What Anne Applebaum has refuses to acknowledge about Russia's current adventure in Georgia is that what has changed is not so much the ability of America to influence Russia as its the will.
The Russia today is no more the a product of communism than it is of Tsarism. The Russia of today is almost exclusively the product of the American conservative movement. It was conservative intellectuals, economists and hundreds upon hundreds of party hacks who descended upon the former Soviet Union and orchestrated the organized looting of the nation. The end of the Soviet Union was every bit as horrible as it's tyrannical leaders prophesied. As the oligarchs stole big and stole little the life expectancy plunged and the society reeled towards chaos.
Yeltsin who was constantly praised in the west would have made Hugo Chavez look like the bastion of legal propriety. The Russian peoples' devotion to Putin was only a desperate hope the could stop things from getting still worse. If he had run against Stalin he would lost in a landslide. The increased value of Russia's energy resources has put a certain guilded glint to Putin's reign. But make no mistake, things aren't really getting better. Russia far more resembles an African nation rich in resources than an Arab one.
The wealth is still flowing to a tiny few. Russia is burning through its energy wealth enriching the oligarch's instead of investing in education and infrastructure that could reverse Russia's decline. Russia's population is dwindling, its culture is disappearing. Conservatives often preached the fiction that Muslims would in the end overrun Europe. Russia is in fact the only country were a marked increase in Muslim influence is even remotely conceivable.
Russia's money isn't just enriching the Oligarchs. The Oligarchs are pumping their wealth in to western investments. In fact in some cases the Russian oligarchs and their western counterparts are neighbours in London where they really live. Just as Ms. Applebaum herself might as well live in Kansas considering her refusal to see Poland's children fleeing like so many rats from sinking their sinking state. While Poland's old men pitifully accuse each other of spying for this or that communist leader, the former communist leaders themselves, now capitalists oligarchs, have been quietly tearing apart Poland's infrastructure and selling it for scrap.
The nation that endured the Soviets, then Hitler, than the Soviets will not long survive the reality created by the last three American presidents. The conservatives' new Europe only limps along with massive subsidies from the old. Just as conservative red states only limp along with massive subsidies from the working economies of blue states.
Just as the Tienanmen square demonstrators where trying to slow the economic reforms that have so enriched the Chinese oligarchs and their American partners, any true democracy movement in Russia would resist the capital outflow that the United States in particular has become so dependent on.
Our own economy racked by ruinous tax cuts and groaning under massive wealth transfers from middle classes to the most wealthy simply can't afford a democratic government in either Russia or China. Just as American leaders, shamefully of both parties, publicly denounced the Tienanmen while they privately gave the thumbs up, now Chinese government routinely highlights the poverty of the vast countryside not not out socialist solidarity but to terrorize the urban elite about what would happen if democracy ever emerged.
Truly no one could possibly have less to gain from Georgia's or Ukraine's territorial integrity or democracy in Russia than America's economic elite. And, really they are not even really trying that hard to create a pretense otherwise.
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