As Obama Stands Silent, Putin Crushes Freedom Online
The motto Vladimir Putin lives by is simple: If you can’t beat them, jail them. If you can’t jail them, kill them. And make no mistake: these days Putin is able to live by that motto in large part because of the craven cowardice of U.S. President Barack Obama.
The definitive case in point is that of attorney activist Alexei Navalny.
Just like businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky before him, Navalny has boldly stepped forward to challenge financial corruption in Putin’s Russia. The country ranks a genuinely shocking #154 out of 178 world nations when surveyed for corruption, meaning that Russia is the 24th most corrupt country on the planet. A new report by former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov documents that this corruption reaches to the highest levels of the Kremlin, including Putin himself.
By choosing Putin, the proud KGB spy, Russians were supposed to be gaining strict law and order in exchange for civil rights and liberties. What’s actually happened is that they’ve got the worst of all possible worlds.
The stronger Navalny has become — in just the past three months, his website has garnered 6.5 million rubles in donations from thousands of people all across Russia — the more pressure he has felt from the Kremlin. Just as with Khodorkovsky, a presidential election approaches; Russians begin to think Navalny would be a good candidate; confidence in the Kremin wavers (last month, approval dropped below a majority). The pressure has reached a crescendo.
In response, the Kremlin’s assault on Navalny has been sudden, relentless, and brutal. First came a massive DDOS cyber attack on Navalny’s website, knocking it off the Internet. Then came KGB pressure on Yandex, the Russian PayPal, to reveal the names and addresses of Navalny’s Internet donors. Then, a wave of harassing phone calls to those donors from Nashi, Putin’s youth cult. Now, to round things out, the Kremlin has announced a criminal investigation, which could put Navalny in prison for five years — maybe even in a Siberian cell right next to Khodorkovsky.
That’s if Navalny is lucky. But maybe he won’t be.
Maybe the Kremlin will decide it can’t afford a long, drawn-out trial and is only using the threat of prosecution to see if it will silence Navalny. If that doesn’t work, maybe the Kremlin won’t risk allowing Navalny to generate the kind of publicity that Khodorkovsky has been able to manage (he gives interviews and releases opinion pieces from his jail cell). Maybe, instead, the Kremlin will decide to implement the “Politkovskaya solution” and simply have Navalny killed.
When Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in October 2006, the U.S. was led by a man, George W. Bush, who “looked in Putin’s eye, got a sense of his soul” and pronounced him “trustworthy.”
Today, Obama meets with Putin’s hand-picked puppet “president” Dmitri Medvedev, munches burgers, and offers the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. ballistic missile defense systems from Eastern Europe — as well as a nuclear arms treaty that calls upon only the U.S. to cut ICBMs.
When America sends the message that it will look the other way when Putin strikes, Putin does not waste time in doing so. During the Bush administration there was a whole host of murders of Putin’s political foes. Not once was a killer brought to justice.
If Obama does not speak up soon, the world may well see Navalny’s name added to that list — and an iron curtain descending once again across the continent of Europe.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why anyone at all is surprised by the fact that Russia is corrupt from top to bottom. It has been that way since the first Tsar sat in Kiev [that is not a typo] and continued right through Peter the Great, Catherine, and so on with the Lenin/Stalin/Yeltsin folks up to and including today’s “leaders.” The Tsars’ absolute rule begat the Communists’ absolute rule which begat today’s absolute rule. There has never been a functioning democracy in Russia. An occasional “duma” here and there through the nation’s history, but never with truly effective power. So the boyars/nomenklatura/oligarchs enrich themselves on the backs of the people and nation. No change.
After the defeat against Japan, Russia was building a democracy until Germany sent an revolutionary aristocrat to seize the power won by the social democrats and took out Russia out of the war.
Ms Ziegfeld probably intended to whet our liberals’ appetite for human rights – and if this was her intention – start a fuzz in Democratic circles as to why the Empty Black Suit DOES NOT CARE!!
Of course, when you are nourished on Marxism and class struggle you’d better be careful what ‘class’ you belong to..
Ending up with the wrong class – and the wrong Leader of the Free World – is gonna cost ye!!
The trouble is that the idiots in DC, State Dept., prez & CIA have this fantasy that Russia is our friend. One would have to be a completely naive idiot to believe this. Russia is a fascist state actively working against freedom & the US anywhere it can. Why else would they support Iran, Chavez, Cuba & Red China? Someone, like Sarah Palin or Herman Cain, needs to stand up to Pukin & Co., & hold their feet to the fire. Tell ‘em we’re putting nukes in Georgia. Say that we won’t enforce the dangerous treaty the lame ducks ratified. If Pukin doesn’t like it, tell him to go pound sand. It is simply amazing how stupid our diplomats are. Kissing Russia’s but will get us nothing but a kick in the teeth. There is an old Russian proverb that says, “I will piss in your eyes & you will call it holy water.” That is exactly what the Russians are doing to us now. We just lay down & take it as if they were going to actually do something good to support us. The corrupt clan running the Kremlin understands only force. Let us show it to them. Hold US Naval exercises as close to their border as possible & see how they like it…
Bottom line: the incompetents in DC NEVER learn!
Russia has always been a corrupt and murderous country. And Snake is right: Obama is taking notes.
The point is that there are many Americans who see nothing wrong with the Russian philosophy of totalitarianism. The concept of a government with a small group of elites who rule over a large homogenous mass of workers is perfectly reasonable (to the elites).
Hopefully, the USA will turn around in 2012 and elect someone who is capable of rejecting Marxism and re-installing the American concepts of personal liberty and economic freedom.
Why do I feel we are owned and operated by the Council on Foreign Relations?
Presidential election of 1976 Gerald Ford vs Jimmy Carter, CFR owned both candidates
Presidential election of 1980 Reagan wins primary vs the establishment/CFR candidate and trounces the CFR Carter in the General Election. CFR trys to make sure it can fill his cabinet and succeeds.
Presidential election of 1988 George H.W. Bush, versus Michael Dukakis, CFR had canidates on both sides.
Presidential election of 1992 CFR had both the Republican and Democratic candidates and we the people had someone that Larry King thought was qualified.
Presidential election of 1996 CFR supports running World War II hero, Bob Dole against the boy from Arkasas, CFR had control of both sides.
Presidential election of 2000 Bush and his father’s cabinet all from the CFR squeek past Al Gore, both strong internationalists and part of the CFR
Presidential election of 2004 Bush the junior and his father’s cabinet win another one against John Kerry, both CFR candidates.
Presdiential election of 2008 shows VietNam war hero John McNice can play the role of CFR candidate to the wonderboy who is now taking us off the cliff with the complete support of the Council on Foreign Relations.
I am beginning to get paranoid about whether the Constitution says “We the people” or we the elites. The political class is small but boy they are arrogant and they are using our money and our military to take all our freedoms away.
Maybe a good subhead for the article would be: Obama is Taking Notes
Even though we all know Putin is corrupt and incredibly ruthless, I don’t really know what Obama can do about it. We can protest, but the Russians would just laugh at us and then ingnore us. Heck, we couldn’t even stop them from invading Georgia, let alone stop them from imprisoning or killing their own people.
Let’s face it, we’re now involved in THREE wars in the Middle East, China is on the move, and Iran is about to start the war to end all wars in the Middle East. I don’t think Putin is that concerned about our reactions anymore. What are we going to do, invade Russia? Obviously not. Economic “sanctions”? They never work and nobody would probably join us in implementing them, anyway. So even if we protested Russia’s policy on human rights, what would they care? In fact, if we protested and the Russians bluntly told us to get lost, we would look even weaker than we do right now.
So, yes, launch a protest if you want. But it will not do much good and it certainly will NOT affect the way the Russians do “business” today in their own country.
Ouch!! Brutally honest, but sadly true assessment of things. . . . we are becoming a “weak sister” nation on the world stage. . . and there is no one on the horizon to help us. . . .
I doubt if Obama was truly doing anything other than admiring Putin’s power and gall. In the meantime, he has instituted his own game of controlling communications in America with his sham cell-phone hot line.
Remember those protests the left made about those Bush terror alerts changing color because they thought it was just politics to give Bush the leadership appearance – well they learn from those false accusations that such stuff could work for liars very well. Expect an October cell-phone surprise of how great a leader we have in Obama because he just __________(fill in your own crisis de jour)
These people do nothing trustworthy.
It is becoming a scary world for people who want to live in freedom. Our own country has so many false leaders that it makes it difficult to see where to go with the coming election. Obama clearly has to go but why do I keep feeling that the actual political class that gave us Obama is also in control of much of the establishment Republican leadership as well. We have two major shape shifters Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich who are now masquerading as conservatives when in fact they are the same internationalists who got us in this mess. You have Fox News cutting the information source of Glenn Beck and another establishment fixture Sean Hannity claiming he is a “Reagan Conservative” while in actual fact he is putting his thumb on the scale consistently to squash politicians like Ron Paul and others trying to tell the truth about what is going on and focus us back on the Constitution. To quote Alice it is “getting curiouser and curiouser”.
After the collapse of the USSR Russians are persecuted by the fear of the furser disintegration.The idea of the revenge is connected to this fear from the beginning.
The cruelty of the Chechen war,Georgia war,oil wars with Ukraina and Belarus and resent Red Square pogroms are the expressions of this fear and revenge dreams.
One who knows the Russian empire history will not throw this dreams off.
The horrible Russian corruption is dangerous for Russia-still the empire!
The question arises in connection to Arab World uprising,Russian internal problems: these non democratic countries must be supported in their development unconditionaly as in the case of Lybia or the West`s main target is the defence of the existing democracies?
Most Russians suffer from serious mental illnesses and personality disorders: including Borderline Personality Disorder, (BPD), narcissism, psychopathy, sociopathy. They can appear quite normal one day and be completely off kilter the next. There is not much to be done about that – it may take two or more generations to normalize the population. In the meantime, Russians adore Putin as they require a strong man to look up to. They don’t mind occasional killings and intimidations as long as it keeps the country more or less functional.
Two questions: What benchmark should be applied to regimes like what Russia is saddled with today.
Second, what are the penalties for those countries when they fail to make that benchmark?
As far as I am concerned, the present Russian federal government, is illegitimate. Therefore, dealings need to be done with those outside of the Kremlin.
What is the deal with all these suggestions that simple comments be posted as “policy proposals” at whitehousevoice.com?
I’ve been seeing these quite frequently in recent weeks. The comment is almost identical in every case, although the name of the commenter is different each time. Whoever is doing it clearly can’t tell a comment from a policy proposal and is obviously trying to steer people to this other web site but why?
This isn’t the usual troll tactic of belittling conservatives but it still feels dishonest somehow….