NY Times Acknowledges U.S. Failure In Russia - Adds More To What Caused It

 

moon of alabama  

The U.S. finally acknowledges the utter defeat of its major manipulation strategy in Russia.

The news comes in form of a New York Times analysis of Russia's recent Duma election.

The core sentence:

Dismal results for the opposition in an election last weekend that was not free or fair only drove home a mood of defeat. The election underscored the grim reality that Russia’s pro-Western and pro-democratic opposition, a focus of American and other Western countries’ policy toward Russia for years now, has no visible strategy to regain relevance.

All the millions of dollars invested and thousands of CIA framed 'news' reports about Russia's opposition launched in 'western' outlets like the NY Times have been in vain.

One would think that the above insight would lead to some reflection about how or why the strategy has failed.

• Was it probably wrong to support 'liberal' clowns like Navalny who are actually too fascist to be acceptable to more than 2% of the Russian electorate?
• Was there a way to achieve a different outcome by looking at the real problems Russians have with Putin's neo-liberal economic policies?
• Was is false to pay no attention to the real opposition in Russia, the one that gets real votes?

Unfortunately the rest of the piece shows that the NY Times author is unable to discuss or to even ask such questions. He instead continues with false claims about Russia's democratic system:

The Central Election Commission reported — as usual after Russian elections — a landslide for parties and politicians loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin. The vote in parliamentary elections cleared a seemingly easy path for Mr. Putin to seek a fifth term as president in 2024.

Ther ewas no such landslide for parties and politicians loyal to Putin.

In fact Putin's party, United Russia, only got 49% of the votes, a loss of 5 percentage points from the 2016 election. It also lost 19 of its seats in the parliament. The Communist Party was the winner in this election. It gained 6 percentage points from 13% in 2016 to 19% in 2021 and 15 new parliament seats. That significant move is not mentioned at all in the NYT writeup:

The pro-government party, United Russia, won just short of 50 percent of the national vote, and 198 out of 225 seats allocated in district-level elections. The Communist Party of Russia, which runs in elections as an opposition party but votes with United Russia once in Parliament, came in second place, with 19 percent. Three other parties, all seen as loyal to Mr. Putin, also won seats. No candidates in open opposition to Mr. Putin entered Parliament.

The claim that the Communist Party is voting with United Russia is outright false. It may have done so on some issues of national importance, like the return of Crimea to Russia, but surly votes against most other laws and the budget resolutions United Russia supports.

The other three parties are likewise opposed to Putin and most of his policies. They, like the Communists, would vote him out if they had the majority needed to do that.

It didn’t help that Google and Apple, under pressure from the Kremlin, removed an app promoting candidates Mr. Navalny had endorsed just before the vote.

A depper analysis of the fate of the candidates Navalny's 'smart voting' promoted would be of interest. But to go there the NY Times would have to tell you this:

I discuss Alexei Navalny’s ’smart voting’ scheme in the light of the list of preferred candidates for this week’s Russian parliamentary elections just issued by Navalny’s team. There are 225 single member constituencies up for grab. Team Navalny recommends one candidate per constituency and suggests voters cast their ballot for thar person, as the candidate most likely to beat the ruling United Russia party.

So who does Navalny recommend?

Communists mostly (61% of the total), plus some from the left nationalist Just Russia, and the occasional person from other parties. But only a handful of liberals.

In short, voting smart means voting Communist.

Now tell me, please, what’s so smart about that? As I argue in my article, precious little.

The NY Times author can not acknowledge those facts because he hates the communists even more than he hates United Russia:

With Russia’s pro-democracy groups now crushed, the center of gravity of the Russian political opposition may shift in other, unappealing directions, wrote Tatyana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Moscow Carnegie Center. The Communist Party, for example, has shifted toward open confrontation with the Kremlin with an ideology of Soviet revival more extreme even than Mr. Putin’s.

Weren't we just told above that the Communist Party 'votes with United Russia once in Parliament'? Now it suddenly is in 'open confrontation with the Kremlin'? How can both claims, just a few paragraphs apart, be true? Hint, the aren't.

And the claim that the Communists have 'an ideology of Soviet revival more extreme even than Mr. Putin’s' is just blatant nonsense.

Putin hates the Soviet ideology and openly rejects it. What he works on is a national revival of Russia by means of a neo-liberal economic policies. The Communist are opposed to that. They reject the neo-liberal economic system. They want to re-nationalize big companies and re-introduce an income distribution system that favors the working class over capital owners. Acknowledging those difference would actually help the NY Times reader to make sense of this paragraph:

But the disillusionment is economic. Most street protests in Russia in recent years have been provincial labor actions that gained little national notice, said Yekaterina Schulmann, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a trend the Communist Party is well positioned to exploit.

Those labor actions also gained no international notice. The NYT's Moscow bureau might by a reason why that is the case.

If the NY Times had reported on those labor actions, instead of the clownery around Navalny, it probably could have made a difference. If U.S. support over the last two decades would had gone to some nationalist minded social-democratic party in Russia, instead of the fake 'liberals', the election outcome this year would probably have been different.

But that would have required factual reporting from Russia and a non-ideological analysis of Russia's political and economical system. Neither of which is available at the upper levels of the U.S. of A.

Posted by b on September 24, 2021 at 18:04 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/09/ny-times-acknowledges-us-failure-in-russia-adds-more-to-what-caused-it.html#more