Charles Clover
Auteur van Leeg hoe overbevissing ons dagelijks leven verandert
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Charles Clover is a journalist and the environmental editor of the Daily Telegraph in London
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Reader's Digest Today's Best Nonfiction 1994 Mind Over Matter | The Downing Street Years | Natasha's Story | Highgrove… (1994) — Medewerker — 1 exemplaar
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His immediate goal was to shore up support for his unilateral annexation of Eastern Ukraine provinces.
Putin claimed that the West hates Russians and took trillions of dollars out of the country at the close of the 20th century. Experts tell us that Boris Yeltsin, his cronies, and Putin after them stole roughly the equivalent of one-half of all the wealth possessed by Russians following the demise of the Soviet Union. An estimated US $800 billion.
Rewriting the history of Russia did not begin with Vladimir Putin, nor did Russian nationalism.
I recommend as a healthy playbook to Putin’s appeal to Russian patriots Charles Clover’s “Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism” published in 2016, after the Russian incursion into Crimea but before its invasion of mainland Ukraine.
Putin’s appeal to patriotism is confusing to the lay reader probably because it has many different roots in the Russian psyche.
Clover identifies four strains of the “new” Russian nationalism: an ethnic chauvinism or Pan-Slavism; Eurasianism, or a strategic block of nations willing and able to undo the hegemony of “the West;” Sovietism; and the Orthodox religious confessional.
Several of these strains appear in Putin’s speech and authoritarianism is a consistent theme in Russian nationalism and, indeed, in Putin’s speech.
A few weeks ago Russia was rocked by the apparent assasination of Darya Dugina by car bombing. Dugina was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a longtime voice of Russian nationalism and confidante to Putin’s upper circle.
Clover follows the evolution of Dugin’s thought and influence, although he falls short in ascribing Putin present state of mind directly to Dugin’s most famous and controversial work “Foundations of Geopolitics.”
This is the Eurasionist school of Russian nationalism based on earlier suspect works of linguistics and philosophy, and political science.
What I find equally telling about the current brand of Russian chauvinism is the reliance on the Soviet experiment, when Russia reached the apotheosis of its world power.
In the early Soviet Union the communists attempted to co-opt the many nations encompassed by the Soviet Union. It was a time when over 200 languages were spoken in those lands and even Stalin couldn’t control them all without a little hanky-panky on the margins.(Probably more than a little.)
The assembly of the Soviet Union was the most blatant of many attempts to pacify the regions. Nationalism in that Russia was always a double-edged sword. The threat of violence breaking out was a consistent of the period.
Putin’s regime is based as much on clan politics as it has ever been in Russia. It features the settling of scores (witnesses the epidemic of oligarchs “falling” out of windows), and Murder Inc. tactics for opponents such as the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the murder numerous journalists including Anna Politkovskaya.
According to Clover, Putin’s authority rests on his ability to problem-solve and adjudicate in elite disputes. In his Russia general collusion is a spectacle of awesome despotic power.
And there are few rules between the cliques and clans.
One of my favourite quotes in the book about the diffuse nature of power in Moscow is that “the Kremlin has many towers.”
I also found noteworthy in the outsize power of political spindoctors in the Kremlin. They are constantly polling the public. They are their own worst enemy. There’s a lot of “whatever the truth may be” thrown around at higher levels of the Kremlin. That can’t be good for any government needing to deal with the same problems yours and my government face every day.
And I’m sure some of those Kremlin spindoctors had a hand in this week’s speech. They want Russians to feel the guilt and debt owing to heroes long gone by, whether ethnic Russian, Soviet, or Orthodox.
Fail your country now and you fail it for all time.… (meer)