Posts Tagged ‘toledo blade’
Putin’s government clings to strategy of the Big Lie
A meteor streaked across the Russian sky and exploded over a populated area with the force of a nuclear bomb last month, injuring hundreds of people and casting the light on the world’s largest country that has failed to put anti-Americanism in the rearview mirror despite more than two decades of post-Soviet development.
Once dashboard-camera video footage of the phenomenon spread across the Internet, Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the founder and leader of Russia’s ultra-nationalist LDPR party and a former vice chairman of the lower house of the country’s legislature — announced that it was not a meteor falling but a secret U.S. weapon being tested.
A showman of Russian politics, Mr. Zhirinovsky is notorious for making outrageous public pronouncements aimed at pleasing Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter uses Mr. Zhirinovsky as a scare for those in the Russian middle class who are unhappy with the country’s systemic corruption and his autocratic regime that perpetuates it.
Unfortunately, many uneducated Russians believe Mr. Zhirinovsky and support him and Mr. Putin, bringing to mind a propaganda technique that Adolf Hitler termed the Big Lie — a lie so preposterous that people believe it to be the truth because they can’t imagine anybody making it up. According to opinion polls, close to half the Russians do not believe the United States is a friendly country.
Until recently it was not that important for us in the U.S. because the livelihood of the Russian elite depended in part on the goodwill of the West, and its leader, the United States.
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Russian orphans pay price for Putin’s new cold war
Many Russians are celebrating New Year’s Eve today. By the Julian calendar — still recognized by the Orthodox Church — it falls on Jan. 13.
Not celebrating are Russian orphans, particularly those with life-threatening illnesses. Many of them will die this year from lack of adequate care after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill that bans U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
There are at least 740,000 orphaned or abandoned children in Russia, by U.N. estimates. Many of them die of illness or commit suicide, news of which sometimes trickles even into the Kremlin-controlled media. About 1 percent of those children get adopted annually. About half of the adopted children used to go to foreign homes, mostly American.
Enter Mr. Putin, who signed the bill Jan. 1 — as a New Year gift to Russia’s corrupt bureaucracy.
Before he did that, he announced at a press conference in Moscow that the parliament had passed the ban in response to recent U.S. legislation — the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 it considers anti-Russian.
Named after a Russian lawyer who exposed a $230 million embezzlement by the Russian establishment and subsequently died in custody, it prohibits corrupt bureaucrats from getting U.S. visas and freezes their U.S. accounts.
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U.S. human-rights measure puts Russia on notice
Finally, there is good news for politically disenfranchised liberals in Russia and for U.S.-Russian relations in the long run.
And that’s not because of Russia’s long-coveted admission to the World Trade Organization next month or the expected scrapping of a Cold War-era law restricting Russian trade with the United States.
Under the boot of Russian President Vladimir Putin for most of the past 12 years, Russian liberals looked with hope to the U.S. Congress to approve a new human-rights bill that would replace the old.
A bill that ties up the scrapping of the old provision — the Jackson-Vanik Amendment — with the adoption of the new one — the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act — was approved in a 24-0 vote earlier this month by the Senate Finance Committee, which gives hope that it will sail through the full Congress.
The 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment that denies Russia normal trade relations has been routinely waived by U.S. presidents since 1992, following the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act would deny American visas to corrupt officials and human-rights violators and freeze their U.S. bank accounts. Prompted by a notorious quarter-billion-dollar corruption scandal in Russia, the Magnitsky bill would cover all foreign nations.
A lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, Mr. Magnitsky died in police custody on false charges of tax avoidance after he was arrested for alleging a $230 million state-orchestrated fraud that he had uncovered.
It is critical that the bill is passed despite opposition from the Kremlin and the White House, which is interested in keeping up appearances in this election year.
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