Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 4 – The
International Vladimir Putin has founded is “unique,” Igor Yakovenko says. It
differs from all its predecessors and counterparts in that it is not based on
any ideology except loyalty to Putin personally and his regime and instead is
founded on the use of money to promote itself.
“Despite all the financial problems
of Putin’s Russia,” the Moscow commentator points out, there is always enough
money for Putin to promote himself domestically and abroad because he controls
far more of Russia’s budget which is much smaller than that of the US than does
Barack Obama of his much larger one (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=568A2BDD982C2).
In an essay today entitled “The
Putin International of Lies: Information War and the Schoederization of Elites,”
Yakovenko cites as evidence of this the fact that Moscow currently spends 20
times more on its English-language channel Russia Today than the US does on
broadcasting in Russian.
Yakovenko argues that “it would not
be a bad thing for the leaders of Western countries to at least become a little
acquainted with this [Putin] instrument of influence and learn how to counter
it.” To that end, he offers a brief
description both of the International and of the views of the man behind it.
“Lenin created the Komintern for the
struggle against Western civilization,” he begins. After World War II, the USSR
“broadened its arsenal” with a whole range of institutions. But now, despite
the failure of many in the West to appreciate it, Putin has both expanded and
transformed this tool.
Everyone must understand, the Moscow
commentator writes, that “Putin is an absolute moral idiot and his closest
entourage has been chosen to reflect that. He is completely lacking int eh
ability to distinguish good and evil. [And] he is convinced that all other
people in the planet also do not distinguish the two.”
Because that is the case, Yakovenko says, Putin “does
not understand what is bad in the fact that he first completely denied the presence
of Russian forces in Crimea and then admitted they were there. He does not
understand why his words about ‘certain Turkomans’ about which he ‘didn’t
suspect’ when he directed bombs and cruise missiles on their territory are not
viewed as quite right.”
“Deception is part of its
professional preparation as a graduate of the KGB Higher School. Therefore
Putin always and on everything lies. And namely on the total lie is built the
Putin International.” But in contrast to other internationals, Yakovenko
continues, Putin’s has an enormous portion that like an iceberg is not visible
on the surface.
The visible portion consists of “three
main structures:” the propagandistic (Russia Today and other propaganda
broadcasts), “the intellectual expertise (the Valdai Club above all),” and the
Russian foreign ministry, with branches throughout “all the state apparatus,
political structures and civil society of practically all the countries of the international
community.”
The basic method the Putin
International uses against the West recalls the way in which a spider kills
something caught in its web, but instead of injecting poison as a spider does,
the Putin International injects money, something that leads to “the Schroederization
of elites” and transforms them into victims of Moscow.
Russia Today gets more attention,
but it doesn’t have nearly the impact many assume: its ratings are
microscopically small both in Europe and in the US. “A much more effective structure,” Yakovenko
says, “is the Valdai Club which now is focused less on “telling the world about
Russia with love” than with setting the agenda Putin needs in other countries.
Its top people are former heads of
European countries, and its “second level” includes people like Nikolay Zlobin,
Alexander Rahr, and Stephen Cohen “and such like who seek to transfer the Putin
cult to the West or at a minimum to create the impression in Russia that there
is such a cult in the West.”
“And the final element” of the Putin
International are those “whom Lenin justly called useful idiots. They don’t
have to be bought. They simply need to be taken by the head, looked at in the
eyes mysteriously, and then they will say RUS-SI-A” with the best of them.”
There are many in this category, unfortunately.
But “the useful idiot of the year
2015,” Yakovenko says, is “by a large margin,” US Secretary of State John Kerry”
who has performed just as Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov would have him.
Clearly, the Moscow commentator
concludes, “the existence of such an instrument as the Putin International
together with the possession of nuclear arms allows the owner of these two
devices to be the greatest threat to world civilization.” It would indeed be
well if Western leaders would wake up to this fact.
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