. Thank god we had this man, and the ones who followed.

Putin has made a mockery of Russia's "democratic" institution. He is not the President of Russia, he is their dictator. I feel bad for those people.

[Jimbuna]

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by jimbuna

He didn't cry when Krusk was lost. He didn't cry when the theater was stormed.

Scary part is, he's "crying" and knows the election was rigged...