I guess I'll never understand totalitarian regimes:
Officials in Russian-occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine were forcing people to vote “under a gun barrel,” residents said on Saturday as staged referendums — intended to validate Moscow’s annexation of the territory it occupies — entered their second day.
What's the point of this? Everyone knows what's going on, and Moscow is hardly even making an attempt to pretend the referendums are real. Should we take it as good news that even a thug like Vladimir Putin feels like he has to at least symbolically carry out the norms of democracy?
This is dictatorship S.O.P. 101. China does the same thing: lots of impressive-looking constitutional machinery including elections and a parliament. But why bother? It's just a rubber stamp. The Party—actually these day a guy named Xi—runs the show. And everybody knows it.
I think at heart it's basically a reflection of the fact that they know they lack legitimacy. So in this case Putin is aping a form of government—democracy—that does have legitimacy.
As some French guy said: "Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue."
It's the most Russian thing ever.
Read Bill Browder's book, Red Notice, on his time in Russia. They'd literally steal companies from people with transparent fraud and lies.
It sounds crazy, and it is crazy, but maybe that's kind of the point too. They can do this completely stupid, insane thing, and you can't stop it.
It's so that Putin can technically stay within the law by sending conscripts to "Russian" land and apply Russian laws against Ukrainians who continue to live within these regions.
Bingo. This is 100% for domestic consumption.
Exactly right.
But why bother?
Just say that the occupied territories voted to be a part of Russia.
They lie quit shamelessly all day long to their domestic audience.
So why bother with the wasted time and effort? Just lie to the Russian people, yet again, and tell them the Ukrainians voted to join Russia.
No effort needed.
Because forcing the local residents to vote for annexation is an important part of the message. The Russian government isn't saying, "The people of Ukraine want to be a part of Russia." It is saying, "We have the power to make the Ukrainian people do what we tell them to do."
It is an expression of power.
It is an expression of power but it's also a way for Putin to mobilize troops without having a general mobilization. Remember, this is not a war, this is a "special operation" for which Russian cannot legally mobilize troops.
However, there is an exception to that rule: if Russia itself is attacked, and the enemy is on Russian territory. So host the referendum and voila, Russia is being attacked and the enemy is on Russian territory!
Also it means Russia can conscript everyone there. As a response to the recent retaking of territory in the north, ethnic Russians were trying to enter Russia from occupied territories in the Ukraine but Russian wouldn't let them. Now those people are all going to get drafted.
Totally agree. It's easy to forget most political decisions are based on domestic considerations.
Yep, and claim that Ukraine is attacking the Russia
Not only this but it's also a way to allow Putin to potentially escalate the conflict or continue it by saying he's "defending Russian land" or "liberating Russian land" or other such nonsense.
Putin gains three things:
- he makes it somewhat harder for Ukraine to attack the newly annexed areas,
- since some attacks will come anyway, he will get the Russian people to more deeply support the war as it now is about the defense of what they will see as "Russia proper",
- he safeguards his regime since there's no point anymore to removing him to stop the war; it will continue anyway. Not even Navalny could give up any part of "Russia proper" as defined by the Russians themselves.
The price he's willing to pay is:
- increased risk of nuclear war,
- no possible end in sight to the conventional war.
"The price he's willing to pay is:"
- OTHER people dying.
FIFY.
No one he knows is going to get conscripted.
Exactly! Alexander Ovechkin had not problem leaving Russia for the US to play another season in the NHL, nor did a majority of the NHL's top Russian players who went against advice and visited Russia this summer. Only one - a Flyer's goalie prospect is trapped in Russia and is ironically a dual national with Finnish citizenship as well - might be a hostage taken to pressure Finland.
I would tell Kaprill Kaprizov you may not being going home for quite a while.
Yep apparently he ticked off the wrong folks in Russia and had to sneak out quickly to avoid arrest.
Meet the Finno-Ugric Britney Griner...
I think part of it is similar to what Trump was doing with his lawsuit and special master b.s.: . Stall, just keep stalling and something may eventually happen to save his behind.
A large fraction of any population WANTS to be lied to--So long as the lie makes them feel better about the world in which they live, makes them feel more powerful or in control of their lives, they will accept it.
Once these areas “voted” to become part of Russia they’ll be able to paint Ukraine as aggressor attacking Russia
Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, & Matt Taibbi havn't been this aroused in years. Prolly not since the Abu Ghraib diaries of Chuck Granger & Lynndie England dropped.
It is part of creating the structure of totalitarian culture. Forcing people to take part in their own subjugation is partly training, partly demoralization.
Eventually, they keep doing it without the whip.
It's all performance. Orwell pointed this out, and then Joe McCarthy brought it here. No one now remains alive who remembers a time when it was otherwise. So now everything comes down to (1) better scripts and (2) better delivery. Reality will continue to operate in parallel and in isolation; by definition, whatever it does will come as a surprise.
It allows him to claim Russian territory is being violated….to justify threats of nuclear retaliation…
Uh, Ukraine has been striking Crimea including with SOF. Is that not a part of Russia to him?
Hell, they've been attacking ammunition and supply dumps inside Russia proper since the counteroffensive began. Pretty sure Putin does not have the cojones to push the button, even for tactical nukes.
Timothy Snyder explains a lot of this in his book "The Road to Unfreedom", and his other books. Essentially it is demonstration of authoritarian power. By openly violating the laws and norms of society while pretending to follow them, Putin undermines the concept of democracy while also demonstrating that he can violate the rules with impunity. The whole point of the exercise is that it is a fraud conducted by the guy in charge and that no one else has the power to stop him.
In this Ohio diner, Meloni still means Oz prison sex aficionado Christopher, not Italian PM in waiting Giorgia, but they do know this: the elevation of postliberal theocrats in Italy & Hungary is proof that the shitlibs in Brussels went too far in trying to make the EU as Woke as LBJ's Great Society.
Do you think the Russian people would suddenly feel that Zaporizhzhia Oblast is a part of ‘Russia proper’ after a sham referendum? They’ve been told that Ukrainians and Russians are one people but also that Ukrainians are Nazis. The public might be skeptical if not cynical.
All of the above, and probably below...
The endgame, obviously, is to sue for peace. No, Putie, you ain't gettin that stapler.
This is for our consumption so that when he throws the first atomic weapon, he can say, I drew the red line and you stepped over. For his denizens, he doesn't give a hoot. They are either just like him or cannon fodder. Pretty pathetic.
Just to add to the lots of good answers here, to make everything look legit inside their own media bubble.
So they can claim the forms of their pretend legitimacy are the same as legitimacy, it's part of the same thing as when conservatives everywhere claim that protecting freedom is exclusively the protection of their ability to harm others with impunity, because this is what you voted for, right?
In short, Jordan Peterson can say, "Up yours, Woke Left!", but the Woke Left cannot say "Up yours, Milo Yiannopoulos!"
Ah but then again, you could cry out, "aluminum tubes, yellowcake!"
It's for the Russian public. They desperately want to believe that they are good people and that their government is in the right. No one wants to admit their government is doing evil in their name. This allows Putin to tell them that if Ukraine attacks the annexed territories, they are attacking Russia.
The fact that the vote was a preposterous sham doesn't matter if you are trying to convince people of something they fervently want to believe anyway. It also allows them to prosecute Ukrainians in those regions for treason, since they will then be "Russian citizens."
It seems ridiculous to us, but we are not living inside their bubble.
Russians are not good people.
Ditto for the Hungarians, whose leader, Vik Orban, looks like my stepfather, had he not lost about 40 pounds.
These are nasty, subhuman swine, more Asiatic than not.
Orban's Jewish ancestry lies behind papist globalism
Spades, sounds like you are a fan of Hitler. You would have been right at home in the Third Reich. Right?
Won't work. Too much has gone down. Putin is heading to removal. He knows it. We can do this the hard way or soft way.
Thousands of Russians demonstrating or trying to flee clearly aren’t buying the propaganda.
Because no matter how tattered, a fig leaf is still a fig leaf. And still sufficient to hide a totalitarian’s shortcomings.
Potemkin elections, ala Potemkin village, that make the sham into the reality. If it happens on paper (or on facade), it meets necessary legal requirements, which requires everybody inside Russia to respond as if it really was legitimate, and events follow pretty much as Ohrk describes.
Remember, the documentations *are* the reality. Never mind what happened on the ground, there's a plebiscite result on paper that the Russian state points to and therefore no one has any basis to contest what the state says.
Sort of Kafka-esque, and kind of the inverse of trumpist claims-- with maga, trump says it, therefore it must be; with Putin, the documents say it, so who are you to say anything else (which, as pointed out upthread, also makes it a power move). There is no discoverable reality grounded in the phenomenal world for either of them.
Those of us old enough to remember Pentagon dispatches from Saigon will recognize that we've had our own brushes with this kind of thinking.
Social conservatives think fake referendums are what things are like everywhere.
American social conservatives think this is what American elections are like.
They think it's a big joke they're 'required' to take seriously because of social convention, and that's their attitude toward public life of any kind, and it's their attitude even when they're holding high office and in a position to actually know what's going on.
Are we admitting that much of the dirtbag left, if not actually conservative, fullstop, is at least socially so? To wit: as much as Matty & Lizzy Bruenig got justifiably shat on for their silence in the wake of Sammy Alito's witchy Dobbs decision, one would also note that their fellow Tradcath Jane O'Meara Sanders said jackdick about it.
Face it: #ourrLOVEution is Ron Paul 2008, but with Hyde Amendment compliant Medicare4AllWhitePeople.
I've been going on about leftist social conservatives for decades.
My point is that you are socially conservative to a formative circumstance and that those biologically inclined to social conservatism if raised in a leftist environment will be socially conservative to that environment, and this is where the woke left come from.
They're a trivial minority of social conservatives compared to the rightists but they are the only leftists rightist social conservatives will understand, pay attention to or even understand exist, so they're the only leftists we ever hear about.
Thank you for that thought - a lot to chew on and reflect in a mirror.
If you think all elections are corrupt, of course one will feel the need to ape democracy by running one’s own corrupt election. It’s not only Putin but our own Republicans that do this. Putin extends it by believing all militaries are corrupt, so his corrupt military will be competitive against NATO, and that all economic systems are corrupt so that his crony capitalist system will be able to compete with the EEC.
Actually, there is a point to this. You can see it by the reports of Russians going door to door to get votes: it allows the Russians to see who supports them and who doesn't.
...because if you believe the votes are anonymous, I'll sell you the Golden Gate Bridge.
Those who vote "no" put targets on their back. Some will vote no anyway; these will be the people that disappear. Others will vote yes just due to this fear.
Publicly, the vote results is a foregone conclusion; the propaganda is already ready to go. But all that does is hide the true purpose: culling the population.
To borrow from Van Jones, today, Vladimir Putin became president... of Iraq & Zimbabwe.
This take is really stupid. I don’t think the people that have survived this long under Russian occupation would be dumb enough to out themselves as Russian hating.
If Putin dropped a nuclear bomb on something and it's a dud and it just laid there on the ground, how do you get rid of it?
Very carefully. The issue is if it splits about and scatters plutonium over the immediate neighborhood.
Call his "good Bud" Donald Trump. After all, Trump has the best duds...........
Why would Putin drop a nuke on Ukraine? It would destroy the wheat fields. Isn't this the same area that they are holding the referendum in?
That would make these oblasts totally dependent on Russian aid.
It's an interesting bluff..........
Just go to TJ MAXXX, where Ivanka's clothing line is no. 1.
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In Soviet Russia, totalitarian regime understands you!
Putin has escaped to a secret palace in a forest amid anti-draft protests in Russian cities, report says,
https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-putin-escapes-secret-palace-amid-anti-draft-protests-report-2022-9
Check out what a stylish heap all the money in the world can buy you.
[OT] Hey Drum. Any thoughts on your governor out there in California? He's sounding a little uppity these days to us middle-earthers out here in Wisconsin but he sounds more and more like he might be running for president. Last president we had from California was Nixon, and we loved him. "Nixon now more than ever...." I can still hear the jingle. Despite Watergate and all. When he let Sammy Davis Junior hug him at a rally event when he was running for re-election in 1968, well who didn't like Nixon after all? Now Newsome. He's not as notorious as Nixon was, but those were different times. Nowadays, newcomers are always welcome, even when they're black (but still not probably female, gay, or Asian). But Newsome: will he run? If he does, do you think he can go the distance?
Reagan an Illinoisan, eh?
... in point of fact, Ronnie R, with his predilection for astrology & hippie woowoo, was more Cali than Nixy.
Is he a fag like Reagan or Roger Stone.
Actual LOL.
If we can’t understand that kind of behavior (from people like Putin), that’s probably a healthy sign for us. Madness, more or less by definition, lacks any clearly discernible form of rationale. And if we can’t wrap our heads around insanity, that’s probably because we’re not sufficiently insane. And that’s a good thing.
Michael Kaine (Alfred) remarks about the Joker that some people just want to burn the world down. There’s no other explanation. People like Putin are, I suspect, just a very few degrees removed from that kind of mindset. He does at least want to preserve his own corner of the world. But that’s it. Everything else can burn. And the rest just constitutes various nonsensical stunts along the way.
Megalomania
I suspect Putin only has a limited time to live. He looks like a desperate man the way he went into the Ukraine and turning down the deal after the failed invasion in late March. He wanted this personally. Putin has always been a globalist. He is a parasite to Russia. He takes oil revenue himself. He works the global rich building kosher nationalism with rich jews. He gave the de Rothschild elites the bank of Russia.
um, really? Jewish bankers and “rich jews” are involved? seriously? cause nothing about that sounds shady or, you know, just a tad stereotypical ... ?
Follow who is following "Putin international" . A bunch of rich Jews who then hires rich guys like Bannon to con the sheep in different methods of brainwashing. Then you have lapsed Ashkenazi like Trump's paternal side while his mother's side is partially scottish, which is where he hides. . Then you have disinformation guys like Alex Jones, a Lukud spy. It all leads to kosher nationalism. The real goal is a plutocratic globalism similar to Rollerball. It's why they attack national security apparatus much like the Kochs in 1980. They want to be kings and only use the law for their own purposes. This destabilization of capital markets is the point of Putin international. A switch from "conventional" free market/ " conservative " rhetoric. I figure another legacy of the financial crisis.
I guess we are now going to see how much Kev really values freeze peach.
Spades, your brain is hopelessly scrambled. I guess it happens. It happened to Hitler and a good portion of the German population who bought into his hate. Perhaps some humans are fatally flawed to believe this anti-semitic shit.
You are exhibit A. That's the only reason I can see that Kevin keeps you around.
CNN reports that Putin is now giving orders directly to his field commanders, bypassing Shoigu and the general staff. That ought to work out about as it did for that other fascist dictator.
Early on In the war some Ukrainian posted a ‘letter’ that read “Dear Putin, Can we skip ahead to the part where you shoot yourself in a bunker?”
Oh, found it. Was a protest sign. https://twitter.com/alexyendell/status/1497273177168355339?lang=en