It took me a little while to find something more important to me than this election coming up: but I've found it. For the last few years I've been trying to explain to family and friends why I'm so disturbed by what's going on in Russia these days. The seperatisist Chechen movement is a perpetual and never endable "war" that Russia is fighting- are war with hazy parameters and which inspires fervent patriotism everywhere else in Russia. Putin's "United Russia" party as well as the "Motherland" party (a sort of fake opposition which backs Putin) tap into that patriotism and turn it into the idea that questioning either the party or it's leaders, is unpatriotic. In the presidential elections, the most powerful opposition figures to Putin all either "dissapeared," died mysteriously, or were arrested on seemingly random charges... then after spending time in seclusion unmonitored by outside sources in Russia, came on national telivision and apologized for standing in opposition to "progress" and "unity."

The same followed true for leading economic figures: sort of like if Kerry, Edwards, Dean, and the rest, all just disapeared out of the political landscape, no one ran any opposition to Bush this November, following which the supreme court was outlawed, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were arested and jailed and all their possessions were confiscated. Except worse.

The reason I'm posting is because up until today I'd felt just sort of like a conspiricy theorist (in fact, I hoped that's all it was). I'm Certainly not an expert in Russian politics or anything- but todays NYTimes really shook me up: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/international/europe/13CND-RUSS.html?hp

Something is going on in Russia right now, and it's not good, and it's not safe, and it's much more dangerous than Iraq or "Terrorism." I'm not sure what posting this here does, except alert incredibly smart people to a big problem. But it's better than feeling totally helpless to News reports. Bush and Kerry has pretty much equally bad appeasment views of Putin ("He's our brother in Fighting Terrorism") but Bush has closer ties to Russian oil, and seems slighlty more likely to ignore what's going on over there. Still, this should be a bipartisan thing, when the 2nd most powerful nation in the world starts a blatent march towards dictatorship, everyone should care.

These in just the last month or two:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10C13FA38590C728CDDA10894DC404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40C16F73E590C748EDDAE0894DC404482


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60712F9395E0C7B8DDDAE0894DC404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70710FC3B5F0C738DDDAE0894DC404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20717FD3D5F0C768CDDAE0894DC404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10814FD3F5D0C738EDDAF0894DC404482

posted by john owens-ream   [5:41 PM]

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