Russians Increasingly Shocked by ‘Wild Parade of Official Incompetence,’ Davydov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 9 – Almost every day brings a new case of official incompetence, Ivan Davydov says, a display of the inability of officials to do their job and of their simultaneous insistence that they are competent and that others to get ahead should follow in their footsteps, a pattern that will produce more failures but ultimately alienate Russians from their leaders.

            The Moscow commentator says that it is now impossible to know “who began this wild parade of incompetence.”  Was it the failure of officials in Vladivostok to carry out their falsification of elections in a way that not everyone would see? Or was it one official challenging Aleksey Navalny to a duel? (mbk.sobchakprotivvseh.ru/sences/s-chego-nachinaetsy/).

Or was it the story, pushed by government media, that American astronauts had worked to destroy a Russian spacecraft? Or was it the Salisbury poisonings which highlighted the incompetence of Russia’s secret services?  The answer doesn’t really matter because all these stories point to “the total and catastrophic incompetence of people related to the powers that be.”

And tragically this incompetence is spreading down into the population because the state is organizing things like a cardboard Reichstag for children to storm or teachers who recognize that the only way to prepare their charges for success is to encourage them to be like the incompetents who are in charge.

A recent poll of Russian teachers found that they respected among politicians, Putin, Lavrov, Zhirinovsky, Glazyev, and Kadyrov; among cultural figures, Mikhalkov, Kobzon, and Loza. No, seriously, Yury Loza; and among journalists, Pozner, Solovyev and for some reason Gordon. And so on.”

One would like to believe that this isn’t typical and that the majority of teachers are in fact “normal people.” It simply can’t be that “good teachers have disappeared completely.”  But if there are, their work undoubtedly is “corrected” by the propaganda of the state and by its displays of official incompetence.

The entire system, Davydov continues, is now all about producing “failures so that there will be replacements if the current failures aren’t able to destroy everything in their own time.”

But what is especially remarkable about all this, he says, is that those who lived through the last years of the Soviet Union know that young people and others will ultimately prefer real life to the mythology the state puts about especially when the state demonstrates at each step that it is incompetent and cannot manage the simplest things.

That preference, of course, led them not only to understand the failures of those above them but also to take part in “’the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’” of the 20^th century.  Given that it is nearly certain that “today’s children are no more stupid than we were then,” they certainly understand too – and they will repeat this drama, getting rid of trash and incompetence in the name of life itself.