Brutal Compulsion
If you're Vladimir Putin you can have it all, the cream, the cake and the party. Of course, if you want to persuade the electorate of your sterling value, give them what they want and need. Circumstances have converged to produce new wealth for a formerly crippled national economy, ensuring that the public marketplace is a teeming, well-stocked cornucopia for Russians so latterly living miserably in a marketplace with a dearth of comestibles and hard goods.That was then, post perestroika, this is now, post-Yeltsin, living in plenitude under his successor. Russians are more than ready to give Vladimir Putin, through their enthusiastic vote-casting, the "moral authority" he claims he needs to proceed with his long-range plan of ruling the country as far as his mortality will permit. Other contenders, protesters of his democratic totalitarianism?
Shut out. State media refusing to air their political messages; they cannot even procure space in the print media, on exterior posters and billboards to deliver their alternative message. Whereas Vladimir Putin's triumphant visage is front and centre everywhere and beyond. Illegal, what's that? Laws are made to be broken and he's ready to break as many as possible, for he has engaged the public in collusion and enablement.
Election monitors? Who needs them, after all. Pretty crafty, changing the rules in mid-stream to allow for fewer monitors, then going into high dudgeon when the international monitors throw up their hands in frustration in the realization that the new numbers they've been permitted will simply add to the show, not enable them to do their job.
Dire warnings have been received about the intent of the west, particularly the United States, to interfere, to foil the will of the people. And this is a population most appreciative of their country's new status on the world stage. Not at all eager to slip back to those humiliating days of want, of seeing themselves taunted abroad, of public order run amok, and state enterprises handed off for paltry sums to the oligarchs.
Most certainly there are rational and intelligent Russians who see through all of these machinations and who aren't eager for Mr. Putin to stay in power forever. In this proudly democratic country they are identified, harassed, warned and bullied into line. Be they teachers, students, government workers, the message is received: cast ballots for United Russia or be prepared for consequences. Dismissal, demotion, anyone?
Relentless propaganda, and remorseless betrayal of democratic freedoms will have their effect. Mr. Putin will celebrate his victory, clasp to his bosom the "moral authority" vested in him by his adoring public. Dissenters will slink back into grudging acceptance. Political opposition will attempt to use their slender electoral gains as well they might.
In the end, might makes right. Might anyone have doubted that? Russia looks back with nostalgia on the memory of their previously most-successful leader, Joseph Stalin. Whose transgressions against his people must be understood in the light of the necessity of the times.
Labels: Political Realities, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, December 02, 2007
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