The Russian George Bush

Filed under: Russia

"They can post all their clips and all their speeches [on the Internet], generally they say unpleasant things about the authorities. This guarantees the independence of the mass media, in my opinion."

I would challenge anyone to find any statement ever uttered by George Bush which can rival the above recent claim by Vladimir Putin's successor Dimitry Medvedev (pictured above, center), regarding the ability of opposition politicians to challenge the Russian regime, in terms of the galactic and audacious vastness of its stupidity (that is, if the explanation for its utterance isn't that the speaker is simply evil).

First, Medvedev is suggesting that it is simply irrelevant whether the Kremlin has total control over print and television media, that the Internet is a more than adequate substitute for them. That cries out to be called a boldfaced neo-Soviet lie. Even in the United States, the country that leads the world in Internet development, political challengers focus their advertising on TV and print sources, with the Internet playing only secondary role. Howard Dean famously sought to rely on the Internet, and famously went down in flames. And Russia isn't the United States. It's a country with an average hourly wage of $4/hour, meaning that the vast majority of the country simply can't afford to access the Internet. Data clearly shows that Internet use in Russia is miniscule and waning, and given the wretched standard of living in Russia (the country doesn't rank in the top 100 nations for male adult life span or the top 50 for per capita GDP), you hardly need that data to know it's the case. If Medvedev would agree to debates, which he won't, you could simply ask him to explain the influence of the Internet in the most recent parliamentary elections, where every single opposition candidate lost, in order to lay bare the barbaric dishonesty of his remark.

Last week, the Moscow Times reported that the Kremlin had investigated the income declarations of all the candidates for the presidency next month, and found that every single one of them besides Medvedev had lied. Medvedev was as pure and perfect as the driven snow. So now, on election day, the Kremlin is going to post notices to that effect at every polling place in the country. Mind you, all the other candidates are actually rabid supporters of Putin's policies, but they're just not the "chosen One," and the Kremlin is still prepared to go that far to make sure they don't come close to challenging its Golden Boy. Is the Internet supposed to compensate for that?

In fact, it's clear that Medvedev himself doesn't read the Russian Internet because, second, he is suggesting that the Internet hasn't been targeted for takeover in exactly the same manner and print and TV. Again, a statement so detached from reality that it almost has to be a boldfaced lie. Can he possibly be that stupid? Our translation from the Russian press clearly showed that the Kremlin is actively and aggressively moving to seize control of the Internet, and we've previously documented many egregious instances of persecution against individual bloggers and reporters, including the Kremlin's recent brainstorm of requiring all blogs with more than 1,000 hits per day to register and be regulated as if they were mass media outlets.

There will always be those among us, however, who are even more stupid -- and we'll likely find most of them in our own mass media establishment. Rather than rallying behind their besieged colleagues in Russia, for instance, the cyborgs at Newsweek magazine responded to Medvedev's mendacious gibberish by saying he "could turn out to be a welcome surprise." That's no different than saying that George Bush might solve the Iraq problem next week. It's like saying Adolf Hitler could turn out to be a welcome surprise -- and let's not forget that Neville Chamberlain did say exactly that about him.

And indeed, the New York Times said exactly that about Vladimir Putin himself when he first came to power, calling him a "democrat" who was "impressed by the benefits of liberty and free markets" and noted that "a steady hand in the Kremlin would be welcome." It stated that "Mr. Putin helped build the beginnings of a capitalist economy in the early 1990's" -- a ridiculous falsehood, because Putin, who holds no economics or business credentials whatsoever, was in those years nothing more than the clueless lackey of a corrupt local politician who used to be his professor -- and speculated that he might choose "to advance reform while protecting the newly won liberties of the Russian people" and make "government an effective, honest and compassionate agent of change." This kind of gibberish helped us decide to drop our guard on Putin and allow him to consolidate his KGB regime. Many people lost their lives as a result. Thanks for the valuable insights, "paper of record." A few weeks ago, when the Times finally realized what was what and brutally accused Putin of "kicking democracy's corpse," it conveniently failed to mention its prior mistake (much less did it apologize). And these folks dare to criticize Bush for failing to accept accountability? Wow. Breathtaking hypocrisy.

If Medvedev really was going to surprise us, he'd already be protesting the manner of his own coronation. He'd demand to participate in debates all over the country, refuse to participate with smear ads in place at polling stations, resign from his party rather than allow the Kremlin to exclude every real opposition candidate (Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Bukovsky and Mikhail Kasyanov) from the ballot. Instead, he's only too happy to accept the office, and to keep mum about the fact that Vladimir Putin will be his prime minister. Can you imagine Dick Cheney running for president with George Bush as his vice president against Mike Huckabee on the Democratic ticket, all the other Democrats having been excluded after lawsuits filed by the White House?

If we allow ourselves to be led down the garden path once again by the cowards and collaborators among us, if we watch the neo-Soviet state form and only take action, as we did in regard to the Bolsheviks, when it is too late, then we will richly deserve the suffering that will result (in the last instance, five decades of cold war).

To be fair to him, though, Medvedev did get one quote right. In a speech in Moscow on January 22nd he admitted that Russia is a barbaric nation, what I've termed a "beetroot republic." He stated: "We need to understand clearly: If we want to become a civilized state, first of all we need to become a lawful one." The only problem is that Medvedev, like Putin and all the other brutal despots from the sordid pages of Russia's long history, believes that he himself is magically immune from barbarism, and thus uses the nation's backwardness as an excuse for further oppression and regimentation, a reason for the Kremlin to accumulate even more power, just as has been done in all the failed regimes of Russia's past. Just as in Soviet times, every conceivable check on the regime has been nullified, meaning that it has no supervision and, just like the infamous Emperor with his "new clothes," no way of knowing when it is walking naked into a frozen wasteland from which there is no return.

The difference between the United States and Russia is, of course, that America has a population that is growing by leaps and bounds, an economy that leads the world and a long history of stable transitions of power between rival parties. In other words, it can afford to have a buffoon in charge once in a while, or at least afford it far better than a place like Russia that is flirting with self-destruction -- if it occurs, it will be the third time in a century the nation has imploded. And the fact is that there's every chance Medvedev isn't simply a moron, but rather a malignant cog in a dictatorial apparatus that will, once again, bleed his nation white.

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