Putin's Ukraine Tea-party (with missiles)

[Mark Thibodeau]

Freaking terrifying.

What now, I ask you all rhetorically, expecting no answer, yet asking
nevertheless?

YOPJ

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 11:01 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/07/putin-and-the-crash-of-malaysian-airlines-flight-17.html
>
> Putin has “created an artificial situation in which a ‘pathological
> minority’—the protesters on Bolotnaya Square [two years ago], then Pussy
> Riot, then the liberal ‘pedophiles’—is held up in contrast to a ‘healthy
> majority.’ Every time this happens, his ratings go up.” The nightly
> television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about
> Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced “spectacle,”
> expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks.
>
> “Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be
> wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public
> opinion and the collective political imagination.
>
> “How can Putin really manage this? You’d need to be an amazing conductor.
> Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this
> trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting
> for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a
> dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with
> Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are
> responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”
>
> Pavlovsky was especially concerned about one of the pro-Russian military
> leaders in eastern Ukraine, a former (and possibly current) Russian
> intelligence officer known to most by his nom de guerre, Igor Strelkov.
> (Strelkov’s real name is Igor Girkin.)
>
> A wildly messianic nationalist who cultivates an air of lumpy intrigue,
> Strelkov is now helping to run the separatist operation in Donetsk. Like the
> radical nationalists and neo-imperialists in Moscow, who have easy access to
> the airwaves these days, Strelkov has a singular point of disagreement with
> Putin: the Russian President hasn’t gone nearly far enough; he has failed to
> invade and annex “Novorossiya,” the separatist term for eastern Ukraine.
> Pavlovsky said that people like Strelkov and his Moscow allies are as
> delusional as they are dangerous, somehow believing that they are taking
> part in grand historical dramas, like the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, or
> “the novels of Tolkien.”
>
> “Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian
> military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War
> reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like
> him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”
>
>
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