From the NYT:
Russia Massing Military Forces Near Borders With Ukraine
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ALISON SMALE 29 minutes ago
Russia acknowledged significant operations in several regions abutting Ukraine on Thursday, even as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany assailed the Kremlin’s actions in some of her toughest language yet.
In the New Republic, New Yorker editor David Remnick is interviewed by Isaac Chotiner upon his return from the Sochi Olympics:
It is this reputation for humor and self-deprecation with his staff and the press that has, at least partially, ensured the laudatory coverage that greets him everywhere he goes. And is it ever laudatory. Check Twitter after a story of his goes online, and it’s like the Internet has emptied the thesaurus of all words relating to “genius.”
The adulation that the New Yorker editor receives from writers doesn't have anything to do with the New Yorker being one of last good-paying gigs left for writers.
IC: You mention his lack of Marxist-Leninism. Do you think he has any ideology?
DR: Yes, I do. I think initially there was not an ideology. He is a state builder. It was all about reasserting the Russian state. But what you see since his return to power is a distinctly conservative Russian ideology, which you might call “Putinism.” What is it? It is a dog’s breakfast ideologically. He is capable of quoting Stolypin, Solzhenitsyn, and any number of people from the Russian or Russian Orthodox past, where useful.
The anti-gay law is an aspect of this. In Stalinist times, as Masha Gessen points out, the convenient other was the Jew, or people from the Caucasus, but mainly Jews. For one reason or another, Putin is not hostile to Jews as such.
IC: He is a forward-thinking guy.
DR: He is very flexible there and we all thank him for that. In Russia, the level of homophobia is extremely high, and so there it is.
World War G is all due to Russia suddenly becoming extremely homophobic (it doesn't have anything to do with radically changing American attitudes and demands, and the Western urge to find an excuse to up the confrontation ante), probably as a mask for its inexplicable (and likely temporary) lack of anti-Semitism at present.
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43 comments:
"David Remnick is interviewed by Isaac Chotiner"
It's remarkable how one group is so overrepresented in the media and thus in shaping the culture.
Remnick said: The distinguishing feature between him and Hillary Clinton was a speech about Iraq. And he says he came to office to end wars. On the other hand, excuse me [laughs], I wish I could hear a lot more from him about, say, Ukraine, than I have, other than just, “We are keeping out.” I find that . . . [shakes his head, trails off]
Hunsdon said: I know, you know! A Russian there, and a perfectly good stick to hit him with!
"Russia Massing Military Forces Near Borders With Ukraine"
Crimea nearly done. After the referendum any last Ukraine military hanging out in any of the Crimean bases should be easy to squeeze out.
Then if he wants the south and east as well we should start seeing bleep and bleep etc. He might prefer it as a second Transdniestria though rather than full accesion.
I very much doubt he'd want West Ukraine as well - more cost than benefit by far.
My guess anyway.
.
"It is this reputation for humor and self-deprecation with his staff and the press that has, at least partially, ensured the laudatory coverage that greets him everywhere he goes. And is it ever laudatory. Check Twitter after a story of his goes online, and it’s like the Internet has emptied the thesaurus of all words relating to “genius"
Jeebus.
The anti-gay law is an aspect of this. In Stalinist times, as Masha Gessen points out,...
OK, Masha Gessen has come up before on this blog. Originally people provided this link to a recording of her saying that supporters of gay marriage are lying when they tell the world the institution of marriage won't change. She said the purpose of gay marriage is to change the institution of marriage and she hopes it is actually eliminated.
What she said could have been dismissed as the rantings of a lunatic by supporters of gay marriage. However, this is the second time in recent months I've noticed her come up in an MSM article that iSteve quotes. So if she really is a lunatic, why are mainstream media sources quoting her and seeking her opinion?
To me it seems that this person is treated as a legitimate person with acceptable views. So shouldn't this bring more attention to her views on gay marriage and whether or not there is truth behind what she says?
"It is this reputation for humor and self-deprecation with his staff and the press that has, at least partially, ensured the laudatory coverage that greets him everywhere he goes. And is it ever laudatory. Check Twitter after a story of his goes online, and it’s like the Internet has emptied the thesaurus of all words relating to “genius.”"
Once you become aware of it, you see this kind of intra-ethnic praise all over the media.
"The anti-gay law is an aspect of this. In Stalinist times, as Masha Gessen points out, the convenient other was the Jew, or people from the Caucasus, but mainly Jews. For one reason or another, Putin is not hostile to Jews as such.
IC: He is a forward-thinking guy.
DR: He is very flexible there and we all thank him for that. In Russia, the level of homophobia is extremely high, and so there it is."
Somehow, I get the impression that people are disappointed that Putin is not anti-Semitic.....
they are insistent that banning the dissemination of homosexual propaganda is the same thing as wanting to round up all the homosexuals and beat them into the ground or something. they never deviate from this message. any move by a foreign sovereign government to ensure normalcy is 'blatant anti-homosexual hostility'. well, if the people doing it look kind of whitish. if they are china, or some other nation, the moral outrage meter is reset back to zero.
one wonders then, what their objection could be to the deviant catholic priests who preyed on catholic boys. wouldn't they...be in favor of this? preventing 50 year old men from preying on 12 year old boys is blatant anti-homosexual hostility, is it not? or would they contort themselves into some kind of logic pretzel. non-catholic homosexual outsiders MUST be allowed to enter the church, advocate for homosexual relationships, and CANNOT be stopped for any reason...but yeah it's still wrong for priests to hump choir boys. at least until they are 18. then let the humping begin.
considering their position on homosexuals, that impeding any action any homosexual anywhere wishes to take is virtually tantamount to lining them up and shooting them, would it be fair to say that passing a law in the US to prevent armed black panthers from coming within 300 meters of a voting booth is the same as rounding up all the africans in the area and blasting them with fire hoses, just before the police begin beating them with nightsticks?
i mean, that's totally the same thing, right? any african anywhere has to be allowed to do anything or it's virulent anti-african bigotry.
this is pretty much their position on mexican immivaders, anyway. how dare you not let them do anything they want, you racist.
"In Stalinist times, as Masha Gessen points out, the convenient other was the Jew, or people from the Caucasus, but mainly Jews."
Ah, the concept of the "Other." The Hegelian trope that is never far from the lips/pens of the SWPL crowd.
RE: Stalin and anti-Semitism,
As near as I can tell, this is over-rated. Stalin only began to engage in it in a serious way after the emergence of Israel. Hence, as with his deportations during WW2, it seems to be more a matter of circumstance than of deep sentiments.
RE:Stalin and Anti-Semitism,
"On the other hand, in Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, historian Albert S. Lindemann observes that:
"Determining Stalin's real attitude to Jews is difficult. Not only did he repeatedly speak out against anti-Semitism but both his son and daughter married Jews, and several of his closest and most devoted lieutenants from the late 1920s through the 1930s were of Jewish origin, for example Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, Maxim Litvinov, and the notorious head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda. There were not so many Jews allied with Stalin on the party's right as there were allied with Trotsky on the left, but the importance of men like Kaganovich, Litvinov, and Yagoda makes it hard to believe that Stalin harbored a categorical hatred of all Jews, as a race, in the way that Hitler did. Scholars as knowledgeable and diverse in their opinions as Isaac Deutscher and Robert Conquest have denied that anything as crude and dogmatic as Nazi-style anti-Semitism motivated Stalin. It may be enough simply to note that Stalin was a man of towering hatreds, corrosive suspicions, and impenetrable duplicity. He saw enemies everywhere, and it just so happened that many of his enemies—virtually all his enemies—were Jews, above all, the enemy, Trotsky.
Jews in the party were often verbally adroit, polylingual, and broadly educated—all qualities Stalin lacked. To observe, as his daughter Svetlana has, that 'Stalin did not like Jews,' does not tell us much, since he 'did not like' any group: His hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native Georgia were not exempt. Whether he hated Jews with a special intensity or quality is not clear." (WIKIPEDIA)
Masha Gessen is of course a lesbian. She is the brother of Keith Gessen, founder of the literary magazine n+1--whom I know a bit and like, by the way, even though he has described himself in print as "a man of the left."
Somewhat creepy to me was the revelation (to me at least) that Keith fathered the zygote that became the putative child of his sister Masha and her lesbian partner. You can read all about it in this piece by Keith's intermittently jealous sometime girlfriend Emily Gould:
https://medium.com/debt-ridden/35d7c8aec846
Anyway, the Gessen axis is all the way on board with the whole WWG business, and all the way on one side. They also know and write a lot about Russia, and Putin doesn't like them.
Here's Keith Gessen's summary of post-Soviet Russian history following the suicide of an oligarch. It strikes me as pretty fair-minded:
http://nplusonemag.com/boris-berezovsky-1946-2013
It seems like American opinion on Russian is more influenced by Keith's radical lesbian sister Masha than by the more sensible of the two siblings.
IC: If you were condemned to a desert island and could bring the works of either Bellow, Roth, or Updike, which would you take?
DR: Roth. Look, I am eternally grateful for the work of all three. And Herzog, of all the novels that the three produced, may be the best. But I grew up on Roth. I might even have extracurricular reasons. I am from Jersey. I am Roman Catholic. Oh excuse me, I am not. I grew up with these books. They meant and mean everything to me. We are in a period of extended celebration of the work of Roth. Some may find that tiresome. I really don’t.
Trying to make something out of his favoring Roth over Bellow and Updike......
Yes, Keith is very good in his reporting on Russiana. His New Yorker piece on Moscow Traffic is paywalled, but well worth reading if you have access to it.
According to "The Court of the Red Tsar" and "The Jewish Century," Stalin didn't turn anti-Semitic until the enthusiasm shown by his Jewish underlings during Golda Meir's 1947 visit to Moscow revealed to him how ethnocentric and Zionist his Jewish officials were. And this is the most murderously paranoid guy in all history, which shows how ingrained anti-anti-semitism was in the Bolshevik state.
slumber_j:"Somewhat creepy to me was the revelation (to me at least) that Keith fathered the zygote that became the putative child of his sister Masha and her lesbian partner. You can read all about it in this piece by Keith's intermittently jealous sometime girlfriend Emily Gould:
https://medium.com/debt-ridden/35d7c8aec846"
Yeah, I've heard of this technique being used by Lesbian couples. Allows both parents to be genetically related to the baby. One could see it, I suppose, as a kind of vindication of socio-biology.Even Homosexuals want to have their genes go on.
Genius: "Mr. Remnick’s journey as an Olympic correspondent for NBC ended on Tuesday...but you almost wish it lasted a little longer. Mr. Remnick...said he received no special TV training.
'It has to be very broad strokes,' he said in a phone interview, back home in New York. 'This is not a televised document, a scholarly documentary. After all, it is Cirque du Soleil.'
His commentary — particularly when one was zoning out during the lighthearted ceremony and he, quite suddenly, discussed how Ivan the Terrible 'poked out the eyes supposedly' of the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral — was a welcome respite from the usual fare."
Slumbr_j:"Anyway, the Gessen axis is all the way on board with the whole WWG business, and all the way on one side. They also know and write a lot about Russia, and Putin doesn't like them."
The Gessens are the sorts of Jews who get invited to swanky gatherings.Putin needs to ditch people like Rabbi Berel Lazar.
The Chabad-affiliated chief Rabbi of Russia is just too uncool.Do you think that he hangs out with Lesbian activists? He needs to find some Davos ready Jewish buddies.
"According to "The Court of the Red Tsar" and "The Jewish Century," Stalin didn't turn anti-Semitic until the enthusiasm shown by his Jewish underlings during Golda Meir's 1947 visit to Moscow revealed to him how ethnocentric and Zionist his Jewish officials were. And this is the most murderously paranoid guy in all history, which shows how ingrained anti-anti-semitism was in the Bolshevik state."
Yeah, this basically confirms what I have read elsewhere. Depicting Stalin as somehow deeply (as opposed to situationally) anti-Semitic is just incorrect.
Re: Masha Gessen. In the 90's anal-marriage proponent Nan Hunter argued one of its benefits would be to "dismantle the legal structure of gender in every marriage". This was before she was appointed Deputy General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Russia acknowledged significant operations in several regions abutting Ukraine on Thursday
I don't think that Russia will invade mainland southeastern Ukraine without a serious cause. What kind of cause? A crackdown by the Kiev government against pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine that leaves thousands of corpses. And I don't expect such a crackdown to happen, partly because Putin's no-nonsense track record and these exercises are acting as a deterrent.
"For one reason or another, Putin is not hostile to Jews as such."
During the South Ossetian war Putin was as explicit as anyone in his position humanly could be that neither he nor Russia had anything against Georgians and that this was only a conflict with Saakashvili. He framed the Chechen war as one against terrorist renegades, not against the Chechen people, and made sure to have very visible Chechen support for his actions.
I remember someone asking him for his opinion of the slogan "Russia for Russians", which I think was coined by Alexander III, who ironically, like all the late Romanovs, was mostly German. Putin said that the people who are saying that are morons. Paraphrasing, "how can you say that in such a multiethnic country as ours, what do these idiots want to accomplish, do they want non-Russians to want to split off, do they want to divide Russia again?"
The background to this is that the breakup of the Soviet Union was painful for millions of ethnic Russians. The ones who became minorities in newly-independent countries were discriminated against. Millions had to flee. If non-Russian parts of the Russian Federation (Tatarstan, the north Caucasus, etc.) split off, that process would be repeated.
He's very sensitive about ethnic topics. He knows it's a minefield and has decided that his role as a head of a multiethnic state is to be impartial. His main difference from Western leaders is that he's not hostile to the majority either. His ideal is polite coexistence. Everyone knows about P***y Riot, but he had also condemned those Mohammed cartoons years ago. I'm sure that those girls and their backers offended him more as a person, but as a head as state he sees impartiality on such matters as a part of his job.
It's funny, we used to be taught that the world of the past was a homophobic and bigoted place where a homosexual was constantly at risk of death if anyone discovered his orientation, until good liberals in forward-thinking places worked hard to change that in modern times.
Now the Narrative seems to be changing: now the past was a place of relative tolerance, until suddenly backward-thinking leaders like Putin decided to turn their countries homophobic.
Gessen's article is really good. Here's a chunk that sticks out:
Berezovsky saw this happening and came up with a plan. The mood of the country was nationalistic, even militaristic. The oligarchs (or liberals, as Berezovsky thought of them) needed their own nationalist candidate, and he found one in a short, unassuming former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. He convinced Yeltsin to replace Primakov with Putin. A month later, two large apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow. The explosions were blamed on Chechen terrorists; the second Chechen war began; and Vladimir Putin was assured election to the presidency even if he hadn’t been assigned to the office in a bizarre New Year’s Eve address by a Yeltsin.
To his credit, Putin disappointed Berezovsky’s expectation almost as soon as he assumed the presidency. He tried to bring the oligarchs to heel. Whatever else he was wrong about—which was everything—in this at least he was right. These were men who had been handed immense industrial fortunes by a desperate government. They became billionaires overnight. But they had not built these companies. The companies had been built by Soviet workers over the course of decades—some of these workers believed that they were building Communism, some of them were prisoners of the Gulag. All of them worked for pennies. For the oligarchs to pretend like they had earned their fortunes was tremendously insulting to the millions of people who had built them in actual fact. The best and fairest thing to do would have been to nationalize the giant oil companies right then and there. But Putin is a bully and he tried to bully the oligarchs. He began police inspections of Gusinsky and Berezovsky, and soon they had both fled the country; Gusinsky quietly and forever, Berezovsky loudly and with a promise to return. The other oligarchs agreed to behave themselves. The exception was Khodorkovsky, who neither left nor agreed to behave himself. He ended up in prison.
Gessen on how the future oligarchs started small back in the '80s:
"Berezovsky wasn’t just an oligarch: he was the first oligarch. He is sometimes referred to slightingly as a “former used car salesman”—this is a kind of joke. In fact Berezovsky was an accomplished mathematician, a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with a specialization in game theory. In the late 1980s, as free enterprise began to be introduced in the USSR, piecemeal and with every possible loophole for corruption, the other future oligarchs began to go into “business”: Mikhail Prokhorov, future owner of Norilsk Nickel and then the New Jersey Nets, sold acid-washed jeans at the local market; Vladimir Gusinsky, future owner of Most-Bank and the country’s first independent television channel, NTV, became an event planner; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, future owner of the country’s largest oil company, now in prison for a decade, opened a cafe."
Gessen on criminal capitalism:
What was criminal capitalism in Russia actually like? On the most fundamental level it was a series of protection rackets. If you sold vegetables on the street corner, eventually you’d be approached by some guys in leather jackets who would demand protection money. If you didn’t pay, they upset your vegetable stand; next time, they beat you up. If you paid them, they protected you. They didn’t do this particularly well, but they would try; if some other group of guys in leather jackets came along and tried to shake you down, they’d tell them to lay off, and if they didn’t lay off, they’d fight them. There was a lot of fist-fighting in those days, and most of the guys in the protection rackets were boxers or karate or wrestling champions, including, occasionally, a former Olympian. There were knives, but, at this level anyway, there weren’t many guns. It wasn’t a great system but in the absence of any other kind of system—of an actually functioning law enforcement system—it mostly kept the violence confined to the battles between the gangs themselves, rather than the vegetable sellers. In the absence of a legal system, it was also a way of enforcing contracts, because eventually these shake-down gangs formed larger shake-down syndicates, or were crushed by them. The larger syndicates, without giving up their positions in vegetable stands, moved on to bigger game: shaking down, or “partnering with,” small businesses, and less small businesses, and small banks. In my understanding of this process—which is an imperfect understanding—there was a lot of mobility for the gangs themselves but maybe not within the gangs. If you were a foot soldier, you probably remained a foot soldier, and you suffered a foot soldier’s fate. If you were shaking down a vegetable stand in 1990, you are probably not in the State Duma in 2013. Chances are, you are probably dead.
More Gessen on criminal capitalism:
My father’s partner called the security firm that was supposed to be guarding him, otherwise known as his krysha, or “roof.” The krysha was run by a former police colonel. Other such groups were run by former KGB colonels. Others still were run by former (or current) gangsters. In any case they were now all in the same game. This former police colonel listened to the story and said he would make some inquiries. “If it’s the Georgians,” he said, “we can deal with it. And if it’s the Izmailovo group, we can talk to them. But if it’s the Chechens, we can’t help you.” This was not a great answer to receive from your security group, but that’s how things worked. The Chechens were considered more brutal than other gangs, and they were also, it seems, better-armed; this may have been due to the fact that Chechnya was in the process of arming itself for a war against the Russians that was to break out in 1994. A certain amount of weaponry found its way north. In the event, the police colonel made some phone calls, posted himself and some others at the office for a week, and the men never returned. Nonetheless this kind of thing scared the hell out of my father’s partner, who despite making very good money for that time refused to move out of his old Soviet apartment or replace his old Soviet car. He now lives, happier and more relaxed, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and my father has gone back to being a computer programmer.
Anonymous:"It's remarkable how one group is so overrepresented in the media and thus in shaping the culture."
Yeah, I really don't think that we will ever see Blacks or Mestizo Hispanics achieve the kind of over-representation that Whites enjoy.
Yeah, I really don't think that we will ever see Blacks or Mestizo Hispanics achieve the kind of over-representation that Whites enjoy.
Actually, I suspect blacks are more overrepresented than whites. Blacks are in virtually every other commercial and tv show these days. It's blacks and Jews who are overrepresented in the media.
As long as we are on the subject of Putin, gayness, and religion, here is a funny GIF of Putin's reaction when a man (a priest) tries to kiss his hand.
America was more tolerant than Russia of homosexuality for at least the last 60 years, if not more, for what it's worth. Homosexuality really is bourgeois decadence, and its hard to have much of that when your bourgeoise is tiny, as it was in Russia.
And yes, Keith Gessen does seem to be reasonable:
https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/440533980522094592
"Yeah, I've heard of this technique being used by Lesbian couples. Allows both parents to be genetically related to the baby. One could see it, I suppose, as a kind of vindication of socio-biology. Even homosexuals want to have their genes go on."
The simpler and better explanation is that it's easier and more fulfilling to love a little human who looks like you than to love something that looks nothing like you. But you just keep on believing in your overly complex question-begging Darwinist fantasies.
Anonymous:"The simpler and better explanation is that it's easier and more fulfilling to love a little human who looks like you than to love something that looks nothing like you. But you just keep on believing in your overly complex question-begging Darwinist fantasies."
Of course, one could also note the socio-biological angle inherent in loving a baby that looks like you....
For many years "anti-semitism" was a capital crime in the Soviet Union, no more be said.
Oh, and of course Israel was the first Jewish ethno-state. The Soviets gave the Jews their own oblast (still exists) which enjoyed greater autonomy than any other.
"Somehow, I get the impression that people are disappointed that Putin is not anti-Semitic....."
I think you may have discovered the reason for WWG.
If Russia lets homos marry, Jews will find something else to bitch about. The real issue is Jews wanna control and own Russia, and they will keep vilifying Russia with one bogus reason after another until they swallow Russia whole.
Meanwhile, Jews attack normal gentiles as the 'new other'. If homos are the 'new normal', then we are the 'new other'.
And of course, Jews are reigniting the cold war by making Russia into the great 'other' because it believes real marriage is between man and woman.
And in Israel, Jews use Palestinians and Iranians as the 'other'. And Jews there spit on Christians.
Keith's view on Berezovsky is surprising, given that his sister tried to portray the russian 90s as nin a public debate in the UI :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2013/05/24/the-intelligence-squared-debate-masha-gessen-has-some-really-strange-ideas-about-the-1990s/
"
...
it’s striking that one of Vladimir Putin’s highest profile public detractors thinks that living standards rose during the 1990′s... terribly during the 1990s as a “myth” ...*the 1990′s were actually pretty decent... in Gessen’s understanding the 1990′s were good and the 2000′s were bad.
I’m often too excitable, so I will do my utmost to maintain decorum and politeness, but Gessen’s contention that the 1990′s were a time of “improved living standards is flatly inaccurate, easily disprovable, and suggests a near-total ignorance of Russia’s actual economic and social trends.
"
ogunsiron linked to Adomanis
Hunsdon: Wow, that's pretty damning. This is the kind of insightful analysis that got Ms. Gessen hired: pure merit, baby, pure merit.
I checked out Masha Gessen's publisher's biography for "Dead Again: Russian Intelligentsia after Communism."
This line leaped out at me: Masha Gessen was born in Russia in 1967, and forced to leave in 1981 by state-enforced anti-Semitism.
I scared the dogs with my laughter.
OT slightly:
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/03/13/commission-finds-no-compelling-medical-reason-to-exclude-transgender-americans-from-military/
Who better to wage World War T than the Ts themselves?
Steve Sailor writes “”””"According to "The Court of the Red Tsar" and "The Jewish Century," Stalin didn't turn anti-Semitic until the enthusiasm shown by his Jewish underlings during Golda Meir's 1947 visit to Moscow revealed to him how ethnocentric and Zionist his Jewish officials were. "“”’’
Jews actually poured into the street by the tens of thousands to great Golda Meir. The incident was actually commemorated on the 10 shekel note in Israel where they reproduce the picture of the Jews in the street on the back and a picture of Golda Meir on the front
http://www.baudelet.net/monnaies/nouveau-shekel-israel.htm
Paulie Boy:"For many years "anti-semitism" was a capital crime in the Soviet Union, no more be said."
Could you please cite the statute in question?
Saw a post once by ex-Denton aggregator Choire Sicha demonstrating how most or probably all The NYer marquee writers with whom Remnick's aura supposedly mingles were actually brought on by noted philistine Tina Brown, and that Remnick's actual hires and institutional adjustments have made considerably less of a lit-scene splash. I think The NYer is almost middlebrow now while Harpers is getting strange new respect.
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