Sulci Collective: Putin

Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts

Tuesday, 3 November 2020

The US election - a view from afar

I'm writing this as US voters go to the polls, with no idea of the outcome of the ballot, nor the potential outcome beyond the counting of the votes, whether the result will be accepted and we get a peaceful transfer of power if Biden wins.

I have a few observations from this side of the pond, none of which add up to a thesis, but which I think have some resonance for the UK's and democracies across the globe.

If Trump loses, what has the last four years been about and what has it achieved? One can question Trump's initial motives to run for President, either an extension of his reality tv persona o the next level, an ego trip to become the most powerful man in the world, or the opportunity to milk the office for him and his family to make as much money as possible, but whatever they were, they don't seem very ideological. He has achieved very little in policy terms. The coal and steel industries have not returned as promised, though the economy seems to be doing better, but this is more due to where the US is in its economic cycle than anything contributed by Trump. For all his bluster, there is no wall excluding migrants from the South, trade with China is fractious but ongoing, while America First in global trade hasn't been delivered and he's only partially repealed Obama Care.

His foreign policy initiatives have been few and far between. He's favoured Russia (both in Syria and Ukraine) and Israel, but the position with North Korea is still unresolved, while he has not been able to get the rest of NATO to pay its fair share of running costs. It's quite common for oligarchies to distract their populations from the money they are raking into their own pockets with foreign policy initiatives, but Trump doesn't seem to have done that. Instead he's ridden on the wave of furious support versus opposition over issues such as Russian electoral interference, using state influence to manipulate private dealings (Ukraine), relations with porn stars, Black Lives Matter protests and COVID19 to keep people divided and off-balance. It's scrutiny, but not in the right places, or rather in so many different pockets that there was never any central laser focus to really damage Trump. And what could be more derisory than an impeachment vote that everyone knew could never get through both houses of Congress?

And this I think HAS been the point of Trump's 4 years. To sow chaos and division under the guise of draining the swamp, that brings the very fundamentals of democracy itself into question. Elections that can't be trusted, elections where the vote may not be respected out on the streets, the assault on the media despite the constitutional protection of free speech. And we have yet to see how the new Supreme Court shapes up. Trump has managed to completely warp reality so that we can't be sure of anything, not facts, not the report of our own senses. Trump can be shown in old footage to be shaking hands with someone and then 5 years later deny that he ever met that person and it's shrugged off as par for the course. Criticism is a witch hunt, evidence is fake news. In four years, his opponents have failed to land a knockout blow on Trump, despite the weight of steel available to lace their gloves with.

Now Trump is the perfect person to sow disorder and chaos wherever he treads, but who gains by him doing so? As said, he's no ideologue, so this is not a precursor on his part to bringing in a whole raft of laws to establish some thought-through blueprint of a Trumpian democracy. However, the undermining of reality and being unable to rely on anything as true, has the hallmark of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Peter Pomerantsev has written extensively about this strategy. But the destabilising of US democracy and hallowed political institutions also has the grubby fingerprints of Steve Bannon all over it, even though he was kicked out of Trump's cabinet at an early stage. Seems like the seeds of chaos he laid down have sprouted in his absence. He hasn't so much as drained the swamp, as allowed the swamp to break its levees and cover the whole country in effluent.

If Trump loses and even if there is no civil unrest in response, it is hard to see how Biden, a singularly unimpressive figure who once plagiarised speeches from Neil Kinnock remember, could ever heal and reunite the nation now so divided down, ironically enough, ideological lines. Anti-immigrant, America First, anti-Vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-science (and facts in general) are the rump of Trump's support. That is Trump's legacy, four years of no material progress for the fabric of society, only regression. Trump has had four years to make America great again, by his own boasting he shouldn't need caps proclaiming the need for four more years. One more hopeful legacy that may also arise, is that the Republican Party may be forced to embrace a greater diversity to reflect changing demographics and that it can no longer just get by largely on just the white male vote. Yet if power is peacefully transferred to Biden, then one can only celebrate the American people's mental acuity; they tried the Trump experiment, adjudged it a failure and moved to change the outcome by rejecting it and going in a different direction. Unlike us here in the UK, who after the disaster of Austerity, the looming disaster of Brexit, the cretinous mishandling of the pandemic, have continued to return Conservative government after Conservative government, with none of the litheness possibly demonstrated by the US electorate tonight. Britain has been punching itself in the face for over a decade now. I hope and pray the American public don't do the same.

Friday, 20 July 2018

Lift The Siege 10 - Moscow Theatre siege

It's hard to know quite where to start with this one. So many of the facts are shrouded in mystery, from the number of fatal casualties, the precise chemical agent pumped into the theatre to start the assault on it, the precise number of hostage takers, to two instances of people walking in off the street and into the heart of the theatre during the stand off stage and both being shot dead.

What can be established is that in 2002, 40 or 50 armed Chechens sealed off a Moscow theatre during a performance and rigged it with explosives as well as many wearing suicide belts themselves. Nearly 900 actors, production crew and audience members were taken hostage. Muslim Chechnya was seeking independence from Russia and was fighting the second of two brutal wars which has produced some of the best war literature since the Vietnam war. International opinion was that the conflict should be brought to an end and President Putin was supposedly feeling this pressure. One conspiracy theory is that a heinous act like taking 900 hostages suited Putin and united the country behind him and that the terrorists were given somewhat of a helping hand with double agents channeling them towards the theatre as a target and that their explosives were in fact non-functioning. There is no way of establishing this, despite allegations that two of the Chechens have disappeared without arrest, because they were FSB (Russian security forces) agents.

The Chechens released several non-Russian nationals, saying they had no quarrel with them. They released mothers with their children and the sick, some 150 people in all. The siege proceeded as a stand off, except for the strange instance of a member of the public waltzing through police and security lines and marching into the theatre. 26 year old Olga Romanov then proceeded to remonstrate with the hostages that they should stand up to their captors, whereupon she was shot dead. Well known Russians were brought in outside to negotiate with the Chechens, singers, scientists and journalists (although in Russia, singers & scientists were also MPs). Another man Gennady Vlakh repeated the feat of Olga Romanov, claiming his son was a hostage and was also shot dead. It was never established who he was exactly, since he had no son inside the theatre.

After 4 days of the siege after claims that two hostages had been killed, and a leak that special security forces were going to storm the building in the small hours, they actually went in at 5am reckoning that the hostage takers would have been more relaxed having stood down from repelling the expected attack hours earlier. The assault itself was mainly conducting by pumping an unknown gas in through the building's ventilation system which knocked out the vast majority of the Chechens and many hostages. None of the wired explosives went off, all the suicide belted women were knocked out by the gas, while the failure to detonate the theatre explosives may attest to claims that it was dummy material supplied by the FSB agent provocateurs of the whole plot). Some of the Chechens had gas masks and engaged the security forces in running gun battles throughout the building, but all were eventually killed, save the mystery men who it was claimed were allowed to slip away as they were Russian agents.

In all, the 40-50 Chechens were killed, 130 hostages died and two special forces had died from gas inhalation. Of the dead hostages, only two were found with bullet wounds; the vast majority of them had been killed by the gas. many were evacuated from the building, alive but unconscious. However the exact nature of the gas was withheld from attending doctors at the site, resulting in the deaths of many of those evacuated hostages. 17 of the cast members of the play died, including two child actors. The authorities blamed the deaths on heart attacks and other health issues from being held hostage with little water and an unfortunate self-suffocation by lolling back in theatre seats when the gas knocked them out and their own tongues blocked up their airways. The gas itself was reported no to have caused the fatalities. Even though many evacuees died outside the theatre having already been poisoned by it.

After a three year official investigation into the affair ground to an inconclusive halt, an independent commission set itself up to investigate, Two of its most famous members were Anna Politkovskaya (a journalist who had been part of the volunteer negotiators with the Chechens) and Alesander Litvinenko (an ex FSB agent, familiar with the operations of the Security Forces), together with Russian politician Sergei Yushenkov, all three of whom wound up being assassinated by the FSB. Their contention was that the whole siege had been precipitated by the FSB with inside agents and agent provocateurs.

*

"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.