Russian Opposition Figure Thinks Anti-Putin Movement Has Faltered 144
New submitter FilatovEV writes "Interview with Russian liberal opposition politician Vladimir Milov taken by Los Angeles Times reveals a different side of the Western narrative about Russia."
From the article: "All they have for a plan is a very simple formula: Let's lead a million people out into the streets, and that will scare the hell out of Putin. He will run away, and we will grab power. But even if they get a sufficient number of people out in the street, they don't know what to do next. All they can do is chant their old anti-Putin incantations instead of offering a program of action. "
Re:yeah and? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like OWS (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds much like Occupy Wall Street in the USA. Didn't like the status quo, but doomed with no clear platform or list of achievable goals.
"We want change"
"Well, what policy changes are you hoping get made?"
"We don't know"
Re:Sounds like OWS (Score:5, Insightful)
Occupy did actually make some fairly specific demands that were entirely ignored by those in power. One of the most notable was a demand that banks and if appropriate their officers be prosecuted when they were found to have committed fraud (the Obama administration instead announced a few months ago that they were closing the investigation on Goldman Sachs without pressing any kind of charge whatsoever even though some pretty damning evidence is a matter of public record).
The vaguer message of Occupy was that the Democratic Party in the US has utterly ignored the liberals in their base in an effort to pander to Wall St and the right wing. And why should people like Obama do that, when all they need to do to get their votes is scare the bejeesus out of them by threatening them with the prospect of President Romney?
Re:Just like the USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it sounds more like Occupy. The only movement that has accurately identified the problems that face us, but can't field any practical alternatives.
Re:Just like the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say repealing Obamacare is a helluva good start.
Why? I've heard many (mostly republicans) say that we need to repeal Obamacare, but why?
Do you not think providing health care coverage for everyone is important?
Do you not understand why providing healthcare insurance for everyone means that everyone (healthy or not) needs to have coverage?
Do you think that forcing insurers to accept those with prexisting conditions is wrong? If so, how will people unlucky enough to have a chronic illness obtain coverage?
What should happen to those who are unable to obtain healthcare insurance on their own when they have a serious medical condition? Are you OK with paying for their urgent treatment in the ER? Should they be left to die? If so, are you ok with paying for their burial, or should they be left to rot wherever they happened to die?
Do you worry that it's too close to "socialist" healthcare coverage? How do you feel about Medicare?
So really, what is it that bothers you so much about providing healthcare coverage?
Re:Sounds like OWS (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't you seen any of the election coverage? "Liberals" don't hold the power. Independents do. Just look at the money spent on battleground states like Ohio and Iowa and Colorado. Now look at the money spent on firmly "red" or "blue" states like California, Texas, Alabama, New York.
Who are independents? Well, if you're in IT support of any kind, just imagine your most average user. Imagine the most middle-of-the-road, undistinguished, normal person. Those are your independents.
Don't get me wrong. They're not stupid by any measure. No, most of them are fairly good at what they do. They're just not really that good at anything else. Politics, understanding social issues, these are among the things they're not so good at. So to make a decision, they rely on campaign speeches and television ads and above all else, their gut feelings.
The gut feeling is often useful in small environments of few variables. It is not so helpful when it comes to large things like national economies and social welfare and things pertaining to more than three individuals with three differing interests. But it's really all they have, since they're very average and the matters at hand are very, very complex.
And they're not motivated by the wealth congregating in a smaller number of individuals. They don't care about the social ramifications of legalized abortions. Now, they'd certainly be interested if they weren't able to put dinner on their table every night, but they'd only be interested to the extent of getting dinner back on their table. They're not so interested in understanding the entire process where dinner ultimately ends up on their table, from deficit spending to farm subsidies to transportation to taxation to local education. They scratch their heads at such things. Now, bring in constitutional law, and they just turn away.
A functioning democracy (not a republic, because we went away from that a long time ago) requires an educated, well-informed voting populace. We don't have a functioning democracy because the majority of the voters are neither, largely because they have been socially engineered since the advent of the television to have no interest in either.
OWS was a failure of epic proportions. Or perhaps, in making these people look as ridiculous as they possibly could, and in allowing them a forum in which to vent, it could be considered an epic victory. Only, the people didn't win, the corporations did.
Re:yeah and? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure where you get your information, but level of sanity of your source is quite questionable. I'm not going to even bother talking about facts, of which your tirade is completely void.
First of all, majority of russians support Putin. There really is no question about this, not even in opposition camps. In fact, one of the main arguments in the opposition camps is that they need to "wake up the nation to oppose Putin". Because they're not opposing him now. Heck, even western election monitoring bodies agree on this part. They just disagree with how much of a majority support Putin commands in Russia.
As a result, Putin wouldn't have to "order an army to shoot down citizens". The anti-Putin mob would be counter mobbed by local youth groups and pro-Putin hardliners, of whom there's plenty. As has happened before.
In Syria, we have a fairly open civil war between different ethnic groups in a country where one ethnic minority has successfully oppressed all other groups for decades. To even think to compare this situation to Russia requires complete of ignorance of basic human interactions. I shudder to think what kind of environment one must live in to suffer from such illusions.
Re:yeah and? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Russians were fooled once with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Unbridled capitalism does not work.
A system where ownership of capital depends on your connections to the ruling class is not capitalism but cronyism. And that's still the system in place today.
By doing exactly the opposite since Reagan/Thatcher - i.e. making governments subservient to the will of big business - we are now in the shit.
Let me guess. A UK resident who still hasn't gotten over the Thatcher era. No one else whines about Thatcher.
As to Putin wanting "to remain strong", so did Reagan and Thatcher for their respective countries. The latter were far more successful than Putin has been.
I would vote Putin any day. I don't want the right to a free press which will be ignored anyway - illusions of freedom serve no purpose to anyone but the stupid.
Ah, so you're a useful idiot. One only needs to look at countries with a free press to see that your point of view is shit. Sure, there are blatant propaganda sources like Fox News in the US. But word gets around, be it in the "main stream media", the blogs, or whatever. One can't have genuine freedom if one doesn't have a clue what's going on.
Re:Sounds like OWS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just like the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you not think providing health care coverage for everyone is important?
It'd be nice, I'll grant. However, there's a question that never really gets answered, somehow: Who's going to pay for it? AIUI, if you can't pay, it's free, and right there's a big problem because the demand for a free good is infinite.
Obamacare is not "free" to most people -- most people will purchase private healthcare insurance. Those that can't afford private health insurance will have their costs covered by the government, much like the situation today.
But even if the government did provide "free" healthcare, it would be just as "free" as the other governmental services that most modern countries provide - fire protection services, police services, roads (taxes on cars pay only a fraction of road costs), military protection, etc.
Demand for healthcare is not infinite even if it's "free" because healthcare practitioners don't dole out unlimited amounts of healthcare - you matter how many times you beg for a head CT after you stub your toe, your doctor isn't going to prescribe one. I have practically unlimited healthcare through my employers plan, I pay only a $15 copay for each visit -- but whether my copay was $0 or $100, I don't think I would visit the doctor any more or less frequently than I do now. I don't *want* any non-neccessary drugs or medical procedures.
And you're missing the other half of the equation.... who is paying for healthcare now? We're not letting (usually) people die in the street because they can't afford healthcare, those that can't afford health insurance wait until they have an urgent situation and then they visit an ER where they know they will get care regardless of ability to pay. And when they can't pay and the ER has to absorb the cost, then the rest of us end up paying more in taxes and/or our healthcare costs to cover it. So you're paying for universal healthcare whether you want to or not, but you're probably paying more now than if you paid for more preventative care so people can have their ailments treated before it requires a trip to the ER.
Re:Sounds like OWS (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think that most of the protesters were smelly hippies? There were Iraq War veterans, 83-year-old grandmothers, unemployed steelworkers, and all sorts of other distinctly non-hippy folks involved.