By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Even presidents-for-life reach their dotage like everybody else. They prefer to die in their own beds, also like everybody.
In these three recent pieces, the case is made that Putin’s Russia – reading number 1 by Paul Craig Roberts — and Erdogan’s Turkey – reading number 3 by Abdullah Bozkurt — are like everybody, too.
In reading number 2, the case is made by Andrei Melnichenko, a Russian oligarch whose power and fortune come from banking, fertilizers, and coal, that short of death in bed or in war, the rule of President Vladimir Putin should not be succeeded by battlefield defeat, Trojan Horse subversion, nor by military rule. Rather, Russian rule should be based on the peaceful co-existence of Russian capital with international capital; Melnichenko calls that “respect for national sovereignty”.
By Russian capital, Melnichenko doesn’t say but means his own and the Russian oligarchy. By international capital, he doesn’t say but means the US empire and its satrapies, including the wealth havens Dubai, St. Moritz and Zug, where Melnichenko has kept himself, his counting houses, aeroplanes and boats since 2014.
Melnichenko is proposing to die peacefully in bed – that’s a Trump-brand bed for which Melnichenko is content to pay a license advance, a management fee, and an annual royalty.
Putin has never explained why his understanding of capitalism, Russian and international, is neither the Marxist-Leninist version of his Soviet education, nor the liberal globo-American version of his political practice. That’s because he has never admitted in public his personal version of religious capitalism, which he confided in secret to President George Bush when they met in October 2001. ” There is a contradiction between a new, young, aggressive financial Islamic capital and the old one,” Putin said. “A moment came when the new generation began to see the old as its competitor. From the time bin Laden became your partner, he felt himself your competitor. His desire to move to Central Asia or elsewhere was his desire to muscle in and subjugate all others to his will. In reality, it is a financial issue. Religion is secondary. The real goal is to have a place in the centre of world finances, a place that is already occupied. They want to push away representatives of Jewish capital or, if not, they will try to destroy the centre and shake it up and, ultimately in that way, to take its place.”
Added to his fear of state capitalism, communism, and socialism, which Putin has made public, he has tried to balance the Russian economy between Islamic capitalism (Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia) and Jewish capitalism (Israel, the US), and ended up taking sides with the latter.
In the immediate future, Paul Craig Roberts concludes there will be no dying peacefully in bed in Russia for as long as the Trump administration is not deterred or defeated in the drone war. “It’s an escalation,” Trump said on July 8, “but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained what Trump meant. “What you’re discussing is the ability of Ukraine to reach deep inside of Russia and conduct strikes. I think that’s one of the dynamics that’s changed in this war over the last few months, and that is that the Russians are finding it more difficult to defend their own airspace. And what we hope that means is that it’s going to create the space now to negotiate the end of this war.”
Deafness to what they are saying, not to understand this, Paul Craig Roberts writes, is naiveté, folly, “extraordinary blindness to reality…Reality has proved to be too much for Putin. He has proven himself to be unable to cope with clear and obvious challenges.”
This is the appearance of Russian politics from the outside.
From the inside of Russian politics, Melnichenko has given a special interview with The Economist, which is owned by a group of oligarch families – Agnelli of Italy (43.4%), Stephen Smith of Canada (26.9%), and Cadbury, Sainsbury, and Schroder of the UK. Melnichenko has proposed that a nuclear-armed Russia cannot be defeated in the current war without nuclear retaliation, and that the alternative to that should be an international accommodation of the oligarchies.
The third piece documents the decline into the final stage of epilepsy by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the escalation this is causing of the contest to replace him from four candidates, not one of which is as committed to preserving the current Turkish strategy with Russia as Erdogan. “Rival factions within the ruling establishment, including the AKP, the cabinet and Erdogan’s own family, have reportedly been positioning themselves for a post-Erdogan era amid concerns that health complications could abruptly end his political career.”
In the history of the Turkish sultans, abrupt ends haven’t been medical ones.
If you read these pieces at the beach, watch out that the sand doesn’t get into the pages. I’ve added a little myself.
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